Johanna Winant’s very thoughtful and compelling essay on the difficulties a 2022 reader faces when confronted by the “classics” of 1922—specifically, Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—makes the assumption that these are books to be read and understood primarily in the classroom. Given this proviso, her conclusions make good sense: inevitably, as Winant notes, we read these books (if at all!) very differently today than did their contemporaries. The cultural matrix has so radically changed and the shrunken English department today may not make time for such distant and demanding reading.
Reflecting on three monumental works of modernism—James Joyce’sUlysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—a hundred years on.
JohannaDecember 7, 2022
This year marks the centenary of modernism’s annus mirabilis. For many, that means T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses—both first published in book form in 1922—perhaps along with the first English language translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. These books are in different genres and disciplines—poetry, fiction, philosophy—but all of them wed experimental literary aesthetics with highly abstract intellectual projects. All invoke myths to represent immense aesthetic and intellectual challenges: each tells of an arduous journey, that could, if successful, be redemptive, even transformative. Each text has its hero, but in each case the hero is also—or really—you. You, the reader, are challenged to find your way through these depths and heights and broad, rough seas. The journey is perilous, filled with traps as well as marvels. Should you succeed, your home may look different by the end; you will be changed too.
Sexual healing: James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room voted best erotic passage
Author beats contenders including Jeanette Winterton, DH Lawrence and Philip Roth in the Literary Hub’s contest to find the best sex writing
Alison Flood Friday 8 April 2016 13.59 BST
A passage from James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room has won a tournament of literary sex writing launched by the Literary Hub to reward the best erotic passages from literature.
In stark contrast to the Bad Sex in Fiction prize run by the Literary Review, which seeks to single out “poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description”, the Lit Hub site set out to find the best sex writing in literature. Judges including the writers Roxane Gay, Candace Bushnell and John Ashbery considered passages drawn from the past 200 years, with an extract from Baldwin’s novel emerging triumphant on Friday morning over fellow finalist Jeanette Winterson.
Giovanni’s Room tells of David, a young American in Paris, who has just proposed to his girlfriend but is drawn to bartender Giovanni while she is away on a trip. The winning extract deals with narrator David’s early homosexual encounter with his friend Joey.
Baldwin writes: “Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other ...
To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it. I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.
Winterson’s contender, from Written on the Body, describes how “she smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She’s refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.”
The judges said Baldwin’s passage was “almost unanimously” chosen as the overall winner.
“There is a good reason most awards given for sex writing are for bad sex writing: to commit to words that most intimate and personal act is generally a doomed undertaking. For even our best writers, to describe sex is to veer between the biological and the euphemistic, the soft-focus and the fluorescent. It rarely works. And yet many have tried, and will continue to do so,” said LitHub, announcing the contest last week.
The competition is designed as a tournament, with writing divided into four groups: everything prior to the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, then writing between 1922 and 1955 when Lolita was published, then 1955 until the 1980s, and then from the 1980s until the present.
These divides were chosen for the first round “in the interest of fairness, variety, and to reflect the literary canon without being entirely dead, white, male, straight”, according to LitHub editor, Jonny Diamond. This was as well as marking “shifts in mores as reflected in literary scandals. The first era was pre-1922 Ulysses, followed by Lolita in 1955 … We did this to avoid Kathy Acker being compared to Flaubert. After the first round, we opened up the competition regardless of era.”
The passages selected, said Diamond, were intended to be “the more iconic examples”. “For example, we went with a selection from Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, even though there are probably better sex passages in Roth’s oeuvre. People have complained about this, but that was inevitable, no matter what.”
The initial “Sexy Sixteen” contenders, which LitHub said was selected from “many, many worthy candidates”, featured authors including Henry Miller, Annie Proulx, Erica Jong, Kate Chopin and Zora Neale Hurston. This list was narrowed down to “The Erotic Eight” and “The Final Four of F*cking”.
Baldwin’s entry beat Jong in the first round, Bram Stoker in the second and an extract from DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which “all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea anemone under the tide, clamouring for him to come in again and make fulfilment for her”, in the third round.
The poet and judge John Ashbery said the Lawrence passage was “ridden with embarrassing clichés”, but that Baldwin writes of “just things as they happen”, ‘another person’s body, […] another person’s smell’. In other words, chances are this really happened.”
Diamond said that the tournament coincides with the American college basketball tournament, known as March Madness, a single elimination tournament comprised of one massive bracket. “We were talking about doing something fun in that format, from a literary perspective, and literary sex writing just seemed the obvious choice. It’s easy to find bad examples, and very hard to find good— considering this is pretty much a basic and universal experience, we thought we’d try to figure out who’s done it well.”
“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”
‘Ulysses’ was a hard read, 933 pages of complex, allusive text, full of echoes, references, challenges and puzzles. Reading this novel passively, without paying full attention, is pretty pointless, and even with three weeks of concentrated reading, most readers, myself included, working without the benefit of one of the many guides available, will probably only scratch the surface of this novel’s complexity.
The novel’s reputation as being unreadable, on the other hand, is unjustified. A parallel with Shakespeare’s prose might help – Shakespeare is often described as being hard to follow, but if you take care and pay attention there is little in the canon that can’t be understood by a native speaker. ‘Ulysses’ is the same. (Incidentally, Shakespeare, and specifically Hamlet, echoes repeatedly throughout the novel)
Finally, we are left with the classics, often by dead white males, those books to which English language readers worldwide return again and again. Say what you like about my list (and thousands have merrily done so these past two years), the Anglo-American literary tradition, a source of some sublime and imperishable masterpieces, deserves to be celebrated for some astonishing achievements. Here, to provoke Observer readers just one last time, is my All Time Top 10 (chosen from this series, in chronological order):
Mark Twain’s tale of a rebel boy and a runaway slave seeking liberation upon the waters of the Mississippi remains a defining classic of American literature.
Since its publication, a century ago, James Joyce’s epic has acquired a fearsome reputation for difficulty. But its great subject, soppy as it may seem, is love.
By MERVE EMRE February 7, 2022
Listen to this story
The Twitter account UlyssesReader is what programmers call a “corpus-fed bot.” The corpus on which it feeds is James Joyce’s modernist epic, “Ulysses,” which was published a hundred years ago this month. For nine years, UlyssesReader has consumed the novel’s inner parts with relish, only to spit them out at a rate of one tweet every ten minutes. The novel’s eighteen episodes, each contrived according to an elaborate scheme of correspondences—Homeric parallels, hours of the day, organs of the body—are torn asunder. Characters are dismembered into bellies, breasts, and bottoms. When UlyssesReader reaches the end, it presents the novel’s historic signature, “Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921,” intact, like a bone fished out of the throat. Then it begins again, arranging, in its mechanical way, the tale of a young Dubliner named Stephen Dedalus and an older one named Leopold Bloom, brought together in a hospital, a brothel, a cabmen’s shelter, and, finally, the kitchen of Bloom’s home—on June 16, 1904, “an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of accidents.”
The masters who influenced the Latin American Boom
Vargas Llosa and García Márquez took cues from Faulkner
Edmundo Paz Soldán
November 21, 2012
For some time now I have been planning to give a course on William Faulkner's influence on the on the so-called Boom in Latin American writing that began in the 1960s. The course would begin with Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, who said that this American writer was the first novelist he read with pencil and paper at hand, trying to "rationally" reconstruct the architecture of his novels, see the workings of the complex play of chronology and point of view.
As Ulysses turns 100, O’Brien tries to pin down what its extraordinary author was really like
Edna O'Brien Wednesday 2 February 2022
Was he garrulous? Did he wear a topcoat? Did he hanker after renown? Such questions we ask ourselves about the deceased great, trying in our forlorn way to identify with them, some point of contact, some malady, some caprice that brings us and them closer. Such questions are not satisfactorily answered in works of fiction, writers being by necessity conjurors, ex-lovers are unreliable, friends overreaching, enemies bilious, so the closest we can get to a legendary figure is from letters. Letters are like the lines on a face, testimonial. In this case they are the access to the man that encased the mind, which housed the genius of James Joyce.
complex, allusive text, full of echoes, references, challenges and puzzles. Reading this novel passively, without paying full attention, is pretty pointless, and even with three weeks of concentrated reading, most readers, myself included, working without the benefit of one of the many guides available, will probably only scratch the surface of this novel’s complexity.
