The Dubliners: "...My intention
was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I
chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to be the centre
of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public
under its four aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public
life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written in
for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness. . . ."
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"Faintly falling, like the descent of their last end upon all the living and dead"
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"To forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." |
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "...I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning..."
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Ulysses: "...It is an epic of two races (Israelite-Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). It is also an encyclopedia. Each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the structural scheme of the whole) should not only condition but even create its own technique. Each adventure is so to say one person although it is composed of persons -- as Aquinas relates of the angelic hosts..." |
 "Love says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred." |
 "If we were all suddenly someone else." |
On reading Finnegan's Wake: On the surface, the book is the story of a family; an amiable but strangely
guilty husband and his forgiving wife, their lovely daughter and her
two competitive brothers. Their tale is told during the course of
one night, a night in which the father dreams, and his dreams have
dreams of their own. . . . and the dream encompass the whole of history,
with all its races, religions, mythologies, and languages; all its
loves and hates, enmities and affinities -- all melting and flowing
into each other, revealing the cyclical, unchanging nature of life.
Essentially, Finnegans Wake is a tale of the subconscious, that nebulous
place with taproots plunged into the collective unconsciousness of
the human race. Here, time is collapsed and finally annihilated, and
all identities are mutable -- a series of masks to be shuffled and
discarded as the need arises. And, like a dream, the book reflects
this mercurial plasticity -- characters melt into each other, identities
are in constant flux, and mythological, historical, and allegorical
counterparts exist for everything and everybody: even the words themselves
are impossible to pin down to any one clear definition. |
