k.e
Posts: 1948
Joined: Mar. 2006
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| Quote (Mike PSS @ Jan. 22 2007,19:23) | | Quote (BWE @ Jan. 22 2007,18:30) | | Why is xian any different from any other book? |
I would put it up there with Joyce's Ulysses for readability. After a few pages of the writing style you just have to put it down, blink your eyes, and focus on something else to get your mind back to reality.
I've tried reading Ulysses three times and never made it past page 50.
I've read much more of the bible, but that was with some "explanatory notes" on the side. It becomes less of a chore and more of a story (depending of course on the author of the notes).
On the other hand, you have in Ulysses the original authors words. Whereas the bible is a copy of a transcript of interpretation of a scroll. |
Mike I hope you get to read this but I had a similar thought about Joyce's "Finnegans Wake".
I rather think his whole purpose was to write a bible in reverse, or more precisely to conceive a set of stories to be received by the reader on an aural plane by Joyce personally telling the story orally. With its images very consciously constructed just as the bible came into being, a product of the imagination. Spoken and sung in the language between deep sleep and sub awakening, of dream. Like an Aboriginal dreamtime story, reality is sung into existence. A mixture of rich fantasy, of metaphor and between the lines meaning. Using rhyming and crossword like clues for almost every line. Even the title fin again, to stop and restart in a circle (fin was always projected on the screen at the end of every movie in those days too, another Joycean touch) . Joyce believed life was a repeating tale, his 2 protagonists Shem and Shaun are the prototypical sons of Abraham engaged in a psychological battle between knowing and not knowing. The limit as always is the reader, meaning can only come by freeing the objective mind.
The countless mythological cross references with elements of '20's and '30's popular culture which have no meaning now, does show how the bibles readers construct from a non current or objective language with mixed fact AS fiction with outdated meaning and unrecognized mythological symbols that can only be understood by relearning a past culture.
Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" is a practice manual, a language tool, a gift for future generations that assists the user in decoding dream and poetic language. Just as the bible is meant to be read.
When words lose their ability to convey only the very basic ideas of Orwellian "good think" and bibliolaters think the OT is fact, when it is the Imagined History of the Jewish people Joyce’s work will remain as voyage of discovery (ultimately of ones-self) equal to a Homeric journey.
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The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions.These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.Haldane
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