No structure at all

this quote should be printed in the new edition

this is the greatest work written in english language.

When did Veeky Forums get so full of shit

No that's King Lear

Why cant the chaotic mess be the deeper meaning?

kek

Its likely that Joyce never said that quote about keeping professors busy, the french guy who said Joyce said that was interviewed years after he had talked one on one to Joyce and wasnt someone Joyce frequently corresponded with. That guy was probably just jumping on the meme because there arent so many unsolvable riddles in Ulysses and the biggest one, the one predicted by Joyce in the work "a man of genius makes no mistakes his errors are volitional and the portals of discovery" has more come from ubiquitous printing errors that people cannot dostinguish from errors Joyce put in decisevly to channel the register of Blooms incomplete knowledge.

That quote sounds pedantic as fuck. I reckon if user and not Joyce had said this we'd shitpost him into oblivion for being this much of a faggot. And this is Veeky Forums. We're supposed to be one of the nicest boards.

Its a really obnoxious quote and it suggests that Joycea entire goal with Ulysses is just to confuse people which really doesnt appear to be his motivation when you read his letters to Frank Budgen or early drafts just as he began to go retrospective

Because meaning happens in the head of the reader, not the head of the author. Take something where meaning isn't obvious and everybody will project their own onto it.

It's like the story of this art professor who had his students analyze a Jackson Pollock painting, only to reveal that it was only a close up photography of his painting apron.

Or those examples in films, where critics say an actors emotional expression was so convincing and impressive, but all they did was film the actors face and the director told him "look bored" without any context.

thats only in works with no meaning at all

in works with a clear vision its pretty damn clear what its going for, when you're unclear then its just free range for any jackball to indulge in "analysis"

I agree with Eliot on this one, not much more to say really.

Elliot? What did he say?

behold: insecurity because he realized he's too dumb to read joyce but still want to pretend to be patrician

>No structure at all.
i mean, you can say that, doesn't make it true

Behold the emperor's new book.

>this is how pseuds sleep at night

I don't see where you get this at all. I hear there is a lot of allusion in Ulysses, but it's not like they are so plainly presented as such. I rarely ever notice when there's something intertextual I'm missing, I just read on oblivious.

As for having nothing to say ... what of Joyce's humanism and exploration of the troubles of average man? Thematically Ulysses is not so different from Dubliners at all. They are universal stories about the intersection of dream and reality, heroism and mundanity. The characters of Ulysses are mostly wretched, jokers, bullies, perverts, they are the lot of us, and Joyce laughs at, laughs with, and sympathizes with them all.

How can you read characters like Stephen and Buck Mulligan interact or Bloom pathetically muse on his wife as she slips away and say there's no heart to the book?

because they havent read the book but want to be enlightened and smart so they'll shitpost about it

> unable to appreciate prose

I feel bad for you, son.

>No structure at all.
False, see>"... put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant"
Quote likely not even by Joyce
>Literally written to be overly analyzed.
Every book is written to be analyzed, otherwise what's the purpose?
>It's fucking boring and stupid.
Nice opinion
>He doesn't even use quotation marks.
Stylistic choice that doesn't impede comprehension one bit.

/thread

I am angry with you Veeky Forums fags. There are a lot of you guys who stated again and again that Joyce was as gifted as Shakespeare and that there were so many poetic jewels in Joyce’s prose that he could and should be placed as high as Shakespeare in the aspect of poetry.

Then in a thread some user quoted the ending paragraph of “The Dead”, and one line from Ulysses:

>The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

And I thought: “Well, is it possible that I will witness the same exuberance of metaphors and imagery that Shakespeare always present to my senses? Is Ulysses filled with unsuspected poetic riches? Was this a pyramid that was all the time in front of my nose but that I, somehow, was unable to see?

So I read the book. It was good in some parts, terrible in others. The great victory of this work is the microscopic details of human life, like smell, tastes and textures; sweat and lard in clothes; all moments of sexuality in human life; small ruminations of the mind; menstrual blood and body fluids; sexual desires; the cooking, cleaning, the everyday activities, etc, etc.

But let me be clear:

>Joyce doesn’t even come near Shakespeare in poetic beauty and metaphorical exuberance; even his best prose is not as good as Shakespeare’s best prose, and to say he can do the same beautiful things with language is simply false. Shakespeare still stands alone as a poet and verbal master.

"The next generation is responsible for its own soul; a man of genius is responsible to his peers, not to a studio full of uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs."

>Shakespeare
>poetic beauty
Be completely honest with me: how popular do you think would Shakespeare be if it was written today?

>how popular do you think would Shakespeare be if it was written today?

Not him, but who gives a fuck? How is this even an argument? Popularity has nothing to do with quality; ignored or not, the words on the page are the same, and equally great.

Is the Context ever clear in Joyce's Ulysses?

I'm wondering about the role of context because one paragraph on Sandymount Strand appeared to be an internal monologue, but upon analysis was clearly intended to be a more direct form of prayer...

I do not think he’s new-incarnation would be as popular as he was in his own time, mostly because we have TV and Films and his way of writing is much more dependent of words and long speeches than of the quick changes of scene and the image-dependence that dominate this more all-reaching mediums.

I do not think that the public of his day was crowding the theaters because of his poetry, but simply because theater was one of the most important forms of entertainment they had. Theater today, even the best theater, cannot compete with TV and films and computer games and all this new-medias that offer entertainment that is more easily consumed. People was as lazy and average than as they are now, and the easier and more bombastic the show the better.

I know that Shakespeare, in his time, was just another of a series of playwright’s when we think in his status with the public: people at that time crowded the theaters to see Volpone and The Alchemist and A Game at Chess and The Spanish Tragedy and A Shoemakers Holliday and It is Pity she’s a Whore, and none of those plays is even near as poetically great as Shakespeare’s work. That means that people enjoyed theater, even when it was not greatly poetic. Shakespeare was known by people with reading knowledge to be greatly talented and quite possibly the best of all dramatists at the time, but his fame and fortune was due to the great value of the theater at that time and to Shakespeare’s partnership in his company (he earned a lot of money not just from his plays, but from all the box-office of the company).

However, I do think that someone writing plays with the poetic exuberance of Shakespeare today would certainly be viewed as a genius by a lot of people, although he would be known mostly among writers and theater-people. He might end up being catapulted to great prominence by a lucky strike of best-selling work (like Lolita or One Hundred Years of Solitude with theire authors), but most likely he would be a kind of sub-celebrity. Many would say that is was not that great, many would criticize it for not being realistic enough, many would say that it couldn’t compare with the genius of the past. But as the time went by and the person continued to enlarge his oeuvre, and especially after his/her death, I am certainly that the genius statues would be recognized.

There is no such thing as inert beauty or quality. There is only popularity.

>this is what subjectivists actually believe

>inert

wew

Sorry, i meant innate. Never trust the squiggly, red god of spelling.

>people at that time crowded the theaters to see Volpone and The Alchemist and A Game at Chess and The Spanish Tragedy and A Shoemakers Holliday and It is Pity she’s a Whore, and none of those plays is even near as poetically great as Shakespeare’s work

Woah m8, really? I'm on your side here but this goes too far, can you really defend that? Volpone's opening speech is some of the finest writing of the era, and indeed in the English language. Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays, and not all of them are great. Volpone and The White Devil and Doctor Faustus are better than, say, Titus Andronicus, or Pericles. Marlowe was generally considered Shakespeare's equal, and had he not died young, might today have a reputation similar to Shakespeare's. People like Webster and Jonson and Middleton tend to be overlooked because of their contemporary who outshone them, but they are masters of the language, and you shouldn't dismiss them so easily.

can you explain your comment further?

I did not mean to offend. Those plays are all great and have sublime moments, as, for example, the opening speech of Volpone, or this:

With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled
Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools,
And scale the icy mountains' lofty tops,
Which with thy beauty will be soon resolv'd:

From Tamburlaine, or this:

Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory 12 of green mummy. 13What ’s this flesh? a little crudded 14 milk, fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper-prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth-worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our heads like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.

From The Duchess of Malfi, and many of them might even be said to be better stage-works than Shakespeare’s plays. But when we compare they’re overall language they tend to be more realistic, more down-to-earth, more simpler: they are not so tempestuously metaphoric as a lot of Shakespeare is. They have great moments of sublime beauty, but not a sustained and continuous tapestry of verbal genius.

Yet you are right: they are all master-works, and better than some of the plays of Shakespeare.

>With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled
>Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools,
>And scale the icy mountains' lofty tops,
>Which with thy beauty will be soon resolv'd:
>Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory 12 of green mummy. 13What ’s this flesh? a little crudded 14 milk, fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper-prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth-worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our heads like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.

great stuff