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Hi Everyone, I guess my less than helpful wording about "simony"in my last post created a bit of confusion on line. I do apologize to all but I was writing after a long long night and I suppose I just wrote a vague, shorthand idea of what I meant. I think it's all been cleared up by a variety of helpful posters but if I have a chance I will add a little note later explaining what I mean by Simony--both in the religious sense and the larger senses that I think Joyce is aiming at. I am also very glad that some people mentioned that not enough people were posting; That was the proverbial boot which kicked me into blurting out something at least. "A Mother" is one of my least favorite stories in the volume for the reasons others have mentioned -- something less that a full portrayal of the central character, Mrs. Kearney. I don't think she is really a flat character but something of the caricature is felt at times. I do love Joyce and I love to talk about his works. But now and then I do need that boot. Chandra made a wonderful point about initial readings of Joyce sans the aid of secondary sources. We are always tempted to use aids but the rewards of an unfettered and uninfluenced reading are substantial. I do think that using critics in some way corrupts any first reading of a text------- we tend to see what we are told to see by 'the authority'---- and we are easily seduced into reading into the text only the generally well argued interpretation of the commentator. At least that has been my own experience. It is not easy to read Joyce without aids -- but when we do, what we get out of the text is our own; It strikes us the more forcefully and stays with us the longer. I tried my best to read Ulysses uninfluenced by critical trots------ got part way through -- but now and then I admit I weakened and cheated. I really wish I had the patience to read it exactly the way the first readers had to. But the flesh is weak, I suppose. I learned the difference between close familiarity with primary texts and texts filtered through secondary sources the hard way. For my undergraduate thesis I wrote on the poet John Donne and must have included at least 50 secondary sources in my work. And I thought I knew Donne-- ha! Well, the first day in Graduate School I met a Donne professor who had the nerve to tell us to "dump" all the secondary sources-- "We are going to find out just how to READ the poems." My heart dropped; These critics were the basis for all my supposed 'Donne knowledge' and now they were worthless. We began to read the poems with a kind of acutely close scrutiny that I had never experienced----- each word was parsed and analyzed. Grammatical structures were discussed. It all seemed at first like a boring process -- merely the nuts and bolts of a beautiful creation -- but it eventually became an amazing journey of discovery. Finally, I realized that I had never really understood what the poems themselves were really saying---- I had merely cut and pasted the opinions of various critics and mixed and matched---- with hardly an original though -- nor a clear understanding of any of Donne's texts. I didn't know Donne; I only knew the criticism. Since that time I have become a teacher and I have all my students write in a little notebook their reactions for 30 minutes or so just after their first reading of any short text. I ask them to include questions about the text or comments for class discussion the next day. Then, after a class of discussion, we all read the text again with hopefully fresh eyes -- paying attention to things others have brought up. Usually I add a guiding question or two for some sort of response in their class participation notebook. And then we discuss the text a third time. I have been amazed at the ideas students have come up with -- ideas I would never have thought of on my own. And I make a comically dramatic point of writing down any interesting comments in the margin of my own text and tell them "Well I may not be so bright in THIS class---- but I will sound like a genius an hour from now in my other class!" If we can, I guess I am suggesting that we take a shot at reading any text at least once or twice before we read anyone else's words. That way we experience what the author wants us to experience -- through our own eyes----- not a critic's. I have nothing at all against literary critics; they provide invaluable secondary aids. But I think the experience of reading literature is heightened by avoiding them initially. Once we get ideas ourselves about the texts, ideas that we have come to by close attention to the work and to our own experiences of life, then the critics become useful. At that point we have a personal knowledge of the text against which we can test the eloquent theories of the "Authorities." JAY |
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