When I first started to take literature seriously, somewhere in mid-high school, I read about a book called Ulysses. There were stories of it being banned, of it being the hardest book in the English language. When I went to university to study literature I eventually realized that I would have to deal with this heavily-contested, opaque work of genius. I was terrified.
So about a year and a half ago, I sat down and read Ulysses for the first time, and it changed the way I look at literature. All the things he did! In Joyce’s Ulysses you will find an artist with no fear, an artist who truly trusts in his own skill, unwilling to sacrifice his art for ignorance. The book is a glittering jewel, containing nearly everything that makes literature truly worth reading, but transforming it. Ulysses is not a text, it is a work, and what it asks of us is that we work a little in return. And trust me, it’s worth it.
It was never really clear to me why I chose “vestige” for my domain, but after reading Michael Blowhard‘s ridiculous little hissy fit about Ulysses (trying at once to say “to each his own”, and “people who like this book are pompous” without appearing contradictory) I realize that it was because, subconsciouly, I wanted to preserve something of literature as a great and worthy enterprise. This is not the only place where you will find the last vestige of literature as high art, but it’s one of them.
I’ll leave you with some words of wisdom from Jeanette Winterson:
Art cannot be tamed, although our responses to it can be, and in relation to The Canon, our responses are conditioned from the moment we start school. The freshness which the everyday regular man or woman pride themselves upon; the untaught ‘I know what I like’ approach, now encouraged by the media, is neither fresh nor untaught. It is the half-baked sterility of the classroom washed down with liberal doses of popular culture.
[ … ]
The solid presence of art demands from us significant effort, an effort anathema to popular culture. Effort of time, effort of money, effort of study, effort of humility, effort of imagination have each been packed by the artist into the art. Is it so unreasonable to expect a percentage of that from us in return? I worry that to ask for effort is to imply élitism, and that the charge against art, that it is élitist, is too often the accuser’s defence against his or her own bafflement. It is quite close to the remark ‘Why can‚Äôt they all speak English?’ (“Art Objects,” 15-16)
Happy Bloomsday.
