I enjoyed this essay. Wondering if you have examples of contemporary fiction that avoid the excess of introspection, where the interior dialogue is what passes through the mind of the character rather than being captured there to be analyzed as if the character is in a therapy session. If I've captured your meaning correctly.
I like Lily King a lot. Writers and Lovers and Euphoria have a quality more like Iris Murdoch than Kings' contemporaries. Euphoria actually spends a hundred pages talking through anthropology as a science, the philosophy of love. But then it starts moving nicely.
Thanks for this comment as I was asking myself when reading your post a fantastic choice of authors, what do you like? Hmm I Found some hope. So I Thank you to you and all beautiful souls around
Nice piece. I also dislike this type of literature and hesitate to even class it as literature—these are novels written by cultural commentators, not novelists. The result, as pointed out, is lifeless art that seeks to explain rather than understand. I’d rather have nothing be explained. For a counterexample I recommend Jon Fosse’s Septology.
Love this! It reminds me a bit of the great new season of the Memory Hole podcast, which talks relevantly about trauma narratives, psychology and recent literature, etc.
After reading this essay, I feel as though I definitely missed the boat that has been modern literature for the last 25 years. Granted, I did not become an adult until the mid-2000s, but I did spend a lot of time reading fantasy and science fiction. The last contemporary novel I read that follows the type you wrote of, was Meg Woltizer’s “The Uncoupling”, and it was the most condescending tripe I’d ever read of suburban life. It was dismissive and pessimistic about marriage, and the smug orchestrator of the magical element in the novel irritated me so much that I skipped and read the last chapter before tossing the book across the room.
I swear it’s like modernist writers took Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism” as a damn guide book for how to do art vis a vis all the worst excesses of the culture and shlopped it through mass consumption for the poulace.
I very much agree with what this piece protests against, the type of literature that "seems to come out of people who majored in literature at college or who grew up reading book reviews and wanted to bring the recursive and ever-questioning sociological analysis that reviewers in The New York Times brought to the reviews into literature itself." It's a smug and neat kind of literature that lacks wonder and rarely surprises. Clearly, there are many books being published that don't fall into this category, but you don't hear enough about them, perhaps because they're more difficult to sum up.
This piece and Greg Gipson's article on Antonio Di Benedetto are my two favorite pieces by The Republic of Letters so far.
Thank you for the nice compliment, but it makes it very funny how much I disagree with this piece, particularly as someone who majored in literature in college and therefore is directly being attacked by Harry here with his anti-elitist elitism nonsense. So very, very tired of people believing that suddenly noticing that "elites" exist counts as a novel insight into human conditions.
I have an MA in English Literature and teach it, and I don't feel attacked. I can't speak for the author, but he doesn't seem to be talking about elitism so much as the unfortunate fad of turning novels into a kind of narrative editorializing, or a kind of narrative espousing of some sociological theory, which ends up being boring and predictable, at least in the hands of mediocre novelists. Too many mediocre--but praised--novelists are more interested in ideas than in people (ie. what their characters might show them). It's easier to write that way, and easier to review a book that's written that way. The true elites, as far as talent, are almost impossible to pin down. They find holes in all the most revered theories, the holes that the rest of us can't see. I'm sure Di Benedetto did that.
"It seems to come out of people who majored in literature at college"
I am so fucking tired of this lazy bullshit, anti-elitist elitism. Perhaps I am choosing to feel attacked but I feel attacked by this fucking nonsense. What should people major in in college, fucking economics? What if they want to talk about and read books all day? It's just a veiled kind of jealousy, and lame. I don't demand anyone have any particular background to write about books and literature and art, just that they do it well, but this guy thinks that he knows best who should be allowed to play. again, it's the pretend anti-elitism that covers for insecurity and the desire to reorder the elitism so the writer/speaker is part of the perceived elite. You're already here, writing, dude!
I am not an anti-elitist. I think the reason Tolstoy is the best novelist ever is that he came from the Russian aristocracy and had free time to read and huge libraries full of books only available to the elite of his era.
But Literary Theory is not necessarily a good use of lucky or wealthy college students time. It's not about whether someone is "elite." It is whether the elite education of a particular generation is helpful for writers or helpful for literary theorists.
A) you're wrong, Tolstoy wrote one very good novel, and one great one. B) You go through this essay talking about a supposed dominant mode of current literary prestige, but you don't quote any of it, or show how it does what you mean. Have you read the books? Did you only dislike them? Were there parts that actually worked and differentiated from others? This isn't about literary theory, what a goalpost-switch. Offer some examples. C) so leisure and time to read is your secret combination? No mentorship, or instruction, or exposure to things outside your comfort zone? I mean, my god have you read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? or Genet? or L'Amour Fou? Three things I never would have found if not for people placing them in my hand, though not all of those people were college professors talking Benjamin.
You think this "trend" started in the early 2000s after the example of Middlesex? I think you need to read more, more, and more widely. D) I also think you fundamentally misunderstand my complaint about the elitism of the anti-elitist, who badly wants to be of the elite but feels excluded and therefore self-consciously announces himself as against it, while pursuing the actions to get into it. It's the same process as plenty of avant-gardes and scenes before, but just placed into modern hipster terms. And without any artistic or aesthetic substance to it.
I think he's talking about people who majored in literature, but who don't get literature. C'mon, admit it, there are lots of lit grads like that. Just like there are lots of people who graduated med school who are bad doctors, but don't realize it.
In a smart book about the place of sociology in culture, written back in the 20th century, Wolf Lepenies argued that the novels of Balzac, Zola, Eliot, Gissing, etc. (as well as essayists from Carlyle to F.R. Leavis) did the work of social analysis that the emerging discipline of sociology then institutionalized. They were, among doing other things, also doing sociology before there was sociology.
Rather than being annoyed by the fact that some contemporary novels seem to do nothing but that, we may ask: how can we think about this? Why is this happening? (Most books written in any given era are forgotten within a decade or two, so I would not work myself up too much by books I don't like. *see below.)
We may wonder whether, systemically speaking, the flood of the kind of novel this post is about might reflect the reality that we no longer possess coherent, bold accounts of the society we live in? If, as the post suggests, novels respond to a demand, doesn’t the production of these books respnd to a demand generated by the experience that to most of us, society has ceased to be comprehensible as a coherent whole? One may argue that a certain type of novel, and novel reading of a certain kind, has been responding to the frustrated need to have some sort of an understanding. We have these novels because the crude analytic frameworks they ingested don’t actually do the job of making the world comprehensible. Those frameworks demand imaginative elaboration and expansion—maybe a bit like George Eliot thought through the usefulness of Darwin in imagining human life in Mill on the Floss.
That doesn't make these novels any better, of course. We are also not in the 19th century, and history does not repeat itself. Which also means it is not going to produce a Tolstoy or a Joyce a second time (except as farce…).
But once we have the diagnosis, we can go beyond being annoyed by traces of the 20th-century discipline of sociology in the novel, and see those traces as symptoms of a larger problem.
And then we can extend the observations in this angry piece to the flourishing of utopian and dystopian fiction, for example—which is also about the hunger for an understanding of the world we inhabit, and the recognition that we don’t, maybe cannot have it except by (radically) fictional means.
*(The essay compares a handful of contemporary novels to Ulysses, Anna Karenina, and Jane Austen and pronounces them as failures by those standards. But by those standards, who does not fail? The essay closes saying, "This literary school has produced many commentaries on life in the 21st-century but it has not produced many great novels." No literary school has produced many great novels. What percentage of the novels written in the 1860s or of the 1930s is anyone actually willing to read? Most of them—really: MOST of them—are so out of print you can't even find them except in copyright libraries.)
“We have these novels because the crude analytic frameworks they ingested don’t actually do the job of making the world comprehensible. Those frameworks demand imaginative elaboration and expansion”
Clever
Not certain literature will be the best place for it but this is a great point
Terrific essay, and sadly accurate. We are currently muddling through the Age of Categories in our culture, which has done much to flatten experience, and coax us farther and farther from each other. It seemed like we celebrated the wild, the unique, the personal for but a blink before once more locking everyone in their identities and the commensurate pieties. It's dismantled romance and nobility with binary analysis to leave us only with litanies of trauma and its twin fruits, revenge and suicide. I pray that we find a way to rebel against this, if only to show our children the world isn't so beige, so preordained, so neatly dissected and discarded.
I wonder what "the very stuff of life" is. What is "life as it is"? Is it feeling like you're "there at the parties on Long Island"?
In other words, what counts as real life in the novels you'd like to see? Is it mainly the realism we know since Zola and Balzac, or more the realism of Flaubert, or of Joyce?
Full disclosure: I taught sociology before Sociology became nothing more than Marxist ideology indoctrination.
I believe the author is correct about all the "science" infiltrating fiction so that, what we're left with is clinical explanations, and self-medication of the"talking therapy." Bluntly: most 21st Century fiction is boring because it predictable. Authors can only write about that which they know because they stop learning anything else to write about. Historical fiction becomes standard romance fare, just set in a different place of time filled with the facts and vocabulary of the era. It is repetitious and subjective--but the messages are all the same. Woe-is-me and hopefully woe-is-you-too so we'll enjoy the same misery.
One of the games I play when I watch movies on TV is: finish the sentence. It's sort of fun, but not entertaining.
I see what you mean but with your example being Middlesex you lost me. That book was a multigenerational epic, not just a story about an outsider. How did you not get a sensory experience from reading about the fire burning down their Greek village and the boat ride across the Atlantic? The descriptions of the Greek Detroit diners and Gross Pointe mansions with pools. The weird people she ends up with. That story had so much sensory description going on and I think it’s far different from the heady Sally Rooney stuff you speak of today. I don’t trust anything else you said about the other books now.
Jane Austen was a romantic? Buddy, did you ever read Jane Austen? Or is that the kind of thing people who majored in literature in college do? What a load of bollocks. You don't like something for reasons, and those reasons mean that anybody who does like it must be wrong, and inadequate, and not really "alive" or something. Criticize representational strategies all you want, but you do actually have to grapple at some point with why people disagreed with you to the extent that they wrote those books, and try to form arguments that defeat their explanation of why they chose to represent reality in a way you don't find useful -- both as to why you don't find it useful, which you do here, and why they DID, which you deny as illegitimate.
That's all novels have done since they began, is shift again and again how they represent the stories they tell, and to make their representation somehow engaging or specific to the circumstances of their production. What you want is for them to stay the same as the ones you liked when you read them, and have continued looking for. Jazz doesn't have to "move the music forward" but it also shouldn't be only a nostalgia act, muttering about roux in the gumbo and playing anemic, joyless, copies of the greats. While there ARE writers who are writing books that you like and in the manner you discuss, they are still writing them from the now-extant tradition of those books you don't.
Middlesex is an interesting choice of example because the Virgin Suicides pulled off such a remarkable representational trick, of speaking with a collective voice in order to embody the supposed collective guilt of the speakers, while subtly undermining whether that actually fit. But have you ever read Chateaubriand? My god, the entire point of that guy's memoirs is the magnificent digression! And, amazingly, it works with novels too. See all of sensation literature of the 19th C. Victor Hugo wrote 200 pages about Parisian sewers, digressed for pages about gothic architecture, and literally revived cultural interest in same. No doubt we can debate whether you are talking about the same thing, but why don't you just come out and admit you don't like the pointy-headed social workers and their scienc-y thinking and you prefer Bukowski talking about beer shits or Carver being drunk and fighting, or whatever mimetic and cramped fiction it is that makes you feel heard,then go read Mating, and the Book of Illusions, and good lord, man, 2666, and see how many colors you are demanding be removed from the palette. Read what you like, but don't tell me what to read if you can't do it any more convincingly than this.
I have read a few Jane Austen novels and I find her portraits of men and women romantic. She likes seeing them spar and flirt and consider each other. She is also a social realist or an ironist, but I think she is definitely a romantic.
She wrote romances, which have genre requirements, but she was not a Romantic. As for small-r, I guess you mean, what? She thought love was real? I think she wrote in a genre she knew was acceptable for women and she was relentlessly subversive of a great many of its tropes, by being more realistic, and even cynical, than had been tried before. I don't think romantic is the word, but maybe if you could define it I would understand. To me, though, she was quite the opposite of an uncritical celebrant of erotic love, though she certainly grew up with all the tropes of courtly love as the social aspiration.
I enjoyed this essay. Wondering if you have examples of contemporary fiction that avoid the excess of introspection, where the interior dialogue is what passes through the mind of the character rather than being captured there to be analyzed as if the character is in a therapy session. If I've captured your meaning correctly.
I like Lily King a lot. Writers and Lovers and Euphoria have a quality more like Iris Murdoch than Kings' contemporaries. Euphoria actually spends a hundred pages talking through anthropology as a science, the philosophy of love. But then it starts moving nicely.
Thanks for this comment as I was asking myself when reading your post a fantastic choice of authors, what do you like? Hmm I Found some hope. So I Thank you to you and all beautiful souls around
Maybe this problem began when writers left the streets and hid in the academy.
Nice piece. I also dislike this type of literature and hesitate to even class it as literature—these are novels written by cultural commentators, not novelists. The result, as pointed out, is lifeless art that seeks to explain rather than understand. I’d rather have nothing be explained. For a counterexample I recommend Jon Fosse’s Septology.
Love this! It reminds me a bit of the great new season of the Memory Hole podcast, which talks relevantly about trauma narratives, psychology and recent literature, etc.
After reading this essay, I feel as though I definitely missed the boat that has been modern literature for the last 25 years. Granted, I did not become an adult until the mid-2000s, but I did spend a lot of time reading fantasy and science fiction. The last contemporary novel I read that follows the type you wrote of, was Meg Woltizer’s “The Uncoupling”, and it was the most condescending tripe I’d ever read of suburban life. It was dismissive and pessimistic about marriage, and the smug orchestrator of the magical element in the novel irritated me so much that I skipped and read the last chapter before tossing the book across the room.
I swear it’s like modernist writers took Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism” as a damn guide book for how to do art vis a vis all the worst excesses of the culture and shlopped it through mass consumption for the poulace.
Sigh. Where did all the good novels go?
I very much agree with what this piece protests against, the type of literature that "seems to come out of people who majored in literature at college or who grew up reading book reviews and wanted to bring the recursive and ever-questioning sociological analysis that reviewers in The New York Times brought to the reviews into literature itself." It's a smug and neat kind of literature that lacks wonder and rarely surprises. Clearly, there are many books being published that don't fall into this category, but you don't hear enough about them, perhaps because they're more difficult to sum up.
This piece and Greg Gipson's article on Antonio Di Benedetto are my two favorite pieces by The Republic of Letters so far.
Thank you for the nice compliment, but it makes it very funny how much I disagree with this piece, particularly as someone who majored in literature in college and therefore is directly being attacked by Harry here with his anti-elitist elitism nonsense. So very, very tired of people believing that suddenly noticing that "elites" exist counts as a novel insight into human conditions.
I have an MA in English Literature and teach it, and I don't feel attacked. I can't speak for the author, but he doesn't seem to be talking about elitism so much as the unfortunate fad of turning novels into a kind of narrative editorializing, or a kind of narrative espousing of some sociological theory, which ends up being boring and predictable, at least in the hands of mediocre novelists. Too many mediocre--but praised--novelists are more interested in ideas than in people (ie. what their characters might show them). It's easier to write that way, and easier to review a book that's written that way. The true elites, as far as talent, are almost impossible to pin down. They find holes in all the most revered theories, the holes that the rest of us can't see. I'm sure Di Benedetto did that.
"It seems to come out of people who majored in literature at college"
I am so fucking tired of this lazy bullshit, anti-elitist elitism. Perhaps I am choosing to feel attacked but I feel attacked by this fucking nonsense. What should people major in in college, fucking economics? What if they want to talk about and read books all day? It's just a veiled kind of jealousy, and lame. I don't demand anyone have any particular background to write about books and literature and art, just that they do it well, but this guy thinks that he knows best who should be allowed to play. again, it's the pretend anti-elitism that covers for insecurity and the desire to reorder the elitism so the writer/speaker is part of the perceived elite. You're already here, writing, dude!
I am not an anti-elitist. I think the reason Tolstoy is the best novelist ever is that he came from the Russian aristocracy and had free time to read and huge libraries full of books only available to the elite of his era.
But Literary Theory is not necessarily a good use of lucky or wealthy college students time. It's not about whether someone is "elite." It is whether the elite education of a particular generation is helpful for writers or helpful for literary theorists.
A) you're wrong, Tolstoy wrote one very good novel, and one great one. B) You go through this essay talking about a supposed dominant mode of current literary prestige, but you don't quote any of it, or show how it does what you mean. Have you read the books? Did you only dislike them? Were there parts that actually worked and differentiated from others? This isn't about literary theory, what a goalpost-switch. Offer some examples. C) so leisure and time to read is your secret combination? No mentorship, or instruction, or exposure to things outside your comfort zone? I mean, my god have you read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? or Genet? or L'Amour Fou? Three things I never would have found if not for people placing them in my hand, though not all of those people were college professors talking Benjamin.
You think this "trend" started in the early 2000s after the example of Middlesex? I think you need to read more, more, and more widely. D) I also think you fundamentally misunderstand my complaint about the elitism of the anti-elitist, who badly wants to be of the elite but feels excluded and therefore self-consciously announces himself as against it, while pursuing the actions to get into it. It's the same process as plenty of avant-gardes and scenes before, but just placed into modern hipster terms. And without any artistic or aesthetic substance to it.
Tolstoy wrote the best novel ever and the best short story ever. He did have exposure to things outside of his comfort zone.
I wonder which Tolstoy novel you consider the great one? Anna?
I think he's talking about people who majored in literature, but who don't get literature. C'mon, admit it, there are lots of lit grads like that. Just like there are lots of people who graduated med school who are bad doctors, but don't realize it.
In a smart book about the place of sociology in culture, written back in the 20th century, Wolf Lepenies argued that the novels of Balzac, Zola, Eliot, Gissing, etc. (as well as essayists from Carlyle to F.R. Leavis) did the work of social analysis that the emerging discipline of sociology then institutionalized. They were, among doing other things, also doing sociology before there was sociology.
Rather than being annoyed by the fact that some contemporary novels seem to do nothing but that, we may ask: how can we think about this? Why is this happening? (Most books written in any given era are forgotten within a decade or two, so I would not work myself up too much by books I don't like. *see below.)
We may wonder whether, systemically speaking, the flood of the kind of novel this post is about might reflect the reality that we no longer possess coherent, bold accounts of the society we live in? If, as the post suggests, novels respond to a demand, doesn’t the production of these books respnd to a demand generated by the experience that to most of us, society has ceased to be comprehensible as a coherent whole? One may argue that a certain type of novel, and novel reading of a certain kind, has been responding to the frustrated need to have some sort of an understanding. We have these novels because the crude analytic frameworks they ingested don’t actually do the job of making the world comprehensible. Those frameworks demand imaginative elaboration and expansion—maybe a bit like George Eliot thought through the usefulness of Darwin in imagining human life in Mill on the Floss.
That doesn't make these novels any better, of course. We are also not in the 19th century, and history does not repeat itself. Which also means it is not going to produce a Tolstoy or a Joyce a second time (except as farce…).
But once we have the diagnosis, we can go beyond being annoyed by traces of the 20th-century discipline of sociology in the novel, and see those traces as symptoms of a larger problem.
And then we can extend the observations in this angry piece to the flourishing of utopian and dystopian fiction, for example—which is also about the hunger for an understanding of the world we inhabit, and the recognition that we don’t, maybe cannot have it except by (radically) fictional means.
*(The essay compares a handful of contemporary novels to Ulysses, Anna Karenina, and Jane Austen and pronounces them as failures by those standards. But by those standards, who does not fail? The essay closes saying, "This literary school has produced many commentaries on life in the 21st-century but it has not produced many great novels." No literary school has produced many great novels. What percentage of the novels written in the 1860s or of the 1930s is anyone actually willing to read? Most of them—really: MOST of them—are so out of print you can't even find them except in copyright libraries.)
“We have these novels because the crude analytic frameworks they ingested don’t actually do the job of making the world comprehensible. Those frameworks demand imaginative elaboration and expansion”
Clever
Not certain literature will be the best place for it but this is a great point
hear hear
Terrific essay, and sadly accurate. We are currently muddling through the Age of Categories in our culture, which has done much to flatten experience, and coax us farther and farther from each other. It seemed like we celebrated the wild, the unique, the personal for but a blink before once more locking everyone in their identities and the commensurate pieties. It's dismantled romance and nobility with binary analysis to leave us only with litanies of trauma and its twin fruits, revenge and suicide. I pray that we find a way to rebel against this, if only to show our children the world isn't so beige, so preordained, so neatly dissected and discarded.
Literature has been taken over by the HR department.
I wonder what "the very stuff of life" is. What is "life as it is"? Is it feeling like you're "there at the parties on Long Island"?
In other words, what counts as real life in the novels you'd like to see? Is it mainly the realism we know since Zola and Balzac, or more the realism of Flaubert, or of Joyce?
Or is it something outside literature?
Full disclosure: I taught sociology before Sociology became nothing more than Marxist ideology indoctrination.
I believe the author is correct about all the "science" infiltrating fiction so that, what we're left with is clinical explanations, and self-medication of the"talking therapy." Bluntly: most 21st Century fiction is boring because it predictable. Authors can only write about that which they know because they stop learning anything else to write about. Historical fiction becomes standard romance fare, just set in a different place of time filled with the facts and vocabulary of the era. It is repetitious and subjective--but the messages are all the same. Woe-is-me and hopefully woe-is-you-too so we'll enjoy the same misery.
One of the games I play when I watch movies on TV is: finish the sentence. It's sort of fun, but not entertaining.
I see what you mean but with your example being Middlesex you lost me. That book was a multigenerational epic, not just a story about an outsider. How did you not get a sensory experience from reading about the fire burning down their Greek village and the boat ride across the Atlantic? The descriptions of the Greek Detroit diners and Gross Pointe mansions with pools. The weird people she ends up with. That story had so much sensory description going on and I think it’s far different from the heady Sally Rooney stuff you speak of today. I don’t trust anything else you said about the other books now.
Jane Austen was a romantic? Buddy, did you ever read Jane Austen? Or is that the kind of thing people who majored in literature in college do? What a load of bollocks. You don't like something for reasons, and those reasons mean that anybody who does like it must be wrong, and inadequate, and not really "alive" or something. Criticize representational strategies all you want, but you do actually have to grapple at some point with why people disagreed with you to the extent that they wrote those books, and try to form arguments that defeat their explanation of why they chose to represent reality in a way you don't find useful -- both as to why you don't find it useful, which you do here, and why they DID, which you deny as illegitimate.
That's all novels have done since they began, is shift again and again how they represent the stories they tell, and to make their representation somehow engaging or specific to the circumstances of their production. What you want is for them to stay the same as the ones you liked when you read them, and have continued looking for. Jazz doesn't have to "move the music forward" but it also shouldn't be only a nostalgia act, muttering about roux in the gumbo and playing anemic, joyless, copies of the greats. While there ARE writers who are writing books that you like and in the manner you discuss, they are still writing them from the now-extant tradition of those books you don't.
Middlesex is an interesting choice of example because the Virgin Suicides pulled off such a remarkable representational trick, of speaking with a collective voice in order to embody the supposed collective guilt of the speakers, while subtly undermining whether that actually fit. But have you ever read Chateaubriand? My god, the entire point of that guy's memoirs is the magnificent digression! And, amazingly, it works with novels too. See all of sensation literature of the 19th C. Victor Hugo wrote 200 pages about Parisian sewers, digressed for pages about gothic architecture, and literally revived cultural interest in same. No doubt we can debate whether you are talking about the same thing, but why don't you just come out and admit you don't like the pointy-headed social workers and their scienc-y thinking and you prefer Bukowski talking about beer shits or Carver being drunk and fighting, or whatever mimetic and cramped fiction it is that makes you feel heard,then go read Mating, and the Book of Illusions, and good lord, man, 2666, and see how many colors you are demanding be removed from the palette. Read what you like, but don't tell me what to read if you can't do it any more convincingly than this.
I have read a few Jane Austen novels and I find her portraits of men and women romantic. She likes seeing them spar and flirt and consider each other. She is also a social realist or an ironist, but I think she is definitely a romantic.
She wrote romances, which have genre requirements, but she was not a Romantic. As for small-r, I guess you mean, what? She thought love was real? I think she wrote in a genre she knew was acceptable for women and she was relentlessly subversive of a great many of its tropes, by being more realistic, and even cynical, than had been tried before. I don't think romantic is the word, but maybe if you could define it I would understand. To me, though, she was quite the opposite of an uncritical celebrant of erotic love, though she certainly grew up with all the tropes of courtly love as the social aspiration.
As in, romantic
The Vaster Wilds is not sensory?
This jumped out at me too...
Joyce realized that Ulysses itself was too sociological. That’s why he embarked upon Finnegans Wake.
This was a compelling essay. Thank you for sharing.