Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time-its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards-Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on October 23, 2022.
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