New at Reason

June 10, 2004

Just in time for Bloomsday, my take on Ulysses, difficult literature, and the unpredictable market for modernism.

Comments

|6.10.04 @ 1:52AM|#

Tim, I thought that was a great article. Thank you.

|6.10.04 @ 2:52AM|#

Ditto. I haven't been able to make it through any Joyce, I'm embarrassed to admit. I find the effort exhausting, and after a chapter I am forced to find something junky but fun.

I would take issue with the idea that Joyce is the least accessible in English. His intellectual barriers are higher, but with a one-two punch of complex style and feeling utterly dirty when you read him, Faulkner is the least accessible good writer to me.

Then there are guys like Pynchon, who has a lot of barriers, and who is very good at implying vague meaning, but I'm not sure there is actually anything reward at the end of the marathon. "Lot 49" I liked becuase it's insanity was contained in a small number of pages. An unread "Gravity's Rainbow" sneers at me from the shelf now and again.

|6.10.04 @ 3:13AM|#

I enjoyed your article as well, Tim.

I don't know that Joyce intended to be a nobrow hero. Yet it makes perfect sense that his work should offer a stylized canvas for a variety of people to project interpretations onto. Perhaps that's what makes a true classic.

Personally, I always found Faulkner more irritatingly inaccessible. "My mother is a fish"? What the fuck is that? I would gladly make 1920 the first stop on my time machine in order to murder him in the face with a fountain pen.

|6.10.04 @ 3:34AM|#

jason: gravity's rainbow is worth the time. it really confused the shit out of me at first because of all the pop culture references to the 1940s. longer than lot 49, but more funny as well.

imo, of course. my three favorite writers are burroughs, miller and joyce, so...salt shakers may need to be applied.

|6.10.04 @ 3:44AM|#

dehex:

I've been polling people about this since college.

Does Pynchon actually say anything, or does he make a game of seeming to say something?

|6.10.04 @ 4:12AM|#

i think he says a lot about nostalgia and the things that create nostalgia, as in v. it's fascinating to me because, like burroughs, it's nostalgia for a time and place i've never come close to experiencing. i guess sort of like listening to old people talk amongst themselves about things from the old neighborhood or whathaveyou.

gravity's rainbow has a heavy emphasis on discipline and "response to authority" or whatever you'd like to call it. of course, it's also a written version of that "its a mad mad mad mad mad mad world" movie in parts, replacing gold-hungry people in bad cars with nazis and hashish.

mason and dixon, on the other hand, is an exercise in goofball humor. it's fun, but the language is so goddamn...period-ish.

though ben franklin as a lecherous hippie dopehead? brilliant.

Rodney|6.10.04 @ 4:31AM|#

Honestly, I loved the book. Maybe that's because what I took away from it was that even a trip across town could be seen as a mythic journey.

|6.10.04 @ 4:41AM|#

"though ben franklin as a lecherous hippie dopehead? brilliant."

How do you figure? Giving venerated historical figures opprobrious traits and thereby thumbing your nose at them, albeit ironically, somehow requires genius? I don't get it. Seems trite, banal.. something some asshat working for Saturday Night Live would think of.

And.. he does make a game of seeming to say something, which is exactly the point of Lot 49. Meaning turns out to be nebulous and altogether ungraspable. His others books are iterations of the same.

A fine article, although I don't see why we have to continue discussing the propensity of uncreative people to transform the works of others into something 'novel' that appeals to their favorite subset of our 'contemporary culture'.

|6.10.04 @ 4:45AM|#

"Gravity's Rainbow" is an engrossing work for me simply because I have at home whole shelves devoted to World War II history. Those with a cooler passion for the early 1940s would easily find the strength to put it down, thereby sadly missing the hot orgy two-thirds through the book.

Joyce? Never met the man.

|6.10.04 @ 4:50AM|#

vv, the character worked for me. his "hippie dopeheading" of franklin was terribly enjoyable for me. not novel. not groundbreaking. but superbly done.

like i said, salt may be needed when it comes to my opinion on books. i'm big on the nebulous, literary-wise. all of my favorite writers are essentially internal monologists (monologuists? monologueians?) gone completely fucking amok.

as for your last sentiment, well...the legacy of any cultural current or figure is how much they're taken apart and reconfigured by later generations, or else they don't exist anymore. it's about as close as humans get to immortality.

Tim Cavanaugh|6.10.04 @ 4:56AM|#

I much prefer the Faulkner of Sanctuary, though even that Faulkner I'm not too crazy about. The stream of consciousness works in Ulysses, imho, because you like Bloom, and he's an alert, intelligent (but not too intelligent) fella. To probe the unfiltered thoughts of a character who is crazy, suicidal, retarded, etc.-well, that way madness lies.

Still, Faulknerians are almost as numerous and dedicated as Joyceans, so I don't want to gainsay their guy. Attacking a book, after all, is like putting on a suit of armor to attack a banana split. Faulkner's also had a greater influence on Southern writers than Joyce did on Irish writers, who mostly weren't aware of him during the 20th century and now resent him because he's the only Irish writer anybody talks about. Ultimately I think Flannery O'Connor will get props as the greatest of the southern writers.

|6.10.04 @ 4:59AM|#

she's basically the only female author i've ever felt really into, bookwise.

|6.10.04 @ 5:06AM|#

I have never read, nor intend to read, this novel, yet I found the article very interesting. Nice work.

fyodor|6.10.04 @ 6:06AM|#

"well, that way madness lies"

So? I like madness, myself!!

I especially liked Homer's stream of consciousness on an old episode where Burns offered him some lucrative but dangerous job and then gave him one minute to respond. Many relevant and irrelevant things streamed past in rapid succession!!

|6.10.04 @ 6:22AM|#

Tim Cavanaugh,

Flannery O'Connor? The best southern writer?!?!?! Everyone knows that the greatest southern writer of the 20th century was Walker Percy, followed very closely by William Styron. :) John Kennedy Toole would be higher ranked if he had a larger ouvre (obviously his short life has much to do with this).

Jason Ligon,

I always recommend Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to anyone struggling with Joyce with Ulysses.

Kevin Carson|6.10.04 @ 8:11AM|#

Benjamin Franklin: the only president of the United States who was never president of the United States.
--Firesign Theater, Everything You Know is Wrong

|6.10.04 @ 8:24AM|#

I recommend "The Dubliners", which is indisputably brilliant.

|6.10.04 @ 9:19AM|#

" Everyone knows that the greatest southern writer of the 20th century was Walker Percy..."

Tried to read one of his books once. Gave me the same sort of inner brain headache I get from writers like Margaret Atwood or Raymond Carver.

|6.10.04 @ 9:57AM|#

Douglas Fletcher,

Nah, Percy is fucking brilliant! :)

Tim Cavanaugh|6.10.04 @ 10:34AM|#

Re. Dubliners et al: Though I avoid superlatives, my pal Mr. Cutlets has a list of Joyce's finest achievements that is pretty funny: The greatest short stories of the nineteenth century, the greatest novel of the twentieth century, the greatest novel of the twenty-fourth century, and the worst play ever written.

Tim Cavanaugh|6.11.04 @ 2:04AM|#

Jason, I sympathize, though I generally like the sensation of following the thrust while feeling like there's more nuance under the shrubbery. A short, simple, and theory-free guide is Nabokov's lecture on Ulysses in Lectures On Literature, which gives brief overviews of each chapter-and is not shy about telling you to skim through passages that Nabokov doesn't like (a great improvement on ponies written by Joyceans, who offputtingly treat everything as holy writ). If you want a book that explains a truly mind-boggling amount of allusion, innuendo, and hard stuff, Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated is a masterpiece.

Mr. Cutlets|6.11.04 @ 2:35AM|#

That is one of my best bon mots, and props to Mr. T for giving it immortality in Google's web cache. A word here for the sublime dublinois, as Nabokov called him: no man ever wrote a better epitaph for his work than did Joyce when he said "if only someone would say [ulysses]was so damn funny." I got the humor before I got anything else, and that thanks to Tim and other right-minded readers. The biggest aid to appreciating Ulysses, though, is certainly Hugh Kenner's Ulysses. (Not to be confused with Joyces Voices or Dublin's Joyce.)

signed,
Mr. Cutlets

|6.11.04 @ 2:54AM|#

Thanks for the tip, Tim.

"... though I generally like the sensation of following the thrust while feeling like there's more nuance under the shrubbery."

I'm just paranoid that the part I'm missing is ironic. That sort of miss can really mess with you.

Maybe I'll arm myself with some Nabokov and put up the good fight again someday ...

Lisa Simpson|6.11.04 @ 2:54AM|#

GG, I couldn't even get past the first 15 pages or so of Portrait, even though it was by then about 10% completed.

OTOH, this was neat: Though I doubt they're still there, in '97 some of the buildings in Dublin sported neon Joyce quotations, lit up at night. I didn't recognize and don't remember any of them except for one: "O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire" in pinky-red neon on the north quay of the Liffey, casting fiery pinky-red reflections on the water. Stirring and romantic, esp. when drunk.

Jeff Clothier|6.11.04 @ 2:59AM|#

Tim,

"If you want a book that explains a truly mind-boggling amount of allusion, innuendo, and hard stuff, Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated is a masterpiece."

A book to explain another book... Sounds like centuries of theological tomes, each one "explaining" the Bible. It is almost a theological exercise to extract any meaning out of Ulysses and/or Finnegan. The question is: Is that level of complexity necessary to the author's purpose or premise? If so, is there something about the purpose or premise that requires such complexity, such as, perhaps, that the underlying idea has no objective merit.

In the article, I was intrigued by the mention of Arnold Shoenberg, composer of so-caled "twelve tone" music. Shoenberg had a system that was at once very simple - create a twelve tone "row" and compose a piece based on repetition and permutation of that row - and hideously complex in the way the repetitions and permutations proceeded.

Twelve tone ultimately appealed only to musical academics because at its root, it is all system, no substance. Mistaking an artificial, intellectual construct for a true intellectual abstraction is a mistake only lesser minds wanting to appear great were willing to make.

I feel much the same about Joyce in these novels. If there was a point to them, the points were all but lost in layers of ultimately needless complexity which served only to make those willing to gut it out and finish them feel good about themselves. Or, as my Uncle Bill would have put it; "He took a helluva long way around the barn."

Tim Cavanaugh|6.11.04 @ 3:32AM|#

Twelve tone ultimately appealed only to musical academics because at its root, it is all system, no substance.

Well, as I argued in the article, Ulysses has appealed to many people who are not academics or experts. That was the point of the comparison.

If there was a point to them, the points were all but lost in layers of ultimately needless complexity which served only to make those willing to gut it out and finish them feel good about themselves.

This argument is not illegitimate, but it's also not new: People have been making it since 1922. But if you're going to say this, you need to explain why, if showing off is the only reason anybody would suffer through this book, the book retains a broad appeal-particularly now, when fewer people are likely to be impressed that you've comprehended Ulysses than ever before in history.

A book to explain another book... Sounds like centuries of theological tomes, each one "explaining" the Bible. It is almost a theological exercise to extract any meaning out of Ulysses and/or Finnegan.

Personally, I don't think Ulysses is all that hard to understand in its general outline, but since Jason noted a particular problem he had with it, I presented one particular solution. A simpler solution, of course, would be not to read it at all, but since he expressed an interest, this seemed like sound advice. Your preferred solution to this problem would be not read it, and that, as Stuart Smalley tells us, is OK. However, if you rule out works that need some explanatory notes, that means no Dante, not much Virgil, no "problem" plays of Shakespeare, and nobody whose work contains a good amount of time- and place-specific reference that contemporary audiences are not likely to understand (Chaucer, among others).

I hate to introduce the old "That's why there's 31 flavors" platitude into this heady discussion, but you can't pretend it's any skin off your back if people care to spend time on this sort of thing. Jane Austen does little for me, but my hat's off to anybody who gets aid and comfort from her work.

Wirkman Virkkala|6.11.04 @ 4:08AM|#

Mr. Cavanaugh's essay is a hoot. Thanks. I've never been much of a fan of "Ulysses," save for the Molly soliloquy. But I love "The Dead," which I regard as Joyce's masterpiece. Also, I once hosted in my home a weekly reading group of "Finnegans Wake," which is best read, I think, as one of Reason's current editors read it out loud then: in a voice imitating W.C. Fields.

|6.11.04 @ 4:17AM|#

FW works well read out loud, as i learned this past weekend from the wife, because it was dictated, largely, because joyce was nearly blind by then.

i feel the same way about most of burroughs' mid period work. because point A and point B aren't as important as the way you get there, as ye olde greyhound used to say.

Jesse Walker|6.11.04 @ 5:06AM|#

I once hosted in my home a weekly reading group of "Finnegans Wake," which is best read, I think, as one of Reason's current editors read it out loud then: in a voice imitating W.C. Fields.

As I recall, not everyone in the group agreed with your assessment.

My favorite Irish writer is Flann O'Brien, but I do like the Joyce I've read. The missus and I are going to be in Ireland for the next two weeks, and yes, we'll be in Dublin on Bloomsday. We're taking along Ulysses to -- heh heh -- read on the plane.

But not out loud, unless we happen to be surrounded by fans of The Bank Dick.

|6.11.04 @ 9:19AM|#

Gary:

"I always recommend Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to anyone struggling with Joyce with Ulysses."

Jason's Joyce Confessions

Probably a good idea. My exposure to Joyce has been exactly ass-backwards of what anyone should attempt. First, I tried Finnegan's Wake. That didn't go well. I recall cursing. It reminded me very much in style, if not tone, of everything I hate about Faulkner.

I then said, "Well, Jason, you should try the one everyone talks about." This was going on the theory that the one with the most press would necessarily be the most broadly appealing. I think I discovered a new logical fallacy that day. Ulysses is on some level comprehensible to me, but I am nagged by the feeling on every page I am missing half of it. Like most people in these parts, I don't consider myself especially dense, and I had always been pretty decent at analysis throughout school. The book made me feel dumb in a very personally difficult. I don't have any problem when new ideas are laid out or when an author is speaking on some subject I am unfamiliar with. I expect, however, that when a good author lays something in front of me, I should be able to penetrate it. I should be able to turn over in my head and form judgements about what the author is doing and form judgements about myself based on my reactions. I just don't have enough confidence when I read Ulysses that I know what is really going on thematically to form any judgements. It makes me feel stupid. I hate that.

|6.11.04 @ 9:21AM|#

"The book made me feel dumb in a very personally difficult."

Great. "... in a very personal way."

|6.11.04 @ 9:54AM|#

Finnegan's Wake is the definitive example of Irish literature, which is to say it's best to read it while drunk.

Jeff Clothier|6.11.04 @ 10:06AM|#

"Dubliners," and "Portrait" I enjoyed thoroughly, so I took a university class on "Ulysses." I realized quickly that any book that requires a university course in order to get through the thing is either brilliant, or a complete brain defecation. My vote after the first three sessions was for the latter.

Any author, or reader, who equates obscurity with genius flirts with pretense. Genius is the art of simplicity. Communicating valuable ideas clearly, simply, and with intellectual and emotional impact is what art is about.

Hemingway is genius. Too much of Joyce, most of Faulkner and almost ALL of Pynchon is simply pretense.

|6.11.04 @ 10:56AM|#

bah!

BAH i say. :)

genius in art is creating an entirely new world out of the ordinary, imo. that's what makes ulysses so funny and poignant and, ultimately, groundbreaking.

or maybe having been raised in an irish catholic family makes it a lot easier to understand?

|6.11.04 @ 11:00AM|#

fwiw, i had a very long conversation with the priest that married my wife and i about ulysses, as he teaches a class on it each year at st. johns. he's read it about 28 times now, and each time says he finds a new angle to look at the work from.

to each their own.

Jeff Clothier|6.11.04 @ 11:00AM|#

Is it possible to be raised in an Irish-Catholic family? ;-)

I thought anyone in such a situation was doomed to a life of arrested development, belligerence and guilt.

|6.11.04 @ 11:04AM|#

that's only if they take the catholic part seriously. :)

thankfully, i accidentally found out about santa claus when i was five and discovered my parents putting out some gifts late christmas eve (thinking i had heard santa banging about) so that sort of fixed the whole "believe what adults tell you" thing.

if you get through that part, you learn to appreciate storytelling in all its glorious forms in a way i think is lost on the prods. :)

Jeff Clothier|6.11.04 @ 11:08AM|#

You can look at a Rubik's cube from a number of angles, too. That doesn't make it a work of genius either to create or to solve, and once you've accomplished it, how has the experience really affected you?

I agree with you on your analysis of artistic genius, though. It's not enough to communicate with clarity, you also have to have something of value to say.

And of course I agree that tastes differ, thank the muse, or there would be only one room in each museum. We'd all jostle one another trying to gaze at the Mona Lisa - the only painting - and the only restaurant to have a bite at later would be Taco Bell.

|6.11.04 @ 11:33AM|#

well, i think both the father and myself would agree on this point (if nothing else, though we had a very interesting discussion about "the cloud of unknowing") is that it highlights the miracle of everyday life and how so many people live together and apart in thousands of ways.

maybe it hits me more because i get that same feeling on the subway every day - sharing close physical space while pretending not to share any space at all, for the most part.

i have to say, while it was interesting to visit dublin on my honeymoon recently and see all the glorious monuments to failed revolt and all these places i'd only read about, i can see why joyce wanted to leave.

Jeff Clothier|6.11.04 @ 11:43AM|#

I've always wanted to visit Ireland and will someday. My family is trade-class English in origin and I've always thought of Ireland, among many glorious things, as a tragic chapter of history the English have yet to really face up to, rather like the slavery issue here or Afghanistan to the Russians.

As for Ulysses being descriptive of the Irish life and mindset, I guess I just didn't get it. I get a much clearer picture of that from "Dubliners" and modern works like "Angela's Ashes." What did you think of "Ashes" by the way?

|6.11.04 @ 11:53AM|#

Jeff Clothier,

Ultimately I thought "Angela's Ashes" was too sentimental; its a good book nevertheless.

Ireland was Britain's first colony; they learned how to govern overseas populations there.

|6.11.04 @ 12:02PM|#

i should, of course, mention that by irish catholic i mean irish catholic in america.

angela's ashes is a good memoir, but i think mr. mccourt should have stopped there.

i think we can all agree dubliners is the hotness.

EEEVVVVYYYY!!!!!

|6.12.04 @ 2:48AM|#

Don`t care much for Joyce - prefer Faulkner or Pynchon myself. Still, the article was refreshing - I had no idea that Joyce`s work attracted so many amateurs.

|6.12.04 @ 3:20AM|#

Tim Cavanaugh records that Anthony Burgess preached the Gospel but he forgets to mention the excellent book "Here comes everybody" which almost makes "Finnegan's wake" fun to read. Great book ! And if this amateur remembers correctly, John Ciardi tried to popularize FW.