Friday 4 February 2022

Patrick West on ‘Ulysses’

 It’s actually a very good essay by Patrick West. He describes Joyce, Ulysses and modernism very well. He says, in effect, that Joyce showed that ‘Victorian’ beliefs in the linearity of time, concrete personhood, a division between the inner and outer worlds of a person and an idea of moral redemption were all outworn by 1922.

However Joyce’s sense that all of these ‘Victorian’ (they actually had far longer heritages) ideas could so easily be dispensed with by Nietzsche, Freud and Jung is a luxury intellectuals’ idea - an entertaining fancy. Anyone who really jettisoned them would be in a mental institution unable to function. The fact that Patrick West earns a living by sense contained in the written word and has faith in language arranged in linear fashion shows that, while we/Joyce might toy with such ideas, existentially it’s impossible to exist without them. In practice modernism either requires that you admit yourself to an asylum or you shrug it off and return to the “linear” day to day world and continue to live (with the normal sense of responsible personhood).

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/02/how-ulysses-shaped-the-modern-world/?fbclid=IwAR2a-xi5aZptpbSWrqlOZSIrlGdfyDXM7BVP1XVMMlrFalSYN5N0S9ZQ3Gc#.YfrMHYSFxvE.facebook



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