Please go on, the man in your avatar is losing the chance to be remembered as one of the main factors of the so called "surprising popularity" of a certain work...Originally Posted by arrytus
Proust
Joyce
Faulkner
Please go on, the man in your avatar is losing the chance to be remembered as one of the main factors of the so called "surprising popularity" of a certain work...
JCamillo was right. It was stupid of me to continue this debate for the simple reason that there is no debate. Debate involves weighing opposing positions presented by others and being open to the possibility that one's initial position is wrong. This, on the other hand, is like a discussion with a religious fundamentalist... or a Lord of the Rings/Twilight/Harry Potter fanatic... except for the fact that the book we are debating is by most standards a great book... a "classic"... but that is not enough. Hanzkline wants us all to acknowledge that Ulysses is the greatest book of all time... a text against which Moby Dick, Don Quixote, the Bible, the Mahabharata, the Divine Comedy, War and Peace, and the collected works of Shakespeare pale. Anything less than that is simply a failure in judgment or intellect upon our part... or a form of heresy.
Ulysses was made with the intention of portraying life, and giving it meaning to the reader.
Does it not seem pretentious on your part to take it upon yourself to assume to know the intention of your God?
SLG (quote)...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.
Again you assume that if someone fully understands a work of art they must embrace it and love it. There are paintings and sculpture and literary works that I fully understand... and still dislike... or find they leave me indifferent. As improbable as it may seem to you, there are certainly those who fully understand Ulysses and its ramifications for literature, and still are left indifferent... or even dislike it. Incredibly there are intelligent, well-read individuals who aren't blown away by Shakespeare's Hamlet or Tolstoy's War and Peace... or even (gasp!!) Dante's Comedia.
...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 assumption that Moby Dick or Don Quixote merely use language to "simply tell a story" misses out on a world of possibilities including the possibility that telling a memorable story (something that Finnegan's Wake fails to achieve at all, and something that many might find rather convoluted inUlysses) is not necessarily "simple" or something to be undermined. It also ignores the possibility that there is more than "simple story telling" going on in Cervantes, Melville, Dostoevsky, etc... Joyce is phenomenally inventive in his use of language... in Finnegan's Wake even more than in Ulysses... but the difficulty... even the inaccessibility that results from this is a valid criticism... as it is with any other writer.
Cormac McCarthy actually shows some Joycean influences, such as not including quotations in his dialogue.
Yes, but one might surely claim this as more of a second-hand Joycean influence... coming through Faulkner. But the style of punctuation seems a rather minor influence in contrast to the elements in McCarthy that owe much more to Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor and Melville... and even Shakespeare.
...(many) 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.
And this is based on what? Your own personal insight into all these writers thoughts? Where is Joyce' influence on Kafka? Neruda? Montale? Hesse? Borges, Rilke? We've already cited T.S. Eliot's assertion that Dante and Shakespeare divided the literary world between them... Dante and Shakespeare... not Joyce. Beyond these two writers, Eliot was profoundly influenced by Whitman, Ezra Pound, Yeats, and Tennyson... all more than Joyce... and Eliot wrote extensively on Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Donne, Dante, Marvell, Swinburne, Baudelaire, Pater, Dickens, and Tennyson... but not Joyce. In my collected essays by Eliot there is one citation of Ulysses listed in the index... Tennyson's Ulysses. Kafka's greatest precursors include the Bible, Jewish/Yiddish narratives and folk tales, Cervantes, Goethe (the writers and works he cites in his notebooks, aphorisms, etc... as well as employing in his major writings). Borges writes a great body of criticism on Dante and Cervantes, and repeatedly references these writers as well as the 1001 Arabian Nights, the Bible, Thomas de Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, and any number of other writers and books... but not Joyce. Pablo Neruda cites Cesar Vallejo, Ruben Dario, Federico Garcia-Lorca, and Walt Whitman... not Joyce. And one could go on and on... but to what avail. I agree Joyce was a great writer... one of the towering figures of the 20th century. I simply do not believe that you can objectively prove that he was the "greatest"... let alone the "greatest 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?
I can see Nabokov at any given moment making such a claim. His work certainly shares elements with Joyce... although it is as deeply rooted in other sources including especially Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Kafka. Of course Nabokov's opinions changed with the wind, and anything he said needed to be taken with a large grain of salt.
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.
Of course... the acolyte can never admit that his God might be lesser than another's.
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.
You have simply Cited, from your own memory... and perhaps your own imagination... statements or opinions of a few writers among the leading figures of later 20th century writers. You completely rejected JBI's comments because Mao (and any other Chinese writer) hasn't influenced "the people who matter". And who are "the people who matter"? The whole of Asia is irrelevant? South America need not apply? Ultimately it would seem that only those writers who share your profound admiration of Joyce "matter." A good many writers from mid-century on certainly display elements in their writing that may be called "Joycean"... but ultimately this is an over-simplification. Just as Picasso cannot be credited with inventing the whole of Modernism in the visual arts, Joyce is not the sole Modernist writer. Virginia Woolf, Andrei Bely, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Franz Kafka, Knut Hamsun, Italo Svevo, Marcel Proust, John Dos Passos, Cesar Vallejo, Mikhail Bulgakov, Hermann Hesse, and many others were simultaneously exploring such Modernist literary techniques as "stream of consciousness", fragmentation, shifting narratives, quotes and misquotes, neologism, etc... and any number of the strongest writers from mid-century on may be far more indebted to one or more of these writers moreso than to Joyce... if not to another tradition altogether, such as the German Expressionist tradition or the French Symbolist tradition that eventually morphs into Surrealism and carries over into Spain where it continues on into Latin America and impacts Magic Realism.
Ultimately, Joyce...like Picasso in the visual arts or Stravinsky and Schoenberg in music... is one of those towering figures that cannot be ignored... at least not by those working within the tradition of Western-European/American (and especially English-Language) literature. This does not make him indisputably the greatest writer of the 20th century unless we negate all other literary traditions... and in no way can he even begin to approach the impact of Shakespeare, the Bible, and Dante (among others) upon the whole of literature. He remains your favorite writer... but obviously that is not enough. Like all good fundamentalists, you will only be satisfied once you have converted all the heretics and heathens. You have your work cut out for you.
Last edited by stlukesguild; 12-30-2010 at 02:55 AM.
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I am not so sure about that; it depends who you consider "matters" and who doesn't. The simple point is that he was an excellent poet, and a great essayist, as for who matters - he is still widely read in China, and all major authors have been affected in one way or another by his writing, thought, and its consequence. He is still widely sold in bookstores in China and around the world (and had quite a prolific output too) and is still regarded as a very good reader of Chinese classic books. As for subsequent writers, perhaps not western ones, but on the whole, Chinese people seem to read a lot more than Americans, for the sheer fact that their numbers are far greater.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 essay Hanzklein is referring to is T.S. Eliot's 1923 "Ulysses, Order and Myth" where he pretty much calls Joyce's book the most important work of modernism.
I don't remember Hemingway ever claiming he wished he'd written Ulysses. He was proud to have Joyce as a friend, but I don't believe he even liked his writing. It's true that he helped Joyce get published and even smuggled some of his books into countries were they were banned but that seems more the act of a friend than an admirer. When his books were being crated up after his death, it was found that his copy of Ulysses was only half read. However, this isn't definitive as he may have read a different copy somewhere else.
Still, I doubt that Joyce had any real impact on Hemingway's style which was far more influenced by Sherwood Anderson, his stint working as a cub reporter for the Toronto Star, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, De Maupassant, and Carl Sandburg, at least in his formative years.
By the time he meets with James Joyce, he's 25 and a professional writer four years in the offing. A regular at Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company his favorite works are those of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. He mentions in his memoirs that a quote from Shakespeare helped him overcome his fear of death after his battle wound. He's spent some time in Italy learning the language and appreciates the work of Gabriele d'Annunzio. He does not like T.S. Eliot.
He would later go on to make remarks in his own books or newspaper articles that he admired Dante, appreciated The Great Gatsby but thought that Fitzgerald's later work had fallen off quite a bit, and considered Huckleberry Finn the great American novel. He read Dashiell Hammett to his children and considered Thomas Mann a great author.
"So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
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He wrote to Anderson saying Joyce had a fine book to come, that I know.
But it is off course an absurd to link Hemingway style to a reaction against Joyce excess. America had already a strong tradition of short stories writers, objective, dry, efficienct. They had Twain and Poe, after all. And france already had Flaubert. And at 10's nobody was making more fuss than english world discovering the russians writers.. Not placing Hemingway inside a tradition and rather seeing the world a single route is an absurd. What is next? Tolkien wrote like that because he was trying to avoid Joyce's ghost?
Tolkien wrote like that because he was a weird, boring, and eccentric depressing professor who was living in a fictional past.
Last edited by JBI; 12-30-2010 at 05:54 AM.
lots of good responses on this thread, but the doc is gonna post his from his gut...(with a caveat that he was reading joyce 10 plus years ago, and the other two much more recently...)
after reading proust, the doc reached for more of that...
same w/ faulkner...
he couldn't get through joyce's 'portrait of an artist...' through two different attempts...started out very good, and then hit a wall less than one hundred pages to the end...and doc very seldom does that...
he recently read dubliners and found it to be fine, but there's something about proust and faulkner that makes him want to reach for the well again...
and not being able to get through 'portrait', he's never felt the urge to try the others...
and proust's involuntary memory views strike a chord as well...but his ability to write is why he'd get the doc's vote...w/ faulkner as 1.a.
Well, Joyce inspired people via his ingenuity with literary technique. Mao's has influenced people because its attached to a famous personnage and inescapably going to be encountered in culture there due to him having ruled the country, therefore influencing people whether they like it or not.
I also read that Ulysses was translated into Chinese and became a best-seller.
Here is the thing, Mao actually was a talented artist. That's what people do not understand - he was an artist, a philosopher, a poet, and a politician all in one. Even if he didn't lead China, he still would have been regarded a great artist, as both calligrapher and poet.
I trust you have read him in Chinese to have such an authority to dismiss him as relevant because of who he was as a politician/revolutionary, rather than as an artist. If not, well then, you do not know Chinese, therefore do not have direct exposure to Chinese art of the 20th century, therefore will have a hard time convincing anybody that they "don't matter."
First of all, the red book is not fictional literature whereas Ulysses is. Secondly, the book was adopted and passed around for political reasons during Mao's reign. This is similar to Mein Kampf - Hitler was also an artist and Mein Kampf has sold millions. Does that mean the book was more influential than Ulysses? No, it simply means it was adopted by an already existing, major political movement that had the authority to give value to the book. It does not mean the book singlehandedly gave rise to Mao's Communist movement, but rather the opposite. I'm sure if Ulysses was mandatory reading in schools in China for years, then it would be more influential there. Lastly, this argument is completely outside of the scope of the debate: the Red Book is not comparable to a novel and has unique circumstances surrounding it due to its obvious political nature.
Actually, the only book of Mao in the biggest public library of my state (the second biggest of Brazil) is a selection of poems of Mao. None of his political writings.
I was just reading Mao's poems and I think JBI would do better to pitch Lu Xun as an alternative. Tu Fu Mao Zedong is not.
"So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
Feed the Hungry!
I suppose the question may be that he was a better writer than just a propagandist, but one could easily list a considerable number of texts and authors which influence and aesthetic merit is imense without being labeled as those irrelevant thigns, fiction or novels. From Plato to Agostyne, Gibbon, Cicero, Seneca, Machiavelli, Pascal, Montaigne, Carlyle, the Bible, Quran, Confucio, De Quincey, Encyclopedia, etc.
Truth be told, he doesn't work to well in English, as Ci form doesn't translate as well as Shi form in my opinion, and there are various translations from what I can gather, of various worth (I hear the new one put out by Berkley isn't bad, but I read him in Chinese), but even so, my argument is not to put Mao forward, but to question the ridiculousness of the assertion that Joyce is the world's best artist of the 20th century, it is an absurd argument, so I use another absurd argument to display its absurdity.
As a personal favorite author of the past 100 years, it would be neither of these three, and that is really the best way to measure - in terms of acceptance or "influence", neither of those things matter when dealing with personal feelings, which reading definitely is, so I won't even bother.
Now, as for Mao, he isn't Du Fu, but then again, Du Fu is one of the best lyric poets of all time, Joyce isn't Shakespeare, or Spenser (who he is perhaps the most closely similar too I would argue), nor is Proust a German philosopher, or Faulkner the Bible - such a comparison only works to an extent.
As for his literature being comparable to Hitler's, have you read it? The most famous prose piece he wrote was his great Elegy for the Canadian Doctor Norman Bethune, which is something anybody, regardless of political opinion can take to heart - his political works are more theoretical, and he is not Hitler. Such an argument to dismiss him is just fallacious and betrays an ignorance.
Cicero wasn't an ideal person either, nor was the Chinese poet/warlord Cao Cao, yet both were excellent writers in their own right. Art isn't measured by how good or bad the artist personally was, but rather, how good the art created is. As such, the dismissal of Mao on political grounds is akin to the dismissal of "reactionary" literature on political grounds. In short, it is hypocritical.
Wouldn't matter anyway though, Western historiography and political practice has a lot to answer for in their projection of Mao, as his greatest Chinese predecessors, Han Wu Di, Qin Shihuang, Genghis Kahn, and others have been traditionally looked favorably upon by western historians, as have been Charlemagne, Alexander the Great, and even Xerxes after the classical era (from a reading of the book of Esther).
That being said, he still is a great artist, so our ideas are just warped by our political obsessions.
I am not an expert of what is being taught in China, and I have to admit that I have never me a native of Inner Mongolia. However, of the dozens of Mongolians I have met, and the dozen or so I have counted as friends, the holding up of Genghis Khan as a Chinese forbear of Mao would most likely not sit well at all. We shouldn't digress, and we shouldn't discuss politics, but it should be noted that such an assertion is actually a political statement.
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