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i'm glad you resurrected this ariadne! i was hoping someone would. i'm really glad you had that reaction to the chapter... this is part of the point i've tried to make about the book in other theads. yes, he creates a whole new language, redefines literature and the novel, references everything ever written and combines theology and philosohphy and aesthetics into each sentence -- BUT at its core it's about physical human things, like getting stinking drunk in a pub admidst a warm and crowded conversation. and it's about these things so well it seems real -- "scary" as you say. he evokes real time, accurate feelings so well, purely through language, while still making complicated points about human consciousness. you don't need the concordance and the history of dublin to feel the things he evokes here.
this is why i think the book is perfect, and why no one else has been able to do anything quite like it -- nabokov, for example, misses out on the incredibly base, human physicality, the dampness and warmth and stink that pours out of the words, and other books that dwell in physicality miss out on the elevated thought that backs this thing up.
this physicallity goes a long way towards the creation within the book of the mini-universe i mentioned in the first thread (chapters 1-3). anyone who's looking for things to say but hasn't figured out WHAT to say -- how about you take me up on some of the theories i constructed in that thread, see if you can back them up or knock them down. they are theories about the book that i'd go so far as to call "barbelithic", in that i make reference to the book as a mystical text and as a living artificial sub universe.
i suggested previously that as the book progresses you can perceive the text waking up, becoming self aware, playing with its own consciousness. by the time we get to chapter 15, the text itself has fully asserted control, like an artificial intelligence realizing that it has power over the system. this is (in part) why suddenly metaphor becomes reality; allusions and trope that were previously confined to language only in this chapter become "Real." real in the sense that they are real for the characters and the text -- it is, in a sense "Lying" to us, because there aren't actually monsters, yet on the other hand if it says so, there they are. no accident the chapter is called Circe, the sorceress -- the text is conjuring magical creatures into the realm of the book.
anyway, if anyone else wants to play this game with me, i'd love to see if other people have thoughts about the book as a living system, as a subuniverse, etc; and i'd love to see if anyone is noticing the book becoming self aware. i think somewhere around chapter 7 you can notice that the language starts to get particularly self-referential, starts to play and purposefully confuse us. this is it waking up, or if you prefer, realizing that it's dreaming. now we're in the lucid dream, chapter 15.
i can back this up with some examples, and i'll pop back in to do so in a bit, but i'm feeling perhaps 1st time readers need something to look for to spur the imagination... hopefully you can find these comments interesting and try to run with them. |
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