标题: James Joyce and Ulysses
作者: Omni
In the history of biology (even looking back from hundreds of years later), there are only two landmark discoveries to be recognized as critical --- the publication of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" in 1859 and the discovery of DNA double helix in 1953.
In the history of English literature, there may also be only two writers standing taller than others. The first is the great insurmountable William Shakespeare and the second should be James Joyce because of "Ulysses".
My personal opinion is that James Joyce was highly overrated, but "Ulysses" is surely way more important than "Finnegans Wake". When Westerners talk about "Ulysses", they are talking about the counterpart of "Hong Lou Meng" in English literature. But I think "Hong Lou Meng" is much greater than "Ulysses" in terms of historical impact, Ulysses's fame benefits a lot from the world-wide dominance of the English language.
One more interesting thing about the publication date of Ulysses vs. Weyl's paper, Wikipedia says that "Ulysses is a 1922 novel by James Joyce, first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from 1918 to 1920, and published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922, in Paris". So they were both published in 1918, we can loosely use Einstein's buzzword "simultaneity" to describe this, hehe.
In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on a list of the 100 best novels in English of the 20th century. I gave a little try on the English version when I first heard about Ulysses at Johns Hopkins in 1996, but I immediately decided it would consume too much of my precious time. When the Chinese translation became available online in 1999, I read more parts of the book. Only because of Tony Zee's great inspiration, I read the majority of Chapters 7 and 15 in English seriously last night for the first time. That two-hour reading exercise was a lot of fun thanks to the two Chinese translators' detailed annotations which saved me tremednous amount of time.
Even after this fun experience, I still won't recommend curious non-English-majored students to read Ulysses directly without the help of the Chinese translation. The time investment wouldn't be worthwhile, a bilingual selective reading exercise may end up saving you a lot of time. Even for those students majored in English literature, they should do some preparatory homework before jumping into the sea of Ulysses without any help from "swimming aids". It's better for them to read Homer's "Odyssey" first and to be willing to use a solid dictionary as frequent as necessary, the following comments from Wikipedia are pretty fair:
Ulysses chronicles the passage through Dublin by its main character, Leopold Bloom, during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title alludes to the hero of Homer's Odyssey (Latinised into Ulysses), and there are many parallels, both implicit and explicit, between the two works (e.g. the correlations between Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus). June 16 is now celebrated by Joyce's fans worldwide as Bloomsday.
Ulysses is a massive novel: 250,000 words in total from a vocabulary of 30,000 words, with most editions weighing in at between 644 to 1000 pages, and divided into 18 chapters, or "episodes" as they are referred to in most scholarly circles. The book has been the subject of much controversy and scrutiny, ranging from early obscenity trials to protracted textual "Joyce Wars". Today the novel is regarded as a masterwork in Modernist writing, celebrated for its groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness technique, highly experimental prose—full of puns, parodies, allusions—as well as for its rich characterizations and broad humour.