You mean that you just don't like Ulysses, but you would love to find a good reason for not loiking it, so you are trying some silly reasons. I am I correct?Originally Posted by blazeofglory
You mean that you just don't like Ulysses, but you would love to find a good reason for not loiking it, so you are trying some silly reasons. I am I correct?
I read the first 20 some pages of the book and then skipped around after that for about a total of 50 pages.
The final 20 some pages appear to be rambling comments without even rudimentary punctuation or grammar. Basically, a child older than 12 who does reasonably well in school would write better than this.
The author did not seem interested in trying to communicate anything to the reader. When I checked Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce ) I see that Pound promoted Joyce. I put 2 and 2 together and suspect Joyce is part of the Imagist school and that actually explains why the writing doesn't make sense.
I realize that people will say I should give the book more time, perhaps months, but the book has not kept my interest. That is, it has not offered enough to justify that investment of my life. In time any gibberish can start taking on meaning. The books that I would dedicate months to are of the order of, say, The Bhagavad Gita, not some Imagist experiments.
In conclusion, I agree with blazeofglory. In fact, I would go further. The book is not worth anyone wasting their time on.
No, that's completely false. It's clearly not worth YOU wasting your time on. Don't tell other people it's not 'worth it' because you couldn't get through it.
Ours means not necessarily yours.There are so many readers who enjoyed Tolstoy. You may read James Joyce with a lot of strain and arduousness. You cannot read naturally and spontaneously. You read it like a school boy and has to have a dictionary with you or must have a summary to understand it.
Whereas war and peace is a good read and you can read it easily.
People read Milton not because they enjoy the reading just because they must.
“Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature””
“If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation.
Whose then? Whose, besides blazeofglory's?
I can read Joyce without too much strain, and I can do it naturally and I can do it sponateneously, and I don't need a dictionary or a summary. This doesn't mean I like it - it just means that I can read it.
So when you say 'you' here, you don't mean me, do you? You mean you.
No, I can't. I've read it in both Russian and English, and I find it very heavy going.
I tend to agree with you about that (not that that makes either of us right).
Last edited by MarkBastable; 05-02-2011 at 12:04 PM.
Not you does not mean not the rest. That You have found the book heavy going does not mean the rest to feel the same.
I have read this great classic but I found it easing going. What is more, there were no elements of swankiness in it the way Ulysses is full of it
“Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature””
“If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation.
Aha. And that you have found Ulysses incomprehensible does not mean the rest feel the same. So perhaps when you talk about it, you should not say 'we' or 'you', but 'I'.
Why not just admit that you found Ulysses too difficult and beyond your attention span? We would respect you more - rather than trying to get us all to agree with your pointless generalities about what books you like and those you do not.
We all have our personal tastes and some of us like to be challenged by what we read. The fact that you (and others who support your OP) don't share the same feelings for Joyce as some of us is neither here no there - and is hardly grounds for denigrating his memory or his literary legacy.
H
Joyce is not part of the imagist school, in fact, he was James Joyce, that was all. I suspect that your relation to poetry makes you a not ideal reader for Joyce. Ulysses is quite simple while compared to Finnegans Wake, but even then, the absence of proper grammar norms is an attempt to bring to memmory the oral conversation and that was very usual among modernist writers.
Huh? Joyce didn't belong to any school, he was his own person in every possible way. You said gibberish can start to take on meaning: gibberish is an idea we've never saw before. The Bhagavad Gita which you seem so tolerable of reading was at one point a mass of meaningless symbols to you.
You have no clue about Ulysses' intricate text and writing methods. The final chapter is poetical, complex, and one of the most highly praised ones of the book. A child could not have wrote one sentence; is it because Joyce decided to decline the use of proper grammar? Or because he didn't follow accepted beliefs that the chapter is horribly written?
We think a good novel is usually preset in its narrative form. I.e., there should be a narrative voice describing what's going on, there should be some kind of easy to understand moral to the story at the end, there should be a main theme, the book should yield to story telling cliches, etc, etc. What happens when this system isn't there? Some people just lock up and call into question anything that so vehemently undermines the basic novel premise (and by basic, I mean things such as the idea that words have to be easily understood, even after consulting a dictionary).
Wouldn't the same be true for Shakespeare? The amount of vocabulary he used throughout his works is roughly equatable to Ulysses'. So what you're saying doesn't make any sense. Because a writer is using the English language, to its maximum, as it should be used artistically, this is somehow deeply against him?
Also, why do you think complexity is a bad thing, and easiness a good one? If you didn't notice, complexity is needed to arrive at simple yet beautiful and profound truths. E = MC^2 anyone?
Literature was once an art that was written to entertain or instruct a few erudite people and the general public were not included in that herd. But in the course of time literary values got reconsidered and it was co0mmonly agreed that a piece of literature must be all inclusive people from a gamut of social layers must profit from it not just the aristocratic elites.
Ummm... when exactly did this happen and where was this great communal vote taken concerning what literature SHOULD be? Somehow I missed it.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of Joyce. I found Ulysses brilliant with passages that I absolutely loved... but as a whole he didn't engage me. Considering his impact upon later writers and how respected and admired he is by a great many experienced readers I am fully willing to admit that the failing may indeed be mine.
I am somewhat bemused by the repeated threads which have popped up recently in which individuals clearly assume that if the find they don't like (or couldn't even understand and finish reading) a given "classic" novel or a "classic" poem it must be because the poem/novel isn't really a "classic" and anyone who thinks differently must be some sort of idiot.
In other words, that which you personally like is not necessarily one and the same with what is "good" or "great", and that which you personally don't like is not automatically one and the same with that which is "bad".
Last edited by stlukesguild; 05-02-2011 at 07:17 PM.
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Also, just want to point out that there are possibly hundreds of recordings out there of people reading Ulysses, including James Joyce himself. In fact, his musicality is really brought to light in reading aloud certain passages.
Quite. Most people seem incapable of seeing - or admitting - that some of the stuff they don't like is really very good, and some of the stuff they do like is crap.
However, they seem to have no trouble suggesting that what's really good and what they like are absolutely and inseparably coincident.
So, given that no one else likes exactly the same selection of stuff, each of these people implicitly believes that he, by some happy quirk of fate and culture, is the de facto sole arbiter of What's Really Good.
Last edited by MarkBastable; 05-02-2011 at 09:34 PM.
Gibberish is pretty common. Good writers avoid it. Bad writers keep wallowing in it. And mediocre academics pump drivel that has become canonical to boost their reputations.
What happens when some literary system or other isn't there? I don't know or care, but the question assumes that Joyce has done something special by avoiding something common. I don't think he has done either. When writers do not communicate they generate a situation of sentimentality, that is, they leave it to the reader to fantasize what is going on.
I've tried to read Ulysses several times and failed everytime but I try to keep a humble perspective. I really liked his short stories in Dubliners and I didn't mind Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (at least I found it accessible!) so I am more inclined to think that perhaps I am not mentally ready for Ulysses just yet.
I have a feeling he didn't write it for the purpose of his readership; more likely I suspect he wrote it to fulfil a duty to his individual, artistic god.
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