The narrator of this rare clip describes James Joyce – arguably the greatest novelist of the 20th century — as a “small, thin, unathletic man with very bad eyes.” Ouch. And it gets worse. According to the voiceover, when Joyce and drinking buddy Ernest Hemingway faced a potential brawl, Joyce would hide behind his more imposing comrade and shout “Deal with him, Hemingway, deal with him!!!’
But we bet they were both just hiding behind Gertrude Stein.
You will find this video (and the others listed below) in our new collection of Cultural Icons.
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James Joyce Reading from Finnegans Wake
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Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
“arguably the greatest novelist of the 20th century”
He made possible many changes. The “greatest” nobody is but “one of the greatest” he surely is.
Nah he was the greatest got cut to the chase with only 2 books and wrote about his love of booty
James Joyce..possibly the most overrated novelist in history.
The “greatness” he is accused of is that he is the first “stream of consciousness” writer; IE he writes EVERYTHING that passes through someone’s mind in a single day in “Ulysses”. He called it “Ulysses” because in his opinion his story is also a great epic; that’s how pretentious he is. To compare his crap to the Iliad!!!
That’s it. That literary trick is his “great” contribution to literature. Forget about Shakespeare! This man is the shit eh!
People often jump on the “praise” bandwagon for Joyce; knowing that many “intellectuals” are supposed to highly regard him they think if they do the same they’ll look clever.
His stories are awful. Boring crap. His characters are forgettable and one dimensional. They think terrible things in their stream of consciousness; as it includes all things, it includes thinking about taking a shit and in one case a woman thinking about what it would be like to have a stallion’s penis inside her.
I suspect you’ve never even read his books.
Joyce sucks; ALL his stories (Well – the ones I read anyway – Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, Portrait of the artist as a young man – are boring crap.
Try reading a real masterpiece, like Les Miserables, then you might change your mind about Joyce.
“The greatest” is a subjective title. Hemingway, Steinbeck, now those guys were writers!
- NullOp -
That they were writers is certainly objective fact, at least.
- James Voice -
I don’t understand why you think the Iliad is a particularly great work. It was more interesting than most other works from the same approximate time period, and that’s about all I can say about it. The culture it belonged to is dead, dust. Its values and its reference points no longer resonate with the world we live in.
I also don’t understand why the constant bodily functions obsession of many of Joyce’s characters is a bad thing in your view. Bodily functions are a huge part of living, I think about mine quite a lot. I found those sections among the most believable, and I don’t think that his characters are one-dimensional at all – more like a-dimensional.
That said, I didn’t enjoy any of his work either. In general I found modernism’s fixation on experimenting with new forms of ‘realer’ realism sort of tedious.
That doesn’t mean he ‘sucks’, and Les Mis is not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination.
Uh you said penis. uh huh uh huh. huh huh huh huhuhuhuhh…
I’d like to know where this clip actually comes from because it sounds like it was part of a longer film.
I love internet debate.
The utter pointlessness of quibbling with a phrase like “Arguably the greatest”. The writer is arguing that Joyce is the greatest, ergo he is, literally, *arguably* the greatest… Yawn.
James Voice:
It’s not called Ulysses simply because he thought it was an epic. Part of its (highly complex) structure is an echo of the Odyssey (‘Ulysses’ is an alternative name for the Odyssey, not the Iliad). In any case, as James Duval points out, “even Homer nods”.
Joyce is not considered the first author to use stream of consciousness (Proust is a more obvious, if still problematic, choice), nor does any serious critic think that his supposed ‘genius’ is merely the invention (or use) of that device.
It’s also odd that you mention his “stories”, but not ‘Dubliners’ (his sole collection of short stories).
it’s obvious that what you are looking for from a novel is not provided by Joyce. On the whole, I don’t like 19th Century novels, but I only dismiss them as “boring crap” for my own amusement. Your criticisms (Joyce doesn’t pay much attention to traditional characterisation, his novels are not narrative-driven) are as irrelevant to Joyce as one who would complain that Picasso’s pictures are ‘unrealistic’, or that there’s no melody in Varèse.
That said, you have some highbrow support for some of your views. Virginia Woolf said this: “Mr Joyce’s indecency in Ulysses, seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows.” Indeed, Ulysses includes the c-bomb. I don’t imagine you’ll enjoy Woolf much, though (if you are a fan of characterisation and are not a fan of stream of consciousness).
This Hemingway story is rubbish. It was invented by someone. There’s never a source given for it. But is continues to be repeated. Ignorance is spreads like wildfire.
The narrator describes Joyce thusly because it is almost word for word how Hemingway described him in A Moveable Feast. I don’t have the book handy, but if you have a copy you can read the chapter on Joyce and it is a close paraphrasing. Love the writing of both of those guys.
cf Gajdusek “Hemingway and Joyce: A Study in Debt and Payment.” Hemingway was a defender of Joyce not just in this anecdote but of his aesthetic which Hemingway and very few others understood at the time and which he and very few others adapted to their own work.
This story from Hemingway and Joyce in Paris comes from the very readable biography on the former by Anthony Burgess.
James Voice’s comments say much more about his own limited intellect and understanding of writing and literature than anything else.
I suggest he keep it simple, to start with, and just pick out some random sentences from Ulysses, or better yet Dubliners. Joyce’s editor suggested numerous changes to the stories in Dubliners and Joyce replied that he wouldn’t change a single word as every sentence was perfectly honed.
Even if one can quibble with his taste or subject matter, it’s hard to dsipute that his sentences are almost without exception as close to perfectly written as is humanly possible. Honed to perfection.