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Friday, June 10, 2005
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COUNTDOWN TO BLOOMSDAY From Bellow: A Biography, by James Atlas: “In its scope, its density of reference, its large cast of characters, The Adventures of Augie March consciously emulates the work of Bellow’s literary masters -- ‘the bedrock writers,’ he called them: Dickens, Balzac, Hardy, Melville, Hawthorne, ‘the Russians,’ Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and above all Joyce. ‘Joyce was a Flaubertian to begin with,’ noted Bellow, an early and assiduous reader of Ulysses: ‘He brought to pork kidney and privies and Dublin funerals a Miltonic power of language mixing elegance with street talk, popular ditties, obscenities and advertising slogans with Homeric echoes, poetry and silliness, the high and low.’ Joyce’s capacious style became the basis of Bellow’s aesthetic credo.” |