ITT: Post your favorite passages by Joyce

what is it that is putting you off?

>His face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled him. Mr Dedalus uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn.
>—O, by God, he cried, I forgot little old Paul Cullen! Another apple of God’s eye!
>Dante bent across the table and cried to Mr Casey:
>—Right! Right! They were always right! God and morality and religion come first.
>Mrs Dedalus, seeing her excitement, said to her:
>—Mrs Riordan, don’t excite yourself answering them.
>—God and religion before everything! Dante cried. God and religion before the world.
>Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.
>—Very well then, he shouted hoarsely, if it comes to that, no God for Ireland!
>—John! John! cried Mr Dedalus, seizing his guest by the coat sleeve. Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb.
>—No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God In Ireland. Away with God!
>—Blasphemer! Devil! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face.
>Uncle Charles and Mr Dedalus pulled Mr Casey back into his chair again, talking to him from both sides reasonably. He stared before him out of his dark flaming eyes, repeating:
>—Away with God, I say!
>Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her napkin-ring which rolled slowly along the carpet and came to rest against the foot of an easy-chair. Mrs Dedalus rose quickly and followed her towards the door. At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage:
>—Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!
>The door slammed behind her. Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain.
>—Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king! He sobbed loudly and bitterly.
>Stephen, raising his terror-stricken face, saw that his father’s eyes were full of tears.

the shitness

of your taste in prose?

It's just ostentatious puff.

1. I don't find the writing at all attractive, I find it tiresome
2. There's no substance

Oh, so you just have bad taste, then.

That's perfectly understandable. SOMEONE'S gotta have bad taste, right? Just stay off Veeky Forums forever, please.

Good refutation.

What do you think is the message within those passages?

which passage specifically?

this one for starters

I don't know. I haven't read Finnegan's wake because it's incredibly dense and full of allusions and puns and so forth.

Immediately, it's a play on words of The Lord's Prayer, but beyond that I'm sure there is more.

Ok, so you can't say but you're sure there's more.
That's some profound literature
Try OP's passage

>message

Oh boy

I've always wanted to know more about the historical context of Parnell. I've read the Wikipedia article, but it either doesn't do him justice or Joyce massively overstated how important he was.

I'm not claiming to understand Finnegans Wake, and I'm not vouching for it.

I do like his other works, though.

OP's passage is describing a man's voice.

Not him but I agree the writing can be tiring. I wish he would cut the bullshit and just get to the point

How did Joyce overstate his importance? As far as I can tell, Parnell was just a very important symbol of Irish independence, so his downfall and the Church's insidious involvement with it left a pretty deep impression on the Irish citizenry. Joyce doesn't imply that Parnell was some great historical figure because of the things he accomplished, he seemed to have more of a local, symbolic significance.

>the point

I don't think that's the point of Joyce's writing.

>the point
Maybe literature's not for you, my friend

And that's why I lose interest in his work

Most literature isn't about the prose

>insidious

The Church was only preserving its own moral teachings. Parnell shouldn't have gotten caught.

Joyce isn't a didacticist by any means, I agree, but the plots are too puffed up to convey story in a satisfying way.
I just don't get the appeal

What is wrong with literature as an exploration of form and aesthetic? Is that not a point in itself?

What is with this cancerous worship of practicality?

ah well just for the record I've never read anything by Joyce.

I was just pretending because it's fashionable to like him on Veeky Forums

I've never understood aesthetic/form worship as an inherently worthwhile thing. I generally don't listen to etudes either

that's true I guess I meant insidious from the point of view of Simon Daedalus/the other Irish nationalists: the Church's involvement no matter the motivation seemed to have created a lot of disillusionment

every story's already been told.

The only thing new is the form.

What about Liszt's and Chopin's concert etudes?

Form exploration is boring and generally comes across as wankery
But I guess he's the most recent author I've read and in older works there's more of a plot/motif focus

You get the point I was making

>Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

From Ulysses

durr uhhh....

but like...

whats the point??

there's a sweet spot where the two meet. both extremes have their fans but it's silly to believe a militant superiority of one over the other

To all the people complaining about Joyce's lack of substance: I think you don't give him enough credit. Ulysses has some of the most emotional scenes in all of literature. It does have a lot of academia plastered across its surface, but embedded within is a truly comprehensive and beautiful rendition of human experience. Joyce may not have been a philosophically deep thinker, but I don't think that literature should be more about the senses than the ideas. Ideas can make a book more beautiful, but they should not be the sole purpose. That is what philosophy is for.

Here we see the deep understanding of the joyceans on full display

u mad, cuck?

Mad that you didn't check my trips

The excerpt OP posted came at the end of a song Simon Dedalus was singing at a bar. Simon Dedalus isn't the most remarkable man and ever since his wife's recent passing he's been slipping further into alcohol and financial troubles. But that moment when he was singing at this little local pub, he seemed to soar high above that. And for Bloom listening, brooding over his own family troubles, it was a moment of transcendence.

it is a point in itself but you have to be lying to yourself to think that joyce is successful in doing this, or at least that any of the passages posted so far in this thread are any good at highlighting it. so what if there's a play on words for the lord's prayer? how is that 'style' how is that 'good prose'? what's the point?

his exercises in language are inconsequential and limited by the fact they depend on a 100 year-old understanding of how language and aesthetics function. it's naive and by extension a failed project. there is something to creating substance out of style but this is style for the sake of experimentation with writing, but it's a failed experiment. compare the modernists in painting from the early 20th century like picasso, whose experiments in style actually carried the weight of academic art at its essence, not just cheap appeals to allegory and christian lit. picasso, duchamp, matisse, kandinsky, malevich and even early surrealism all had more profound impacts on their art than joyce. the only people who write like joyce now are pseud monolingual undergrads with no understanding of language

>But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

"PRIVATE CARR
Here. What are you saying about my king?

STEPHEN
(Throws up his hands.) O, this is too monotonous! Nothing. He wants my money and my life, though want must be his master, for some brutish empire of his. Money I haven't. (He searches his pockets vaguely.) Gave it to someone.

PRIVATE CARR
Who wants your bleeding money?

STEPHEN
(Tries to move off.) Will someone tell me where I am least likely to meet these necessary evils? Ça se voit aussi à Paris. Not that I... But by Saint Patrick...!"

>i wikipedia "intellectual" topics to get a dilettante level understanding so i can namedrop and shitpost on Veeky Forums: the post

take notes kids, this is what autodidactism does for you

>her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!
That's a reference to her female parts, right?

as Stephen lies in the infirmary at Clongowes and thinks he's dying (portrait)

Dingdong! The Castle bell!
Farewel, my mother!
bury me in the old churchyard
beside my eldest brother
my coffin shall be black,
six angels at my back,
two to sing and two to pray
and two to carry my soul away.

I laughed out loud but, truth be told, I'm a bit scared by people who think like this.

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

I loved this chapter.

nice arguments. i'll print these out so i can look at them before i make another comment about joyce. i'm glad he's had such a profound influence on your thinking

Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary's fingers prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones.
Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil, lights shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest them.

yes yes you are very clever. -pat on head-

here have, this toy ball. do you want a piece of candy?

>the only people who write like joyce now are pseud monolingual undergrads with no understanding of language

This hurt desu senpai

this is from what chapter?

This reads like a parody of itself, which is actually what Ulysses reads like.

no shit nigga the first line is parodic

BRRRRRRRRRRRRT

T. Nora's Hole

who cares

I certainly don't. Only losers care about stuff like that. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to ignore the whole thing. Not gonna bother me anymore. That's right.

This so much, dear God

>Shop Illicit, flourishing like a lordmajor or a buaboabaybohm, litting flop a deadlop (aloose!) to lee but lifting a bennbranch a yardalong (Ivoeh!) the breezy side (for showm!), the height of Brewster's chimpney and as broad below as Phineas Barnum; humphing his share of the showthers is senken on him he's such a grandfallar, with a pocked wife in pickle that's a flyfire and three lice nittle clinkers, two twilling bugs and one midgit pucelle.

1. You haven't read Ulysses
2. You have no idea what the fuck you're talking about if you think Joyce isn't super influential and also that Duchamp/Picasso/etc. haven't inspired a fair share of undergrad hacks
3. Maybe actually try reading up on the themes and (gasp) maybe actually try reading one of his books instead of trying to make judgements on the man's whole oeuvre from selected passages in a Veeky Forums thread

All of these excerpts posted are bad examples of writing, just dressed up with a little more capability. A bunch of purple prose, a bunch of cringey alliteration–––it reads like a college kid's jack off session.

>a college kid's Jack off session
Cool, I have a new way to describe this board

i hope you actually feel embarrassed by this post in real life after some reflection

they were yung and easily freudened

I want to kill myself

this

>endlessnessnessness
i like this

Why?

Is Ulysses poetry?

How can Ulysses even be translated into other languages?

If I'm not a native English speaker, am I fucked on getting the full experience?

I feel like ending myself.

>Don't eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of that cow will pursue you through all eternity.

>gets dubs that looks like eyes in post about eyes

Of course.

You should try to read it in English.

>"Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.”

>literature always needs to have a """message"""

>there's no substance
>making this judgement from quotes
Do you dismiss authors based on Facebook posts or something? Why don't you read some of the literature surrounding these quotes before you say "it has no substance", because otherwise you have no idea what you're talking about you're just repeating criticisms you think are relevant.

Ho! Ho! Ho! Lynch, the jejune jesuit! the jujube jew! Lynch the nigger! Dedalus! Dedalus! Dedalus! Race war, now! Helter skelter! Ho! Ho! Ho! We're the master race!

>My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.

>it's a patrician joyce readers post the worst excerpts of joyce thinking they're good episode

i don't know if it says more about joyce or more about this board

From Ithaca

>If he had smiled why would he have smiled?
>To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.

True, they're not his best, but I'll say for any author it's difficult to represent how good a line is out of context. It just doesn't work

LOL good one my fellow white male

post a good one then oh master of joyce