/lit/ - Literature

It's okay son, one day you'll understand that novel. The day you grow a brain cell.

>>2071754

If it takes only one brain cell, then it's not much of a novel.

Thanks for the childish ad hominem though - nice to see that /lit/ is staying classy.

You wrote

>It's okay son, one day you'll understand that novel. The day you grow a brain cell

I read

>I don't understand it, I just pretend to like it and appreciate it because I'm 17 years old, haven't formed any real opinions of my own yet, and I'm not bold enough to buck the trend. I am a conformist, although I daren't admit it, and I also have a very low level of education, coupled with a limited exposure to literature. It's not my fault, I'm young, and I can't help acting the cunt.

Perception eh? How does that fucker work?

Please explain in detail how it's a joke, and why Joyce would put so much time of his own time and effort, as well as that of his friends, e.g. Beckett, into this joke. As far as I'm concerned, if it's a joke, then it's a joke brilliant enough to belong to the same canon as the works of Shakespeare and Dante.

>>2071755
Given that you can't even understand simple trolling, I'm not surprised Finnegans Wake is lost on you

>>2071768

No, I don't even know what trolling means, I'm retarded.

By joke, I mean that he looked around him at his imitators in modernism, and furthermore after years of writing realised that whatever he was trying to do with Finnegans Wake wasn't working. That's when he decided to write a parody of the fractured, stream of consciousness garbage that was becoming as much a cliche within modernism as the cliches modernism was supposed to have overturned. In despair, Joyce published a screed of gibberish that nobody truly understands, but because of an Emperor's New Clothes effect, no-one is prepared to dismiss.

Joyce was probably working on a sequel Trolololol I Troll U.

As for Beckett, I think that if you've ever read anything at all about the man, or have any understanding of his works (far superior to Joyce - the student exceeded the master), then you'd realise that a massive literary troll of this nature would have been entirely relevant to his interests, and he would have almost certainly helped. They probably got pissed up together and wrote the whole thing in a weekend, lobbing random allusions in there every other word and trying to outdo one another in pointless erudition, laughing their cocks off and weeping as they thought of all the scholars and critics wasting their time on this drivel.

I also doubt Joyce's ability as a writer, but that's a story for another day

>>2071781

>Ah, jaysus, Sam. Oi can't put 'commodius vicus' in de openin' sentence. They'll be onto me quicker'n a priest on an altar boy. They'll be rumbling it's a joke straight away, to be sure.

>Ah, Jim, Go on. Go on go on go on. Go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on

>>2071781
You shouldn't doubt Joyce. His use of language is potentially the most authentic I've ever read (him or Flaubert among modern writers). It's simply not language for language's sake, or language for a silly or facile concern.

>>2071781
>They probably got pissed up together and wrote the whole thing in a weekend
It took 17 years dude.

>>2071797

It took 17 years for Joyce to realise it was going nowhere, dude. Read my earlier post.

Fucking teenagers and their 3 second attention spans.

>>2071791

>Oi'll tell you what, Jim. One o dese days, oi'm goin' te wroite a play, for de t'eatre and all dat, in which nothin' happens. Twoice.

>Feck off Sam, you'll never get away with dat in a t'eatre, to be sure.

>Oi'll do it, so oi will. Oi swear to Godot.

Beckett and Joyce. Part-time writers, full-time trolls.

>>2071792

The dialogue in Dubliners is appalingly bad. The man had a cloth ear. His head was too far up his own arse to actually hear the world around him.

Well isn't this guy edgy.

who gives a shit what it is so long as it's well written

>>2071804

Nope, not edgy, just tired of buying into the Joyce industry. There are so many people with vested interests in his work, coupled with so many people who've been spoonfed the idea that everything he wrote was imbued with divinity, that no critical appraisal of his works is possible anymore.

That said, I'm specifically talking about Finnegans Wake. While I may not like Joyce's style, I'm prepared to accept that Ulysses is one of the grounbreaking novels of the century, and is enormously influential. Finnegans Wake however, is a howl of despair and a parody written by a man who was horrified by his creation, assisted by his secretary/heir apparent/successor/luke skywalker.

>>2071807
>finnegans wake
>well written
oh right I see the problem then

Finnegans Wake is quite consistent with the rest of his body of work, and it's the quite logical conclusion to his development.

It was sincere.

>>2071807
This,
>>2071814
but not this.

>>2071817
what's your problem with the second one then

>>2071807

So you're saying we should appreciate it on the level of a well-done troll? The critical equivlent of an

>orsonwellesclapping.gif

8/10 would be trolled again?

>>2071817

D&E just hates modernism.

>>2071842

Unusually, I agree with the drunken fool. In the main, with certain notable exceptions, modernist novels are utter shit.

So OP, what are your thoughts on Bardolatry

>>2071860

Shakespeare revolutionised the English Language, altered concepts of drama for ever, and was one of the finest poets I've ever read in any language. I don't totally go overboard for the bardic cocksucking, but his place in the history of English LIterature is probably unassailable unless someone literally takes the language apart and changes the words we use in everyday speech the way he did.

>>2071850
At least he's sometimes clever and funny, unlike you

>>2071871

Really? I must not have been here that afternoon.

Hi D&E, by the way.

>>2071875
>Hi D&E, by the way

>At least he's sometimes clever and funny
>sometimes clever and funny
>sometimes

I'm not that modest.

>>2071802
He's got an ear for the Southern Irish vernacular c.1900 not the manner of contemporary American/British speech.

It's no joke, OP, it's an experiment gone wrong. Joyce had a good sense of humor, though, I'm sure there are many points in those 17 years where he realized how absurd the whole project is, but I'm not sure how one would measure the extent to which he makes jokes at himself and where in a text like Finnegans Wake.

You know what, OP? I agree with you. In spite of the inexplicable praise he receives from critics, Finnegans Wake, and his work in general, is a total sham. But it doesn't make me angry.

It makes me hungry. I think of boiling his scrawny jowls down for dinner. I dream of eating his quadriceps with drooling pleasure, thinking about how satisfying a delicacy his testes will make in stew. I view him as the Chimpanzees of the Gombe view the Red Colobus monkeys. He may look like my people, but he is not my people. He is my people’s food. I extend to him no rights, no recognition of personhood. I would happily forego a plate of the finest Angus beef for plate of his haunches. A Steer has at least the decency not to sniff the farts of its own kind. There never was a steer that wrote so thoroughly of its homeland in spite of its expatriation. Every time I see that Irishman in his pork pie hat I get a raging craving for meat. I want it immediately, rare and juicy with blood. I want every bite of flesh to squeeze blood out of soft, gummy tissues, too much blood to swallow, flowing out of my mouth and running down my chin…

Do not misunderstand me; I have no interest in torturing this animal- that would be cruelty of the basest kind, of which I vehemently disapprove. I just want the opportunity to slip off his jacket, undo his bowtie, unbutton his shirt, unbuckle his belt, untie his shoes, peel off his socks, slip off his glasses, and yank off his undergarments. I want to hang him upside down from the rod that supports my shower curtain and slit his throat from ear to ear, and leave him to drain. I want to quarter him, deflesh and debone him, and cook him at 350 degrees until the insides of his arms and legs become slightly pink. I consider this gustatory impulse an essentially healthy one, but I will admit to nursing a slight macabre desire to eat his head raw. I wish to decapitate him, draw his sightless eyes level with mine by pulling on the remaining wisps of hair on his balding head, suck his tongue into my mouth and feel the back of his tongue split under my incisors, feel it pass through my throat whole, like a strip of calamari. I want to slip my thumbs under his eyes, pop them out and gnaw them into a gelatinous mush. I want to crack through the thin layer of bone at the back of his orbital sockets, hold his head up and drink his pink and custardy brains like one would drink milk from a coconut. There is perhaps the slightest inclination towards superstition here, I admit, some urge towards cephalomancy, a desire to imbibe and come to know the future through my consumption of his head, as if his face so eaten allows a few instants to fly into the future, where he shall wait patiently to see me again, and thank me for his freedom.

Dear OP:

If you're an intelligent troll, you know these facts already, so hats off. If you're a moron, well, you won't appreciate the irony.

Oliver St. John Gogarty referred to Finnegans Wake, in his review printed the day after publication, as "the most colossal leg pull in literature since Macpherson's Ossian."

Oliver St. John Gogarty was not a disinterested party, as he is immortalized in Ulysses as Buck Mulligan, the closest thing that the book has to a villain or antagonist.

Congrats, OP! Your post manages to demonstrate that you prefer Buck Mulligan to Stephen Dedalus! Discuss.

Yours ever,
James Augusta Aloysius Joyce

>>2071942
>>2071941

Somebody just read 'Lestrygonians'.

>>2071941
>>2071942
10/10. A /lit/ classic. Would read again...

>>2071962
>>2071962
Yeah, ten years ago, because it's an excerpt I copy pasted, with some minor alterations to suit the thread, from: http://adaptivesystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/adapt-ebook.pdf

(this isn't my work, btw, but I highly recommend it. it's about sex, drugs, genetic engineering, and it's all delivered in prose that would make DFW jealous)

>>2071971
i'm sorry..

>>2071974
>dat newfag feelan

On a less forlorn note, that cephalomancy stuff makes a lot more sense with that predestination subtext than it does here. Docked you to a 4/10, for quite a shoddy retrofit.

And damn did SA have some good content back in the day.

>>2071989
It's the only way I could get anyone to read it

I jsut hope I didn't crap it up too badly. I thought a couple of my insertions were amusing..

>A challenger appears!
>>2071957
Yes. This thread is only a success for the OP in that he believes his own theory. A more human success would be understanding the merits of the text based off of selections from it, instead of the hypothetical bull that OP, D&E, etc. have setup around it like an homage on the Day of the Dead.

>>2072218
Yeah, basically.