Was James Joyce the Greatest Mind-Scientist Ever? | Cross-Check. I bought a Kindle recently, and excitedly downloaded free stuff: Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (not as good as I remembered), stories of H.P. Lovecraft (like a parody of Poe, but good for bedtime) and, finally, James Joyce’s Ulysses, released in full (a journal published chunks beginning in 1918) in 1922. I trekked through Ulysses in college 30 years ago under professorial guidance and wanted to revisit it to see how it holds up. It holds up just fine. In fact, I’m digging Ulysses so much that I must foist an appreciation of it on you. Joyce did something that still feels fresh and revolutionary, although it has inspired countless imitations.
I’ve written about the problem of solipsism, how each of us is trapped in a hermetically sealed chamber of his or her own subjective awareness. Joyce had scientific precursors. James and Freud merely told us these things about ourselves. Joyce reveals—revels in—the animality of his characters. Also, Ulysses ain’t everyone’s cup o’ tea. Home Fweet Home. Finnegans Web. TOC - FinnegansWiki. Taking on the “Wake” | The Jung & The Restless. “Dreams are the Sea-Monkeys of consciousness; in the back pages of sleep they promise us teeming submarine palaces but leave us, on waking, with a hermetic residue of freeze-dried dust.” ~ Michael Chabon Some guides on the Journey:A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph CampbellJoyce’s Book of the Dark by John BishopThe Books at the Wake by James S. Atherton “I began, thinking that if I could explain the book to a seven-year-old, I might have some hope of explaining it to myself.
. . . “. . . I confessed to my son, in the end, that I was not sure. . “ . . . “. . . Like this: Like Loading... Gordon Bowker’s ‘James Joyce’: Portrait of the author as a man.