The Great Novelists - a few random scribbles

Once you've got the Joycean bug it's very difficult for any other writer to hold your attention. I remember saying to my professor (about fifteen years ago in one of our last seminars in Eng. Lit) that after reading Ulysses it was almost pointless to read any other novel. "I hear that every year" she says. Well, I was serious - I guess I've read maybe half a dozen other works of fiction since then but Ulysses is the book which keeps reeling me back in.   I'm really thinking Joyce's lack of popularity maybe down to one of a few things; First, there's the colloquialisms in Ulysses which make it such a treasure trove for native Dubliners but which can only be largely lost on a non-Irish audience. This gets even worse in ;The Wake' were there is so often a play on the sounds of words as they heard in the Dublin slang thus making it the most utterly untranslatable work there is. Second, the absence of any distinct plot; there are no evident lines of causation which link up the action from one place or time to another. It's there alright tangentially but you have to go searching for it. Thirdly, the human body in all it's noisome glory is stretched out on a bawdy canvas while a narrative's herd of pigs, goats and other swinery is allowed to grunt, sweat and copulate all over it. Ordinarily, this type of endeavour is not classed as 'literary' in that vague sense I suppose which aspires to capture life's "truths" in an elegant or otherwise philosophically memorable manner. No heroes and no grand themes then, on the surface at least. From the established greats and at a distant joint second I'd go George Eliot, mainly for her masterpiece Middlemarch, Thomas Hardy for his unredeeming misery - calamity lay behind every corner but not until he made you grow to love the character first (what a sadist), Dickens for his colourful characters and social commentary (Great Expectations, Hard Times), Dostoevsky for the unforgettable Raskolnikov and Conrad for getting under the skin of the colonialist worldview (Lord Jim over Heart of Darkness in this respect). Jane Austen (phwah); we were forced to read about three of her tomes - all of which were identical fluff as far as I could make out and were well teed up for a good Marxist welly; which is precisely what she deserved and got.

She's such a brutally conservative force - I mean she's writing during the Napoleonic Wars, the slavery debates, the upheavals of the industrial revolution and amidst all that urban squalor that would wind up being castigated by Dickens. I don't find any of her psychologising particularly enlightening in view of the consistent omission of all these events from her character's psyche. Drawing a well rounded portrait of a character can hardly omit significant contemporary events that must have been the stock of every conservation - rarefied and hermetic sums it up. I have yet to read Silas Marner or Adam Bede but Eliot's eye remorselessly strips bare so many pretensions I yet believe she made the likes of Joyce possible. Readers had to be first attuned to the noises that were out there in the wilderness - the utter wrenching of their world that was afoot. In elementary equivalent I devoured every work of fiction available - even the worst novel, play or poem was a thousand times greater than the utter tedium that was maths, physics, geography or whatever. I remember we had Lord of the Flies, I am David, Huckleberry Finn, Hard Times - really can't complain there - no Little Women either thank ye gods; that sounds truly dreadful. Tolkein's very popular but I wonder how he'd fare were it not for the films - they seemed to spark a massive resurgence. Favourite authors is something we always gabbled about in college and I can't recall anyone ever mentioning him; while saying you liked anything Russian back then of course gained you instant kudos. I went to see my first Lord of the Rings with a (very) - ex girlfriend and I have to say it was the most excruciating agony - the thing went on for three incomprehensible hours; I twisted and turned in mortal pain for the entire duration but she remained welded to the spot as though glued to some horrible but all-important religious ritual. Need I tell you the vast universe of knowledge which I soon discovered to be trapped inside her skull - it was as though all those neurons that happily dance away to the beat of everyday reality in the minds of most of us (death, taxes, bills, jobs, the economy,) were in her case, first inverted, dipped in mescaline then obliged to re-invert themselves and blossom forth in a bizarre fixture of unearthly parallelism. In essence I queried which of us was truly the happier