Ulysses/Joyce hate thread

Well then you don't know anything of Joyce's character at all, he looked at the literary worlds obsession with finding allusions and decided to explode it at its foundations.
Ulysses as a novel was conscious terroristic act to destroy the novel, and he succeeded

retarded, don't spread your garbage interpretations around

writers don't pour decades into a work because "lol i jus' wanted to be silly and crazy!"

>He said something like we know tons of facts about Bloom but we never really know him.

That's absolute, total nonsense. I will admit there's a kernel o truth to what OP said (Proteus and Ithaca are the two best chapters, the symbolism can be seen as pedantic) but if Borges said that then he's a complete idiot.

Oh, and

>I get that Ulysses can be a research adventure, and maybe that's how it should be read. That Joyce really wants you to look up the references etc

Is a stupid thing to say also.

kek I knew Bloom better than myself when I read it

felt kinda bad about it

Meh, his characterization/psychology isn't that amazing. It's mostly that Joyce has connected the ideas really well.

I mean, Bloom is hungry and then he looks at women and thinks of them in culinary terms (ie. like a piece of meat!) Wow! Incredible! Brilliant! Isn't that how everyone thinks? It's way below Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Dante.

Christ you're not even able to understand my simple post properly, I recommend you go to a different board

I'm not that user, but it looks to me like he understood your post better than you did.

Agreed. Bloom isn't that deep or complex a character. I can't quite articulate why exactly, but whenever I read Joyce, I get the feeling that Joyce is writing about what he has heard human beings are like: there's always one level of detachment. Maybe it's due to the excessive use of symbolism, which really puts part of the characterization in an area of abstraction. I found that Woolf, by contrast, is able to really delve into the psyche of her characters (Mrs. Dalloway especially) in a much shorter time span as well.

Why does every author hate Joyce so much ? Is it envy ?

Sorry did I ask for another plebs opinion

> can't use commas
> other people are the idiots!

Sorry, Joyce didn't fart out a thousand reference just cuz' Eliot and Pound were doing it and he wanted them to stop.

> Joyce is writing about what he has heard human beings are like: there's always one level of detachment

Sort of. He inherits the detachment from Flaubert but I really think Ulysses and FW are what Nabokov called "literature of ideas" but thought didn't apply to Ulysses. Bloom is just a bunch of ideas of what Joyce thinks people will be like in the future. Which is maybe why Bloom doesn't cohere to some like characters from other novels.

It doesn't look like you're in need of any more pleb opinions. I was just pointing out the facts.

>Sorry, Joyce didn't fart out a thousand reference just cuz' Eliot and Pound were doing it and he wanted them to stop.

Except thats exactly why he did, and sure why not?

aren't we all, user?

Isn't that kind of the point though? Bloom is the Everyman, he's not supposed to have a sharply unique characterisation because it would defeat the point of the novel.

at least we dont wank to farts

Speak for yourself

>Bloom isn't that deep or complex a character.
>Meh, his characterization/psychology isn't that amazing.

Can you explain to me the purpose of the references then? I don't mean this in a way to criticize what you said, but I personally never understood their purpose in the novel. Some people say that it's a way to raise the everyday into the sublimity/greatness of literature, but, again, I don't see how the parallels in, say, Stephen Daedalus's life to Christ accomplish this. Yes, Stephen had an ashplant that symbolized the cross. But, the fact that there happens to be a semantic link between the ashplant and the cross does not necesarily reveal anything about reality. To me, the references were simply a means of connecting themes and ideas throughout the novel, and even though they seemed to suggest something more than that, they easily could have been replaced with references to less literary, more everyday objects, almost to the same effect.

>If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.
t. Joyce

They had no purpose other than this notion

well that's pretty empty t b h

this

So many anons here that think a writer can't be serious if he's being crude or playful.

Which is why they're not worth concerning yourself with, they're not the meat of the text they're the garnish

Show don't tell. You see Wilde's Requiem above Stephen's uncle and you know that he's mourning the death of his sister, Stephen's mom, like Wilde did in the poem. You hear Stephen compare Martello to Elsinore and you know he's troubled by another family member disappearing, this time his dad. You hear the names of children in school and you know they're all Protestant, not Irish, and he's teaching them history their ancestors made bloody for his. Get it?

Yeah, it is sort of the point and I guess Joyce wants the reader to have enough detachment to be able to accept that. I still don't care. Forcing Bloom into being the everyman doesn't make him the everyman, imo.

What else but his take on culture/history and where it's going? I'm not saying the technique is successful (at least for me). I think Joyce tried to encapsulate all of western culture in Ulysses and definitely in Finnegans Wake.

I just can't imagine that his intention with his allusive style was to explode the allusive modernist novel and prevent anyone from doing it ever again.

Do you believe these two intentions are necessarily contradictory though?

Ulysses is an experiment, it is all style. It isnt a good conventional novel. Joyces talent was grammatical, mastery of the English language, not human psychology, or being able to think of a great plot.

It is read for the innovative, creative compound words and neologisms which occasionally are used in some beautiful pages/paragraphs/sentences, and are very hard to translate, almost as if it were poetry.

That is the reason why it should be read in English instead of a translation, almost nobody in the west has has read Dostoievsky and Tolstoi in Russian, but you are really missing out if you dont read Joyce in English.
The paralels with the Odyssey are worthless btw.

How could you know what it feels like to fight the hounds of hell?
You think you know me so well
How could you know what it feels like to be outside yourself?
You think you know me so well
I just want you to realize I blame, I blame myself
I blame myself for my reputation

Sup, Coelho?

i will laterally killy yuo

his talen was linguistic, not literary. Perhaps he should have created a new language, like Esperanto.
He got the wrong job.

>Perhaps he should have created a new language, like Esperanto.
>He got the wrong job.

Oh yeah, he only made whats widely regarded as the greatest novel ever written, too bad he didn't use his talents to create a useless meme language

Oh, so you are from /sffg/.

Did he really though

some might say Toni Morrison Beloved surpassed him?

>isn't that how everyone thinks?
To answer your question, no, no it's not.

Joyce writes beautifully and captures the middle classes (in the dubliners at least as its the only one of his ive read)

I don't normally meme but if you don't appreciate the jamba juice:

KYS KYS KYS KYS KYS KYS

>KYS
what does this mean?

>Do you believe these two intentions are necessarily contradictory though?

Yes. Read what Joyce fanboys will tell you about how he predicted our media culture, how everything is Joycean etc. There's no way he's simply parodying references and laughing at people who think maybe he's trying to say something serious and not a cliched "truth is elusive, man, i dunno lol"

it was sarcasm

He wasn't trying to be clever. The book is stream of consciousness, so the narrator would be narrating all his thoughts, but that probably went over your head.

Can someone answer me why Ulysses out of print?
Considering how famous it is, you'd think there would be a stable copy that you can buy.

I went on Amazon to buy it and the only non shady version is like a $37 annotated version.
And I'm not spending that much money for a book that I'm most likely going to hate.

Most of Ulysses isnt stream of consciousness, have you even read the first chapter?

Threads where anons confirm that A Great Author is actually A Bad Author are almost worse than transient /pol/ frog threads.

>Joyce doesn't understand capital h Humanity

Oh wow he doesn't meet your completely arbitrary criteria this should make for a fruitful discussion

>he doesn't understand Humanity

I don't even understand what people mean by this. He spent his whole life around people. Isn't he just writing about the people he knew?

Or are they saying he's too dumb to understand why they do things.

The funny thing is I've seen this same exact 'complaint' lodged against Borges on this board whose opinions on Joyce OP is garbling here.

It doesn't mean anything of course. Some anons just think it's the smart way of saying 'this text didn't appeal to me personally.' As if someone's pleb tastes were the watermark for the state of the species.

he's groping for ammo, if anything it's the other way round

his understanding of humanity is nearly transcendent, his use of symbolism is trite and simplistic and I think intentionally so. the book is called Ulysses for heaven's sake; he wants the parallels to be obvious and digestible so his points about myth and man, hero and the heroic enterprise can be explored in the context of what the myth of Odysseus reveals about the individual and the eternal struggle of the individual in the face existence, even as it occurs on a day to day basis

like Borges is in any position to critique Ulysses

Borges actually praised Ulysses to the amount that it was the greatest novel of his time. That user was memeing.

You know what else is considered one of the best and most beloved novels ever written? Harry Potter

Who gives a fuck about popularity nigger, its called a literary criticism for a reason

Bloom is a lower middle-class, middle-brow man, an outsider in an outsider country

He argues against antisemitism in bars, he has an intellectual curiosity that he often doesn't follow through on, aside from seeing if the greek goods excreted ambrosia by seeing if the sculptors had included assholes in their statues. But he has an emotional complexity that every human possesses and that Joyce demonstrates with precision and moving clarity. The way his thoughts drift towards his lost son and intermix with his interaction with Dedalus; the way he deals with his wife's affair, preserving his deeper relationship with Molly who in turn reciprocates. Bloom is simple but his joys and wonders and sorrows are complex, and complexly delivered to us so that we can share them in a simple way that reflects those of our own.

People who dislike Joyce are utterly beyond hope. It's like disliking Hamlet the play because Hamlet the person is a moody faggot, or because nothing happens until the end.

>Implying that's a compliment coming from Borges.
B-man probly loved J-boy as a poet, but thought he was bad as a narrator. In a lecture about Joyce he outright calls him a man of simple ideas--not in a negative way, but simply as a fact. As someone who worked as a reader, Borges knew very well what it was like to have to read a book that seemed to never end: his short stories are both about and against that knowledge.

I like this statue user, where is it from?

Joyces physocology was simple. That does not make it bad.

Compare him to the other great psycholoists of literature: Proust, Dostoevsky, Woolf. The reasoning behind Joyces characters in their actions is not near as deep, however I don't think this detracts from his work.

The struggles of Bloom and Steven were something i felt on quite a deep level. We may not understand precisely in exact detail why these characters feel the way they do but we know that they feel, and Joyce does an excellent job of helping us feel along with them, and really sympathise without a deep understanding.

Dostoevsky never made a character that garnered empathy like this, they were all intellectual character studies. I felt simjlarly about Woolf.

Proust is unique in this regard in that he garners both deep empathy and great understanding.
Anyway in summary. Joyces psychology is simple as a rule yes. We do not necessarily understand every facet of these people. But we do not need to to empathise. As an exercise in empathy doesn't that reflect the real world better than if we knew and understood all of these characters psychological reasons perfectly?

he still didn't really like it and felt obliged to recognize its greatness and would rather just reread hg wells

>he thinks Telemachus is what the whole book is like