In which the author compares James Joyce to Hitler

Well, I've thinking recently... pretty much everyone, given a timemachine, would have the question of whether or not to go back and kill Hitler (personally I think he's caused too much change to now be safely killed - the world would be COMPLETELY different, and we may have learnt nothing from the atrocities that occurred). HOWEVER - the question I want to pose is who would you consider killing apart from this dictator who forever changed our associations of the Chaplin comedy mustache? I propose James Joyce.

The face of evil.

Who?  Irish modernist poet/dickhead extraordinaire, the writer of Ulysses (the dublin-set novel, not the Homer story or Tennyson poem!)

Why? If you have to ask this question then you have the envious position of never having had to read Ulysses. To give you an idea, let me quote you a few lines from a random page:

'Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar Mac-Mahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father's a bird, he lapped the sweet lait chaud with pink young tongue, plump bunny's face. Lap, lapin. He hopes to win in the gros lots. About the nature of women he read in Michelet. But he must send me La Vie de Jesus by M. Leo Taxil. Lent it to his friend.'

- Joyce, Ulysses: The 1922 text, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). p.41

Starting to get the idea? It's all pretty much like that, with random bits put into play form or newspaper headings to stop me from going completely mad. Oh, and there's 732 pages of this, as well as 3 appendixes and 217 pages of explanatory notes, did I mention that?

I hear his other novels are quite good, and as much as I can understand what he was trying to do with this novel I still can't forgive him. Yes, he was trying to revolutionise literature, but he could have achieved that just as well with a short story. Yes, I can appreciate the scale and planning of the project, but REALLY? 700 odd pages of this? What kills me the most, however, is that he created this novel to be as impenetrable as possible with the explicit intent to cause as much trouble to critics and literature students as he could, so that it would take generations to work out all his random allusions. He wanted literary immortality, and went about it by writing the most headache-inducing novel possible. These atrocities were committed knowingly and purposefully by a sane man, and that's why I feel, and I'm sure many an english student would agree, that Joyce is the English students' Hitler.

There. I feel a little better now.

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