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Originally Posted by Lokasenna
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Originally Posted by Jermac
What is UP with all this hate towards the modernists? Is it because they're difficult?Quote:
Originally Posted by glover7
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Originally Posted by Lokasenna
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Originally Posted by Jermac
What is UP with all this hate towards the modernists? Is it because they're difficult?Quote:
Originally Posted by glover7
I think you'll find Lawrence and Joyce aren't the only modernists :). Plus, 'overrated' doesn't mean that they aren't good, just that there's a lot of inexplicable hype around them.
Yep, you have figured us out: Since we cannot understand the literary works of great depths, we just go nasty on the authors... Kind of a defence mechanism.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielBenoit
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Originally Posted by Scheherazade
Well maybe I'm just projecting from experience. I have a friend who despises anything made in the 20th century, so I'm just too used to hearing people complain about Ulysses because it's a difficult book.Quote:
Originally Posted by escapologist
Trust me, 1000 year old skaldic poetry is a thousand times more difficult than Lawrence or Joyce. It is also far more enjoyable!;)Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielBenoit
Sorry Daniel but I don't think Ulysses is all that "difficult". Virginia Woolf said that the book was "immature" and I tend to agree with that. I really rate Woolf, I think she was a genius and her novels are far more complex and enjoyable than anything written by James Joyce.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielBenoit
Maybe it's Finnegan's Wake that gives Joyce the aura of complexity more than Ulysses, because he makes up words that only he truly understands in that one.
The measure of success in inventing new words is whether they are accepted into general usage and in that sense I would have to say Wake was a failure.
If you read Ellman's biography of Joyce you will see that it is not critics who, initially, heaped praise on Joyce, but fellow writers, including 'popular' writers like Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells, as well as modernists like Eliot and Pound. (When Bennett praised Joyce in a review, Pound cheekily sent him a note saying "You have heard your master's voice"!) In "Top ten", the best books as chosen by a herds of modern authors, Joyce also does well.Quote:
Originally Posted by escapologist
Woolf was the only great writer to criticise Joyce (read Ellman's biography...) Every top writer has at least one other great writer who somehow manages to miss their genius -- Shakespeare had Shaw & Tolstoy (and even Shaw praised Ulysses!) Just because you are a great novelist doesn't mean you are a great critic, in fact Joyce admitted to not being a great critic...Quote:
Originally Posted by neilgee
Because Woolf was an English snob, or at least hung around with a bunch of English snobs, she was exactly the right person to get Joyce wrong... Not a critic to be trusted here...
I don't blame you... There's nothing I hate more than people stuck in 19th century literature, afraid to try reading something outside their comfort zone, cos that would require the use of a brain.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielBenoit
Do you honestly believe that the best 19th century literature doesn't require the use of the brain... or that it is inherently easier to read? How easy is Mallarme? Rimbaud? Dickinson? And what of 18th, 17th, 16th (etc...) century literature? Are Donne, Dante, Spenser, Milton, Sterne, etc... easy reading?
I'm definitley not saying that. I find all of those names to be just as complex as any of the literature made in the 20th century, and in some cases even more so.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I think I remember Woolf saying about Ulysses "how I wish I could write like that", though maybe I'm thinking of what she said about Proust, I'm not sure.Quote:
Originally Posted by neilgee
Either way, to each his own.
Also, Finnegan's Wake is not complex just because Joyce "makes up words that only he can understand", it's because both it and Ulysses brought about an understanding of language recently explored in philosophy by Wittgenstein and later by Derrida. Having read Finnegan's Wake I do not think Joyce wrote it with a big evil grin on his face thinking "oh how I'm going to confuse everyone". Rather, he was pushing the limits of the medium.
I was talking about prose, I think poetry is a medium of its own, so I wasn't talking about the Symbolists or the Metaphysical poets. I would, however, argue that Vonnegut is a lot more difficult to read than Dickens or Hardy. That was what I was aiming at.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I would agree about Dickens, although others would disagree. ut I can totally not agree with you on Hardy. Hardy is not as easy as he comes across.
That's ok, all I'm saying is that some 20th century writers are more difficult to read. Of course, 'easy' and 'difficult' are completely subjective adjectives when it comes to literature.
I can't remember who said that Finnegan's Wake was Joyce's revenge on the English Language for what they did to the Irish language so I suppose the comment doesn't count if I can't identify it, but I picked up on the awe that surrounded Joyce's work as I was growing up as well as the sense of incomprehension that clung to Wake [in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar for example].Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielBenoit
I respect you more as I read more of your comments, Daniel [that's not to say that I don't respect everybody else - he hastens to add!] though like you say it's each to their own and we'll agree to disagree on Joyce.
I think you're right about Joyce pushing the limits but he wasn't the only one and I don't think he did it the most effectively, but he was certainly rated the most highly when I was growing up, though you don't hear it as much nowadays.
So I'm not to be trusted either because I agree with her :)Quote:
Originally Posted by mal4mac
Seriously is this biography you recommend as educational about the literary establishment as it seems to be because I might add it to my reading list if it is as obviously I don't know as much about that fecund period of history as I would like to, but as I've already said I'm not the biggest Joyce fan in the world.
Why thanks :blush:Quote:
Originally Posted by neilgee
Yes, there were plenty of other writers during Joyce's time who were revolutionizing the medium; Faulkner, Proust, Hemingway, etc.Quote:
I think you're right about Joyce pushing the limits but he wasn't the only one and I don't think he did it the most effectively, but he was certainly rated the most highly when I was growing up, though you don't hear it as much nowadays.
@Neilgee and Mal4mac:
The question, too, is if critics are to be trusted... There have been several critics who had their own agenda and criticised literature for its melodrama and other features because it didn't fit their theory... I have serious doubts about that. Who criticises a writer for his writing style or his style of telling a plot? Clearly then you have missed the point because a writer does not write if it isnot necessary. But then agan, their theory was probably threatened or something.
At any rate. Joyce has his supporters and his enemies. I am of the opinion that a writer should convey his message. How does he do that? By language. If he cannot write language (as in some passages of Ulysses where he relinquishes punctuation or where he just adopts the most horrendous annoying writing style with short sentences that not even a baby would dare to use) he fails in his profession of writer. A carpenter will also not make good things if he has no skills, or chooses not to use them. That said, he could write properly when he started.
Woolf, a snob.. She belonged to a higher class than Joyce, that is true. Whether she was a snob is another matter. Woolf specialists might have more to say on that, but it is not because one moves in the highest intelectual and cultural circles that one is a snob. The word has a very clear meaning and I don't necssarily agree wth it.
Daniel I love William Faulkner, he was an inspired novelist. I'd forgotten that he was writing about the same time as Joyce.
Kiki I recently heard a recording of an old radio broadcast by Virginia Woolf and I was shocked to hear how posh she sounded. Why she makes the Queen of England sound common!
Of course as you point out that doesn't necessarily make her a snob [although it is known from her diaries that her attitude towards "servants" was not particularly liberal] and she did write what's regarded as one of the earlier works to champion women's rights in A Room of one's own.
Yet I think above all Woolf had an extraordinary talent for self-effacement in her novels. You rarely get a judgemental tone in Woolf. She lets you make up your own mind.
Many critics rate "James Joyce" by Richard Ellmann as the greatest literary biography of the 20th century, and it's certainly one of the most entertaining and interesting biographies I've ever read. It's definitely an education about the most admired writers from the early period of the twentieth century, and of the literary establishment - not altogether the same thing! It's also (perhaps surprisingly!) a very easy read. Also, Joyce had very interesting experiences, friends and family.Quote:
Originally Posted by neilgee
I wasn't the biggest Joyce fan until reading this, reading "Dubliners" and re-reading "Portrait" (the Wordsworth classics version is recommended it has "just enough" notes. The publishing event of next year might be the Wordsworth Classics version of Ulysses in early January. No money left after Christmas? It's only £1.99!)
Of course Joyce can write language! If anyone can. He can write "normally" when he wants - read Dubliners or some of his letters. I just read a passage in Ellmann of his without punctuation writing that is extremely beautiful and reflects the kind of stream of consciousness thinking that we all do without punctuation and sometimes we do baby sentences as he's just reflecting the way we think and not showing himself up as a bad writer as if but this kind of writing is very difficult just compare what I'm doing here with Joyce!Quote:
Originally Posted by kiki1982
She was being a snob when she called Joyce 'underbred' and Ulysses 'the book of a self taught working man'. She also called Joyce's editor Miss Weaver a 'woollen-gloved missionary for a book that reeled with indecency'. The (wonderful) Miss Weaver asked when a friend read this critique responded 'What is wrong with woollen gloves?" Exactly. Nothing is wrong with woollen gloves. It's just Woolf being a snob again...Quote:
Originally Posted by kiki1982
Note I'm not saying Woolf isn't a great writer! My opinion hasn't been formed about that, and she may only be a snob now and again... I like several of her essays and must get round to reading her best novels someday...
Exactly, you illustrated what I mean: writing without punctuation is unnecessary and obscures the meaning of that writing just to obscure it. It has nothing to do with message, but, maybe, rather with snobbery (to me). Art for art's sake which i very difficult to understand, and maybe even ununderstandable.Quote:
Originally Posted by mal4mac
Correction: that is not being a snob, that is reflecting the ideas of society then. She came from a high-class family that occupied itself with art and intellectual knowledge. He came from a working-class family. There is a difference in perception of what is proper and what is deemed interesting. The woollen gloves might have had more to do with Weaver being a suffragette. I haven't been able to do enough research, but several accounts of suffregettes mention 'desguise' and woollen gloves as a part of that desguise. As women's hands were supposed to be small and delicate, they cannot have worn big bulky woolen gloves as that would have made their hands bigger instead of smaller. Not to mention the fact that by the 1920s gloves were hopelessly out of fashion. This was more or less the time when Woolf was speaking. If she was alluding to this then it is the question if she was a snob. People do not become snobs because they criticise someone's work.Quote:
Originally Posted by mal4mac
Note that I am not saying that Joyce is in all his works a bad writer. He just got carried away at some point in my mind.
Dickens
I read two of Dickens's novels and that was enough for me!
Okay I will order this next time I get paid. You've convinced me!Quote:
Originally Posted by mal4mac
You're taking a far too conventional approach to this. What Joyce did was convey his message through his use of language. Not only that, but it serves as an expressive tone for whatever he is describing. The use of newspaper headlines in the Aeolus episode are meant to be a satirical take on the sensationalistic journalism of the day. The extremely long unpunctuated sentences in Penelope are meant to perfectly decipt a stream-of-consciousness, flowing and unpaced by periods. The Oxen of the Sun episode takes on a beautiful medium by going through the history of English dialect as he describes the birth of a child. One must truly have a love of language when reading these passages, or any part of Ulysses.Quote:
Originally Posted by kiki1982
Leaving what I already said about long sentences aside; what about e.e. cummings? That's another example of a writer's idiosyncrratic use of language as a means to depicting what he wants to say. The unusual line breaks and spaces in his poems perfectly leads the eye down the page. Besides, writers have in fact since Joyce found ways to convey things through their use of language and puncuation. To take a simple and common example, when some writers use an uncapitalized 'i' in a first-person narrative. The letter on the page physically appears more irrelevant and inferior when compared to the all-powerful stand-out 'I'.Quote:
Originally Posted by kiki1982
From mal4mac's quotes I conclude that she's both a snob and reflective of her time :) No she's not a snob for criticizing Joyce, but for going about it in the way she did. It doesn't make her a bad writer though. Eliot and Pound obviously had unpleasant ideas concerning Jews and support for Mussolini by the latter, but that doesn't diminish the fact that they're both masterful writers.Quote:
Originally Posted by kiki1982
Hell, no. It's because Joyce does nothing for me. If I want to read about temporal disjunction, then there are plenty of other places to find it than Ulysses. If I want to explore stream of consciousness, I find there are better writers using that particular device.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielBenoit
My problem with Joyce, which has been so aptly demonstrated by the discussion following my comment, is that people praise him based purely on reputation.
As for "difficulty," I absolutely despise that people immediately single that out as the reason for disliking Joyce. I, for example, find that cultural translation of Kawabata's texts is more difficult to decipher than Joyce's dull prose, but I still think that Kawabata is an excellent writer. If difficulty dictated the measure of a text's worth, then the greatest work of literature is a string theory dissertation.
Joyce has become the hero of the intellectual elitist, especially in my field of study. Anyone who has not read Joyce may as well be illiterate because without having read and understood everything he says, you have no place in the world of literary academia. It's stupid. No study should hinge on such a piece of tripe as Ulysses.
He did not. His father was an upper-middle-class failure. He had a Jesuit school education & went on to study Modern Languages at University in Ireland's main city. He was as fully occupied in art and intellectual knowledge as any one in Ireland could be, and even approached Yeats and other leading lights to get comments on his work in embryo when he was barely into his twenties. In fact his education was probably more thorough than that of Woolf, who had the usual disadvantages of women in those days. Heck, it was probably more thorough than any English men of letters, given the reputation of the Jesuits & his own driven nature...Quote:
Originally Posted by kiki1982
Well, it is not as straightforward as you put it. Born in 1882, he went into Clongowe's Wood College in 1888 (at the age of 6) and left, because his father could no longer pay the fees, in 1892, at the grand age of 10. A lot of art or intellectual education he cannot have had at that age. If he already knew arithmetic properly, could read and write, and had some basic knowledge of abstract mathematics (goniometry and Euclid f.e.) and could read some Latin and Greek it would have been a lot.
At any rate, his father ad grandfather married into a rich family but were bad managers. Although that might mean they had money, they certainly did not belong to the intellectual elite, like f.i. Oscar Wilde who was also an Irishman although in a little earlier period. Woolf already moved in intellectual circles when she was a child. Joyce started to move in them when he was going to university. That certainly shaped both their worlds and ideas. Woolf was definitely of a class that was not even concerned with money, Joyce was definitely so.
David Eggers
Why is it that everybody thinks my favorite writers are overrated :bawling:Quote:
Originally Posted by FrankMarcopolos
Just kidding. Eggers is not one of my favorite, but he's certainly one of the better contemporary writers. Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was a hilariously depressing work of ironic bipolarism.
Eggers is all style and no substance. He has nothing to SAY. (Except maybe, Worship me, Hipsters!) Which is why I can't stand him.
Okay. . .. .obviously you've never read What is What. Besides, it's a bit unjust to use the style/substance dichotomy with postmodern writers, since style is used to express substance (an inheritance from Joyce).Quote:
Originally Posted by FrankMarcopolos
Just because his work is done in a stylistic way doesn't mean he has nothing to say except "look at me I'm so cool because I write in a self-refferential postmodern way". Besides, what's wrong with excersizes in style? Sections of Heatbreaking Work may be excersizes in style, but they're still meaningful. Any unique percpective is meaningful, even if there is no message or meta-narrative.
I have not read What is What. After AHWOSG, why would I be fooled again? I disagree with your statement above in that story is story, for postmodern, modern, postpostmodern, or any other kind of writers, regardless of what they are inheriting from anyone. Style is fine so long as it is used in conjunction with substance, for my taste.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielBenoit
There's nothing wrong with style exercises, per se. They just don't appeal to me. Some people love eating cotton candy, for example. I do not. David Eggers, to me, is literary cotton candy.
I don't think you understand. The merits of modernist literature brought about a technique in which content is expressed through style. The simplest example being Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in which the youth of the narrator is expressed through the style of the writing. Story is story, but if all stories were told the same way then the history of literature would be kind of boring now would it?Quote:
Originally Posted by FrankMarcopolos
Anyway, we can agree to disagree. I'm enjoying my cotton candy thank you very much :)
Yeah, I know. That's not my point. To me, style for style's sake alone wastes my time. Your mileage may vary.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielBenoit
I'll not argue the merits of Eggers, not having read him... but I will question the dichotomy of style vs substance. What exactly do you imagine makes a worthy substance or subject vs one that is unworthy? A vast portion of the arts are dedicated to the expression of something as seemingly frivolous as sexual infatuation, attraction, lust, and love. Is a work of art automatically relegated to the "frivolous" pile because the theme the artist has chosen isn't something truly "heavy" like the Holocaust, race, gender issues, etc... ?
For me, there has to be SOME point to a story, some reason why the writer is demanding my time to listen to his tale. What that is is less important than that it be there. AHWOSG, for example, is pointless sophistry, written in a whimsical and amusing style. (Again, in my opinion. Another reader could say the point of it IS the whimsical amusement of it, which makes them feel happy...to each their own.)
The style should help to get the reader emotionally invested in a story, thereby allowing for some kind of impact at the end of it.
For me, sometimes "points" seem to distract books from the rhythms of life. That's what I love about Ulysses; it is first and foremost concerned with the sensations of perception, not any kind of moral or universal truth.Quote:
Originally Posted by FrankMarcopolos
In the immortal words of Mark Twain: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."
In the world of cinema Hungarian director Bela Tarr has revolutionized the language of film by doing away with narrative and focusing on the passing of time and emotion through slow and contemplative camera shots. "I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another ... All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that's still genuine -- time itself; the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds."
Still it leaves the question of whether this or that "point" being made is more important than another... and whether having something serious to communicate inherently makes the work better... or the lack thereof makes it worse. Looking at other artistic forms by way of analogy I again ask what is the "point" of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet or Monet's Waterlilies?
Exactly, that's why Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, etc. forms of criticism can only go so far. Come to think of it, music hardly has any "point". With the exception of opera (whose music exists to express the stroy) really what other types of music really offer a "point"? That's why I side with aestheticism, "art for arts sake". Can one not find Rembrant's Night Watch or DaVinci's The Last Supper beautiful even if we may not know what is going on?Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I think you might be defining 'point' too narrowly. A point of a work of art is whatever the artist wants it to be. If they want it to be just an exercise in style, then that is the point and the validity of that point is not up for discussion. And if anyone were to limit the scope of its meaning, they would be limiting the freedom of art.Quote:
Originally Posted by FrankMarcopolos
I believe the Twain quote was made in jest. As for the rest of your point, I can see what you're talking about, however, that kind of art, whether it be in print or on film, does not appeal to me. I don't want an art form to mirror life precisely, I want it to entertain and then educate or enlighten me, or at least try to.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielBenoit
As far as Ulysses, I'm not an expert on him, so I'll refrain from comment.
Indeed. However, it does not mean I must enjoy it. I'm talking about my own perspective as an audience member, not as an artist. Obviously, an artist is free to choose to express him/herself any way they want. But don't expect me to pay attention to it if it's only a style exercise... my time is valuable.Quote:
Originally Posted by escapologist
As to the points about music above, I would say any song with lyrics has a story, and perhaps someone with more musical acumen than myself might argue that any musical composition tells a story in its own way. And to my ear, my favorite musical artists are the best storytellers -- with the flavoring of the musical style added to make it more (ear)-appealing.
As to visual art, I'm not an expert on that, so I haven't thought much about it. To my mind, though, it seems that even in that art form, the artist can capture a story on the canvas, albeit perhaps more open to interpretation by the viewer since it is static and visual.