New Author V.S Author SHowdown: Proust VS Joyce VS Faulkner

[JBI]

I've got two books by him but I've yet to read them [the sweet and sour of having a backlog is the excitement of finding some new and inspirational perspective and yet the interminable discovery of finding you are still behind]. Could you tell me a bit more about him, or your favorite works of his?

He is very, very ironic, and takes a great deal of historical and cultural knowledge on the part of the reader (his works are quite reactionary and revolutionary) but his quintessential work, which contains his most important fiction is his collection Call to Arms, or Outcry (translated under both names in English). Though to me his best work is his history of Chinese literature (I do not know if it is translated or not).

[arrytus]

[

the secondary characters are only developed to the extent of their interaction with Bloom.

Not really, there are 4 entire chapters dedicated to another character, one even dedicated mostly to minor characters, and every chapter is littered with other characters so much that I wished it would go back to Bloom. What you are saying doesn't make sense. Three characters are at the focus, Molly, Bloom and Stephen. All other secondary characters are developed as humanly as possible and make numerous appearances throughout the novel, I don't understand what you expect.

Don't care to get too in the middle of this but remember the last 50 pages or whatever [off the top of my head; it's been years since i read Ulysses] was like 3 sentences [!!!!!] from Molly's perspective. [and quite fabulous as I recall].

[quite funny epiphany here!!!! when I tried to write Molly I wrote instead 'Molloy'. And the first book of Molloy is like only two or three paragraphs for like a hundred pages if I recall. And as Beckett was Joyce's famulus I wonder if there is a connexion there which I overlooked the first time, and somehow Molly and Molloy are in some broad way intertwined, at least in a formal view.... or I'm crazy and it's just a random insight]

[stlukesguild]

That's great if such an individual exists, I haven't seen them.

The fact that you haven't personally met such an individual doesn't quite amount to proof that such a person does not exist. You have yet to show a far greater grasp of literature and critical discussion and debate than that regularly displayed by any number of regular members here including JBI, Mortal Terror, Petrarch's Love, and a good many others. As Alex suggested, it is best to assume that everyone here is well-read, knowledgeable, and intelligent (at least until they prove otherwise). It becomes difficult to maintain such a stance, however, in the light of statements that suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is an illiterate idiot.

Ulysses was eagerly recommended to me a Joyce fanatic in 2006. He said he spent 3 years studying the novel. Highly respecting this person's opinions, I went ahead reading the novel.

And we might all cite similar experiences with other writers.

The book just consumes your life...

No... the book consumes your life. My life is consumed with many other things... including any number of books, works of art, pieces of music, friends and family, etc... I was honestly far more seduced by J.L. Borges, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rilke, Eugenio Montale, T.S. Eliot, William Blake, Dante, etc...

I've had dreams about Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, however sad that may be.

Indeed.

Yet, every single one of those seconds I found to be totally worth it to get to the novels deeper message, its punchline.

And again that is simply your experience. Not everyone is going to find as much in Joyce as you do... not because they don't grasp it fully... nor because they are less intelligent than yourself or less well-read than yourself... but because Joyce doesn't resonate as deeply with them... and/or they find someone else speaks to them far more.

Ulysses has influenced far too many people in far too short a time to not be considered the greatest text in literature.

This, unfortunately, is an extreme exaggeration that ignores a number of facts. As JBI pointed out, Joyce's influence is rather limited relative to any number of alternatives. If we recognize that the English-speaking world is not the sole measure of literature then we also must recognize that there may be others with a greater impact than Joyce. Just considering the Western writers of the 20th century, there are any number of rivals to Joyce in terms of impact including T.S. Eliot, Rilke, Pasternak, Kafka, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, etc... Joyce certainly has had a major impact upon subsequent writers and in no way would I underestimate him or downplay his impact... but I recognize that his lack of accessibility has meant that many subsequent writers have intentionally rejected him as a role model (which in some ways his great pupil, Samuel Beckett did in stripping down his writing to bare bones) or turned to other sources. Joyce certainly challenges our concept of the novel and of the traditional narrative... but poets, short story writers, dramatists, non-fiction authors quite likely will have been far more impacted by other sources. In many ways, including the fragmentation, the expression of the angst of the individual in the face of the modern bureaucratic culture, and the Surrealism, Kafka may ultimately be seen as the far greater influence. I might note that the term "Kafkaesque" is far more likely to be understood than that of "Joycean".

But let's address the larger assertion... that Ulysses must certainly be the single greatest literary text ever when one considers the scale of its impact in such a brief time. So... by the same token, no artist can be greater than Picasso considering his impact (which dwarfs that of Joyce) upon the visual arts? Or is it possible that Picasso and Joyce were both the beneficiaries of modern communications, travel, trade, and mass production/promotion which allowed for the rapid dissemination of their achievements? Picasso and Joyce are unquestionably giants... but the notion that they surpass Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Homer, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens is not something that can be proven by pointing to their rapid influence upon subsequent artists and writers. One may point out that the influence of Picasso and Joyce already has begun to wane. Whether they continue to speak to subsequent readers/viewers and writers/artists as profoundly as Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt do after the passage of 500 years is debatable.

Faulkner himself said it best when he said: "You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

Didn't you suggest earlier, when one of us noted that T.S. Eliot had proclaimed Dante and Shakespeare as dividing the literary world between them, that we take all such author's quotes with a large grain of salt? You probably don't want to read what J.L. Borges said of Joyce.

If you don't completely understand it (no one does)...

Again... this might be said of any great work of art: it is never fully "understood"... never depleted of possible "meaning". The question for the individual is what works of art bring the greatest degree of aesthetic pleasure to you after repeated experience. You assume that Ulysses is unique in its ability to achieve such, because of your personal experience. I found a certain aesthetic pleasure in Joyce, but I honestly found far more to be had in Proust, Eliot, Kafka, Borges, Dante, Shakespeare... in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, in Bach's cello suites, in Mozart's Magic Flute, in the Sistine Ceiling, in the paintings of Pierre Bonnard, and in many other places.

...or don't want to read it, that's fine. However, if you come here bashing the novel claiming to have read it and analyzed it in depth enough to understand it, I'm going to call you out on it.

Again... I don't believe anyone has claimed to have read it and understood it and felt it was but crap (although MortalTerror might make such a claim). On the other hand... I would again suggest that someone may fully understand a work of art and still dislike it... indeed, dislike it even more than upon their first cursory experience.

[arrytus]

He is very, very ironic, and takes a great deal of historical and cultural knowledge on the part of the reader (his works are quite reactionary and revolutionary) but his quintessential work, which contains his most important fiction is his collection Call to Arms, or Outcry (translated under both names in English). Though to me his best work is his history of Chinese literature (I do not know if it is translated or not).

Great. I've got the collection "Diary of a Madman" Which contains I guess 95 percent of those stories from Outcry as well as from the 'Wandering' collection. I just moved it to the top portion of my list [so sometime in the next month or two.].

but as you say it probably takes a familiarity or scholarship and thus I likely won't get a lot of it the 1st time around.

[mortalterror]

Again... I don't believe anyone has claimed to have read it and understood it and felt it was but crap (although MortalTerror might make such a claim).

Thank you for the invitation, but I've fought that particular battle enough times already, and I don't intend to get sucked into it again. Defending my opinion in any substantive way would mean re-reading, at least in part, books I have no interest in reading right now. Let's just say that I find all three of the above writers highly pretentious and full of themselves, and leave it at that. I've been wrong before, and I may be wrong about this. However, that's a subject I'm happy to remain ignorant about, for the time being.

You know who really knows his stuff when it comes to Joyce and Proust? Kafka's Crow. I think he has a masters in one or both of them. His opinion might be worth seeking out.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Ulysses has influenced far too many people in far too short a time to not be considered the greatest text in literature.

I don't really see how anyone can say any certain piece of literature is the greatest. Plus, like Stlukesguild and JBI pointed out, you're just looking at English language novels, which is extremely narrow.

Anyways, if we do have to quantify what is the "greatest" text in literature, I doubt Ulysses would even break the top fifty, not with the likes of Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer. Or Melville, for that matter (just to throw in a more contemporary American author). I guess it could be the best of the 20th century (in English), but beyond that? Doubtful.

Well, Proust had thousands of more pages to develop his characters. I just completely disagree with this statement, I know Bloom's daughter, his dead child, his middle name, what he ate for breakfast, what his favorite food is, what he does for a job, what he thinks about Irish nationalism, what religion he is, what country he's from, who his dad is and how he committed suicide, the house and street he lives on....do I need to go on? because I can.

What do trivial facts have to do with character development? In the scheme of things, knowing these little character traits really doesn't count for much when it comes to character analysis. You're just listing things you've memorized about a character because you've studied the novel so much. I'm not saying you don't have a deep understanding of the character. I'm sure you do. But this doesn't prove it.

Show me one Faulkner character who has that much level of detail, and also make a list like I did.

I can't do it for Faulkner, but I could for several Star Wars characters. But, I won't for a Star Wars character or any, for that matter, because what does it prove?

[PeterL]

I think that this should have been a head to head, rather than three way. I don't think that Proust fits with Faulkner and Joyce.

[Alexander III]

I think that this should have been a head to head, rather than three way. I don't think that Proust fits with Faulkner and Joyce.

Why not ?

[PeterL]

Why not ?

A) Having three muddies the water. Comparisons among three are, byt necessity, less direct.
B) Proust wrote in a slightly earlier period that had different standards.
C) Joyce and Faulkner were rather similar in their writings, so the contrasts are sharper.
4) I have never read Proust, and I promised myself that I would not read anything by him for moral reasons.
5) Joyce and Faulkner probably would understand why I switched from letters for sequence to number, but I don't think that Proust would. This suggest that the contest would be fairer.

[stlukesguild]

A) Having three muddies the water. Comparisons among three are, by necessity, less direct.

Perhaps... but it is also closer to reality in that Joyce and Faulkner were not the only writers vying for attention and immortality.

B) Proust wrote in a slightly earlier period that had different standards.

Did he? Proust dies the same year as Ulysses is published (1922). Joyce' Finnegan's Wake was published in 1939 while In Search of Lost Time was published over the years 1913-1927. That places it a little over 10 years behind Joyce' final novel. Faulkner, on the other hand, published The Sound and the Fury in 1929, As I Lay Dying in 1930, and his final major works The Mansion and The Rievers date from 1959 and 1962. By this measure, Faulkner is further removed in time from Joyce than Joyce is from Proust.

C) Joyce and Faulkner were rather similar in their writings, so the contrasts are sharper.

Perhaps, but does that matter. We can compare Shakespeare with Joyce with Chaucer regardless of their differences.

4) I have never read Proust, and I promised myself that I would not read anything by him for moral reasons.

Moral Reasons? Homophobic?

5) Joyce and Faulkner probably would understand why I switched from letters for sequence to number, but I don't think that Proust would. This suggest that the contest would be fairer.

???

[Jeremydav]

Well, Proust was definitely a modernist like Joyce and Faulkner. I think he's pretty comparable, actually, and each writer sort of represents a different use of stream of consciousness and innovation in narrative form (among other things).

Something sublime about Joyce's work has always struck me. He seems able to fully develop a character in the span of a page, and was a brilliant man as far as keeping the tradition of literature, going back to the classics, alive. I don't really see room here for claiming one of them is the best and being definitive about it, though.

[JCamilo]

Well, they are too similar, and comparassion can follow any rule. But it does not say who is better, superior, etc.

From a point of view, Faulkner is the most influential of them. It was him who Latin America was reading. Cortazar, Vargas-Llosa, Borges, Guimaraes Rosa, Mario de Andrade, Graciliano Ramos, Marquez... simple the best batch of writers of South America admired him. And he is obviously major in North America. Proust had a minor reading, but even so, his translators included the best modernists brazilian writers. Now Joyce was something else. Borges was reading him, Guimaraes Rosa too.

Now, the list is clearly strange. Because Kafka really stands out (and his impact was almost imediate too, considering even, his lack of publishing). And Virginia has an imense impact, doing the same techniques, because her influence in the feminist writing is imense.

I like Ulysses a lot (do not think it surpass Moby Dick, Dom Quixote, Crime and Punishment, but this is all relative. Hell, Sesame Street was quite liked a lot) and I prefer Finnegans but even if we discuss the irish representation only, Yeats is a monster of similar size and Bernard Shaw is not that behid. This if we just not acknowledge Beckett who was superior to Joyce in a new terrain. In the end, when we talk about those guys the mathematical difference is not clear.

But really... Derailling another thread for a guy which incapacity of comprehension is such that he just answered to Stlukes that an individual who did not consider Ulysses the greatest book, etc does not exists when Stlukes just did it (and we should send Mortal in a package to him house)? And Stlukes he cannt even use the cracked english excuse...

[hanzklein]

The fact that you haven't personally met such an individual doesn't quite amount to proof that such a person does not exist. You have yet to show a far greater grasp of literature and critical discussion and debate than that regularly displayed by any number of regular members here including JBI, Mortal Terror, Petrarch's Love, and a good many others. As Alex suggested, it is best to assume that everyone here is well-read, knowledgeable, and intelligent (at least until they prove otherwise). It becomes difficult to maintain such a stance, however, in the light of statements that suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is an illiterate idiot.

I am not saying anyone who does not understand Ulysses is illiterate. The problem may in fact be that they are too literate and expect to get straight narrative from the novel, and give up in disgust. You could have read the entire western canon: it won't significantly help you read the novel.

And we might all cite similar experiences with other writers.

We can, but Joyce seems to have inspired in his numerous fans the most respect and admiration.


No... the book consumes your life. My life is consumed with many other things... including any number of books, works of art, pieces of music, friends and family, etc... I was honestly far more seduced by J.L. Borges, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rilke, Eugenio Montale, T.S. Eliot, William Blake, Dante, etc...

I wasn't referring to your life, exactly, as it is obvious the novel did not affect you. Anyone who read Ulysses and loved it had the same experience as me. The novel is like that on purpose.

And again that is simply your experience. Not everyone is going to find as much in Joyce as you do... not because they don't grasp it fully... nor because they are less intelligent than yourself or less well-read than yourself... but because Joyce doesn't resonate as deeply with them... and/or they find someone else speaks to them far more.

Firstly, how can you not resonate with life itself? It may be Dublin life, but I can't imagine anyone except maybe some strange exceptions like vehemently anti-Irish, or anti-Jewish people might find the novel completely alienating in terms of its deeper messages. What I'm saying is that the novel will resonate with anyone, the problem is seeking out that resonance and having faith (as Faulkner said) that that it is there.

This, unfortunately, is an extreme exaggeration that ignores a number of facts. As JBI pointed out, Joyce's influence is rather limited relative to any number of alternatives. If we recognize that the English-speaking world is not the sole measure of literature then we also must recognize that there may be others with a greater impact than Joyce. Just considering the Western writers of the 20th century, there are any number of rivals to Joyce in terms of impact including T.S. Eliot, Rilke, Pasternak, Kafka, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, etc... Joyce certainly has had a major impact upon subsequent writers and in no way would I underestimate him or downplay his impact... but I recognize that his lack of accessibility has meant that many subsequent writers have intentionally rejected him as a role model (which in some ways his great pupil, Samuel Beckett did in stripping down his writing to bare bones) or turned to other sources. Joyce certainly challenges our concept of the novel and of the traditional narrative... but poets, short story writers, dramatists, non-fiction authors quite likely will have been far more impacted by other sources. In many ways, including the fragmentation, the expression of the angst of the individual in the face of the modern bureaucratic culture, and the Surrealism, Kafka may ultimately be seen as the far greater influence. I might note that the term "Kafkaesque" is far more likely to be understood than that of "Joycean".

Influence is just one aspect of Ulysses that proclaims it the greatest novel: the proof it is, is in the writing itself. When you consider the obstacles against Ulysses (Joyce was practically the only one who knew the novels significance when it was published, it was banned in two English speaking countries, he wrote it as a nobody for seven years, it was a radical literary experiment) then its a miracle Ulysses was even recognized. Despite these obstacles, it managed to have an extreme effect on the literary world after only a few years: Beckett was only stripping everything down in response to Joyce. His early work actually tried to imitate him. After Ulysses, a writer could never hope to eclipse it. Random house took a poll of hundreds of professors, and they too said Ulysses was the best novel in the 20th century, and Portrait was the third.

But let's address the larger assertion... that Ulysses must certainly be the single greatest literary text ever when one considers the scale of its impact in such a brief time. So... by the same token, no artist can be greater than Picasso considering his impact (which dwarfs that of Joyce) upon the visual arts? Or is it possible that Picasso and Joyce were both the beneficiaries of modern communications, travel, trade, and mass production/promotion which allowed for the rapid dissemination of their achievements? Picasso and Joyce are unquestionably giants... but the notion that they surpass Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Homer, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens is not something that can be proven by pointing to their rapid influence upon subsequent artists and writers. One may point out that the influence of Picasso and Joyce already has begun to wane. Whether they continue to speak to subsequent readers/viewers and writers/artists as profoundly as Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt do after the passage of 500 years is debatable.

Well, I'm not getting into Picasso as I know nothing about the subject and hes a painter and not a writer.

Joyce's influences are obscured in a large way, many of the people he's actually influenced is not obviously apparent because not all of them are coming out and proclaiming they have been influenced. Thomas Pynchon is one good example of this. I also read an article that Ulysses influenced the film industry with its shifts between characters and narrative technique.

Didn't you suggest earlier, when one of us noted that T.S. Eliot had proclaimed Dante and Shakespeare as dividing the literary world between them, that we take all such author's quotes with a large grain of salt? You probably don't want to read what J.L. Borges said of Joyce.

Actually, I would. From what I know, Borges liked Ulysses and hated Finnegans Wake, which is not a strange opinion to have considering Vladimir Nabokov. By the way, the T.S Eliot quote was about his own works, where he said his paled in comparison to Yeats and others. We should not use isolated quotes from even the most well respected authors to prove heavy claims. However, the authors citing Ulysses are all saying the same thing, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, Anthony Burgess, Samuel Beckett, T.S Eliot, Ernest Hemingway. These are all authors we take for granted as major writers of the 20th century, but they have all been extremely influenced by Ulysses. Many more are also up there who read Ulysses, secretly liked it, and had it in mind when they did their own writing, they just wouldn't admit it because of their own pride.


Again... I don't believe anyone has claimed to have read it and understood it and felt it was but crap (although MortalTerror might make such a claim). On the other hand... I would again suggest that someone may fully understand a work of art and still dislike it... indeed, dislike it even more than upon their first cursory experience.

I thought you've been insinuating this entire time that you've actually read Ulysses and did not like it too much?[/QUOTE]

[Alexander III]

"I have never read Proust, and I promised myself that I would not read anything by him for moral reasons."

I think this pretty much discredits your opinion in the matter. Also simply because you are homophobic does not discredit the works of one of the major 20th century writers.


Personally I am not commenting as I have yet to read a full length novel by either of the three so it is nice to hear others opinions on the matter, I must say I am terribly ignorant of 20th century lit; my preferences lying in the 19th century. That being said I am developing a certain infatuation with Hemingway.

[mortalterror]

We can, but Joyce seems to have inspired in his numerous fans the most respect and admiration.

People were pretty rabid about Pope, Dryden, Sterne, Fielding, Johnson, Arbuthnot, and Addison once too.

That being said I am developing a certain infatuation with Hemingway.

Good man!