/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14749416]

I walk the same streets this man writes about everyday, I talk with the same archetypes of people that he creates. But, I still couldn't connect with it bros. I wanted to love it, but after reading it I can't help but feel as if I've missed something. What's wrong with me?

[Anonymous No.14749843]

>>14749416
I found it to be lukewarm compared to Ulysses, but The Dead is a goddamn right story

[Anonymous No.14749887]

>>14749416
>>14749843
better or worse than portrait?

[Anonymous No.14749938]

>>14749416
same, besides writing beautiful he brings nothing to the table


I like portrait much better

[Anonymous No.14749953]

>>14749416
I didn’t really appreciate until rereading it a couple times

[Anonymous No.14749980]

[Anonymous No.14749993]

Come out of the pale and you will meet the real Irish, the differences between Dubs and actual Irish people in Cork and kerry are striking. The people in Joyce's stories bear a lot more resemblance to modern day people in kerry than the bugmen in Dublin. The place is a shithole lad, you'll only realise it when you get into the countryside.

[Anonymous No.14750008]

>>14749993
this.
Dublin hasn't been Ireland for a long, long time.

[Anonymous No.14750509]

I just picked up a copy of Dubliners. I was gonna read some other stuff first (I'm still working my way though the western canon) but I decided to read the first story anyway.
I found it somewhat interesting, though I'm not at all irish so I don't think I could connect to it in that way.
I was surprised at how simple it was to read. Are all the stories in such straightforward language, or only some? Should I just jump right into it, instead of dawdling my way through the western canon first?

[Anonymous No.14750561]

>>14749887
Portrait is better.

[Anonymous No.14750575]

>>14749416
Familiarity breeds contempt. Joyce wrote in more or less exile, about a country that burned his books. Maybe you need the same kind of distance to appreciate it.

[Anonymous No.14750580]

>>14750509
Dubliners is easy modo Joyce.

>Should I just jump right into it, instead of dawdling my way through the western canon first?
It sounds like you want to and are asking for an excuse to do so. So yes, you should. There's your excuse :^)

[Anonymous No.14750588]

>>14750575
He wrote Dubliners while living in Dublin.

[Anonymous No.14750623]

>>14750580
I'm just making sure that its not gonna get way harder and I'm gonna be in over my head if i start without a good foundation of knowledge

[Anonymous No.14750635]

>>14750623
Nah Dubliners doesn't do the Ulyssesesque allusions. You might want to read up a bit on Parnell before reading Ivy Day in the Comittee Room though.

[Anonymous No.14750656]

>>14749887
Portrait didnt grab me like dubliners occasionally did

[Anonymous No.14750751]

>>14750635
will do, thanks

[Anonymous No.14750765]

The only good stories are A Painful Case, A Little Cloud and The Dead, but all of them are in the top 10 best short stories ever.

[Anonymous No.14750771]

>>14750765
Also, to add to this, Grace is probably the worst thing Joyce ever wrote. If you claim to like that story, you are lying.

[Anonymous No.14750806]

>>14749887
Ulysses > Dubliners > Portrait > Finnegans

[Anonymous No.14750839]

>>14750806
Wake > Dubliners = Ulysses > Portrait

[Anonymous No.14750854]

>>14749416
Dubliners has very few, if any, likeable characters, and its pervasive tone is one of cynicism and despair. It's lower class people with stilted personalities living inauthentically as they struggle with poverty, alienation, and alcoholism in a degenerating, greybrown metropolis. Through Dubliners, Joyce wanted to represent the spiritual, cultural, and economic paralysis of the Dublin in which he grew up. It makes sense that you did not connect with it. None of the characters in it are able connect with the world around them, with one another, or even with themselves.

That said, nearly every story is a masterwork in terms of form and nuance. Joyce doesn't even really hint at the later experimental direction in which he will take his prose until the final story of the collection, "The Dead", but every word throughout the collection has weight, and as far as the structural nuts and bolts of the stories, the guiding images and metaphors, and the unresolved insinuations go, they are some of the strongest short stories in the language.

"A Portrait" is polarizing: either you are a narcissistic pseud with some aesthetic inclinations and a high estimation of your own intelligence (i.e. most posters on /lit/), and you identify, to some degree, with Stephen, and thus really like the book; or, you are not that, and can likely appreciate it for its nearly flawless composition, but will find the protagonist somewhat tiresome (you can tell that by the time Joyce got a few chapters into Ulysses, he himself had grown tired of his fictional alter ego, as well).

"Ulysses" is God-tier on all formal levels: linguistic virtuosity; formal innovation; dialectical rigour--the list goes on. However, you may still find even the most "relatable" of his characters in "Ulysses" somewhat difficult to empathize with. For all his talents, Joyce was, I think, a little bit autistic when it came to people. He had way more brains than heart. This is part of the reason why, I think, he had so much trouble creating new characters, and inventing things for them to say. All of his characters are based on people he knew, and most of what they say in his books are polished versions of things he heard them, or other people, say in real life. Unlike, say, a Shakespeare, who created hundreds of unique personalities, each with their own drives, feelings, and voices, Joyce wasn't connected enough to humanity to be able to imagine what people might be like or might say in certain circumstances, so he had to copy from people he actually knew. There's always a kind of coldness and distance in Joyce's works, even at the ostensible peaks of pathos.

All in all, he's still unquestionably one of the GOATs.

[Anonymous No.14751009]

>>14750854
>For all his talents, Joyce was, I think, a little bit autistic when it came to people. He had way more brains than heart.
This post was fantastic right up to this part. I am not trying to be funny when I say that the fart letters are unquestionable proof that he had more heart than brains.

>All of his characters are based on people he knew, and most of what they say in his books are polished versions of things he heard them, or other people, say in real life. Unlike, say, a Shakespeare, who created hundreds of unique personalities, each with their own drives, feelings, and voices
I would argue that this is unavoidable in a writer who only uses contemporary settings. If Shakespeare had limited himself to writing exclusively about contemporary people living in Stratford-upon-Avon he would have faced the same limitation.

[Anonymous No.14751019]

>>14750806
Wake > Ulysses > Portrairt = Dubliners

[Anonymous No.14751024]

>>14750854
Relatability is a classic Plebbitor issue.

[Anonymous No.14751044]

>>14750806
>>14750839
>>14751019
Pomes Penyeach >>> Exiles >> Chamber Music >>>>>>>>>>>>> Dubliners >>> Wake > Portrait >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Ulysses

[Anonymous No.14751195]

>>14751009
Yeah, it isn't really an opinion i've heard anywhere else, just my own I've come to after years of reading and rereading Joyce alongside other novelists. It also comes out when you read stories about him interacting with other people, especially as he got older. He was rarely sincere, preferring irony and cynicism and snarky wordplay in conversation with people to anything open and genuine.

I see him as chronically anxious, chronically a little depressed, and very, very self-involved and self pitying. As Ellmann puts it: "Beckett was addicted to silences, and so was Joyce; they engaged in conversations which consisted often of silences directed towards each other, both suffused with sadness, Beckett mostly for the world, Joyce mostly for himself." In "A Portrait," Stephen's mom prays that Stephen, the calculating Jesuit-trained intellectual, will "learn what the heart is and what it feels." The key word here is learn. Empathy and openness never came naturally to Joyce, so he, in perfect intellectual form, set out to "learn" about it, to "learn" about human warmth and feeling. His later works are certainly warmer than Dubliners, but they still have nothing close to the kind of deep sympathy for humanity you see in a Shakespeare, a Cervantes, even a Dickens. Despite his best efforts, Joyce remained something of an isolated, intellectualizing misanthrope, not unlike Gabriel in "The Dead". The reason "The Dead" is so powerful, imo, is that through it Joyce tries to work through his own issues with being a cold intellectual at a distance from the natural humanity of the people around him. It's telling that, though Gabriel has an "epiphany" at the end of the story that gestures towards him becoming more empathic and open, Joyce ended the story soon after the epiphany. He simply did not have it in him to explore that direction sincerely.

Anyways, just my take. Again, I clearly am a big Joyce fan. Not shitting on him by any means.

[Anonymous No.14751267]

>>14749993
Off topic question, but what would you say to an American who's considering making a move to Ireland? I qualify for citizenship and have family that my dad keeps in semi-regular contact with.

[Anonymous No.14751755]

>>14751195
It's an interesting take. I remember reading that his daughter wasn't fluent in any language because of the odd mix of languages his family spoke at home when he was writing Finnegans Wake and there is probably something to be said that the reason he was playing around with languages so much was he was trying to figure something out about how humans think but went about it in an autistic way. There is definitely something uncanny about some of his writing that makes me think you are on to something.
>>14751267
Fuck off we're full.

[Anonymous No.14751833]

>>14749416
say something irish for me

[Anonymous No.14751890]

>>14750765
>All of them are in the top 10
There's 15 stories tho

[Anonymous No.14751912]

>>14751833
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9dLgKK1Y6c

[Anonymous No.14752076]

>>14751267
Americans in general aren't that well liked where I am in the South, I'm sure you'll be fine as long as you stick to more metropolitan areas though. It depends on what you want out of Ireland.

[Anonymous No.14752082]

>>14751890
Are you illiterate

[Anonymous No.14752245]

The Dead was pretty below average. Do you all really like it that much? I want to hear why it was so impactful to you.

[Anonymous No.14753429]

>>14750854
>LIKEABLE, RELATABLE CHARACTERS

[Anonymous No.14753464]

>>14750509
He wrote it when he was like 20

[Anonymous No.14753476]

>>14749416
Where in Dublin do you live? If you're northside or hung out in central bank you probably wouldn't get it.

[Anonymous No.14753480]

>>14751890
based

[Anonymous No.14753722]

>>14752245
I liked how you had no idea where the story was going until like the last few pages.
I liked how Joyce contrasts the happy jovial atmosphere of the party with the revelation at the end.
I like how Joyce uses the technique of giving people characterization by the things not said rather than the things said. I don't know if there's a literary term for this, but there's not many other authors I've read who do this technique, let alone do it well.
Also, the last 5 paragraphs of Gabriel's inner thoughts are probably the best 5 paragraphs of prose ever written. Every word and phrase is flawlessly constructed.

[Anonymous No.14754897]

>>14750854
Pretty good post but the implication that unlikable characters make a work of literature bad is a bit silly.

[Anonymous No.14755151]

Dubliners, for me, always has the ability to identify mistakes. The relatability in it is in the reflections I find in the mistakes of these characters. Obviously mine are different, but that complacency that many of the characters fall into is a trait most of us possess in one way or another. Joyce identified problems with these so-called Dubliners — Booze, religious indoctrination, irish “paralysis”, British influence, etc. Aside from the obvious situational ones, this is a collection of reflections on human failings. Aside from the subtextual, the pictures are crisp and clear and it’s easy to immerse yourself in the waves of dark brown.

[Anonymous No.14755166]

>>14749416
>What's wrong with me?
You are at heart a culchie and beyond the Pale.
Please gtfo of my town and go to Kerry or whichever bog you prefer.

[Anonymous No.14756196]

>>14753429
>>14754897
I used the word likeable once you goons