My problem with Joyce is that he seems more interested in linguistic innovation and the movement of consciousness than literature itself. I don't have problems with digressions, complexity or even footnotes. I just want to know where I am in the novel locally instead of being lost. Why should I have to take a course or keep a companion in hand to understand the movement of consciousness? Isn't it something already present in my own mind? If Joyce wants to represent ordinary consciousness, why can't I experience it directly through the prose? I know the references to Homer, Irish politics, Catholic theology and literary history. My problem isn't a lack of knowledge. It's that the prose should give me a chance to interpret it instead of being so clever, putting obscure Latin phrases as refrains, instantly shifting to a random scene in a coffee house, and then fading into a memory. There's a difference between not knowing what a scene means and not knowing where I am or what's happening in the novel. The former invites interpretation; the latter just leaves me lost. And having to consult a companion is already distorting the experience because I'm supposed to read the book firsthand. What is the point of representing consciousness if I need a guide to understand how that consciousness is being represented? Infinite Jest is recursive, digressive and complicated, but at least it gives me enough local coherence to follow what's happening. Finnegans Wake takes Joyce's experiments even further, to the point where I struggle to see the literature beneath the linguistic experimentation. Joyce might be a great language philosopher or a master of the movement of consciousness, but I think he was more concerned with those things than with literature itself. Everyone tells me Ulysses is the greatest novel, but is it really the greatest if I need a companion to understand it? How many people would call it the greatest without the hindsight of its literary legacy? Its historical importance and linguistic innovation are one thing; the actual experience of reading it is another. I don't reject experimentation, but why should I care about an experiment with prose if it makes the novel itself unreadable for me?
>My problem with Joyce is that he seems more interested in linguistic innovation and the movement of consciousness than literature itself.This is a good thing and part of why he was based. Human consciousness IS more interesting than literature. Art should be a monument to its uniqueness and special qualities.
>>25590407If he is soo good at it why can't any well versed reader get the exposition without essays, annotations and guidebooks. The most intimate thing to our life is our own consciousness still then most people can't grasp the representation of it in his works without a retrospective knowledge of him. Not to mention if students of joyace need mediation to understand text, what is the point of removing narrative structure? You are placing it through a backdoor of guidebooks and annotations .
>>25590426How much is 1+1?
>>25590426>The most intimate thing to our life is our own consciousness still then most people can't grasp the representation of it in his works without a retrospective knowledge of him.You're so close, anon. Think about how intimate and yet how mysterious the very nature of experiencing thoughts and emotions can be. Think about their ephemerality, their transience. You seem to think his form and content are at odds, but the opposite is the case from my view.>why so many references, why so hard, why so dense, etcHow genius can genius really be if it's easy to understand? Do you think Boer and Einstein should have made their most famous essays more layman-accessible? (I understand Einstein did in fact do that for some of them but A) that's besides the point, and B) they're still pretty fucking hard even then.) Ulysses and FW are demonstrating what interior minds can look like when taken to an extreme limit. The references are more like signposts and clues, not the idea or the point in itself. If Joyce removed every allusion but kept the same complicated diction, syntax, etc., it would still be a similar reading experience and it would still be difficult and dense.
>>25590390Have you ever considered that Joyce is representing the movement of his own consciousness, a consciousness far more erudite, elastic and profoundly inspired than us mere midwits could ever aspire to possess? We get to temporarily inhabit the mind of one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century. It’s no surprise that most are left confused and disorientated.
>>25590449>You're so close, anon. Think about how intimate and yet how mysterious the very nature of experiencing thoughts and emotions can be. Think about their ephemerality, their transience. You seem to think his form and content are at odds, but the opposite is the case from my view.I can agree with all this but that isn't my argument, he might be the genius of stream of consciousness or how neurons fire thoughts even, but still it's premediated through secondary literature, essays and commentaries. His attempt to remove premediation fails, because of all its greatness, you need to understand it through deciphering. Joyace fails everytime in giving any immanent experience of consciousness moving through language, instead he ends up creating a transcendental idea of how a great representation of consciousness should like in language. Not to mention this stems from his pervasive catholicism, which wants to see and watch every small movement of human thought. Joyace is just a priest making his own confessioners and declare it holy along with his fellow believers. Truly disgusting
>>25590484I considered that and I think it's a failure by his own aesthetic theory
That's the thing with JJ; when he goes wrong, it's never through doing something badly, always through doing something I don’t want done. The funny bits in Ulysses are very funny: 'and with that he took the bloody old towser by the scruff of the neck and, by jesus, he near throttled him', and that section like an examination paper makes me laugh at the start, but all the stream-of-consciousness business strikes me as a bore; once in 1000 times something stands out as 'a good touch', but hardly more often.>>25590449>How genius can genius really be if it's easy to understand?ever heard the story about the emperor’s new clothes?Skelton, in his appraisal of why Chaucer was so great, wrote:Chaucer, that famus clerke, His termes were not darke, But pleasaunt, easy and playne;Ne worde he wrote in vayne.
>>25590500Art, by definition, is artifice. It necessarily presupposes some extent of "premeditation". This isn't necessarily a bad thing at all, but it is antithetical to the Modernist ethos of being suspicious of metanarratives, not exactly unlike how Postmodernists (the philosophers, less so the painters or film directors) are suspicious of metafiction. People who think art can be "THE THING IN ITSELF" are made fun of by Joyce constantly through his more air-headed and self-satisfied characters, usually the ones who are the least unselfconscious. Joyce is very aware of this and toys with it as early as page 1 of A Portrait. The idea that any work of art can be 1:1 recreation of life experience is rejected by his works, and how he consistently comes up with new stylistic ways of demonstrating and portraying this is a big part of his genius. Political/religious analysis will not save anyone in these waters (which, again, is another thing he accurately predicted and anticipated multiple times).
You must understand, that when James is on fire, he's on fire. Lots of good points made in this thread by both sides, but one think I thing we can all agree on is that that opening line from Finnegan's Wake>Begin again, FinneganWhich and, this is no hyperbowl, send chills down my arms every time I read it.
>>25590519
The fact that Joyce lovers are fun and funny and just want to have a good time and Joyce agnostics are annoying spergs tells me everything I need to know.
>>25590509>ever heard the story about the emperor’s new clothes?I've read chapter three of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and chapter nine of Ulysses, yes.
>>25590530Hickory dickory dock. Point is, it’s a thoroughly bad way of framing genius, which, when doing its job, makes things simpler rather than more complicated.
>>25590484The same could be said of experiencing the intellect of the retarded.
>>25590390>>25590426>>25590500My final argument would that, literature itself is missing from joyace supposed giant works. None of defenders of faust, Shakespeare, Dante, Tolstoy or even Woolf has to hide behind style of writing (supposed stream of consciousness) to be called the greatest works but every joyace apologists defend the bad pervasive structure of novel in name of innovation and genius and the difficulty of representating consciousness. The literature itself is very low in priority and experimentation with psychic structure, linguistic developmets takes centre stage . Again as I already said the pervasive desire to represent every microthought, every development stems from catholicism of joyace and his supporters see him as the culmination of history of English literature (which is wrong and cultism), all this brilliance is only there because students or scholars of joyace create a retrospective teleology towards Ulysses starting with homer but taken in abstraction it's a weak and rather shallow work of literature and a very tedious one. (Sure you can keep calling him artist of language or whatever)
>>25590562Yes, which is why to keep myself well-rounded I occasionally read stuff by Mishima or Jordan Peterson.
>>25590570And all these so called joyace fans(faggots) should directly confront my arguments instead of trying to make filmsy argumenta about his greatness
>>25590500>>25590570maybe if you weren't brown and ESL you could take high art more seriously, and then, in turn, be taken seriously (You)rself. oh well.
>>25590551>genius is when you pander to the masses of women and browns
>>25590578Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings, the unscholarly globe patrons who walked in from the cockfight on the street. Any group that tries to seize hold of art for itself and defend it against the hordes of plain people is as offensive to me as simple snobbery.
>>25590585writing for is fine, pandering to is not
>>25590589Great then we have no quarrel.
>>25590390A true artist owes you nothing. You meet him at his own terms, and the piece either resonates with you or it doesn't. You shouldn't wish for the artist to be different; instead, you should examine your own reaction to it. What moved you? What bored you? What repulsed you? Why? How does it relate to your worldview and your inner sensibility?There are many 'masterpieces' and 'greatest X' that I consider strange, or even bad. And there are many 'failures' and 'unreadable' stories that I relate to deeply. Who cares what society or some schmuck critic has to say about it?
>>25590597You posted a good counterexample to your argument. when Picasso invented a new language of painting in cubism, he painted casserole dishes that every commoner had in their kitchen. He too (like Shakespeare, Cervantes) wanted to persuade the public to accept his art. To do that, you have to play the part of a prostitute. Put on a bit of make-up, be a little bit dishonest, you have to give something the public can follow.
>>25590572You yourself are retarded if you think anything of worth could ever come from an Irishman. Paragraphs of intellectual masturbation critiquing or praising a potato nigger can not hide this truth.
>>25590616god you want to come off smart so bad
>>25590621NTA but I don’t think people who care to appear smart throw around terms like potato nigger.
>>25590597What a huge cope, you’re probably a failed “artist yourself. An artist only becomes an artist through the praise of the crowd, cope all you want, you are screaming into oblivion.
>>25590631”
>>25590631>An artist only becomes an artist through the praise of the crowdthat's not an artist, that's a video game programmer
>>25590630>ethno-narcissists would NEVER dramatize or fetishize intellectual bloodsports
>>25590621Im not smart. This is simply the average intelligence of the non Irish. You wouldn’t know this you feral alcohol ginger monkey.
>>25590631>An artist only becomes an artist through the praise of the crowdBy that metric the greatest artist of all time is Justin Bieber
>STOP SCREAMING INTO THE VOID, he said, shrewdly yelling into an empty potato burlap sack
>>25590639No it isn’t. A screaming junkie is inspired in his own opinion, or is he also an artist in your cope?
>>25590639
>>25590650>No it isn't.Yes it is.>A screaming junkie is inspired in his own opinionThat's not an opinion, that's a cope.>or is he also an artist in your cope?That's not cope, that's an opinion.
>>25590651>poets can't be their own readershow old were you when you got your high school diploma? 23?
>>25590648Is he not?
>All this long-winded cover up analysis to justify an obvious skill issueBegin again with the Greeks.
>>25590630This isn't Walgreens, JaMarcus.
>>25590656are you asking me or Dante Rossetti? I think he went to Kings College.
>>25590654You can attempt to escape the truth I have told you all you wish. You are not an artist if nobody enjoys your work. You are a pretender at best, and will only be peddled by those who others avoid. Such as you peddle Joyce.
>>25590570He did say he considered himself a scientist. His linguistic ability probably outran his ability as a psychologist or seer of spirits. Your critique is correct but this still doesn’t mean he isn’t the greatest writer of the 20th century. Youre analysis reminds me of Lukacs on modernism and Joyce in particular. I don’t remember exactly what he said but iirc its that he’s doing a new kind of literature which is a dead end. But this is all symbolic of spiritual crisis
>>25590570I don’t think you’re wrong to find Joyce lacking in, say, transparency. Something that could never be said of Tolstoy. But to be sympathetic to him I don’t think that’s the point; it’s rather to say that he didn’t have standardly realist ambitions. Your task is to heed the provocation and find something else. I have a similar impression of Coetzee, whose novels, though in a different way, can seem like just so much scholar bait - of which they have been so criticised.
>>25590661do they say that a lot at walgreens?
>>25590597I s’pose Nietzsche might have agreed with some of what you said. But the dominant view of aesthetic creation and evaluation, from Kant, holds that art is created, as judged, disinterestedly - from a universal voice or perspective, from something we share just in virtue of being human. This is how there is such a thing as a canon, or was at least the most common apology given for it.
>>25590663i think video games and hentai are more you
>>25590697NTA but I’ll add that a work of art is a collaboration between artist and audience. How you perceive anything is always half made up by you. Samuel Butler said it takes two people to say a thing: a sayer and a sayee. We call it the humanities. There’s a reason for that word. A human approach.
>>25590726Maybe. I can say though, for certain, that certain artists wanted their works to be apprehended by beholders with no awareness of themselves as beholding those works - where beholders make no contribution other than to be “absorbed” by the work. Michael Fried, once the most influential critic of modernist painting, has made a career of saying this. Arguably the same goes for realist literature, like Tolstoy.
>>25590734‘Overpowering’. But is the function of art to overpower? To be overpowered is to accept spiritual defeat. Shakespeare never overpowers: he raises up.
What does it say about someone who genuinely cannot finish this book but has made it at least 50% of the way through with no guides?
>>25590750very little.
>>25590426Most people don't even understand theirselves
>>25590748Overpowering? I mentioned nothing like this. Those arts that do not absorb aim to get our attention in other ways: a sculpture literally looms over us, say. That seems more ‘overpowering’. Do you think Tolstoy is overpowering? Sometimes he is, I suppose, but only when I feel myself undergo the fate of one of his characters. He is also, by the by, the only novelist who has occasioned my really asking “how can these people exist when ‘made of words’”? Doubtless a silly question, but the experience that provokes it is one of being absorbed in the book, by the characters, losing myself (willingly) to live it and them.
>>25590762Was Milton that came to mind actually. Goes without saying you can’t (truly) experience anything without filtering it through yourself first. You don’t take in what you read or hear unless you’re tuned in to receive it. Wouldn’t be able to take it in. Art is a conversation with the artist. There’s so much that’s intuitive and not spoken, and the reader must be co-author. You leave with the feeling that you wrote the book.
>>25590795"Goes without saying you can’t (truly) experience anything without filtering it through yourself first." Sure, but we disagree over what this means. "You don’t take in what you read or hear unless you’re tuned in to receive it." I can agree with this. One has to position oneself such that one is ready to receive (absorb) great, at least realist, works."Art is a conversation with the artist." I don't know about this one. Proust said that the pleasure in reading consisted in having conversations in private, which he took as a correction to the thesis (I don't remember by whom) that it consisted in having conversations with great, dead men. Maybe this is something in line with what you mean. Unhelpfully I can't remember the rest of the essay nor what it was called. Also recall Tolstoy, who likewise thought that that art was a mode of communication, but an asymmetrical mode (not unlike Proust, maybe): the artist inculcates in his reader, by means of "symbolic marks", experiences he himself has undergone. Again the readying a reader needs to do sounds like one of "attunement", readying oneself to receive, not converse. I'm not sure I could agree with a stronger thesis that reading consists in dialectical, in any case not asymmetrical, conversation. Some type of reading sure: philosophy, theology, some science; not novels, not realist ones anyway.I also don't think that leaving with the feeling that one oneself wrote the book is at all a common experience. Quite the opposite: recall the poor sods who killed themselves in the wake of Goethe's Werther, lamenting that they *did not* themselves write the book. It's also one that, when it happens, singles itself out for remark, hence odd. At least in my experience. I think of it as a kind of the experience of believing that a writer, however far removed, wrote what they wrote *for* you. (For what it's worth I sometimes have this experience with Pessoa. Though he himself talks about the phenomenon.)Where I would fully agree with you is whilst one is learning to write. There the process is much more active, reciprocal. Maybe you are a writer and so this process never ends. I am not, I think.
>>25590917Found the Proust, if it interests you. 1906's Sur la lecture (On Reading), originally published as a preface to his translation of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies. I think I will reread it.
