Dickens and Joyce
"OF the making of many books there is no end." This, as the preacher implies, is bad enough in itself but the condition is aggravated when on three nights of a single week over 3YC, BBC champions persuade you to get beyond a youthful affection for Dickens’s least typical novel or to take up the struggle with Joyce again. Already looking at these speculatively it is fortunate I missed Grigson’s talk on Hardy. By
treating Dickens not as a realist but as one who, looking at the world through a child’s eyes, saw people in their more arbitrary and mysterious aspects, and combined this with a passionate discow of Victorian "charity," Walter Allen gave an introduction to Dickens which made the rough ways smooth. Joyce, frankly, goes beyond me except in certain features of Finnegans Wake, where ‘his. strange language unites heaven and earth in a new beauty not observed by those romantics whose one aim in life is to get all the earth off their hands. Yet whether I agreed with Henry Reed or not I see clearly for the first time why Joyce. may be considered as a barrier in the history of the novel, as one from whom many have borrowed but whom rione has surpassed.
Westcliff
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19520208.2.21.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 657, 8 February 1952, Page 10
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213Dickens and Joyce New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 657, 8 February 1952, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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