After Dubliners

I am supposed to be writing a history essay on Geronimo,but am stuck, so I thought I'd drop a note to myself. Finished Joyce's Dubliners, of the collection I especially like "The Dead" and "An Encounter". Joyce is really very good at capturing sounds, especially in his dialogues, one character sounds distinctly different from another. Also, he is really quite excellent in rendering scenes. Woolf is very good at capturing light and shadow on things and their colours, so is Joyce. Sometimes, I think that great writers have the eyes of an artist, only presented in language. They paint a vivid scene. The very last scene is "The Dead" was such a surprise and revelation, it was so moving and came so suddenly, I thought it was very fantastic and impressive. Joyce uses songs and sounds to create atmosphere. Woolf likes to interrupt her characters' speeches with thoughts. Good writers, I guess, have a good ear for sound, but also great visual memory and imagination.

I like how impressive and revelatory the last scene of The Dead is, but at the same time, I much prefer that obscure, lighthearted ending in An Encounter. I think that we tend to think that Great art must be sombre and give one a sense of mortality. We expect great works to move us. But I think, even little pieces full of lightness can be fantastic. Beethoven is not necessarily greater than Bach, although I'm sure alot of people think so, at least on a sub-conscious level.

Although this is so obvious, I have never thought of this before today--that what we call classics was once very contemporary. All that talk about opera, house parties, horses carriages were contemporary things for Joyce and Woolf. This just makes me feel that the lot of snobbery going on now in relation to contemporary literature is wrong-headed. Great writers, of course, have always been very educated on classics that preceded them but they have always been very true to their own time, written about concerns relevant to who they are in time. I think today, people scorn contemporary writers. I don't think what so many academics and old snobs call as the death of literature and the deterioration of language is true. Language changes. And it is the writer's job to capture that language of their own time to make sense of it. There is very little point in trying to emulate Woolf or Joyce. What we need to do is to use our own voice--even if it's less fancy and sophisticated and to make it our own.