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introductory remarks to Chapter 1 AND true Joycean experience: I have read with interest what you wrote as introduction to Ulysses, Rasik, and thank you very much. I would love to start reading the main book now but I have fallen in love with Coetzee's writings, and right now reading his books have become my priority and pleasure. Still, as I read your comments, I remembered what I had read in the introduction to the penguin edition of Dubliners. The section I quote below has to do with hunting for the symbols in Joyce's writing: "For it is not that Dubliners does not possess a complex structure and a detailed symbolism, for all the realism it also achieves, but that such readings direct attention away from a full encounter with the individual story itself to a reductive account of some altogether simpler narrative which is a poor substitute for the true Joycean experience". So, how does one proceed best to have this true Joycean experience?? That is a very burning question for me particularly after reading the explanation, you gave Rasik, on the significance of the colour yellow. Do I pay attention basically to every word, and look for all the nuances that word implies? Wow!! I guess that this book will teach quite a few things in how to read a book. I also guess that I am not the first who will be taught that! In the same introduction I read that Ulysses has to do with both Odysseus and Hamlet. To see the threads of connections between all three works, and the traditions of Christianity,etc, must be something!! Now for the rest of the things that have to be done, letters that have to be written and mailed before 1999 ends! Let me borrow the wordings from an Indian greetings card to wish you all a very happy new year: "Happy new year in the new millennium of the century!" Chandra ( Also read in the article which quotes the above sentence that the Indian languages do not have a word for millennium.) |