Are we starting to catch up to Joyce?

[IrishCanadian]

This is an exciting thread to read ... since I was about sixteen years old Ulyses was a goal of mine. I could probably tackle it now but I still want to wait so I can do it justice.
I think Joyce is an acquired taste. My Dad likes him, I love him, my sisters think that he's totally overrated like Virgil does. In my case he accomplished a form of telling stories that i have been attemting for years before and have been attempting to perfect in the years since I first read Portrait and Dubliners. His realist style is something I can relate to directly. Realism is very difficult to write but i think that may be why he chose to write each chapter in a differnt form (remembering that i havent read Ulysis yet). Throughout each useless, uneventful day that each of us goes through we see things differently and appreciate different events throughout depending on our mood and surroundings that can change at the drop of a hat. In that sence it is not practicle writing (for the reader's sake) but it is very good writing.

[Daniel A. C.]

About the references to Nabokov above, I read his Lectures on Literature, and I think he did find Ulysses to be a great novel and enjoyed the varying narrative forms, but could be over-rated by critics entranced with the "ideas" or theories in Ulysses, as opposed to pure storytelling.

[abcedminded]

Joyce said "People will understand me in a hundred years"
It has now been about eighty years since publication of the "Wake".
Joyce's big insight is that the form of human communication will be internalized by the population that uses it. (Marshall McLuhan famously paraphrased this as "the medium is the message".) Joyce lived and worked at a time of tremendous change (the early part of the 20th century) and recognized that the birth of the electric circuit was equivalent to a tsunami in human affairs. In this brief sliver of time, the alphabet stood revealed for the first time in centuries, and Joyce was one of the few who saw it and understood its effects. He also understood that it had been swamped by the electric revolution...the world we now live in. The alphabet with its strong visual bias, crushed the aural world of speech and song (this is as much a current event as it is a historical artefact) and came to dominate the Greco-Roman world (really anywhere that uses a phonetic alphabet.) The alphabet, in turn, has been rendered innefective by the speed and scope of the electric circuit. We are back in the aural world again, although there remains a few things to work out.

[jmjk63]

I have to do an essay about Joyce for school, any ideas? I don't have time to read all his works, so I am looking for a little help here.

Thanks

LK

[Jolly McJollyso]

In recent years, we've had some authors showing up (in the mainstream!) that, to my mind, echo Joyce in some way--Chuck Palahniuk and Mark Danielewski are the first that come to mind, but there are more.

Do you think we might be catching up? Do you think we ever can?

We already caught up. He's called Samuel Beckett.

Also, Chuck Palahniuk and Mark Danielewski are post-modernists...while they're bleaker than any modernist I can think of, they're much more accessible. I don't find them much like Joyce at all... Care to explain?

[Jolly McJollyso]

Not in my opinion. Ulysses was more of an historical novelty than a breakthrough in literature. Stream of consciousness style was an experiment at the time. It's been done to death since then.

First of all, Joyce's predecessors, such as DuJardin, wrote in stream of consciousness style. Joyce himself used it instead as a technique, so I'm not exactly sure why you choose to invalidate a technique simply because people don't choose to use it... You might as well say all poetry is invalid because so many people have done it.

Joyce turned stream of consciousness from an experiment to an accessibility, and was the first author to use it in a clear, effective manner. His constant fades in and out of characters' minds through an almost non-existent third-person narrator was new, innovative, and would influence nearly every major writer after Joyce. Beneath the story itself are vibrant undertones and themes of incredibly insightful linguistic observations and theories. Joyce was the first writer to really try to tackle the language problem, lovingly mocking his ignorant youth in the process. In Ulysses, Joyce gives the son's search for a father a philosophical, linguistic tone; it is the book in which Stephen Dedalus finally understands that the dead language of the signs he mocks in Portrait is actually the living language of the world, and that it is his own elevated language that is flawed and dying. In short, Stephen Dedalus becomes James Joyce.

[Odiwann]

The last chapter, "Penelope," is one of the best things written in the twentieth century.

http://soundcloud.com/phlashboredom/mollys-soliloquy

[Billy]

Whatever your opinion on the ranking, something has to be said that his intention was to create a work that was in accordance with his version of Aristotelian aesthetic philosophy. Toward the end of A Portrait, Stephen has a conversation with his friend Cranly (I think was his name) in which he spells out his aesthetic philosophy. I won't go into it here, but the amazing thing is that the book you are holding in your hand as you read that bit of aesthetic theory is Joyce's very effort to adhere to it! Ulysses does so on a greater level, though I degree to the point others have made about its erudition and transitions in style remove it from the ability to be immediately appreciated. But that doesn't take away from his aesthetic achievement.