The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Unlike its original, the Odyssey [3], it is not an open book. It yields its secrets only to those willing to work, just as Beethoven's last quartets reveal new riches the longer they are studied.

These statements made, I have three suggestions for the

reader:

н. Read Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This is fairly straightforward, as compared with its greater sequei. It will introduce you to Stephen Dedalus, who is Joyce; and to Joyce's Dublin, the scene of both novйis.

In this one case, read a good commentary first. The best short one, I think, is by Edmund Wilson, the best long ones by Stuart Gilbert and Anthony Burgess.

Even then Ulysses will be tough going. Don't try to under­stand every reference, broken phrase, shade of meaning, allu- sion to something still to come or buried in pages youve already read. Get what you can. Then put the book aside and try it a year later.

As you read it, try to keep in mind some of Joyce's pur- poses:

To trace, as completely as possible, the thoughts and doings of a number of Dubliners during the day and night of June 16, 1904.

To trace, virtually completely, the thoughts and doings of two of them: Stephen Dedalus, the now classic type of the mod­ern intellectual, and his spiritual father, the more or less aver- age man, Leopold Bloom.

To give his book a form paralleling (not always obviously) the events and characters of the Odyssey of Homer. Thus Stephen is Telemachus, Bloom Odysseus (Ulysses), Molly an unfaithful Penelope, Bella Cohen Circe.

To invent or develop whatever new techniques were needed for his monumental task. These included, among dozens, inte­rior monologue, stream of consciousness, parody, dream and nightmare sequences, puns, word coinages, unconventional punctuation or none at ali, and so forth. Ordinary novelists try to satisfy us with a selection from or summary of their charac- ters' thoughts. Joyce gives you the thoughts themselves, in ali their streamy, dreamy, formless flow.

Even the attempt to read Ulysses can be a great adventure. Good fortune to you.

At this writing probably the best edition to use is the 1986 Vintage Books (Random House) paperback, described as "The corrected text edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior." Perhaps even better is the edition by John Kidd (Norton, 1994).

C.F.

I I I

VIRGНNIA WOOLF

1882-1941

Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves

Three names among the brilliant but overpublicized Bloomsbury group have not only survived but grown more impressive with the passage of time: those of the economist John Maynard Keynes and the novelists E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Long before her death in 1941 Woolf had already begun to influence decisively the course of the English novel. That influence has continued to expand. We can legiti- mately claim that, along with Conrad [100], Henry James [96], Proust [105], and Joyce [110] (whom she did not admire), she is truly seminal.

To put it in formula terms, she demonstrated that the accepted realistic English novelists of the first quarter of the century—Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells—suf- fered from an inadequate view of the resources of their art. They dealt in surfaces, as she argued in her trail-breaking essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." She proposed to get under- neath these surfaces by using devices that have become famil­iar—stream of consciousness, interior monologue, the aban- donment of linear narrative, and a sensitive adaptation of some of the techniques of poetry. At times she failed in her endeavor; more often she succeeded.

Of the four novйis here recommended, Mrs. Dalloway is perhaps the most accessible. Through the central figure, a wealthy political hostess, Woolf gives us a picture of the London upper class, of a whole society at its highest peak of self-confidence. The great themes of love and death dominate. But there are interesting minor ones such as snobbery (Woolf herself was partly a snob), rebellion against privilege, and, more faintly, lesbian attachment. Her own intervals of mad- ness, which were to culminate in suicide, gave her extraordi- nary insight into the mind of the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith, a character as firmly realized as Mrs. Dalloway herself.

In To the Lighthouse, as in ali the novйis beginning with Mrs. Dalloway, we slip in and out of people's minds, some­times with no warning. The personages, drawn from Woolfs own family memories, are consciousnesses rather than charac­ters. Not chronological time but moments of epiphany deter­mine the novePs form and structure. She writes, . . any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and trans- fix the moment.^,>