Re Joyce

by Anthony Burgess

"My book does not pretend to scholarship, only to a desire to help the average reader who wants to know Joyce's work but has been scared off by the professors. The appearance of difficulty is part of Joyce's big joke; the profundities are always expressed in good round Dublin terms; Joyce's heroes are humble men."

--From the Foreword by Anthony Burgess.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Ireland, Criticism, Literature, 20th Century, Biography

276 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).

He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers , a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air . His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac , Oedipus the King , and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire . He composed the Sinfoni Melayu , the Symphony (No. 3) in C , and the opera Blooms of Dublin .

Reviews

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

“abnihilisation of the etym”,

roughly meaning, the recreation of meaning out of nothing...

~

Burgess’s study of Joyce was not a hard sell for me. Joyce is not only my favorite writer, Ulysses not only my favorite book, but Joyce himself is a personal hero, not only for the works he produced but for the manner in which he lived his life, persisting in the face of every obstacle to pursue his art to its very ends, to the limits of what English literature might achieve, on his own terms. He accomplished this while facing down personal poverty, ill health, vilification, obscurity, a life of wandering and exile, while the calamities of the 20th century raged about him. (Ulysses was written during the first World War and the years immediately after, Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s “17 year palimpsest” was published on the eve of World War II, Joyce nearly gone blind.) All the while, though, Joyce, the finest artist of haute literature, who set the highest standards for his own work since men like Shakespeare and Milton, was the writer of the “common man” par excellence, (the heros of all of his books to the last are working men, men of the pubs and streets, their parents, wives and children, everyday Dubliners all), devoted husband and father, a remarkable tenor, great joker and lover of puns- the drinking, laughing, singing martyr to art. As a young man reading through his body of work and then Ellmann’s biography, this was nothing less than pure inspiration to me. My experiences with Joyce and the literature surrounding him changed the way I thought about words, what books are and can be, what art is meant to do, what it is capable of, why one might devote their life to such a personal vision and ambition despite the antagonism of the world at large. Joyce taught me a valuable lesson in perseverance that I never quite got from parents and friends.

Burgess’s Re Joyce, then, is the perfect celebration, reflection and survey of the body of work, and a looking forward (through Finnegans Wake) for someone like me, who is familiar with the texts through Ulysses but wishes to make inroads into Joyce’s masterpiece. It would also be ideal for a reader curious but apprehensive about the legendarily “difficult” author, because Burgess is far from overly academic here, it is a very personal study*, and throughout the book he continues to remind the reader that Joyce was, above all, the most human, even humane, of writers. Not only in his personal life, but in the works themselves- when the symbolism and high diction, the torrents of style and neologisms and layers of reference are stripped away, Joyce’s works are at their hearts loving, gentle, touching. They exalt familial love, devotion to partner and parents and children, kindness, intelligence, elevating human beings and their creations into eternal forms, they deride violence, bigotry, hostility, and stupidity, and search out truth amid the chaos of the universe, they attempt to reform the connections that bind together all of our human experiences from the “shattered glass and toppled masonry” of history. But above all, and most importantly, all of Joyce’s works, and most especially his two big books, are comic masterpieces, howlingly funny, satiric, playful. Joyce created the most erudite works of the twentieth century, but he made them out of the stuff of old stories, legends, folk tales, as well bawdy jokes, bar humor, popular songs, children’s rhymes. (”...the eternal vision is made out of muddy water, old saws, half-remembered music-hall songs, gossip, and the stain on a pair of underpants. The heart bows down.”) The low into the high, the high out of the low. The mythic in the everyday, the universe as it sings through the familiar. How else to construe the cosmos that can only be construed at all through the character of human language?

So Burgess guides us through Dubliners, Stephen Hero, A Portrait Of The Artist…, the poems and plays, and then spends about 100 pages each on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, emphasizing their structure, their repetitions, the workings of their internal symbolism, their musicality (Joyce was the most musical of writers (a consequence of his failing eyesight?)), their progression from and relation to each other. The book closes with a defense of the Wake against its critics and the hostile reception it has historically met with. All the while he builds the case that what Joyce was approaching throughout his entire body of work, that which culminated and was perfected in Finnegans Wake, is a static art, art that does not lead from event to event (the traditional “narrative structure” of the novel) but an art that moves in circles and cycles, if it moves at all, on which layers of meaning are allowed to accrue, an art that is structured and acted upon from the outside, by the universe, by history, by myth, by a reader's personal experiences with the text, by the same forces that structure and influence our lives in the natural world, which are the same forces at work in the most distant regions of the space**. In this mode of art, first expounded upon as early as Stephen’s aesthetic musings in A Portrait Of The Artist…, “the mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing”, therefore it cannot be degraded and anchored between those two poles of popular literature, the pornographic and the didactic. To make eternal works of comic art (that is, art related to the workings of the cosmos), those artworks must be composed in imitation of the eternal- thus the importance of Vico’s Scienza Nuova and its theory of cyclical history to Joyce’s two big books; thus the returning motifs of transubstantiation and metempsychosis throughout the final works. Burgess argues most effectively that Joyce’s goal, most especially achieved in the Wake, was to empty language of the encumbrances and limits of time and space, and let the radiance of words burn by their own internal energies. To let the words have their voice.

”Examine that stain on the table-cloth, the crescent of dirt in your thumb-nail, the delicacy of that frail cone of ash on your cheap cigar, the pattern on the stringy carpet, and see what words will most exactly and lovingly render them. The words that glorify the commonplace will tame the bluster of history. The moon is in a cup of cocoa and the Viconian cycle turns with the sleeper on the bed with the jangling of springs. At the same time, take words as well as give them, so that eternal myths are expressed in exactly caught baby-talk, the slobbering of the crone in the jug-and-bottle, or a poor silly song on the radio. This is Joyce’s art.”

*There is a touching anecdote about Burgess, a soldier in Northumberland in winter 1941, polishing the windows of the Sergeants’ Mess with a week-old copy of the Daily Mail- he turned it over and beneath articles about the latest destruction of the latest Great War was Joyce’s death announcement- “Good god, James Joyce is dead!”- His sergeants’ reply- “Back to it!”, so he returned to scrubbing the window, Joyce’s obituary facing outward toward the snow “faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

**His analysis of the mathematical structure underlying Finnegans Wake is especially fascinating and enlightening- in this morphing, hallucinatory, deep dream-tongue-world the governance of mathematics yet reigns eternal- as it does in the outermost undiscovered reaches of the universe. Another instance of the macro within the micro, and vice versa...

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Burgess has set himself a task which is rather next to impossible in today's reading climate when readers might complain about needing to read a second book in order to understand a first book. "My book does not pretend to scholarship, only to a desire to help the average reader who wants to know Joyce's work but has been scared off by the professors." I suspect that the books themselves have already caused the scare. And is it not true that any work which is worth your time and effort and desire to understand requires some measure of pre-understanding? Some prior initial understanding of what it's about? Some establishment of what to expect even before turning to page one? I may have read it backward, but I suspect that what Burgess has done here is provide an excellent first glance into the question of Joyce's two big books. Should you possess even the slightest trepidation in the face of these two books, do yourself the favor of reading Burgess's love letter to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Should you have already read the one or the other or both, do yourself the favor of reading Burgess's love letter.



_______________
"The appearance of difficulty is part of Joyce's big joke." --Burgess

But I object to the characterization of Joyce's work as a "big joke."


And Burgess's contribution to the question regarding ;; "Finnegans Wake: What It' s All About" :: http://www.metaportal.com.br/jjoyce/b...

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful so far, and I'm almost at the end.

***

"If critics will accept the logic of Finnegans Wake, hidden beneath what seem to be mad words and intolerable length, they will still shy at the lack of what they call action. This, they say, is presented to us as a novel, and in a novel things are supposed to happen. Very little muscle is exerted in either Finnegans Wake or Ulysses, but we have to avoid lamenting the fact that Joyce was never strong on action of the Sir Walter Scott kind, that, though he was drawn to epic, he early rejected the bloody substance of epic.

We have seen in his work how even the least gesture of violence will provoke earthquakes or Armageddon, even shiver the universe to atoms- events too apocalyptical to be more than static, comic rites, final mockeries of action as the best-sellers know action. he did not reject such action as a vulgarity, only as a property that might damage language by inflating it. The representation of passion or violence had best be limited to thought or speech, since the thrust of fist or phallus, being a physical cliche, seems to call for a verbal cliche in the recounting. The cliches of Dublin pub-talk or an advertising canvasser's interior monologue are mere naturalism; the frame of symbol and poetry is a new creation out of words and the rhythms of words, static rather than kinetic. The novel should aspire to Shakespeare's language, not Shakespeare's stage-directions.

But, of course, Joyce was a family man, and the small events of the family day had far more meaning than the big passionate public events of the books on the sitting-room shelves. In both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake he attempts to cut history down to size, measure it against his son's cold or his daughter's toothache, his wife's plea for more housekeeping money and the broken dental plate he cannot afford to have repaired.

He committed himself to glorifying the common man and his family, anointing them with a richer language than the romantics, whose eyes were full of the universe, ever gave themselves time myopically to amass. Examine that stain on the table-cloth, the crescent of dirt in your thumb-nail, the delicacy of that frail cone of ash on the end of your cheap cigar, the pattern on the stringy carpet, and see what words will most exactly and lovingly render them. The words that glorify the commonplace will tame the bluster of history. The moon is in a cup of cocoa and Viconian cycle turns with the sleeper on the bed with the jangling springs. At the same time, take words as well as give them, so that eternal myths are expressed in exactly caught baby-talk, the slobbering of the crone in the jug-and-bottle, or a poor silly song on the radio. This is Joyce's art.

It is, finally, an art of scrupulous rendering. I do not mean by this that Joyce's great achievement was solely to find the right word and the right rhythm for the thing that was already there, waiting in the DBC tea-shop where Parnell's brother 'translates a white bishop' or on the banks of Shakespeare's Thames where the pen is 'chivying her game of cygnets.' I mean rather that he set himself the task of creating exact and inevitable language for the conceivable as well as the actual, and that Finnegans Wake is an exercize in rendering the almost inconceivable. From this point of view alone it cannot be ignored, though imaginitive writers continue to ignore it, being perhaps frightened of admitting that they, like young Stephen Dedalus, 'have much, much to learn.'

Joyce continues to set the highest standards of any author except Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Hopkins to those who aspire to writing well. His mountain looms at the end of the street where so many of us work with the blinds down, fearful of looking out. So long as we ignore his challenge we can go on being content with what the world calls good writing- mock Augustanism, good manners an weak tea, the heightened journalistic, the no-nonsense penny-plain, the asthmatic spasms of the open-air invalid, the phallic jerks of the really impotent.

But when we have read him and absorbed even an iota of his substance, neither literature nor life can ever be quite the same again. We shall be finding an embarrassing joy in the commonplace, seeing the most defiled city as a figure of heaven, and assuming, against all the odds, a hardly supportable optimism."

Amen. You may now put down your hymmnals.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Dublin pub-crawlers claim him as their own, but official Ireland rejects him. This is as it should be.'

[Bob R Bogle · Rating 4 out of 5]

In RE JOYCE well-known James Joyce enthusiast Anthony Burgess (in his youth when ULYSSES was still banned he cut the book into pieces which he taped to his body under his clothing to smuggle it into England) enthuses at length about his literary hero. Nothing wrong with that. Burgess has acted upon an impulse shared with many a Joyce enthusiast. My first question about RE JOYCE is: Who is Burgess' intended audience? The answer is Burgess himself and, to a slightly lesser degree, others who are already likewise committed enthusiasts. "My book," Burgess tells us, "does not pretend to scholarship, only to a desire to help the average reader who wants to know Joyce's work but has been scared off by the professors." I grant Burgess does not emphasize the literarity of Joyce's works, but frankly I've never encountered an "average reader" of ULYSSES or FINNEGANS WAKE, and I doubt that many Joyce enthusiasts anywhere would ever be deterred by even the most formidable pack of hydrophobic academicians; in truth, most either are or have been academicians themselves or at least are more than comfortable in the presence of same, even if only encountered in the printed pages continuously churned out by the Joyce criticism machine.

Excepting the opening and closing chapters, Burgess in RE JOYCE engages in charming confabulation about nearly all of Joyce's oeuvre, providing, from a devotee's perspective, an interpretive retelling of what happens in Joyce's fiction from DUBLINERS onward. A fresh-minted undergrad working on a class paper on DUBLINERS or A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN might crack open RE JOYCE in search of guidance to this famous Modern writer of naturalism. But as Joyceans are made by reading ULYSSES (only a small fraction of them going on to the WAKE), Burgess' readers will already be rather well-informed about much of the content of his book, this can't really be a guide for the general public. Fortunately, Burgess gives us much to think about.

Reflecting upon Joyce's painstaking meticulosity when sculpting in the Word, let's consider some of what Burgess has to say. Beginning with his conceptualization of epiphanies, Joyce forever labored to "manipulate the commonplaces of language into a new medium that should shock the reader into a new awareness" and so expose the numinous in its quotidian setting. The evolution of Joyce's textual voice on the way to ULYSSES, and the masterful level of artistic control required in its achievement, demonstrates that his kneading of style is not an affectation but a means to a desired artistic end. Citing a famous example, Burgess points out that, increasingly self-identifying in the last chapters of PORTRAIT with the fabulous artificer, Stephen Dedalus nevertheless skates out of that novel as more of a retrogressive Icarus in search of a father, conflating the mortal father-son relationship with the one of more pressing concern to the Church and pointing the way to Joyce's follow-up novel. Joyce assigned relevant bodily organs to most of the episodes of ULYSSES not to pile up allusive layers but to bring forth the equivalent of an ad hoc human body in his creative work, making him a Dr Frankenstein with a difference.

I'm grateful a few important points are raised in RE JOYCE that are seldom mentioned or recognized by self-signifying Joyceans. For one thing, although the Circe episode of ULYSSES is almost universally spoken of in terms of hallucinations, Burgess rightly observes that the visions "are coming from without, are summoned by the author's own magic . . . this huge dramatic exercise is not dramatic at all." Whose hallucinations? Bloom's? Stephen's? Joyce's. Concerning style, some who do not favor Joyce object to his use of symbolism, finding it far too pervasive and pretentious. Burgess allows that " . . . those critics who hate verbal ambiguities tend to love sharp visual images, and Joyce . . . has been repeatedly attacked for the low visibility of his writing." Inevitably this begs the question of whether Joyce's wrote more to appeal to the ear than to the eye as a consequence of his life-long poor vision. But even more than the ear, Joyce's writing appeals to the cerebral cortex, and his prose can seem particularly cold compared to that of other writers. If it is so, as Burgess says, that "the fundamental purpose of any work of art is to impose order on the chaos of life" (a more sustainable postulate, I think, than AE's vortical claim that "the supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring"), then Joyce's extensive use of weight-bearing symbols (or at least an intricately interlaced motif network) under his strata of naturalism is there for the glorification of his art: a view which we who are not naysayers and ruffians reflexively attacking verbal ambiguities embrace. A broader we, descendants of serial pop-culture generations no longer apprehending a distinction between art and entertainment, its vision atrophied to such a degree that it can only ask of an artistic or recreational exhibition: _What is this about?_ and not _How does this reflect the human condition?_, may accordingly leave vulgar, one-star reviews of Joyce at Amazon, frustrated by his copious verbal ambiguities instead of marveling over the limitless possibilities they open up for us. Of these ambiguities, of Joyce's insistence on loading words with multiple, often contradictory referents, Burgess reminds us that they are "all artistically legitimate . . . they all seem to aim at a mode of communication rather than a wanton muffling or quelling of sense." The mundane insistence on one word/one meaning locks us into a much smaller world than the one Joyce inhabited . . . and a world, one might add, easily exploited by sordid politicians and those with degrees in marketing.

What of FINNEGANS WAKE? Some, Burgess points out, "were inclined to desert him as a man who was going further than was either sane or decent." Indeed, it's often a challenge for even ULYSSES devotes to find the courage to take on the WAKE. Is the book explicable? Is it sane? The gulf separating Joyce's last two books is so grand that we have to make a leap of faith; that is to say, we have to ask ourselves whether Joyce has earned our trust in him to not waste our time as readers, to believe that the WAKE must indeed be sane and sensible despite the evidence that is manifestly to the contrary. No one, Burgess wisely points out, "writes a book of six hundred and twenty-eight pages (especially a man with Joyce's lack of sight, wealth and encouragement) for the sake of pure play and sheer irreverence." Hints of what's to come may be found retrospectively. In the conflict between angels and devils (Michael Furey and Gabriel Conroy) lurking beneath "The Dead" we detect the eternal brother battle between Shem and Shaun in the WAKE, and even "Grace" begins with a fall not wholly unlike that experienced repeatedly by HCE. Likewise, a clever Burgess detects manifestations of Shem, Shaun and Issy in the characters of Richard Rowan, Robert Hand and Bertha in EXILES. As Leopold Bloom finally succumbs to sleep with dissolving thoughts of Tinbad the Tailor and Sinbad the Sailor, we find in the WAKE the sailor who seeks a new suit of clothes from the tailor and ends up marrying his daughter. A great deal more of ULYSSES may be found in the WAKE as well, of course, because Joyce was always a writer who plowed under his previous works and experiences to fertilize his next crop of written words. Joyce "set himself the task of creating exact and inevitable language for the conceivable as well as the actual, and . . . FINNEGANS WAKE is an exercise in rendering the almost inconceivable."

Burgess' framing chapters are the best in the book. In the opening chapters before we get to DUBLINERS he informs us the popular novel didn't yet exist when Joyce was writing ULYSSES and puts Joyce in his proper time and proper perspective. We get a handy list of holidays Joyceans might celebrate. And Joyce's democratic subject matter is bound in a nutshell: "Ordinary people, living in an ordinary city, are invested in the riches of the ages, and these riches are enshrined in language, which is available to everybody." Such insights, and their expression, make Burgess a worthy read. And in the book's closing he says of Joyce: "when we have read him and absorbed even an iota of his substance, neither literature nor life can ever be quite the same again."

He is quite right.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Auch wenn Burgess kein Literaturwissenschaftler und lebenslanger Joyceaner ist: JOYCE FÜR JEDERMANN liest sich nicht nur unterhaltsam und hervorragend, es hat mir auch in vielen Punkten neue Erkenntnisse beschert.
Besonders bedankt sei Burgess für seine Ausführungen zum 9. Kapitel des ULYSSES, Skylla & Charybdis. Wenn das 3. Kapitel, Proteus, schon eine Herausforderung ist, ist das 9. eine Potenzierung. Da kann ich als einfacher Leser jede Hilfe brauchen, die ich bekommen kann ...
Aber natürlich seien Burgess Ausführungen zu diesem Kapitel nur beispielhaft genannt.

[Paul H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5 stars.) Maybe the best general intro to Joyce? I've always thought Burgess was overrated as a novelist but this is very, very good 'amateur' literary criticism, reminiscent of James Wood (or maybe TSE), not bogged down in theory, and written by someone who clearly loves Joyce -- as we all should. (Every time I read a book about Joyce's novels I am reaffirmed in my apodictic certainty that he is easily the greatest of all time; it's not even close.)

Re Joyce relies a little too heavily on Joyce's half-facetious schema given to Gilbert, and also many of Burgess's insights have been expanded upon since 1965, though he should receive some credit for getting there first. Still, absolutely first-rate throughout; the final third of the book contains the best/clearest analysis of FW that I've discovered thus far.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've yet to read A Clockwork Orange but from what I know of it and of Anthony Burgess's style and use of language, James Joyce was a major influence, and it only seems natural that he should write an exploration of Joyce's art. The work opens with a bit of biography, all very fascinating, laying down the case that so much of Joyce (perhaps more than is so with other authors) is autobiographical, from his religious upbringing to his relationships (primarily with his father, brother and, of course, Nora), his exile/outsider status, his connection with Dublin, his struggling eyesight, and, naturally, his birth as an artist. Once the autobiographical foundation has been laid, the rest of the first section deals with Joyce's early works -- namely Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist, as well as (to a lesser degree) Stephen Hero, Exiles and Joyce's verse. The second section is devoted to Ulysses and the third (and final) section to Finnegans Wake (autocorrect didn't try to add an apostrophe this time). This was a book packed full of rich language that I eagerly looked forward to picking up every night, and upon reaching the last page I would have experienced great disappointment at having reached the end of this journey if I didn't know already that this is a work that I would surely revisit. Undoubtedly, I will probably come back to it again and again as I get lost in the great language dream that is Finnegans Wake, which (if my book group maintains its current pace) should take several years to read.

Burgess gives us a picture of Joyce as not only artist, but a man aspiring to the heights of God, a creator of a world and a language filled with beauty and mystery, likening Finn Wake especially to the creation of the world/the word, of nature, awe-inspiring and incomprehensible in its entirety. We might pick up a little here and there, but (almost) every word is packed with so much possibility that in any attempt to navigate our way through the great labyrinth of Joyce we will ultimately miss quite a bit and on a rereading we might find something new every time and also lose sight of something that caught our attention on an earlier read.

Joyce's world, like the natural world, could be studied on end (he wanted his readers to become his devotees) and we would never be able to pick up everything, but only understand (if lucky) a small slice of it (and here I am referring to all of his works to some degree, but mainly Ulysses and more so Finn Wake). I wonder if Joyce would have understood it all after the creation (remembering that when reading Gravity's Rainbow, a work strongly influenced by Joyce, I had encountered a line from Thomas Pynchon somewhere suggesting that he couldn't remember what he meant in many parts of the book).

Of Joyce's final work Burgess writes:

Difficult? Oh yes, difficult. But a certain difficulty is the small price we must pay for excitement, richness, originality. And we must learn to smile rather than frown: this is the world of 'Jabberwocky'. But the dream is not Alice's. We are dreaming a mature dream, remembering the past of mankind and the primal guilt that history hides but reveals. Yet the dream is a joke, as life itself may be.

Burgess provides interesting analyses throughout for Joyce's major works, shining a light on Joyce's influences -- including, but not limited to, Lewis Carroll, Blake, Freud, Milton and Vico -- and personal life throughout. And while I am having lots of fun so far at Finnegan's Wake (to quote from the Irish folk song), Burgess has helped deepen my understanding (limited though it is) and appreciation for Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

I found much to like in Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners when I first encountered them, but I don't think I was ready for Ulysses when I first took it up. I had not at the time read The Odyssey, which was a mistake (I've since read two translations of that work) and was not quite prepared for any of Joyce's puzzles. And Ulysses left me feeling in awe, no doubt, but also frustrated (as I guess could just as well be said of life). But it undoubtedly made an impression upon me.

Joyce has, over the years, earned a respectable seat at the table of Western literary greats, but he still remains a polarizing figure because, in part, of his erudition (I can only imagine what Tolstoy, who hated Shakespeare, and didn't consider him a real artist, would have said about James Joyce), and also because of his madness (Carl Jung diagnosed Joyce as schizophrenic after having read Ulysses), so much so that Burgess finds it necessary to tack an entire chapter in at the end of this book to defend Joyce against his critics.

Burgess did give me a deeper understanding and appreciation of not only Finnegans Wake, but all of Joyce's work. And I think that, love him or hate him (or love him and hate him) there is so much truth to T.S. Eliot's remarks about Ulysses, which really extend to all of Joyce's major works: "I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age had found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape." Burgess gives us clues here to the puzzles of Joyce, if we haven't figured them out on our own. But we shouldn't be too sure of ever finding a way out of the labyrinth.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a while it actually makes you want to read any of the crap that James Joyce published. The feeling thankfully passes.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hela boken är lika genial som titeln.
Anthony Burgess går igenom James Joyce författarskap och dess utveckling, alltifrån 'Dubliners', över 'A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man' och det aldrig avslutnade 'Stephen Hero', som alla innehåller aspekter av hans alterego Stephen Deadalus. Och så kommer en 100 sidor lång betraktelse över labyrinten 'Ulysses'. Det är mycket givande läsning, som man inte behöver läsa för att uppskatta 'Ulysses', men som på alla sätt fördjupar den glädje som en närläsning av 'Ulysses' kan innebära. Det är upplyftande läsning, insiktsfull.

De avslutande 90 sidorna behandlar 'Finnegans Wake', som Joyce ägnade sina sista 17 år i livet åt. Den som många har sagt vara snårigt obegriplig. Burgess visar med sina insikter, kapitel för kapitel, hur även detta verk tar sig an livet med humor som bas. Även om jag aldrig kommer att ha tid läsa denna tegelsten - i ultrarapid - där Joyce blandar språk och onomatopoesi, även inom orden, för att skapa en mytisk drömvärld, som bas för det lilla livet, människolivets villkor - så är jag själaglad att jag läst Burgess utredning.

Burgess väcker känsla och förståelse för Joyce idéer bakom verket, och dessutom de enormt djupa kunskaper Joyce satt inne med både litterärt, mytologiskt, och språkligt. Jag blir mycket intresserad av den mytvärld han återskapar i närmast burlesk, farsartad stil, råhet likt 'Ulysses', men som under ytan tar näring ur en mycket rik tankevärld.

Precis som med 'Ulysses', hittar jag Hologrammets helhet i varje detalj. Och här verkar det uppenbart att Joyce själv tänkt i dessa banor, då livet bygger på myter och berättelser vi berättar för varandra, och återupprepar rituellt, in i minsta vardaglig detalj. Fadern och sönerna (tvillingar, som i de äldsta mänskliga myterna), mannen som försöker ta över Guds roll, Patriarken, bygga städer, samhällen, men misslyckas, faller för att ersättas av sönerna.

Och mot detta sätter Joyce Kvinnan, Vattnet, den livgivande Modern, som likt Isis försvarar sin make, och efter hans fall samlar ihop resterna av sin fallne make. Hur än många gånger, hur många generationer, dessa grundroller byter namn, är det ändå samma grund liv efter liv. En Evig Cirkelgång vi lever.

Det är mycket inspirerande att ta till sig denna tankevärld, oavsett om jag någonsin får tid att fördjupa mig i ursprungstexten.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Burgess states in the Foreword of Here Comes Everybody, "After nearly fifty years of reading Joyce, it seems only right that I should pass on what I have learned of his methods to those who come fresh to his riches". And indeed his does this beautifully. Burgess covers the entire scope of Joyce's work, arranging the book into three chronological parts, Part 1 covering everything up to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Parts 2 and 3 expounding Ulysses and Finnegans Wake respectively.

This book may be read as an introduction to Joyce, as an accompaniment while reading Joyce, or as a synopsis having read Joyce. My familiarity with Joyce's works could apply it to any one of those three categories. In the case of Finnegans Wake, however, I'm most certainly talking about the first. Burgess devotes a third of the book to elucidating this monster and quotes enough passages to illustrate the difficulty of the text, but in the process gives me a curiosity that will some day result in further study.

My final thought; it seems a Shem to me that later editions of this book were renamed to Re Joyce, I preferred Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will read and have read any biography I can find on James Joyce. He fascinates me, so when my library got a new (old) biography in, I was really excited. Once I got it, I realized the author wrote "A Clockwork Orange," one of my favorite books. It isn't as much a biography as just a fellow writer and fan talking about why James Joyce is such a fascinating and enigmatic figure. It didn't give as much insight into Joyce's life as I would have liked, but it was written so well.

[Fraser Kinnear · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this is the best work of literary criticism I've ever read. At least, I could confidently make this claim about the middle third of the book, which is the share Burgess devotes to Ulysses. Burgess teases ideas and cross-text connections out of Ulysses that I just couldn't believe he found (let alone that Joyce invented them!)

I think I would have gotten much more out of the Dubliners and Finnegans Wake sections if I'd already read those books. Although, I'm not sure if I'm any more devoted to reading the Wake, as I could barely follow Burgess's theorizing!

[spass_mit_buechern · Rating 4 out of 5]

„Das weiß man, dass der Ulysses in Deutschland maßlos überschätzt wird. Er wird ja nur deshalb so überschätzt, weil ihn kaum jemand gelesen hat“, ist ein berühmtes Zitat von Marcel Reich-Ranicki. „Joyce für Jedermann“ ist ein Buch über ein Buch das kaum jemand liest, also das wohl noch weniger gelesen wird, als Joyces Werke selbst.
Burgess schafft es, dass wir noch tiefer in die Welt von Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus und Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker eintauchen und sich der Nebel an einigen Stellen etwas lichtet.
Von der Algebra im Ulysses bis zur Glorifizierung der Arithmetik in Finnegans Wake erfahren wir so viele interessante Details, dass man kaum hinterher kommt.

Also ein unbedingtes Muss für jeden Leser von Joyce.

[Steve Garriott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Burgess’ book is helpful (hopefully) in providing a context for anyone who wants to read Joyce’s works. My goal is Ulysses. My takeaway is to just take my time and enjoy the work rather than be intimidated by it.

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the third book on Joyce that I've read in the last few weeks--Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study, Richard Kain'sFabulous Voyager, and now Burgess' take on Joyce's overall work. I read through these as I read through Ulysses itself, and I left Burgess for last because I mistakenly thought it discussed the entirety of Joyce's output throughout. Instead, I found out that, if one wished to, readers of Ulysses could read 2/3's of Re Joyce and find a useful synopsis of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses itself.

I'm tempted to say that Burgess' book was the best of the three 'guides' that I read--and I do think it probably is--but I did read the other two first, and it's hard to know how much groundwork they laid, which then may have made Re Joyce more effective. I don't buy all of Burgess' interpretations, but since he includes Joyce's earlier works (which really do seem to be as much a part of Ulysses--or it them--as they are individual stories), the overall effect was to pull it all together and give it a sense of coherency in a way I hadn't been able to do before, either because of the stretch of time between each book, or because I hadn't paid enough attention, or from sheer ignorance of the references.

I've seen this book described as sort of a love letter to Joyce, and I think that has some merit; Burgess is definitely sold on Joyce's ability. His enthusiasm is infectious--sometimes even making me want to go back and re-read portions of Dubliners, Portrait and Ulysses. Considering I thought the first was fantastic but really disliked both of the others, that's saying something.

The last third of the book covers Finnegans Wake, and I only skimmed through this section. I felt all of the irritation, annoyance and frustration I had while reading Ulysses come back with full force just reading Burgess' thoughts and quotes from Wake. In fact, with all the study I've done on Ulysses in the past few weeks, that book seems almost pedestrian when compared with Finnegans Wake. Maybe someday I'll be open to it, but not now. The way I see it, to want to study either of Joyce's last two books, you have to believe that the effort will pay off with something of value. You have to care about what the point is, in order to spend all that time tracking down the references. Burgess certainly does, and his cheerleading was effective enough to at least make me consider putting in a little more effort, in taking a second look at some things I'd pretty well decided I was done with. And that, I would say, was probably Burgess' entire reason for writing the book.

[Brigham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting walk through of all of Joyce's works by the man famous for writing a Clockwork Orange. Something like really brainy Cliff Notes that span an entire career. Not sure what kind of reader would best be served by this book, but for me, a guy who is always considering revisiting Ulysses and Finnigans Wake, it helped stimulate the Joyce part of my brain and give me a little more ammo for when I do get around to reading those books again.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Burgess does not cover a lot of new ground but he does provide a unique perspective as a writer and he provides a complete analysis of the Odyssey parallels. I think this book is best read after you have already read Ulysses.

[Henry Begler · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing I’ve always admired about British media of the 1950s-1970s is that there was a ton of material like this produced for a public audience that took for granted the idea that ordinary people are curious and intelligent and might want to do something like read Joyce, and didn’t condescend or coddle like our horrible cultural mandarins at NPR/NYT do today. This book fits into a cosmology that includes shows like Ways of Seeing or The Shock of the New or still-extant radio programs like In Our Time. I don’t really know when to read this— Before? After? I read it after Ulysses which I already read alongside a lecture series explaining similar things so lots of it was old news, which is not his fault ofc. But the introductory chapters (with some fascinating biographical details— imagine passing around Ulysses with all your world war II buddies because you had heard it was a “dirty book”) and the section on Finnegans Wake are excellent. Particularly if you will probably never read FW - while reading this I went from a from a solid “never going to happen” to “maybe one day”.

[Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't read a lot about Ulysses since reading it last year (and I'm not sure I want to do a full deep dive into even half of the very many famous, "must read" books that have been written about it) but this is without a doubt the best of what I have read. I would almost argue that it's worth reading Ulysses so that you can then read Re Joyce. Excellent criticism that deeply enhanced my understanding and appreciation of a lot of Joyce's work, especially Ulysses, and even some grist for thinking a little more intelligently and generously about works of literature in general.

(I'm not sure I'm ever going to read Finnegans Wake, though I'm maybe 10% more likely to consider it after reading several chapters about it here. But many of the FW chapters are worth reading even if you're also in my position--especially the first 4 and the final one).

[Tony Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An accessible way into novels that demand a great deal from the reader. (I read this book under its original title of Here Comes Everybody.) Burgess situates Joyce in his times and provides and overview of his work. He gives a useful review of Joyce's more easily read books, within the context of his overall opus (noting, for example, that the final story in Dubliners begins to depart from strict realism, foreshadowing the literary adventures to come). But by far the greatest value of Burgess's book for me was the way he takes ordinary mortals though the story line of Ulysses, and the even more challenging Finnegans Wake.

[ñick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A witty, erudite little summary of James Joyce’s bibliography, chunked into three sections of roughly equal length: “The Stones” (poetry, Dubliners, A Portrait, and Exiles); Ulysses; and Finnegans Wake. Burgess is clearly just happy to lay bare some of the more abstruse allusions and references moiling around in these texts, and his abiding love of Joyce’s work is, I think, a greater merit of this book than the summaries themselves. These summaries are crystal clear and very insightful, but Burgess’s little [auto-, sometimes]biographical asides and critical rhapsodies are the real meat of this book for me. Like the back cover says: good reading for anyone with any sort of interest in Joyce.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gearing up for an autumnal reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, I thought it would be a good thing to take a stroll through Joyce with Anthony Burgess. I am so glad that I did. Burgess' generosity of spirit and the easy and authoritative extent of his knowledge of Joyce and his exhilarating enthusiasm for the subject makes this book a welcome breeze to read. ReJoyce is one illumination after the next, and Burgess is both sherpa and cheerleader, both for the subject matter, and for the reader set to embark on the journey.

[Kuma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd been watching old Burgess interviews and enjoying his interesting, erudite, thought-provoking and very honest opinions. Having never read Joyce, and being interested in Joyce, I bought this, and it's like listening to Burgess chatting about a subject with great enthusiasm, just like he does in interviews, so I found this a wonderful book to dip into on a regular basis. I didn't read it from start to end, more like constantly dipping in and out, like I would with the Bible! So it's constantly next to me on my side table in my study. Highly recommended.

[Michael Haupt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite frankly, I'm too daft to grok Joyce on my own, fascinating as his books are. Burgess' introduction to all of Joyce's books is clearly written by an admirer. It makes the work accessible without relieving the reader (and aspiring scholar?) of some intellectual work. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is fascinated by and interested in Joyce without daring to tackle the heavier lifting.

[Marta D'Agord · Rating 5 out of 5]

Publicado originalmente em 1965, é muito mais do que uma introdução à obra de James Joyce. Formada por três capítulos, cada um dedicado a uma apresentação e análise dos romances: Um retrato do artista quando jovem, Ulysses e Finnegans wake.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a daft book I read on Bloomsday. Couples with Campbell's commentary, you'd think Joyce's works were more important than the Bible (they're certainly better written at least).

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed Anthony Burgess's views of Joyce. Plan on reading Finnegans Wake chapters with that book. Ulysses chapters were in depth on Joyce and experiment.

[Joe Loftus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nobody understands Joyce better than Burgess imo.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great chronological (and in some case chapter-by-chapter) intro to Joyce's work for the regular reader. Would recommend to anyone who wants a way into the Labyrinth of Joyce's two big books.