Re Joyce (1965)

Burgess, Anthony. Re Joyce. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

The first line Burgess sets down in the foreword is: "Another book about James Joyce?" It is a fair question and inevitably had to be spoken at the start, for it must be justified. With the authoritative James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study by Stuart Gilbert and Joseph Campbell's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce's Masterwork available for scholars and non-scholars alike to use as guides, why should we take time to read Burgess's book? Perhaps the strongest answer is in Burgess's own profession as a novelist. (The highly idiosyncratic language of A Clockwork Orange certainly has its antecedent in Joyce.) From this perspective, the reader not only reaps the fruit of one who has read and obsessed over Joyce for over thirty years, but has the fruit peeled and blended into a smoothie. Who better than a novelist (as opposed to an exponent of academia) to maintain sensitivity to the lay reader while also enhancing the appeal of important books by important authors? Because Joyce is important. Ulysses (the longest day) and Finnegans Wake (the longest night) are, as Burgess has it, "twin heavens for scholars" but they also contain the entire cosmos and man's relation to it. Behind the mundane events, the books are about enormous matters. Their difficulty is by design and for our benefit. Heavily laden with a lifetime's worth of reading and study, Burgess plies us with critical extracts, biographical anecdotes, close-readings, and good humor, passionately guiding us into the dense "word jungles" of Joyce's masterpieces.