Fwd: ["EXLIBRIS-L"] Joyce's "Ulysses", a contemporary review

[Zachary Bos]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Maureen E Mulvihill <maureene...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 9:51 PM
Subject: Re: ["EXLIBRIS-L"] Joyce's "Ulysses", a contemporary review
To: Mark Stirling <markst...@sbcglobal.net>, <exlib...@list.indiana.edu>

Yes, an inspired essay from Dr Joseph Collins, an American medical specialist. 

Hearty thanks for sharing this, Mark Stirling. Entirely useful, I admired the piece.

I have but a gentle refinement to this claim by Dr Collins: 

"[Joyce] was so unfortunate as to be born without a sense of duty, 

of service, of conformity to the state, to the community, to society, ...."

Correct, Joyce was wary of most institutions; even detested some of them. 

The man was no joiner, no sociologist, no good-doer. But, mind you, he had a 

foundational "sense of duty, of service" to far larger and greater things: service and duty 

to history, to literature, to his own Irish 'race'. Why, he prays to his gods, at the close of

Portrait of An Artist, that he is up to the task & on his mettle: 

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge

in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me

now and ever in good stead.” (Thrilling words; the man is on a noble mission.)

Joyce was deeply committed, in my view, to making a serious contribution to history, literature, and nation.

Perhaps he felt that he was rather 'fingered for the job' -- some Irish-Catholic version of destiny, 

what certain special people are fated to do with their hours. 

All to say, a complex and deep subject, meriting discussion.  

Sláinte,  

MEM

Centenary Essay, Rare Book Hub (Feb. 1st, 2022)

____

On Feb 1, 2022, at 1:00 PM, Mark Stirling wrote:

From the New York Times, May 28, 1922, a wonderful, funny, sad, prescient review by Dr. Joseph Collins, an American neurologist, co-founder of the New York Neurological Institute. 

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/01/09/specials/joyce-ulysses.html

Mark Stirling 

Up-Country Letters www.upcole.com

PO Box 596, Gardnerville, NV  89410 

530 318-4787 

"One's intelligence is understood to increase with the strength of one's disbelief in everything, and nothing real and incontestable is to be discovered."  (Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, 1913)

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