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22352626 No.22352626 [Reply] [Original]

Before reading Joyce and Faulkner I thought that Joyce was the greatest and Faulkner was a meme.
Then I dropped Ulysses 2/3rds of the way through, and I thought Joyce was overrated, but Faulkner still a meme.
Then I read As I Lay Dying.
Finally I realized that yes, you can compare the two, yes, Joyce sniffed too much of his wife's ass particles, and yes Faulkner is a king of not just American literature, but of the world

>> No.22352631

Post fucking hand.

>> No.22352633

>>22352626
It's really sad about Joyce too, Dubliners contains some of my favorite stories I've ever read, but God-Damn, I do not care for the "style" of writing that Joyce perfected in Ulysses. No, I do not want to have a map of 1905 Dublin next to me at all times. No, I do not want to have to re-read a paragraph five times to make sure I caught all 573 references to a random street in Dublin, ranging from the ear-shattering flatuence of Joyce's favorite whore to the location of a Charleston chew. No, I don't want to have to read 200+ long chapters. No, I don't want to waste my time on a shitty book

>> No.22352641

Faulkner's a great cautionary tale too, horrible how alcohol destroyed his brain. At least Hemingway, who not only had the alcohol, but the artillery from the war, and the concussions from the war, and the plane crash concussions, and the chronic disease that fries his neurons, and his electroconvulsive "therapy", at least he knew his work was turning to shit. Its sad how Faulkner never realized this.

>> No.22352766

ive read TSATF and a few short stories by faulk. he can be incredibly cliched, dull, in your face and pretentious

>> No.22352768

>>22352641
Hemingway had The Old Man and the Sea when people were starting to doubt him. It’s a pretty personal and meta book for him

>> No.22353325 [DELETED] 

people dicksuck Faulkner because he speaks for le downtrodden negro
and that's about it

>> No.22353581
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22353581

>>22352626
I just wanted to see him in Oppenheimer, bros.

>> No.22353601
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22353601

>continues to filter until the end of time

>> No.22353700

>>22352626
FYI pic related mentioned Faulkner in his bim bim bim quote

>> No.22353754

>>22352633
>No, I do not want to have a map of 1905 Dublin next to me at all times. No, I do not want to have to re-read a paragraph five times to make sure I caught all 573 references
Catching the references is optional. Joyce is literally the biggest midwit filter around. There is an entire body of midwit-themed academia built around cataloging every single one of Joyce's references, and the man would be howling in (spiteful) laughter. He hated academics and he hated the way they need to try to dissect everything down into first axioms so they can pretend they Understand Everything. They're the kind of people who think the Wake was an elaborate puzzle box that needed to be manipulated in precisely the correct way to get the nugget of Meaning nestled in its core. The point is the box itself. Joyce had a distaste for people like you, and his writing was never intended for your consumption.

>> No.22353846

>>22353700
>He was one of the worst practitioners

>> No.22353871

>>22352626
the final realization is that they're both memes

>> No.22353898

>>22352768
Honestly I think Islands in the Stream is pretty damn good considering it’s not finished.

>> No.22353907

>>22352768
Exactly, Old Man and the Sea is one of my favorite books, and it's what makes Hemingway ultimately the better on paper writer, he's one of the few authors who actually gets better as he aged (Excluding the stinkers he produced). May seem easy to do until you realize a lot of authors's best work's were from their first 10-15 years writing.
Only Hemingway could've kept improving with his brain damage.

>> No.22353917

>>22352641
>>22353907
Is his war correspondence journalism and letters any good?

>> No.22353925

>>22353700
I love both of them, Bukowski is a great story teller, same as Hemingway and that whole short-prose type of authorship, while Faulkner is a great writer, someone who actually gets great words to the paper, same as Melville and Whitman. Real beautiful prose and unconventionalness, but without going too hard on the fart sniffing.

>> No.22353931

>>22353917
Yes actually, Hemingway is one of those writers that you can read him write about anything and enjoy. I haven't read them fully but the excerpts I have I really enjoyed.

>> No.22354466

>>22353601
>>22353754
these

>> No.22355613

Based Faulkner bro. I want to get more reads under my belt before tackling Ulysses, but I’m eagerly looking forward to it.

>> No.22355806

>>22352633
I just finished Dubliners. "The dead" woke me to something I didn't know text could do. Just incredible.

>> No.22356251

>>22355613
I feel one day I will return to Ulysses and enjoy it, or at least be able to finish it. It'll never be a favorite of mine, but it gave me a realization that I had taste in literature, and for that I'll be forever grateful
>>22355806
I know that exact feel. I was jobless for a few months wandering around my city reading Dubliners in a lightning pace. I remember going into the local universities library and reading the Dead in one sitting, looking out over the 10th floor window and just staring for an hour feeling that story in me. I realized at that moment just how much a story can affect one's soul, and it really made me decide to be a writer. That and "An Encounter" were my favorites, but there wasn't a single one that didn't change me in a way. That's the writing I enjoy, that's the writing that I sorely missed in Ulysses.

>> No.22356264

>>22352626
>>22352633
I have tried so many times to get into Joyce. As you mentioned, some of his short stories are excellent (the Dead) and I genuinely really enjoy the first half of Portrait of the Artist where he's a little kid. But whenever he starts getting into his spot-the-reference shenanigans it just bores me to tears. Faulkner isn't perfect but he does the stream of consciousness style better, with more interesting characters, and without the aforementioned deluge of inane references.

By the way, check out The Sound and the Fury as your next Faulkner. It's not as consistently good as As I Lay Dying, but the peaks are higher (the first half of the book is some of the best stuff ever put to paper imo). Funny enough, while I was singing Joyce's praises for his short stories and not his novels, I think that the inverse is true for Faulkner: his novels are excellent while his short stories rarely rise above "fine".

>> No.22356347

>>22356264
Funnily enough I'm reading The Sound and the Fury right now, and it's what prompted me to make this thread. Its crazy how to me its really comparable to Ulysses, where its both super stream of consciousness, and deliberately made to be at least a little confusing. The style I can say I may be a little biased to Faulkner, but the composition of both books is what really made me decide which one was the better writer. Ulysses is confusing because of its myriad of random references, Faulkner is confusing because of his time-independent character development. Its really telling how despite being as confused in both books, one im forcing myself to read every word and hating my life, and the other I feel like I'm in a dream, I feel like I'm an overseer, a god over a family, watching it fall apart through everyones actions to each other, that I slowly piece together throughout the story.

>> No.22356514

>>22353754
I don't think you understand my gripe with Ulysses. The problem with the references is fundementally a problem with literature itself. If im reading a sentence, and there's a reference to something that I don't understand, my brain will naturally filter it out. This adds up, and up, and up, until im naturally filtering out 75% of every sentence. This is an inherent flaw of literature, in film at least you can focus on something else, the cinematophrahpy, the facial expressions, the music, etc. In literature you only have the words on the page. And if you don't understand those characters, then what the hell are you even doing?
Im not trying to understand everything, infact I DONT. I don't want to waste my life understanding everything. But to my knowledge you're essentially arguing im just supposed to gaze over the entire book, because im supposed to "see the box" How is that good writing? How is it competent writing when im "supposed" to ignore 90% of the words? If I have the wrong mindset, please tell me! Correct me, call me a retard, make a fool of me, I'll take it, just please please please explain to me how that's good writing.

>> No.22356522

>>22356514
>>22353754
Look. I totally get it, you're supposed to get a feel for it, in fact I have more respect for Wake then Ulysses, Wake is not randomly references, its a dreamlike state, actually interesting. But please explain to me how capturing the references are optional when it's the entire fucking book. The whole book is a reference to the Odyssey. The entire book is a reference to Shakespeare, the entire book is a reference to the old testament, the entire book is a reference to Dublin, the entire book is a damn reference to literally everything. It's an impressive achievement, I applaud it, but if "catching the references is optional" then over 90% of the book is optional.
if Joyce based his book on filtering academics, it doesn't sound like an actually good book, it sounds like a meme. Meme's can be fun, but I want to spend what little time I have on this earth reading serious literature, not shit that exists just to make eggheads go apeshit

>> No.22357390

>>22356514
based post and nobody has responded because they know you're right

>> No.22358737

>>22356522
I'm gonna weigh in here and suggest that instead of approaching the book as a namby-pamby tome of "serious academics only" bullshit, you look past all the aforementioned "midwit filters" and genuinely look to the genuine thematic core that the book (and most of Joyce's oeuvre) is really focused on: the unavoidable nature of social paralysis, the concept that some things are (and will forever remain) ineffable, and finally, his own lifelong search for some way to rise above those truths.

Ulysses, as far as I'm concerned, is primarily a book focused on people who cannot effectively speak to one another (or sometimes even to themselves) due to the weight of their personal and societal histories.

Bloom is a cuckold; everyone knows it and ridicules him. On top of this, his son is dead, and he's become alienated from his Irish and Jewish connections. He is a Jew, and perceived as an "other" by his peers because of it, and he doesn't even feel like he's worthy of that because Rudy is dead (Jewish tradition suggests that deaths of the son in miscarriage are the fault of the father), he's fallen out of Kosher, and his own father is dead by suicide, an incident he refuses to process. He's trying, albeit somewhat poorly, to make peace with these facts of his life and trying to save what he still possibly can through his choice not to confront Molly about her infidelity. He loves her, but he cannot (or refuses to) assert control over her as the other Irishmen would, which is exactly what allows him to win back his place in her heart by the end.

Stephen is completely isolated as well; he's ridiculed and exiled by his roommates, incapable of overcoming his mother's death, and acknowledges outright during Wandering Rocks that he cannot save his sister from their terrible household, since that risks him being dragged back into the middle of his family's problems. He'd worked so tirelessly to escape his chains in Portrait, but here he's
-dead broke,
-actively in debt,
-teaching ignorant schoolkids,
-forced to work with a racist
-not a famous poet (not even close)
-forced to know that the only person who takes his art seriously is the Englishman Haines, who only wants to publish it for his own culturally appropriative clout.

Stephen is Joyce's personal mouthpiece once again, except he never escapes Dublin like Joyce did, and instead remains constantly frustrated with the hellish levels of self-important bullshit that everyone around him seems unable to get enough of.

>> No.22358761

>>22358737
(2/2)
Meanwhile, Molly bears the exact issues of the women of her era, unable to speak or act for herself outside of the most drastic options available. She's the only woman to really get a voice in the entire book, and even then it's the things she's afraid to say aloud. She's haunted by her childhood and its lost opportunities, unsure in her marriage, dearly missing her children, and trying desperately to balance the all-consuming desire of her Id with the patient and expected reality of the superego she's forced to keep on display at all times. She is miserable, and yet she is fulfilled all at once, and every word she says is beautifully complete in itself without ever really allowing us to understand her depth. It's fucking great.

All of this to say; I love the literary puzzles and tracking down references. I go fucking Professor Layton mode on that stuff when I have the time. But that aside-- at the end of the day, Joyce only uses his experimentation with structure and plot to force the reader towards a more careful eye. He wants you to really envelop yourself in the world he's creating, and to notice its intricacies. He's doing all of it so that you can see the world and the people who walk around in it every day just like he does: a bunch of tragic, useless machines who psychologically fight like Greek heroes to reach out to one other. This was his attempt to live forever through words powerful enough to express everything, and whether he succeeded or not, you can't deny his sheer ability and commitment.

>> No.22358792

>>22352626
>Faulkner is a king of not just American literature, but of the world
You've meant Proust but I can get you man. Faulkner is one of the greatest melancholic writers who wrote in English.

>> No.22359403

>>22358761
I agree with you about the importance of Ulysses, and frankly your discussion of it reminds me of one of the reasons I desired to read it in the first place. But I don't think you get my point, or maybe I was just being too jester-y earlier.
When you read, there are two steps. What is the author saying here (Understanding the words) and comprehension (What is the author meaning). I just have zero desire to spend literal weeks of my life waking up at 8am and studying sentences to learn what the author is merely saying. I spend so much time trying to figure out what he's just trying to get across, that I'm not going to have any time to ask myself why he's saying it, unless I want to be an academic and spend years analyzing the text.
It's not a problem with Joyce, a lot of writers fall into the trap. Some people like you enjoy it and that's great, I just feel that its really a sign of bad writing where I have to spend more time trying to figure out what the words are saying, over what the words are meaning.
It's the reason why I've only really read Nietzsche in depth compared to other philosopher's. He explicitly wanted you to spend time figuring out what he means, not what he's trying to say.

>> No.22359654

>>22359403
Yeah I think you’re right, you and I just have different ideas of what’s fun to read and what isn’t. It’s cool, Joyce isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. I still do hope at some point that you’ll give it another shot (or at least just skip around in specific episodes you find interesting) purely because it’s one of the few books that asks the reader to shift their own thinking in the way it does, and also because I’m a sap— it’s gotten me through some rough spots in my life.

What I will say tho is that I bet you’d really enjoy James Baldwin if you haven’t read much of his stuff. It’s similarly intense psychological narration and has that same lean towards the intense stakes and heroic moments that exist within the lives of ordinary people trying to make peace with themselves and their history.

>> No.22359780

>>22359654
You're now the third or fourth ish person that's recommended me James Baldwin. I've been wanting to read him, it might to time to take the hint

>> No.22359821

>>22359780
Do yourself the favor, I can tell you for a fact that his short nonfiction essay Notes of a Native Son is the best piece of creative nonfiction ever put to paper. I’m working my way through Go Tell It On The Mountain right now (third book of his I’ve read) and I’m absolutely fucking loving it. He’s an incredible author.