Notable Quote: “A Poor, Dotty Irishman Called James Joyce” by Evelyn Waugh

This is just an amazing quote by Evelyn Waugh on James Joyce.  You have to know a little bit of literature.  You have to know that Evelyn Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited, which I’ve posted on here, was a curmudgeon of the highest order.  You have to know that James Joyce is the great modernist writer of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and, relevant to the subject here, Ulysses.  I don’t know if it’s probably not accurate to say that Joyce was the founder of modernist literature, but he certainly is its greatest devotee.  And in modernism we find that the stream of consciousness narrative is its most difficult to device for the reader to grasp.  James Joyce is “the major pioneer of stream of consciousness” as the Wikipedia entry says.

So now the quote: Waugh is asked about James Joyce’s influence on Waugh as a young man.  He replies with this.

 “A poor, dotty Irishman called James Joyce—if you’ve heard about him—he was thought to be a great influence in my youth. . . . and he wrote absolute rot, you know. He began writing quite well and you can see him going mad as he wrote, and his last books—only fit to be set for examinations at Cambridge.”

At this Waugh was asked: “He didn’t always write gibberish, did he?”

 His response: “No, you could watch him going mad sentence by sentence. If you read Ulysses, it’s perfectly sane for a little bit, and then it goes madder and madder.”

That's just too funny.