8 ms·
Breaking Up with James Joyce
- rumcajz 8y agoWhat people often forget about classical books: They were written to be enjoyed. That's true even for Finnegan's Wake although it requires a special kind of person to enjoy it.
- okket 8y agoNitpick: His book is titled correctly "Finnegans Wake", not "Finnegan's Wake".
- rumcajz 8y agoOops!
- fergie 8y agoJoyce's books are, in a real sense, "unreadable", and thats to some degree what the attraction is.
- justonepost 8y agoUnreadable, but very very listenable. These books are amazing on audio tape and fantastic to listen to when going on hikes or runs or whatever. I find there is a very pleasant atmospheric lyricism to Joyce's work that paints a very particular picture of Dublin that is quite fascinating and enjoyable. Art sometimes is best absorbed rather than understood. Great art can reveal when pressed, but I usually only do that randomly to ensure that there is substance there, and there usually is.
- tracyshaun 8y agoYes. I only read Finnegans Wake by reading it aloud to myself. I can hear a lot more of the puns and word enjambnents auditorally than I can see them visually. Having said that, I am still reading the book only a few pages at a time every other week or so. I’m 25 years in and not even close to being done. I’m ok with that.
- mordechai9000 8y agoI think (for me at least) it's best approached as a kind of wild, surreal poetry with mythological themes and scope. I've never read it end to end, and I probably never will, but there are passages I have memorized just from rereading them so many times.
- tomgp 8y agohuh? In a very real sense I read Dubliners last month.
- stult 8y agoThat is by far his most readable work. And his earliest. He became steadily more impenetrable over time.
- fergie 8y agoTIL- will check it out
- josephjrobison 8y agoI love Dubliners and reread it all the time. Shows what Joyce could have produced if he stayed in that style, but then again he may not have become Joyce.
- pupser 8y agoI wonder how you enjoy 200 pages of no punctuation or coherence (Ulysses)? It takes a special kind of person to enjoy this sort of thing... or some hipsters who want to show off.
- rumcajz 8y agoIt requires a person that loves to solve riddles. Think of a crossword aficionado escalated to the next level.
- pupser 8y agoBut maybe there's no riddle after all... just Joyce being a dick. This is my preferred theory. The guy was a dick or just mocking the academics - nothing more, nothing less. Edit / To clarify: I know about art and people's preferences. I am not English/Irish, am no expert in Shakespeares' works or "speak" fluent Latin, so there will be things I won't understand without some (sometimes substantial) effort on my part (reading Ulysses) - I know that. I am also capable to enjoy unconventional styles and writing (like Naked Lunch, for example - no comparison, just an example). With Joyce, however, I just can't shake the feeling the guy was just showing-off and making fun of the people who later try to convince others and/or themselves that they "got it". But to each their own.
- rumcajz 8y agoI can't tell about Finnegan's Wake. I am not a native English speaker and that kind of prevents me reading it. I've enjoyed Ulysses though. Even on the most simple level, you can, for example, read the book with a clock and a map of Dublin and follow what's happening in real time (the reading time seems to match the time described in the book). Anyway, my point was that art is, essentially, to be enjoyed. I've enjoyed it. Great. You didn't. Good as well. What's weird though is the academics analyzing books nine-to-five, to put food on the table.
- sdenton4 8y ago(To be sure, I am a native english speaker, and feel that not being Joyce prevents me from reading Finnegans Wake.)
- lmm 8y agoThe article seems to me to claim otherwise: > his life was driven by his one-eyed obsession to fulfil his destiny > The method did not please Joyce very much because he considered it not imaginative enough, but it was the only way he could work. What if Joyce wrote not to be enjoyed but to gain a literary reputation? (You could claim that the literary establishment favours books its members enjoy, but I think that's only true if you define "enjoy" in a way that removes all meaning)
- twoodfin 8y agoI think even the most ardent critic of the Wake would acknowledge that it’s full of delightful linguistic somersaults. Joyce had a talent for producing prose that can be enjoyable to read without being fully comprehended—the question is whether the level of effort Joyce required to achieve even limited comprehension is adequately rewarded.
- lisper 8y ago> it requires a special kind of person to enjoy it. I have never been able to get through even a few paragraphs of Joyce without feeling the need to throw the book down and scream WTBF? I guess I'm not a special kind of person.
- justonepost 8y agoGabrielle co-wrote puberty blues, a book about 13 year old girls becoming groupies for a "surfie" gang in 1970s australia. A rather autobiographical account. How much of it she lived, and how much of it was Katy, I'm not sure. No doubt the beginning of some of her choices she talks about in this piece.
- midhir 8y ago_Solar Bones_ by Mike McCormack just won the International Dublin Literary Prize and might appeal to Joyce fans. It's based on the West coast of Ireland and is a one-sentence novel. Looking forward to reading it next month. Not without trepidation though...
- te_chris 8y agoIt's excellent. One of the best books I've read.
- jyriand 8y agoIf you like podcasts, I would suggest listening Frank Delaney's Re-Joyce [0], where he goes through Ulysses sentence by sentence and tries to explain what's going on. Sadly this great podcast was interrupted by Frank's sudden death. [0] -- http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/ http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/
- lisper 8y ago> interrupted by Frank's sudden death That would seem to me to be the inevitable result of such an endeavor given the relative scales of Ulysses and a typical human life span. Even just trying to read Ulysses carries a certain non-negligible risk in this regard. I myself narrowly escaped a brush with catastrophe when assigned to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I was myself a young man (in high school). I thank God daily that I lived to warn others. ;-)
- twoodfin 8y agoThe podcast had slowly and then significantly ramped up its length, and certain sections of the novel are amenable to more rapid treatment than others. There was no reason to think he couldn’t have finished in another 10-15 years. He was halfway through “Wandering Rocks” a “mere” 6.75 years in, and I had been estimating he’d be at my favorite “Cyclops” by around now. :(
- sxcurry 8y agoI second this - a fascinating and well-researched deconstruction of Ulysses. And fun to listen to! Frank's death was very sad - I felt like he was a friend of mine. I had donated to his Paypal account several times to thank him for the podcast, and he always replied with a nice personal response.
- mbubb 8y agoI like this essay - took 2 Joyce seminars back in college days and got a lot out of it. Never made it all the way through FW. I am not familiar with this writer but she nicely shifts from a serious to a joking tone. I feel like her breaking up with Joyce may take a long time and the results will be interesting to read.
- biswaroop 8y agoI highly recommend Dubliners by Joyce. It's the most beautiful collection of short stories ever written. Ulysses has its roots in Dubliners, and if Ulysses is a daydream, then Finnegans Wake is a nightmare. Leave the nightmares to the hobgoblins.
- 2dollars27cents 8y agoI agree. Dubliners is also (compared to Ulysses) very readable. I'm almost afraid to admit how much several of the stories resonated with me...
- psychometry 8y agoI found Dubliners frustrating. They are not so much short stories as vignettes and I was often left scratching my head after each one, confused as to what the point of it all was.
- artpepper2 8y agoI think "vignettes" is a good way to look at them. They aren't really plot-driven, rather each one builds to a psychological or spiritual moment, what Joyce called "epiphanies"
- DanSmooth 8y agoFurther reading: The NYT had just last week a longform piece on Jason Kidd, who was once celebrated as the greates JJ scholar alive: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case-of-the-missing-joyce-scholar.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case...
- barleymash 8y agoJohn* Kidd :)
- tracyshaun 8y agoThank you. I was about to be amazed about the other life of a hall of fame point guard and mediocre coach.
- daxfohl 8y agoAfter several years of on again off again trying to read Ulysses, I'm 20 pages from done, and now this.
- thanatropism 8y agoWhen you listen to jazz, you don't complain that you don't know all the chords.
- kbutler 8y agoSteven Brust, Will Shetterly and others formed the (at least) half-joking "Pre-Joycean Fellowship", emphasizing storytelling over extravagant literary flourishes. Sounds good to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Joycean_Fellowship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Joycean_Fellowship
- ordinaryperson 8y agoFormer English major here. Just my opinion but I think Joyce has not aged well in the internet era, particularly Finnegan's Wake (which the OP here seems most cynical about). Joyce's allusions (there's an entire cottage industry of books dedicated to them) seem less impressive in 2018 than they did in 1918, since any fool with a smartphone has near-instant access to all the world's written works. I still like the experimental nature of Ulysses. It's ambitious and thoughtful in a way you're not going to be challenged in, say, a John Grisham novel. But take, for example, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, which ends the book and led to the obscenity trial in the US (it's widely interpreted that she's masturbating and the book ends with her orgasming) -- it's written without punctuation, but a Joyce scholar told me once of a study of people who read it that found people silently inserted the punctuation (mentally) as needed, sort of the way ancient Latin or Greek scrolls were writted/read. He also said that few scientists or philosophers really believe nowadays the human mind works in streams (the term was coined in 1890), that short of mental illness humans think in linear patterns. To me that's an example of a Joyce experiment that failed but I still admire his attempt at something unique and ambitious. Finnegan's Wake, however, was Joyce off the deep end, and not worth anyone's time. You're much better off as others suggest in this thread reading Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man or Dubliners. /my two cents
- agonz253 8y agohttps://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/09/21/who-the-hell-is-this-joyce/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/09/21/who-the-hell-...
- werethegoodguys 8y agoThanks, that was much more enjoyable - and better written - than the main article.
- throwawaymanbot 8y agoUlysses is meant to be read aloud
- beevai142 8y agoJoyce scholarship in some sense seems like mathematics --- the construct is an invention, axioms can be whatever they are decided to be, and the only question is in how productive and beautiful the construction is. That being said, from this point of view the whole enterprise seems empty and vain. Even if you finally find what the book "means", the whole project seems like a dead end and does not lead to anything else --- you have gained nothing that generalizes beyond a narrow scope, and Joyce is long dead. This means that the work is not beautiful.