Considering reading Proust? I'll save you several thousand pages: places evoke memory.
Proust
Joyce
Faulkner
Considering reading Proust? I'll save you several thousand pages: places evoke memory.
Considering living life? I'll save you many a decade: you die.Originally Posted by Night_Lamp
It appears to me that the question is quite ambiguous, which means there are different ways to answer it. I also think when judging the quality of novelists it is difficult to avoid questions on narrative point of view.
But to follow your example, this post served only one purpose: to give you an opportunity to provide us with a condescending, yet idiotic comment.
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.
That may be so in some instances... on the other hand some readers may fully understand what Joyce is doing and simply find that other books speak to them more. Considering the fact that a good many of us are familiar and comfortable with Lawrence Sterne, Kafka, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, J.L. Borges, Italo Calvino, T.S. Eliot, Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill... indeed with poetry in general... I doubt that many of us who are not Joyce fanatics struggle with him because we have expectations of traditional linear narratives.
We can, but Joyce seems to have inspired in his numerous fans the most respect and admiration.
Ummm... how do we measure that? How do we measure whether I like Kafka or Borges more than you like Joyce? Yes, Joyce has a group of rabid admirers... but so does Borges, Neruda, Rilke, Hesse, and any number of other modern writers... to say nothing of Dante or Shakespeare. Is there a single writer who has more critical volumes dedicated to him than Shakespeare... even 400 years after his time?
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.
How old are you? I'm thinking 17 when I read these continual comments in which you use yourself as the standard by which everything is measured. It is quite possible that someone who reads Ulysses and loves it will not have anything like your experience. Honestly, I quite liked the book... to the point that I've read it more than once. Earlier, you suggest that someone might indeed have been well-read and still not see Ulysses as the end-all/be-all of literature because they approach the book with the wrong expectations. While that is certainly a possibility, it may also be that someone who has read a lot of other literature will have a context of other brilliant books against which to measure Ulysses... and they might not be so quick to declare it the greatest text ever when they are also familiar with Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Goethe, Firdowsi, Cervantes, Borges, etc...
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?
Art is not life... not even Ulysses or Shakespeare or Dante. They are art.
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.
No, one may not find the messages alienating, but one may find the forms excessively mannered, artificial... and inaccessible and dislike it for this reason. Again, I am not saying I dislike Ulysses, but I can fully understand someone else disliking it.
Influence is just one aspect of Ulysses that proclaims it the greatest novel:
Again, you are blinded by an almost religious zeal for this book to the possibility that there may be alternative novels with equal claim to the title "the greatest novel".
the proof it is, is in the writing itself.
As it is in Don Quixote, Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Tristam Shandy, The Tale of Genji, etc...
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.
The obstacles Joyce faced are irrelevant... and not uncommon. Milton wrote Paradise Lost while blind; Dante wrote the whole of the Comedia while banned from his home under penalty of death and his novel conveyed ideas that made him dangerous enemies in the Papacy and in the Empire; Conrad and Nabokov wrote their great novels in a novel foreign to them; Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was seen as subversive by those loyal to Henry IV and Thomas Arundel who had usurped Richard II and may even have led to his death; Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, poems of Verlaine and Rimbaud all faced legal battles and censorship. One would assume that a great many works of art were created by artists who continued to believe in their own work when no one else did: William Blake, Schubert, Kafka, Rimbaud, van Gogh, etc...
Despite these obstacles, it managed to have an extreme effect on the literary world after only a few years:
Again... Joyce' rapid influence owes much to the speed of modern communications, publication, travel, trade, etc... One doubts the impact would have bee as rapid had Joyce' work been published 300 years ago when mass communications, ease of travel and trade, etc... were not the same as they were in the 20th century. In spite of the limitations in trade and communications, etc... you might do well to read up on the rapid spread of influence by books such as Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Cervantes' Don Quixote, etc...
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.
In part this is true. No artist wishes to come off a a mere extension of his or her artist heroes. Beckett turns to French and strips down his language in part as a means of escaping the influence of "Daddy"... but he also builds upon other sources including Dante, Shakespeare, William Blake, and the Bible.
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.
Random House and The Modern Library actually polled their editorial staff asking for nominations for the Greatest Novel written in English in the 20th Century. By these limitations Kafka, Proust, Mann, Hesse, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Garcia-Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Jose Saramago, Jean Genet, Camus, Gunter Grass, etc... are not even considered.
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.
Thomas Pynchon and John Barth are both clearly influenced by Joyce... but there are other writers of far greater abilities and achievements who build upon other writers. Cormac McCarthy is clearly rooted in Faulkner and Melville. J.L. Borges owed more to Kafka, the Arabian Nights, Cervantes, Dante, Shakespeare, Poe, etc... Again, Joyce is a huge influence... but that does not earn him the title of "the greatest writer of the 20th century"... let alone "the greatest writer of all time."
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.
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.
Yes, all these writers recognize that Joyce was a major contemporary writers and innovator... but do they all proclaim him as the greatest writer of the 20th century... let alone the greatest writer of all time? Nabokov, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Eliot would most certainly have scoffed at the very idea. And what about the other major writers: Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Rilke, Eugenio Montale, Federico Garcia-Lorca, Pablo Neruda, J.L. Borges, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino, Frans Kafka, Jean Genet, Cormac McCarthy, etc...?
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
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I used to claim Pound as the greatest artist of the 20th century mainly because of his influence on men and women of letters of the Lost and Beat generation [Olson, Ginsberg, Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, Yeats, Williams, et al]. Though I still love Pound- even if he was a detriment to my own attempts at poetry for a year simply because I tried to imitate him without the requisite skills and talent- I no longer make this claim. However who am I to deny you your inspiration? Not that it is irrefragable but simply because it does for you, that something astounds you, that something is enlightening or beautiful. Mazel Tov.
Last edited by arrytus; 12-29-2010 at 11:43 PM.
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Let's not forget Rowling and Meyer. If we're going to factor in how many people are devoted followers of a certain author into the measurement of an author's worth, than Harry Potter and Twilight shall also rank up there. Those high school girls are obsessed.
I just mention this to point out the absurdity of using an author's "devoted fans" as a measurement of his "greatness."
"How old are you? I'm thinking 17 when I read these continual comments in which you use yourself as the standard by which everything is measured."
Hey hey hey hey, don't generalize
Meh, in terms of wide spread influence and readership, as well as becoming the most significant writer the fastest, the crown goes to Chairman Mao hands down. That argument is absurd - Mao is by your definition the greatest author - he takes the tradition before him - in his case, a rather impressive knowledge of Chinese classics, both artistic, and literary, historical, fictitious, and poetic, and creates a new ground burning over the old - he has style too, as he is still regarded as an excellent poet and calligrapher, and I would throw in, from a non-political perspective, a fantastic essayist as well (and a rather good literary critic).
That being said, I would not support Mao as the be all and end all of literature, I would just point out the contradiction.
It makes no difference anyway though, the thread is so ethnocentric it is ridiculous - Joyce's audience seems rather tied to France and the English speaking world, Faulkner, is perhaps the most widely read, in that he seems to have had profound influence on Latin American authors, namely Marquez, as well as other ranges, such as dominating the stylistic ideas of excellent novelists like Tony Morrison.
Now, beyond that, these are all novelists. Other forms have had profound influence as well - for instance, essays, poetry, drama, etc. and too, other countries have had their titans of modernist writing, for instance, Japan's Soseki, China's Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Lao She, or Ba Jin (all of whom have had a giant impact on the traditions of the world's biggest population mass, most of whom are as literate and well read as any European).
Who is to say Italo Svevo, or Thomas Mann, or any other number of figures aren't as dominant.
[QUOTE=stlukesguild;992907]
That may be so in some instances... on the other hand some readers may fully understand what Joyce is doing and simply find that other books speak to them more. Considering the fact that a good many of us are familiar and comfortable with Lawrence Sterne, Kafka, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, J.L. Borges, Italo Calvino, T.S. Eliot, Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill... indeed with poetry in general... I doubt that many of us who are not Joyce fanatics struggle with him because we have expectations of traditional linear narratives.
I'm pretty sure if you understand what Joyce is doing on the first reading (unassisted with references texts, or other resources), well, let's just say that isn't even possible. Virginia Woolf herself gave up on the novel and only got to the fifth chapter.
How old are you? I'm thinking 17 when I read these continual comments in which you use yourself as the standard by which everything is measured. It is quite possible that someone who reads Ulysses and loves it will not have anything like your experience. Honestly, I quite liked the book... to the point that I've read it more than once. Earlier, you suggest that someone might indeed have been well-read and still not see Ulysses as the end-all/be-all of literature because they approach the book with the wrong expectations. While that is certainly a possibility, it may also be that someone who has read a lot of other literature will have a context of other brilliant books against which to measure Ulysses... and they might not be so quick to declare it the greatest text ever when they are also familiar with Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Goethe, Firdowsi, Cervantes, Borges, etc...
I can't really explain myself here, but I am not using myself as a measure or whatever. What you need to understand is that Ulysses is an extremely unique case: there are meanings buried beneath multiple layers: finding that central message is an indicator one has truly unlocked the novel. When one finds this, they will behave in a certain way when speaking about the novel and acknowledge the main message.
Art is not life... not even Ulysses or Shakespeare or Dante. They are art.
Ulysses was made with the intention of portraying life, and giving it meaning to the reader.
No, one may not find the messages alienating, but one may find the forms excessively mannered, artificial... and inaccessible and dislike it for this reason. Again, I am not saying I dislike Ulysses, but I can fully understand someone else disliking it.
But it isn't that, which is why I'm exactly saying if someone is calling Ulysses that they haven't examined it in the proper depth necessary.
As it is in Don Quixote, Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Tristam Shandy, The Tale of Genji, etc...
None of those novels pay as much attention to language as Ulysses, with its groundbreaking uses of it, except maybe Moby Dick, but it still doesn't come even close. I guess you could make a case for Shakespeare. Those novels you listed, rather simply use language to convey a story.
The obstacles Joyce faced are irrelevant... and not uncommon. Milton wrote Paradise Lost while blind; Dante wrote the whole of the Comedia while banned from his home under penalty of death and his novel conveyed ideas that made him dangerous enemies in the Papacy and in the Empire; Conrad and Nabokov wrote their great novels in a novel foreign to them; Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was seen as subversive by those loyal to Henry IV and Thomas Arundel who had usurped Richard II and may even have led to his death; Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, poems of Verlaine and Rimbaud all faced legal battles and censorship. One would assume that a great many works of art were created by artists who continued to believe in their own work when no one else did: William Blake, Schubert, Kafka, Rimbaud, van Gogh, etc...
It may be relevant, as influence was involved which was the main subject of debate.
Again... Joyce' rapid influence owes much to the speed of modern communications, publication, travel, trade, etc... One doubts the impact would have bee as rapid had Joyce' work been published 300 years ago when mass communications, ease of travel and trade, etc... were not the same as they were in the 20th century. In spite of the limitations in trade and communications, etc... you might do well to read up on the rapid spread of influence by books such as Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Cervantes' Don Quixote, etc...
No, it really doesn't. Joyce also wrote a Portait, Dubliners, and Finnegans Wake and had mass communications...why didn't they have as much influence? When you consider that Joyce was a nobody and Ulysses was published by an obscure little company, its amazing what happened. "Mass communications" does not really matter as much as you think: word of mouth is actually what got Ulysses circulated in the first place. This is a unique case, people right now can barely understand the novel, and in 1922 probably would have found it about as comprehensible as nuclear physics on the first reading. Joyce himself therefore went around telling his friends what the novel was about, these people happened to be the literary "elite" and they passed the word amongst themselves. Eventually, everyday people found out the novel had merit. I do not see what modern communication systems have to do with that.
Thomas Pynchon and John Barth are both clearly influenced by Joyce... but there are other writers of far greater abilities and achievements who build upon other writers. Cormac McCarthy is clearly rooted in Faulkner and Melville. J.L. Borges owed more to Kafka, the Arabian Nights, Cervantes, Dante, Shakespeare, Poe, etc... Again, Joyce is a huge influence... but that does not earn him the title of "the greatest writer of the 20th century"... let alone "the greatest writer of all time."
Cormac McCarthy actually shows some Joycean influences, such as not including quotations in his dialogue. As well, he admitted he followed Joyce's example and used little commas. As I have said, again, that Ulysse's massive influence in a century is just one reason its the greatest literary work, not the only one.
Yes, all these writers recognize that Joyce was a major contemporary writers and innovator... but do they all proclaim him as the greatest writer of the 20th century... let alone the greatest writer of all time? Nabokov, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Eliot would most certainly have scoffed at the very idea. And what about the other major writers: Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Rilke, Eugenio Montale, Federico Garcia-Lorca, Pablo Neruda, J.L. Borges, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino, Frans Kafka, Jean Genet, Cormac McCarthy, etc...?
No, they wouldn't have scoffed at the notion of Joyce being the greatest writer of all time. If that was the case, why did Nabokov for one come out and outright make a list of the greatest novels ever written and Ulysses was number 1? And secondly, authors don't really say who their favorite writers are, they only praise things and show appreciation if they are not conceited. Nabokov spent years lecturing on Ulysses, and Ernest Hemingway personally knew Joyce and once remarked he wished he had written Ulysses. In my opinion, Hemingway's minimalism was just like Samuel Beckett's reaction: to escape the influence of Joyce as much as possible. Those writers you listed are "good" but not near perfect like Joyce. I wouldn't be surprised if more than one of them was significantly influenced by Joyce, either.
The difference is its mostly professors and students showing an appreciation for the book and not teen girls. The unique circumstances surrounding this book should atleast be given some thought: it isn't exactly something going to seep into popular culture where it can easily be referenced like Shakespeare, although it has made some progress in this regard.
I realize what you're saying about Mao, but he hasn't really influenced the people who matter by his book...you know...the main figures in literature after 1922. Also, influence is not the only argument I'm making for the novel being the best ever written (nor even the main one), stlukesguild just keeps focusing on it for some reason.
the number of factual errors is growing extravagant in this thread
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I still don't see how any one piece of literature can be seen as the best ever written. So far, almost all of your arguments involve personal opinion. When it comes down to it, you have offered nothing more than, "I really, really like Ulysses because it's really deep, innovative, and original. If you don't like it, you don't get it, and therefore your opinion is invalid. And if you did get it, and didn't like it, you're wrong, because you didn't get it. It is also influential to many authors. Therefore, it is the greatest piece of literature ever written."
Further, there does not need to be a "greatest" piece of literature, does there? There is no possible way to identify one. It all comes down to personal opinion, and your opinion is not fact, no matter how vehemently you present it as such.
I've backed up my claims numerous times and cited well respected authors. Nearly every argument I've put forth has invoked some kind of respectable figure in literature who coincided with my viewpoint. As for how it could be viewed as the greatest piece of literature? I think Jacques Derrida said it best when he said:- "an American tourist of the most typical variety leaned over my shoulder and sighed: "So many books! What is the definitive one? Is there any?" It was an extremely small book shop, a news agency. I almost replied, "Yes, there are two of them, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake."
Meanwhile, I've seen little to no outside sources except your opinions backing up your own opinions from you and stlukesguild.
Alright, so your argument could be more accurately paraphrased by saying: "I really, really like Ulysses because it's really deep, innovative, and original. If you don't like it, you don't get it, and therefore your opinion is invalid. And if you did get it, and didn't like it, you're wrong, because you didn't get it. It is also influential to many authors. And here's some quotes and citations of authors who share my opinion. Therefore, it is the greatest piece of literature ever written."
You've cited authors and quoted them, but I have to ask, so? That doesn't prove anything. You can't prove a novel is the greatest ever written. I may have backed up my own opinions with only my own opinion, but you have backed up your opinions with other opinions, which seems to me only marginally better. I could do some Google searches and find some well respected authors who don't find Ulysses to be the end-all be-all novel, but again, I don't see the point. It's all opinion. Arguing whether one piece of literature is the greatest of all time is pointless.
When it comes to a rational argumental exchange, which is all this really comes down to since a novel can not be proven to be the greatest ever written, between you and Stlukesguild, Stlukesguild has made better points by far.
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