There’s been some general dislike of Jame Joyce expressed around these parts as of late, and although I fully support the freedom of expression it represents, I’d like to submit, on this snowy St. Patrick’s Day (in New York City, anyway), as evidence of why he’s considered the genius he is, this final passage from his short story, “The Dead.”
This is the only passage of prose I’ve ever memorized in my life…it speaks for itself:
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
“His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smoke ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech.”
A small piece of craft I have always liked. You try describing smoke. Ulysses. Ulysses and FW of course hard to quote or excerpt, a hunk of text being no more readily removed from its context than a person abstracted from his environment. Living things may not be reduced.
As I was visiting Norm Geras, encountered three more respectable Joyce fans, and since the approaching 100th Bloomsday is driving me mad,just a little proselytizing.
As I was looking for quotes, I went to the penultimate section( and my favorite), “Ithaca”, which has less language difficulties, ruling style being hilarious pedantry. Catechism, Science, Astronomy, Stephen and Bloom comets orbiting the luminous Molly. A varying rhythym of different size paragraphs listing the contents of a spice cabinet and Bloom’s guilt at abandoning the faith of his father.
The stages of Joyce reading:confusion, analysis, hilarity, ecstasy.
Once you realize that the “games and tricks”, the structures and guiding metaphors are there to help you, to communicate, to add *meaning* you can move to an intuitive and emotional reading of Ulysses.
And so Leopold Bloom, a comet in orbital decay collapsing toward the great white mass of Molly, fixing cocoa, folding his trousers, remembering and passing judgement on his day…connects the macrocosmos and microcosmos together in the reader’s heart.
And to Joyce’s explicit purpose in “Ithaca”, Kant’s “starry skies above and moral law within” reveal themselves thru science to man.