Some literary stylists bestow greatness on every sentence without tiring their readers. Many readers feel this way about Joyce, but I have always preferred the subtler beauty of the sentences in Dubliners to the obtrusive, slightly show-offy ingenuity that afflicts every sentence in Ulysses: individually each of those sentences may be small masterpieces, but an unrelenting sequence of such sentences is wearisome. Great minimalist sentences – those of the short-story writer Lydia Davis, for instance – may have a longer shelf life.
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Anatomy of the sentence …
… Simplicity or style: what makes a sentence a masterpiece? | Aeon Ideas. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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"every sentence in Ulysses" is a whole lot of every.
ReplyDeleteThe post caught my eye the more because yesterday I was at Powell's in Portland, and picked up a couple of volumes by Edward Dahlberg.
I re-read Ulysses some years ago and didn't find the sentences at all distracting. In fact, I finished it in Dublin, and I noticed that after just a few days in Dublin it seemed easier to read, and I began to think it really wasn't written in English so much as in Dublinese.
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