Why can't I "get" James Joyce?

[Mike 03]

I feel very stupid, because one of my ambitions for a few years now has been to read, absorb, understand and appreciate "Ulysses" and, even more importantly, to master "Finnegan's Wake."

I have bought all sorts of books, glossaries, interpretive works that were supposed to help me understand these novels, including gigantic volumes about "Finnegan's Wake," but they left me more confused and despondent than ever, feeling my brain is simply not capable of grasping Joyce.

Argggg... It's depressing.

[no name no slogan]

1. .... because he sucks?

:shrug:

[elshiva]

3. What does he suck?

:shrug:

[elshiva]

2. You are not the only one. It's challenging material.

[UndertheOcean]

4. No need to worry , everyone has his thing

I feel stupid when it comes to economics , Das Kapital read like gibberish to me .

[leftyclimber]

5. Anthony Burgess wrote some great commentary on Finnegans Wake.

I read the commentary. I still can't understand the book. But it might be helpful to you. Regardless, I gave up a long time ago. Ditto for Ulysses.

I hope you're able to get further than I did. I decided that I like Portrait of the Artist, and I'm happy to stop there.

[DeepBlueC]

6. I'd rather read Burgess any day

[Mike 03]

8. I LOVE Burgess and collect his first editions.

I didn't know he had written on Joyce.

Thanks for your post.

[susanna]

24. Thank you! Portrait of an Artist...

was very interesting, and I loved it. Everything else, well, not so much.

It's not that I am clueless; his works just do not really speak to me. I wish they did, but alas...

[DeepBlueC]

7. Ask yourself instead...

why can't a suppposedly brilliant writer do better at making himself understood?

[Mike 03]

10. Well, I know that is what some of my other favorite writers would say, exactly.

But "Finnegan's Wake" is regarded as a masterpiece.

It just frustrates the hell out of me that I can't understand it.

I consider myself reasonably intelligent. I get Pynchon, why can't I get Joyce... blah blah...

[DeepBlueC]

14. here read the Franzen essay

It sums up a lot about the direction my tastes in literature have taken since my days as an English major. At the time I quite loved "decoding" particularly as a student of now-not-so New Criticism but I came to view it as a quite different activity than reading and I decided that I prefer reading. The essay is excellent stuff. I can probably find the response by Ben Marcus if you like.

http://adilegian.com/FranzenGaddis.htm

[Mike 03]

11. P.S.

So many of my favorite authors would agree with you, including John Irving, T.C. Boyle, and tons of others who I respect, and maybe it is important to pay attention to these opinions.

[DeepBlueC]

13. Jonathan Franzen as well

It has been a big debate as to whether it is the author's responsibility to make himself understood or the reader's to decode. Franzen wrote an excellent essay on this subject in in The New Yorker (2002) about the novels of William Gaddis. Ben Marcus responded with his own defense of the oblique (my word not his) in Harper's. I wish I had saved that piece. Here"s a bit about that essay:

In his New Yorker essay, Franzen juxtaposes two models of fiction in their relationship to the reader. His preferred model “represents a compact between the writer and the reader” according to which the writer is to supply the words that elicit the reader’s pleasure and sense of connectedness (“Mr. Difficult” 100). The second model often shows apparent disdain for the reader with its unrealistic language and syntactical thickets, and is imbued with an aura of status that grants it independence from the average reader. While difficulty signals trouble for readers of the first model, it signals excellence for readers of the second. For the reader Franzen, Gaddis’s first novel The Recognitions ranks at the top of a personal list of most difficult works he has ever read—“voluntarily” at least (“Mr. Difficult” 101).

[Manifestor_of_Light]

16. I'd rather read and not stop and think too much.

I vote for clear writing.

I will look up foreign phrases though.

[susanna]

25. I love this phrase: "the defense of the oblique."

That pretty much sums it up for me. I wish I had time to really focus and "get it." But I don't, so I find myself on the outside. Ah well; I'm fine with it now.

[tigereye]

41. interesting perspective

I think reading challenging writers tells us a lot about the structure of language and how we use it to process reality...It always has seemed that Joyce, Woolf, Gertrude Stein, etc. operated out of that type of mode, using words to describe reality in the way that they felt it was experienced.


It's rough, but often worth the challenge, I think.

[DeepBlueC]

47. I wouldn't put Woolf in there, nor Stein

both intelligible enough.

[tigereye]

51. but there are structural and conceptual similarities...

I think many folks would find them similarly challenging, though. Sometimes it comes back to the reader and the scope of his or her ability as well as willingness to deconstruct or parse the material.


I was trundling around to look for some additional perspectives on this - there is an interesting dissertation about modernism encompassing some of the writers I mentioned. The link doesn't quite work though... I'll see if I can correct it.

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/BritishLiterature/20thC/?view=usa&ci=9780195368123



Here's another interesting litcrit comment indicating the author's feeling that Joyce is more linear than Stein. ;)

http://books.google.com/books?id=m_mVWRPShyYC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=Joyce,+Woolf+and+Stein&source=bl&ots=y91IeWp9hV&sig=pKXjuE7BNQRTOxh2tcpeoXNOp-w&hl=en&ei=WQfRSd-5COOHlAemxe3NCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPA45,M1

[hibbing]

20. TC Boyle

Hi,
Saw your mention of T. Coraghessan Boyle, I have read some of his stuff, but not much lately. Any recommendations?

Peace

[susanna]

26. My favorite of TC Boyle's remains...

East is East. I don't know why; but I really absorbed that story. I liked the furtiveness of the shipmate, I guess!

[Mike 03]

44. Yes, "World's End." His best novel, one of his earliest. It

deals directly (or obliquely, rather) with his feelings towards his father.

It is his deepest novel, and after writing it he backed away into works of less depth.

[Mike 03]

45. BTW, thanks for asking! Nobody's ever asked me that question.

He keeps typing away, novel after novel.

After "World's End," I would rec:

His short story collection "Greasy Lake."
"Budding Prospects" (because it's hilarious)
"Tortilla Curtain", which actually resulted in threats on his life, considered "controversial" by some.

Almost all of his work is enjoyable for its pyrotechnical vocabulary and humor, but one disappointment to me is the lack of depth. I know he's got intense issues to write about, but he seems to steer clear of them.

I'm still waiting for his great American novel. Maybe it was "World's End," but I think he's got something more in him than he has thus demonstrated.

[PittPoliSci]

28. i'm not really sure that was his intention.

:shrug:

[DeepBlueC]

38. why write then?

take up cryptography.

[JohnnyLib2]

9. Grandpa passed on the secret.

It involves sad Irish music and a lot of Jameson's. Some substitute Guinness, but that takes longer.

[Critters2]

17. Bailey's will work, too.

Or St. Brendan's, if you're on a budget.

[FloridaJudy]

12. Ulysses is actually a lot of fun

But I gave up a fifth of the way into Finnegan's Wake. Unless you're willing to spend almost as much time reading it as Joyce did writing it, it's hopeless. I'll always thank him for "quarks" though - who knew physicists read Joyce?

Portrait of the Artist and The Dubliners are a lot more accessible. If you feel you have to read Joyce, try those.

Now Proust...

[Oeditpus Rex]

22. Summarizing Proust can be quite difficult

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwAOc4g3K-g

[Ivan Sputnik]

15. Did he intend for people to "get" it?

Is there something to get? Maybe it's an abstract painted with words instead of oils.

[skooooo]

18. Get a good literary analysis of Ullyses...

....that explains it a little. Then you'll enjoy it more. It's a parallel of Homer's Odyssey, but you probably know that. So, make sure you've read that first.

As far as Finnegan's Wake? Forget it, no one understands it.

[hibbing]

19. I tried

Hi,
A few years ago there was a list from some organization about the 100 top novels. Ulysses was number one. I tried and tried, think I was about 100 pages in and had no idea what was going on. I still have a bookmark in the hardback copy of the book somewhere. I presume it is rather dusty.

Shout out to whoever mentioned TC Boyle earlier in this thread.

Peace

[Chan790]

21. What don't you get about Ulysses?

It's a stream-of-consciousness retelling of Homer's Odyssey set in the present of Joyce's day...somewhere about 1910 in Dublin, Ireland.

Leopold Bloom is our Odyssian figure, a man who just wants to get home to his wife he suspects of infidelity and keeps getting waylaid by circumstance and the interference of higher powers. Joyce himself, in the form of Stephen Dedalus (there is a hint...Joyce frequently interjects himself and always uses the same name. He feels the need to be present in it, not merely its' scribe. Why? Because it's not merely something he's writing...it's something that he's writing, out of everything he's written or writing, which is actually important to him. There has to be a better way to say that, but I'm tired and can't think straight), plays Telemachus to Bloom's Odysseus in a series of narratives all of which revolve loosely around the journey.

Whereas Odysseus was side-tracked for an act of disfavor against the gods, Bloom's transgression is "worse" (certainly not worse in Joyce's eyes. He's making a point, circuitous as it may be): Leo Bloom's a Jew, both the chosen people of a god that Joyce considered to be amoral at best, yet an object (to Joyce) of...if not reverence, at least personal pride worthy of defense. (Remember, even as a lapsed Catholic and an atheist, Joyce would have been fiercely defensive of his Catholicism in a occupied-nation where religion was a cultural-identifier much more than a religion. To Joyce, the term "secular Catholic" is no more seemingly an oxymoron than "secular Jew" is...it's likely that he'd have considered the atheist son of Anglicans to be a "secular Protestant" even. If you're born one, atheism is not enough to escape it.) and target of anti-semitism that was appallingly acceptable in that society. Odysseus is set against the whims of gods; Bloom against those of men, including Joyce himself.

Possibly the most important thing to realize about Ulysses is that it was largely the work through which Joyce attempted to work out his own thoughts about a number of issues of identity, faith, politics and nationalism...and he was never really satisfied enough in the answers. He died re-editing Ulysses for the 90th or so time, was furious when a draft (the most-common version of the novel we know today) was published without his consent and left instructions in his will which were thankfully ignored to burn all the notes and manuscripts of a work he considered his life's failure. There is no one accepted version of the novel as it was never formally published. (Check two versions out of the library and there is a 75% chance that they differ vastly.) Also, he wrote really really slow. Someone figured out that based on the length of the most-common version of the book and the years it took him to write, that he averaged a net of 16 words a day. (In reality, for a novel of about 220,000 words...based on the known revisions we know that he wrote at-least 10x that in redaction and additions and re-redaction and re-edits.)

To put it another way, Ulysses is beautiful because it's a cluster-fuck. Anybody who tells you they "get" it or understand it, is wrong. There's nothing to get. It's a long guarded meditation on the internal conflicts of the author, written into a narrative. Someone once quipped that Ulysses should have been titled Portrait of the Artist as a Intellectually-Frustrated Middle-Aged Guy. Speaking of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, note who our protagonist is...it's our old friend Stephen Dedalus.

[CrawlingChaos]

33. In addition...

It also helps to know that Joyce was mimicking a variety of literary styles as the book moves from chapter to chapter. That can really throw you when these dramatic stylistic shifts take place and you suddenly feel like you're reading an entirely different book. As others have said, a good reader's guide can remove most of the WTF? factor and actually make the Ulysses enjoyable.

Finnegan's Wake, on the other hand, I walked away from in frustration. Glad to see I'm not alone. Evidently there's a highly regarded guide called "A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake" that's supposed to be tremendously helpful, but good luck finding a copy. It was rare and OOP when I last looked. I understand it's very helpful if the reader is fluent in multiple languages and that's certainly not me. Oh well. It was fun deciphering the polyglot of Clockwork Orange, but FW is a freakin' nightmare.

When I want to illustrate the difference between public and private education in this country, I point out that FW was on my husband's (private) high school English reading list. Sadistic!

Say, how about The Sound and the Fury? There's another stream-of-consciousness migraine inducer, IMO.

[susanna]

23. I did the same thing.

Once upon a time. Frankly, I just don't "get it" and I am now fine with that.

His biography is all sorts of interesting, though. I enjoyed that. :-)

[KitchenWitch]

27. I find James Joyce's writing to be completely soul crushing.

I struggle enough with depression without reading his depressing stories.

[nomorenomore08]

53. Even 'A Portrait of the Artist'? I thought that one ended quite hopefully.

nt

[vixengrl]

29. I kind of get Ulysses, and I don't think I'll ever get Finnegans Wake.

And I'm speaking as an English Lit major who kind of considered modernists my "thing" and wrote one of my better papers on Dubliners. I recall reading Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses out loud on the bed with my boyfriend at the time, two poets enjoying a work of art in a really pretentious way (chardonnay may have been involved) after which we tuned into the World Series (it was 1993) and the moment was ruined when my boyfriend chided me for being such a "homer" when I was aggreived that Mitch Williams gave up the game to Joe Morgan. Blah. I have never looked at literature or people who were "serious" about it, the same since.

While I can enjoy Ulysses, seriously, I have decided to give up on Finnegans Wake. I'm a better person for it. I *get* that the thing is a linguisic palimpsest that makes every phrase fraught with a multiplicity of meanings and implications--and fuck auld Jim for deciding telling a bloody story wasn't good enough. Damn your dying eyes and damn Dublin, Jimmy-boy. Damn you for writing a book, a bleeding book, a dense, fathomless, bottomless Chinese finger-trap of a Celtic-knot mind-fuck that actually wastes everyone's time and seems to boil down to: Anna Livia Pluribella is allwoman who loves auld Finn, who is everyman, who dies and is reborn in her, and they beget dualities....or something like that. I can't like it. I can't read it. If I stop to grok each ponderous momentous pun, I'm shafted out of a narrative. If I look for a narrative, I'm screwed again, because he forgot that language actually was supposed to be meaningful in order to be more concise than gestures. Language is a vehicle to convey--it was supposed to arrive at a point. He knew what the point was and buried it in there like a corpse--and I resent him for being gifted at language, but letting babble take over.

The point of Finnegans Wake was that you, and probably I, would have to shift all over creation to find the words, the traditions, the history, to sort of "get it". We'd have to get ourselves as "smartened up" as Jimmy. And damn him again for elitism. Sorry Jim. My Northeast Philadelphia was nearly as Irish and almost as Catholic as his Dublin, albeit less insular and paralyzing. But it's no myth. No myth needed, no myth need apply. No allegory to transcend the lives of people who already are whatever they are. No need for a baptism of words that were allwet as Anna's panties. And too short a life to need to read a two-volume concordance to root out what he was getting at in a not-very-long so-called novel.

[Heidi]

30. It's like any other piece of art. You don't need to "get" it or aspire to profound understandning.

If you enjoy Joyce's use of language, that's reason enough to read "Finnegan's Wake," for example. And if you don't enjoy it, that's enough reason to put it aside. Don't beat yourself up or get depressed about it, either way. :hug:

[Tangerine LaBamba]

50. Bingo!

That's it, exactly.

No big "analysis," no dissection, no psychological evaluation and examination, nothing but sheer joy of the story and the language.

I write, and I'm always amused when people write to me about the symbolism in my work, or the theme, because all I know is that I wrote a story. Maybe a long one, but just a story.

I think "The Dead" is one of the most beautiful things Joyce ever did, but for real fun, smoke a doobie and read "Finnegan's Wake" out loud. I had a friend who was a full professor of English Literature at an Ivy League school. Once a year, she did speed and read "Ulysses." Said it was the most fun she had all year.

She was strange in other ways, but delightfully creative.

Sometimes a story is just a story. Just because people have made an industry out of trying to "figure out" what the author intended doesn't mean the author intended anything.

Thank you, Heidi................

:toast:

[SoDesuKa]

31. Because It's Not Interesting, That's Why

Whatever Joyce's soul-struggles were at the time, they're not interesting now. Joyce is heralded as the first of a type of novelist, but that crowd just isn't relevant anymore.

There's the unexamined life (boo!), the examined life (yay!), and then there's narcissim. Joyce was narcissism. Consider the title Portrait of the Artist ... which is actually a self-portrait. Joyce spent a lot of time looking at himself. Today we see that as a kind of ego trip. Nobody should spend that much time looking in a mirror.

[mduffy31]

32. Don't feel that way

Hell I have tried to get through it and I just can't, the same thing with Crime and Punishment, War and Peace all the classics. I think nursing school just ruined me that's all. It is challenging material you shouldn't feel stupid.

[cleveramerican]

34. "Dubliners" is much more approachable.

his short stories always spoke to me much more.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

52. i agree

[nomorenomore08]

54. +1

Seriously, has there ever been a better story collection written in English? "The Dead" is one of the very few things I've read that actually had me tearing up by the end.

[tekisui]

35. It sounds like you are getting it, exactly.

[UTUSN]

36. You oughta try William BLAKE, he of "Tyger, tyger burning bright..."

He is IMPENETRABLE (in his writings)!1 And Google "William Blake posters" to see what his art is like. These are among the most accessible:

[UTUSN]

37. As for JOYCE, think "phallic symbols" first!1 Celery STALKS ain't just celery. Quaint, eh?!1 n/t

[Lindsey]

39. Whenever I think of Joyce, I think of "stream of conscouness" for

that, I am grateful.

[UTUSN]

40. &, perchance, THAT is the crux!1 I don't know whether JOYCE was tortured by celery or liberated?!1

[FloridaJudy]

42. I had problems getting James Joyce.

Then I signed up with DirectTV.

[WinkyDink]

43. Because that's what Joyce wanted!

[hedgehog]

46. I wouldn't claim that I "got" Ulysses, but as an Irish American

Catholic familiar with the type, I thought Daedalus thought a bit much of himself first for being such a prick as to refuse to comfort his dying mother because his integrity was too important, then for wanting everyone else to feel sorry for him because he felt guilty afterward.

In other words, I liked the book but thought that Daedalus was an arse!

[UTUSN]

48. You ALSO have HIT upon the KEY: Irish/Catholic GUILT & BITTERNESS &

supposed longing for freedom, but IT AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN!1 There will ALWAYS be a Pope-Bareback attempting to screw with our minds, even after our parents are DEAD!1

[UTUSN]

49. Same with Mexican-CATHOLICISM, guess the keyword is CATHOLICISM!1 n/t

[TheMightyFavog]

55. Didn't Garrison Kiellor have a warning abotu James Joyce on his last show?

James Joyce drives people mad.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

56. Try to take a class if at all possible

Ulysses is my favorite novel, hands down.

I took a class on Joyce in college and we had to read it. I'm a big fan of "difficult" books and writers, Pynchon, etc., but I can honestly say that there's no way I could have read the entire thing by myself and had any understanding of it. I've now read it in full 4 times (and taught it for a book club) and believe that it is probably the greatest monument to humanity that's ever been created.

Now, there are a lot of folks who'll tell you that Joyce was trying to be deliberately obfuscating, but that's simply not true. The fact of the matter is that Joyce was trying as best as possible to capture the essence of a Dublin day in 1904. This means that he used all sorts of slang from the era and place; when writing it, he consulted newspapers from Dublin of that day and made all manner of reference to the actual, real news of that day. Likewise, the book is filled with characters and business establishments that were actually real people and businesses. Certain "obscure" sections are actually parodies of actual local newspapers. There's an entire chapter parodying a novel called The Lamplighter; you've never heard of it, but if you were a woman in an English-speaking country, there was a pretty good chance you had a copy. (It was a runaway bestseller, bested only by Uncle Tom's Cabin in the year it came out. Of course, it's been largely forgotten by now.) Yes, there are also many allusions and references to classic works that lie in the purview of a classics scholar, but the vast majority of the book would have been fairly understandable to an unemployed, lower-class Irishman who had been alive and living in Dublin in 1904 if he or she had taken the time to read it. (Molly's terrific final monologue becomes so much more clear when you realize that some of its "incoherence" are actually snippets of popular Irish songs running through her head. She was a singer, after all....)

So, it's not that Joyce was being willfully obscure; it's more the fact that an American in the 21st Century is going to have an incredibly difficult time, for instance, wondering what exactly the catastrophe is in New York that Bloom thinks about a few times throughout the day. It was the General Slocum fire, which killed over 1,000+ people -- mainly women and children -- and was plastered on the front page of most international papers on the day in question. It was the single largest loss of life in NYC until Sept. 11 and was considered at the time to be a colossal tragedy. Of course, no one remembers the General Slocum now, but it seems unfair to criticize Joyce for that.

Now there are all sorts of guidebooks and things that annotate these items and explain what each one means. However, there are literally tens of thousands of entries in each of these books. It becomes a Herculean task to try and track each one down and figure out the reference. This leads to my belief that the book is best read with someone who knows it fairly well. It's much easier and more illuminating when you can actually ask someone what's going on in a particular section and get a straight answer, rather than looking up a bunch of references and trying to figure out what exactly is being alluded to.

As I mentioned above, I've even taught this book in a book club. A couple of the members were not big readers at all; however, everyone finished the book, everyone "got it" and nearly everyone liked it. You just need to remember that you're literally stepping into a different time, place and culture when you pick it up.