1. @jbthazard I actually think there’s a slew of writers—Joyce, Pinter, Beckett—that nobody reads because they enjoy or like them. The point of reading these people is more an intellectual status signalling game among high tier intellectuals and academics.
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I can agree with most of this, certainly. Even about fiction to an extend because as I age I read more non-fiction and poetry, myself. I'm an Orwell fan but I'm also a Joycian at heart. Even all you say about academic showing off is entirely true, for the most part
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Much of Joyce's exegetical writing was deliberately meant to satirize the pretentions of academia. Joyce hated snobby scholars and simply found it amusing to beat them at their own game.
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He also accurately predicted that the academic trend for solving "literary puzzles" would extend the lifespan and influence of his work.
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That's part of why I like Joyce so much. In many ways Ulysses is a prank. It is deliberately the most pretentious novel because Joyce was essentially an academic accelerationist: he wanted his work to mark the end of such pompous trends, to truly beat it at its own game
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I also give him credit for understanding the innate, implicit or just often neglected linguistic and auditory aspects of novels. It's true his work is full of endless trivia and allusions but one can enjoy his work without having to pay attention to the references/namedrops
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So yes, Joyce participated in the usual "intellectual puzzle games" of academics, but not for the typical self-imposed masturbatory reasons.
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Ultimately however I do agree that poetry is king, but what do you think of "prose poetry" novels? TS Eliot said that Nightwood by Djuna Barnes "is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it."
End of conversation
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