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Sometimes I just want to have a random collection of words and try to make it mean something. Or make up my own language for the sub-conscious, go Joyce!
Helped apple, left walk in – right downstairs steel varnish; lactic sleuth brown.
posted
Except those aren't random collections of words -- he spent quite a long time carefully crafting those sentences using his excellent multilingual skills combined with a brilliant sense of timing and punnery.
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But yes, I'm much more a fan of the directions Beckett's literary development took. Even his most obscure stuff is still remarkably accessible, whereas appreciating Joyce's achievement seems to require the mastery of several languages.
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Oh, at least one or two of his novels have an audience . . . Bloomsday is a huge event.
Finnegan's Wake does require a somewhat expansive academic background, but then again, the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem requires an incredibly expansive mathematical background.
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So only stories that reach a wide enough audience should be told? Is there some cut off I should be aware of?
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I imagine you can tell any story you like, but if it doesn't have enough of an audience then all the king's horses and all the king's men can't make it get the widespread respect it deserves. Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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The idea of having to decipher a novel in order to figure out its meaning seems to me to be a failure in communication of the novel.
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Luckily Joyce didn't care much if everyone respected his story .
Mack, no novel I know of has a single meaning, and every novel I know of requires thought to decipher its deeper meanings, sometimes huge amounts of thought. Why is it such a heinous crime that the first level of meaning requires a lot of thought (and not even all that much, on the surface Finnegan's Wake is mostly cool sounds which are cool regardless of understanding).
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And he's told a story, he's just told a very complex and hard to follow one. See Spot Run is easy for anyone who can read to follow, but many of the meanings in Shakespeare are only accessible to someone with a good literary and historical background (hardly all, but many of the most rewarding). Yet Shakespeare is not considered inferior to See Spot Run.
Why should your inability to follow the story in Finnegan's Wake invalidate the worth of the story? Why not just let it be for those who can enjoy it and wait until when/if you can enjoy it?
There are countries where a huge percentage of the people wouldn't appreciate Mark Twain; should his stories not be published or made available there for the people who would?
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I think that there's a perception that all Joyce was trying to do with Finnegan's Wake was to be an elitist snob and that the only reason people read it or like it is because they like to think they're better than other people. I don't think that this is true. I like it because of how chaotic and yet structured it is. Taken individually, each page is like a puzzl. You can read it to try and work out the puzzles. Taken more as a flow, it's about how the unconscious works and also how the unconscious works. If you approach it with a begginer's mind where you're not trying to see the puzzles or figure out what's actually being said, where you just read uncritically, you may find your unconscious kick in and just start throwing things out at you. These things are often more related to what you bring with you than what's on the page.
Anyway, I can see why it's not everybodies' cup of tea, but I enjoy it. I find it both frustrating (I only know three languages and only speak two of them) and fulfilling.
Also, I really like playing the finnegan's wake game where you respond to the meaning you find in people's oddly connected strings of words with oddly connected strings of words yourself. It's one of my more favorite improv warm ups and you can get some really interesting things going if you're doing it with a bunch of people who are good at it and click well together.
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Yes, Joyce (from what we know) was not trying to be pretentious, he just wanted to write what he felt the best thing he could write was, and didn't care what restrictions in audience that might entail.
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Joyce is brilliant and funny, for which I love him. He's also a showboating prat, for which I hate him.
I think you'll find that most people who really, really love English feel this way about Joyce; he wrote some of the cleverest, densest explorations of the English language (by way of a few others, even), but in so doing was willing to risk alienating some -- and, I'm sure, at times even all -- of his audience.
The mention of fallow is actually quite apt, except that Joyce didn't necessarily set out to insult his readership QUITE as often. My problem with fallow is never his language, but rather the fact that he uses language to obscure rather vicious digs at people. All the people JOYCE was insulting are, thankfully, now dead.
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There's a test of creativity called the Remote Associates Test that kind works like how I think Joyce sort of worked. It comes from word associations. Like , the first word you think of when I say boy will probably be girl. Anyway, the RAT takes lesser common word associations (like, toy or bat for boy) for three separate words and puts them together. So it would present falling, actor, dust as the test looking for star as the answer.
At least when you're playing the finnegan's wake game, you're acting sort of like that but in a wider context. The words you say come up because of the associations with a bunch of the words in the other person's sentence, but are also suggested by the words that are in what you're saying and also may be aimed towards some goal. It's like a highly recursive RAT. And again, it's really fun.
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Whenever an author write a book, he aims it to an ideal reader. I've read Ulysses, and I say that I'm not one of Joyce's chosen. It's easy to say that Joyce fails to tell a good Story, since his works are so hard to...well...digest, but we should think that some authors think about the story and its comprehension as somethink almost secondary to the language and form. It all depends of his intentions, in the first place. Let's also considerate how experimentalism was rampant in Joyce's time.
Posts: 1785 | Registered: Oct 2003
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You only think that cuz 'o' the ones (posts) that have yer name in 'em. I know you're a stand up guy, 'cept when you slink around on yer belly like some overly-calloused wyrm-ridden eh... nevermind.
seriously, though, what's with the high-horse clean-boots routine?
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