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“You sound like you just don’t like Modernism”

I certainly like other eras—ancient, baroque, classical, romantic—better. But, no, I do like some modernism. I love Conrad (if he is a modernist, and I think so) and Kafka, am fond of Fitzgerald (as required by law, being a Minnesotan) Hemingway, Anderson, etc. As for poets, I gobble Yeats and enjoy certain Eliot, though not much the footnotey “Wasteland.”

“You probably don’t like Virginia Woolf or Proust either?”

Woolf, no. Talk about pretentious. As for Proust, I see him as antithetical to Joyce, at least in some aspects. His sentences are beautiful, his characterizations ring true without dwelling on bowels and such, and his details are actually interesting instead of the stuff that just happens to be around as in Joyce.

Proust’s style, too, has an aesthetically unearned density of meaning. I mean by that to say the discursiveness of his sentences is not fully justified by what they yield to the understanding. And talk about digressions! Though, in this case, he’s not really digressing from anything, as the books could be seen as nothing but a series of digressions. On the whole, though, Proust yes, Joyce no.

“They were inheriting a Victorian storytelling tradition that they felt had become exhausted and they wanted to make language more important.”

Yeah, you hear this a lot. Painters felt representation and perspective had been done to death, so they replaced them with abstraction. Composers felt the sonata, symphony, opera,and ballet worn out, so they turned to atonality, serial and accidental music. Writers saw nothing more to be gained from meter and rhyming in poetry, and lineality and first-person narration in prose.

So they tried new things. And know what? They made it worse. Tonality is better. Perspective is better. Meter is better. Mimesis is better. Rising and falling action and climaxes are better. You failed, grand experimenters.

By the way, people bash Victorians a lot, and they surely were gas bags. I have to get a running start to read Arnold, Stephens, Spencer, Bagehot, etc. Don’t even get me started on the Germans. But you know what? They were on to something. No matter how little we’d like to go back to talking like that, they were onto something. Something more than Joyce, Beckett, Woolf, etc. I’d rather read a Dickens, a Hawthorne, or even a Melville any day than read “Ulyses” again.

“Joyce was a comic writer who could write in just about any style you choose”

Too many. So many that he lost all grasp on the benefit of sticking to a style, or what artistic point abruptly changing styles might serve.

“Ulysses is an epic on the head of a pin”

This sort of statement might sound profound to some, but is meaningless to me. Except insofar as he deals with ordinary things in limited time and space, I guess. There’s nothing epic about the events, setting, or characters, nor in the way the story is told. It’s just a bunch of slumming and dead-end deep psychologizing.

The only way to perceive epicness is to delve into the footnotey depths. But such depths, in my opinion, have nothing to do with the art of novel writing. Everyone can see this in “Finnegans Wake,” since it’s impossible for anyone really to enjoy, unless they’re enjoying it the same way scholars get a kick out of translating Linear B or mapping genomes.

We can’t see that “Ulyses” is no different only because it, as I have said, is fun to read once you get the hang of it. But not all fun is good, at least when we’re dealing with the subject of high art. The general choppiness and fragmented prose, as well as the famous stream-of-consciousness, and the whiplash style changes are all destructive of good writing, in my opinion. The fact that they are used to cover up the fact that we’re dealing with ordinary, boring, vulgar, and sometimes obscene matter (on the surface, anyway, though not in the footnotes) makes it all the worse.

“he popularized the epiphany as a literary climax so I don’t know who did it better”

To clarify, it’s not that Joyce misused the epiphany. When I call his epiphanies anti-climactic, I should clarify that I was being redundant, and all epiphanies are anti-climactic. It’s a bad trick, and destructive of good storytelling.

“The Dead is probably the best short story ever written in English.”

I couldn’t disagree more. Well, maybe if you had cited “Death in Venice,” but who knows? “The Dead” is compelling. I’d call it a page-turner. It is saturated with details, without it being overwhelming or them being uninteresting (as in “Ulyses”). The setting is well realized. The characters are thinner than I’d prefer; the only one who ends up sharply drawn gets that way via the epiphany, which I shall address presently.

It’s nothing more than a trick, a dirty trick. It runs afoul of all we used to know, up to the modern period (though scholars no doubt could gainsay me with previous examples) of good storytelling. What do you call the reverse of a Shaggy Dog Story? An epiphany. It’s all blow and no build-up. You may counter that the whole story up to the epiphany is the build-up, but it isn’t. Nothing that came before, or at best only subtle little hints, have anything to do with the epiphany scene in “The Dead.” The title does, obviously, but not the rest of the story.

Narrative form is governed by causal chains of rising and falling action capped off by a climax, which is (or isn’t) resolved in a denouement. Long story short, what happens before the climax is supposed to lead to it. To inform it, to help us understand what’s going on in it, to build tension for it, and so on.

What happens in “The Dead” is a bunch of stuff. Interesting stuff, well-drawn stuff, not very dramatic yet pleasing stuff. Then, suddenly, something happens. It’s as if the earth cracks open and Deep Meaning oozes out. Only we weren’t prepared for it. Nothing built up to it. It just happened. Not that nothing like that ever happens in real life. Events like epiphanies have happened to me, I suppose. But only in the sense that nothing immediately preceding them caused them. But I, unlike “The Dead,” have more than one night to reference. Certainly something happened earlier to prepare the ground for what could be considered personal epiphanies.

Literary epiphanies are like a 1.5 seconds of intercourse after an hour of half-hearted foreplay. I can’t say the intercourse would be worthless or that I wouldn’t have a good time. But that’s not the best way to have sex, nor is it the best way to tell a story.