I had a strange mood today and started and finished this in one 10 hour sitting. It was excellent, but simultaneously not as excellent as I had hoped. I enjoyed lots of the short stories in Dubliners more, I think. The "avant garde" structure often felt superfluous - although not always. The color symbolism was interesting, but I felt it fell away in the second half of the book. In fact, the entire middle portion (those gigantic sermons, my god!) was a bit rough to get through. But I do appreciate that it really evoked the sensation of being in a washed out, weary, hypnosis sort of state - and it did leave a psychological impression in the following sections, like you really "remembered" that part of Stephen's life. The discussion on Stephen's philosophy of art was the highlight for me, along with a bunch of tiny little fragments of test that felt like beautiful lucid clear thoughts. It did evoke the feeling of going through life in a largely automatic blur, with a few powerful moments sticking out. I especially enjoyed that the powerful moments were often completely mundane events made powerful only via Stephen's feelings in the moment. His struggles with expressing and capturing this elusive sensation were beautifully portrayed. And the switch to first-person at the end felt delightful in its regressive irony (according to Stephen's point of view), as it represented the "lyrical form" in some rough sense.
Anyways, curious if anyone else has thoughts on it to share. I couldn't find any discussion online about the red/white color symbolism. I interpreted it as a representation of cold lifeless religiosity vs hot vivacious "mundanity". But I'm not sure if the York/Lancaster origination of the symbols is meant to lend more to it, etc., or if maybe I've missed that entirely. The green and maroon were clearly political and I found lots of discussion on that. I'd love to hear what anyone else's favorite/least favorite aspects were.
Comparing Dubliners with Finnegans Wake is astounding, it is like tracking the first rocket launch humanity ever made to outside the atmosphere of the known novel starting from the very center of a Hemingway like minimalism in the deployment of language to tell a story (that still largely suffocates the imaginative potential of words as a vehicle for storytelling to this day 100 years later) and blasting off to the most rich and creative use of language a human being has ever committed to paper.
In Dubliners James Joyce restricts his extraordinary creativity and playfulness entirely to the use of absences (of plot, of direction, of heroic resolve) and it is stunningly beautiful in a polar opposite way to Finnegans Wake.
Don't miss the political motivations of his evolution of writing style either. JJ never had any issue with directly talking about the shitty parts of life, of speaking truth to power, hence the US Supreme Court case.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Book_Called_Ulysses
The growing thicket of tangled meanings James Joyce deployed was at its heart a defense against Victorianism dissecting everything into dead categories seperated by industry and strict social norms, directly and profitably compatible with fascist annihilatory artificial divisions of reality. Understand the mess of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as an embrace of life and a battlecry against fascism.
https://engelsbergideas.com/portraits/sylvia-beach-the-bookseller-who-defied-the-nazis/