Quote:
Originally Posted by ferretchucker
Why is it so important?
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Joyce intentionally created somthing to be puzzled over and studied for centuries. The form is everything.
The story is of a man lamenting the infidelities of his wife while engaging in a few of his own...all the while strolling the streets (and pubs and brothels) of Dublin.
The novel is structured to mirror Homer's The Odyssey, except the incidents in this novel aren't epic...the prose is.
One section is written as a play with stage directions. Another HUGE section is written with less than a handfull of punctuation marks. Yet another section about the birth of a child is written as a punny evolution of the english langauge, starting in Anglo-Saxon and Latin then leading to Middle-English then contemporary (for turn-of-the-century) Irish slang.
Points of view shift (and the theme of parallax is explored in depth), characters hallucinate, the church is mocked and anti-semitism is confronted... all with an odd comedic touch.
It is a novel that also revels in an accute awareness and acceptance of human sexuality - this coming from Ireland in the early 1900s - that was a precurser to Henry Miller's sexually charged prose.
it is far from my favorite novel, but as a point of study it is fascinating and as a landmark in modern writing it is unparalleled.