Reading [Joyce's works] is thus a superhuman task. It involves not only reading the printed text and understanding its encyclopedic complexities, but tracing development through the pre-texts, and disentangling the accidental from the significant. The laziness and complacency of readers is commonly and often rightly blamed when inventive and original literary work fails to its effect. Good writers know that what is absorbed without effort is effortlessly forgotten, and they build deliberate difficulties into their work. From the author's point of view, when one writes under the aspect of eternity, as Joyce evidently did, it matters relatively little if five or ten generations of readers, after wrestling with the text, give up on it (with rare exceptions) in frustration, if not despair. This means only that the audience has not grown up to the author's conceptions. But the practical consequences of having an unread and almost unreadable book as the supreme achievement of the most talented prose writer of his day are bound to be complex. A first, primitive reaction is, of course, to deny in varying degrees that Joyce was a great writer at all, the usual formula being that he had great talents but misused them. (The distinction between "use" and "misuse" tacitly but perceptibly assumes the standards of contemporary society as a norm —whereas it is exactly from the sleep of contemporary society that Joyce asks us to wake that we may put on the dimensions of all the buried Finnegans within us.) There is no logical way of refuting this position, except, to point out that its pragmatic Gladstone prudence imposes on the visionary artist an impossibly contradictory set of demands. Joyce's art is the art of seeing through, of going beyond. He looks past ideologies, conventions, and intentions, beyond morals, manners, character, and individuality, to the visionary substructure of human life: by which I mean the primitive instinctual patterns and tropisms by which life is and always has been controlled. To ask that such a vision be conveyed in conventional literary forms, tailored to the measure of semi-conscious minds in search of diversion, is like asking for the universal solvent to be delivered in a plastic teacup.
That is long, but Adams needed to lay out that context in order to make his point, which is basically this: in order to convey a message or a kind of "human predicament" that will last for eternity, writers cannot afford so easily to suck up to the norms of their particular societies —instead, writers must risk being ridiculed, ignored, complicated, in so far as all the complexities of their writing hold a definite place in the whole world of their novels.
I've never read such a well-said vindication of Joyce's four novels.
Of course, there is the art of simplicity and vivacity. Kafka and Dostoyevsky are the two leaders in telling vivid and simple stories that are nonetheless rich and elevating. Both writers have the exceptional talent of telling the exactly right details of their characters' lives, in order to construct an entertaining read that lasts forever. It's not wholly true that "what is absorbed without effort is effortlessly forgotten." But it's true in so many cases. Especially in repetition. By repeating conversations, acts, mechanically and unconsciously, those moments in life lose their proper place in memory. That phenomenon is familiar. Even Kafka's memorable story, the Metamorphosis, can grow mundane as you ponder on it every night for a month (I guess nobody would do such a thing, but hey.)
Joyce's stories indeed wake the readers up from any slumbers in repetition. Whenever you hear someone complain, "my life is meaningless" or "my life is repetitive," buy them a book of Joyce. A new perspective on the world never hurts, especially if those points of view come from some Irish fellow who loathed the idea of mundane, impersonal, repetitive acts. Adams' insight —"what is absorbed without effort is effortlessly forgotten" —is another great proverb that I was able to encounter today. Lucky.
