This isn't a shitpost. swear to god. I'm in a Ulysses reading group right now, and Joyce's breadth of knowledge is astounding: medicine, history, physics, epistemology, phenomenology, obscure newspaper advertisements, early film, dead languages, obscure printing technologies, Egyptian mythology, color theory... it seems like nothing escapes him. Multiple times I've tracked down a reference in the Gifford, thinking there's no fucking way this was intentional, only to find out that it is intentional, and forms yet another node in a seemingly infinite network across the book.
As far as I know, Joyce quit school after 20 and lived on patronage/teaching gigs until he died. How did he learn languages as disparate as Norwegian and Hebrew? How did he find the time to learn about fetal development? The man was a genius obviously but how, physically how and where, did he learn all of this shit to put into his book?
I doubt he knew anything to an expert level. Just that he was talented enough to mask it with his prose and let intuition do the rest. If he were alive today he would just be browsing Wikipedia for little gems and bits to stick into his new word-salad masterpiece.
Ryder Jackson
You can learn all of that with like 20 - 30 good books. It's not not unfeasible at all.
If you've ever tried to write, you know it's impossible to fake in-depth knowledge without the reader knowing. It's like trying to paint a landscape from imagination and making it look like you painted from reality.
Robert Johnson
you're just a bad writer
Benjamin Garcia
William Gass compared Joyce to the Latin American writers like Cortazar in his Temple of Texts and said they actually had a grasp of the subjects they covered while Joyce was more like a magpie seeking ideas like trinkets, whose superb prose made up for it. If you want to check go through any part of Joyce where he makes a certain reference and ask yourself how much information about that reference he needed to write that line. He probably had more understanding of Lit related stuff but I'm sure for everything else a page or two is all he needed to know.
Logan Wood
>William Gass A complete retard. His comments on Borges are particularly imbecilic and come off as elitist in the most rancid, odious way. And Hopscotch is literally what arthoes read in Latin America (I'm from the region). It's not something on the level of Ulysses.
Lucas Lopez
Who should one listen to? A rando on Yea Forums or the guy who wrote The Tunnel?
James Morris
literally Yea Forums
John Phillips
I'm alive, he's dead, therefore, I am right and objectively correct.
Nicholas Cruz
Schizophrenia is a hell of a condition
Benjamin Anderson
read a couple quality encyclopedia volumes and you'll seem like a genius popping off with trivia in conversation. i imagine he probably did the same.
Carter Allen
To your own brain, you dumbfuck.
Jaxon Martin
He had autism
Benjamin Nguyen
Nobody who spends any amount of time on this site has brain that is anywhere near the level of William Gass', or Cortazar's or Joyce's. So I'm placing my bets on the better brain.
Isaiah King
It's funny just how Irish his face was. Really remarkable how you can tell some people's nationality by their physiognomy.
Brandon James
I beleive that is a very poor summation of what Gass said on the subject. If memory serves (been a few years) Gass is talking about how they use their knowledge in their writing, Joyce does in explore the idea and the text is like a magpie nest of idea that forces you to consider things in contexts one would not normally consider like the random objects woven into a magpie's nest. Joyce shows understanding of a fair amount of what he references, but he does not show off the understanding, he sticks the idea into his nest and leaves the rest to the reader.
Isaiah Kelly
>The Tunnel
>Robert Alter in his review of the book in The New Republic wrote: "Some may seize on it as a postmodern masterpiece, but it is a bloated monster of a book. [...] The bloat is a consequence of sheer adipose verbosity and an unremitting condition of moral and intellectual flatulence. [...] The abjection of (Gass') hero seems less lived than written. It is an act of ventriloquism: behind the repulsive, potentially fascist narrator stands his critic, the novelist, presumably committed to humane, democratic values. But those values are nowhere intimated in the book, and what emerges is a kind of inadvertent complicity between author and protagonist. The supposedly critical novel becomes an enactment of bad faith."[6]
sorry, i just had to post it
Leo Ward
I like Borges. Borges is better than Gass. Gass cowardly shat on Borges. Therefore, I stand by the greater writer and his patron light illuminates my way through the dishonest, malicious ways of Gass the Fartsman, making me correct in every way, shape, or form.
Mason Harris
>intellectual flatulence holy KEK perfect and poetic way of describing a pseud named 'Gass'
Jayden Torres
he had hardly any scientific knowledge. i'm sure he knew a lot of literature, and naturally some history, though because thats what he spent his life immersed in. ulysses was basically him jacking himself off over how many different allusions to literature he could fit into every sentence.
Aiden Jones
Wow, Alter either has very poor comprehension/critical thinking skills or was blinded sided by "he is literally me."
Grayson Mitchell
Gass still loves Borges though. Labyrinths was in his Temple of Texts. Gass just doesn't idolize the author. A lot of his essays are focused on the gulf between the transcendent work of art and the baseness and stupidities can exist in their creators.
William Carter
The Tunnel is definitely based on Gass' life and opinions, with tweaks to make the narrator be a lot worse. A lot of stuff Gass writes in his essays finds itself in Kohler's monologues and there are some definite biographical resonances like Kohler also translating Rilke. Still, the entire point of the novel is to critique solipsism and to let the reader decide for themselves. Alter is being stupidly moralistic when all he had to do was to just say he hates the book.
Sebastian Rivera
Gass looked down on Borges merely because Borges' taste didn't align with his own. He read and admired many writers including the likes of Poe, Chesterton, Stevenson, Wells, and just because of that Gass tried to crucify him. God forbid writers read for pleasure every once in a while. That one essay reads to me as if Gass were pretentiously asking 'why did a writer like THAT read THOSE other 'lesser' 'genre' fiction writers?.' His fossilized, near-soulless academic sensitivity prevents him from looking at the beauty and fun of reading that others may have. Whereas Borges was just a chad who read for pleasure and poetry.
Tyler Baker
I don't think you know what the word crucify means if the one doing the crucifying still thinks the other is one of the greatest writers ever
Jace Gonzalez
Gass is pretty upfront about how Literature saved his life and how much his drive to consume all the masters is driven by deep seated insecurities especially due to his family upbringing. But stop using words like 'chad' when talking about authors as if you're awarding the best medal at some high-school prom. Gass' point is always that all these writers, including himself, are painfully human, subject to all sorts of general idiocies and hypocrisies and pretensions, which no one is exempt from. Trying to find models out of authors, except in their prose, is a flawed and silly task. Anyway the original point of the query is whether Gass was right about Joyce not really knowing much about the stuff he referenced and I have yet to see any good counter. I mean it's kind of obvious when you read the text. Nobody reads Ulysses for specific knowledge but for its innovation and beauty.
Josiah Flores
he was educated by jesuits who place a heavy emphasis on thorough research and citation, it probably wasn't that difficult for him to look stuff up as he needed to. i remember a story about him writing to someone in dublin to check the height of a fence so that it'd be believable that stephen and bloom hop over it
Landon Torres
What's the alternative, that James Joyce had an encyclopedic knowledge of science and philosophy, could perform surgery, was a polymathic polyglot, etc., all to no practical end demonstrated anywhere but as enriching the detail of his novel Ulysses? Or you're a nitwit who knows fuckall about writing.
Gabriel Scott
>gass's life what life, spending his entire adult life in academia?
Andrew Russell
I mean that's what The Tunnel is about.
James Jones
He was a fearful Jesuit
Gabriel Gutierrez
This is the most Reddit thread ever
Jackson Garcia
he lived before tv and internet, so he had plenty of time to learn
Joseph Young
He read a lot retard
Ayden Peterson
Instead of playing video games, watching TV and browsing Yea Forums, Autists back in the day had only reading to entertain themselves
Nolan Mitchell
He got access to the Library of Babel and to the Akashin Records via sleep deprivation and the channeling of his daughter's schizophrenia.
Zachary Wood
kek based
Elijah Scott
If you have the opportunity, look up My Brother's Keeper, the memoir of Joyce's brother Stanislaus. He describes the self-directed study routine and schedule that James kept himself to while a teenager. In addition to whatever school demands he had, he would spend hours reading, studying, and writing. He intuited in himself the possibility of greatness and felt obligated to prepare for it. Beyond that, he knew how to find the information that he wanted. Thinking that he would needed to pattern the Oxen of the Sun episode of Ulysses on the gestation of a fetus, for example, he could read up on that particular subject.
Joyce did have advantages in intellect and the capacity to retain information, but he also had an almost superhuman drive to push and discipline himself to read and study. He invested years in this venture, believing himself capable of greatness.
>on top of that it's from 2 years ago Lit is truly over.
Jason Brown
>It's like trying to paint a landscape from imagination and making it look like you painted from reality. yeah and good artists do that shit all the time. thanks for making my point for me.
Brody Lee
he just used wikipedia like everybody
Ayden Cook
some would even say it is the mark of a great artist to be able to do that...
Easton Scott
The quality of education Joyce receive was vastly superior to even a good education that one of us got. It's hard to imagine how people had such good teeth before refined sugar as well. Looking back is just going to cause us pain as it is like a fun house mirror.
Colton Fisher
do you feel pain when looking in a fun house mirror?
Angel Fisher
It’s called having autism.
Jason Gonzalez
He didn't, actually. He committed some stuff to short term memory and mostly looked up stuff in books what he needed for the moment.
