I came across Brancusi’s sketch of Joyce again; a spiral, loosely coiled, hovering somewhere between caricature and reverence. Joyce’s father, when shown the drawing, reportedly said his son had changed somewhat since he last saw him. The refusal to mythologise. Or the recognition that Joyce had already done enough of that on his own.
The sketch reappears in David Pierce’s Reading Joyce, a book I have been circling with the same mixture of curiosity and resistance I bring to Ulysses itself. I have not begun Ulysses this time, not quite. Instead I hover: rereading fragments, letting my attention spiral rather than proceed. Pierce calls Brancusi’s spiral an epiphany, “the moment, for example when a character or the reader suddenly understands their destiny or the narrative’s destination.”
Epiphany as form: not a breakthrough, but a looping return. A slow realisation that the same sentence reads differently now. That you have changed since the last time you saw it.
Perhaps all reading is this kind of spiral. You never really begin with the book itself. You approach it through sketches, through other readers, through the language that gathers around it. Sometimes, you do not arrive, not quite.
>Dear Anthony,But I'm on Declan Kiberd's side with regard to the first sentence of the excerpt you posted. Reading Joyce is undoubtedly for everyone who can read. Not all books for all people; however, most readers can read up to and even through _Ulysses_ if they choose to do so. So, I suppose it is merely a matter of what it means to be "for everyone." Not to everyone's taste–that I can buy–but beyond the intelligent reader's grasp–I don't think so.Thanks for posting this. I'm unaware of the book referenced and may have to pick it up.shalom,Steven
>Steven – I have the Declan Kiberd to read at some point. I took Pierce's remark to be a statement of taste rather than ability or intelligence.
>It's funny, I just recently picked up Pierce's book as well (after reading a glowing review of it in the most recent James Joyce Quarterly) and I read it on both legs of a cross-country flight but, although I got through almost half of it in that time, I don't really like the book very much. Reading about Joyce and his books is almost always satisfying but in this case I was a little turned off by how much personal material was included. It really makes the study feel watered down to me and I'm at a point where I want to penetrate deeper and deeper levels of Joyce's art. I think it would be a helpful book for someone new to Joyce and there is some good info about Dublin and many nice pictures, but I'm overall pretty unsatisfied when reading Mr. Pierce's book.At the moment I'm in the middle of Richard M. Kain's "Fabulous Voyager" study of Ulysses from the 1940s and really enjoying it.
>PQ – Apart from reading A Portrait twenty years ago, I am very much a Joyce beginner. It is why the Pierce book was useful and interesting. I can certainly see that, if you have covered the same ground before, it would offer much less.I've just received Hugh Kenner's Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians and much looking forward to reading it.