My take on the subject-hardly original-is that throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and in our time, any innovation in the arts, from The Rite of Spring to Anarchy in the UK, from the Fauves to the Entartete Kunst, from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi to Beckett’s En attendant Godot, from Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ to Carl Andre’s ‘Equivalent VIII’, has been met with precisely the same incomprehension, hostility, derision and mockery, with the artists invariably depicted as cynical conmen trying to pull a fast one on the public in order to make a dishonest living.
#Godot book skin#
Has there ever been an anthology of authors writing about Ulysses? By which I mean a collection of writings for and against by other novelists, contemporaries of Joyce with skin in the game, whether in reviews or essays or letters or diary entries? And has there ever been a collection of the countless negative reviews of the greatest novel ever written? That could be interesting, and form the basis for a chapter in my long-planned Short History of Philistinism. ‘I see nothing very wonderful in this’ he harrumphed. There’s a second placard in the photograph announcing the author Arnold Bennett’s review of the novel, which appeared in The Bookman (August 1922). Later in the review ‘Aramis’ says, puce-faced, that Ulysses would ‘make a Hottentot sick’. Multiple Joyce: 100 short essays about James Joyce’s cultural legacy David Collard Two-thirds of it is incoherent, and the passages that are plainly written are devoid of wit, displaying only a coarse salacrity intended for humour."
There are whole chapters of it without any punctuation or other guide to what the writer is really getting at. In addition to this stupid glorification of mere filth, the book suffers from being written in the manner of a demented George Meredith.
James Joyce is a writer of talent, but in Ulysses he has ruled out all the elementary decencies of life and dwells appreciatively on things that sniggering louts of schoolboys guffaw about. ‘The Pink ‘Un’s’ literary critic was an anonymous hack named ‘Aramis’, whose view was that "appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine. The top one, advertising Sporting Life (known colloquially as ‘The Pink ’Un’) screams THE SCANDAL OF “ULYSSES”, below which are some horse racing odds:Īccording to the Pall Mall Gazette (27th March 1922), Sargon and Kilvemnon had both won their respective races at Warwick, and Sporting Life had tipped them both, which explains the placard.