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/lit/ - Literature

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19925745 No.19925745 [Reply] [Original]

>tfw James Joyce thinks Ibsen is a greater dramatist than Shakespeare

>> No.19925801

He is though.

>> No.19926193

>>19925801
You're not right.

>> No.19926208

>>19925745
you ever read his entire play cycle straight back to back? his plays weren't meant to be read separately, Ibsen specifically said he wanted people to read them, claiming that the whole has a greater effect. blows Sh*kespeare out of the water

>> No.19926211

>>19926193
Joyce’s opinion matters to some.
Shakey spears O’Pickles is a tad overrated, being deified at this point.

>> No.19926212

>>19926208
Can I get a citation on this?

>> No.19926232

Did James Joyce really think Ibsen is a greater dramatist than Shakespeare?

>> No.19926241

>>19926232
He said Shakespeare was a poet, not a dramatist.

>> No.19926242

>>19925745
He is.
Also, Joyce thought Shakespeare was the greatest of all authors, and he was wrong. But of course one suspects he was just trying not to be polemical, as is often the case with people who praise Shakespeare. Borges never dismissed Shakespeare publicly, but in private he suggested S. was the most overrated of all authors.
Many such cases.

>> No.19926259

>>19925745
How is this controversial? Shakespeare is a great writer, but hardly a great dramatist.

>> No.19926260

>>19926242
Shakespeare is not overrated though. Maybe a little bit as a dramatist but just purely in terms of his language he completely deserves his position at the very top of English literature. It's actually almost astonishing what he does with language

>> No.19926263

>>19925745
It's so interesting how great writers can have such varying opinions about what makes good literature. Joyce is one of the greatest novelists and thought Ibsen was amazing. Chekhov was one of the greatest short fiction writers ever, and in his short playwright stage, wrote incredibly great plays, and he couldn't stand Ibsen.

>> No.19926289

>>19926212
Here's a quote from Ibsen himself
>Only by grasping and comprehending my entire production as as continuous and coherent whole will the reader be able to receive the precise impression I sought to convey in the individual parts of it.
>I therefore appeal to the reader that he not put any play aside, and not skip anything, but that he absorb the plays -- by reading himself into them and by experiencing them intimately -- in the other in which I wrote them.
He was specifically referring to the 12 major prose plays he wrote in the second half of his literary career, chronologically starting with Pillars of Society, ending with When We Dead Awaken.

>> No.19926295

>>19926289
Is there narrative crossover? I have never read any of him

>> No.19926311

>>19926295
No their overlap is purely thematic. But this is why I refer to them as a "cycle", like there are such things as "short story cycles" (for example, the Dubliners is one) in which even though the stories may not overlap per se, what they do is each short story paints a picture that each gives you one glimpse of a mountain (which is of course many-sided, being 3D), so that when you finish you have a more plural understanding of the themes being expressed. I haven't finished his entire cycle yet, I was literally just larping, so I can't yet comment on the "precise impression" he was trying to convey

>> No.19926329

>>19926311
What language are you reading them in?

>> No.19926333

>>19926329
shut up bitch

>> No.19926335

>>19926329
where i'm from, my library, you ask a motherfucker that question you get shot right in the aisle no questions asked

>> No.19926340

>>19926335
>>19926333
Kek I just wanted to know if he was reading them in english and if so if it was good because I was thinking of reading it. But if it's one of those things you have to read in Norwegian I wont bother

>> No.19926344

>>19926260
He has great imagery, and also many varied characters (who are often predictable and mediocre, though) as well as a good knowledge of life in general.
But the same can be said for someone like Flaubert, who is of course a very important and top writer, one of the greatest, but he isn't nearly as 'rated' as Shakespeare is.
What else does Shakespeare have? Music? Granted, he was a fine versifier, but so were most poets back then. Vocabulary? His superhuman vocabulary has been shown to be a myth. Original ideas? He didn't have any, most of his ideas are recycled from the classical world. Was he a fine story-teller? Well, considering he stole most of his stories, I'd say he's certainly not at the top. Originality? Nah, the more interesting techniques he uses, such as the play-within-a-play, were already popular stuff back then.

>> No.19926364

>>19926344
Flaubert is maybe the best prose stylist in the French language so to me he is almost a Shakespeare tier writer but Shakespeare is just special. And it's just the visceral beauty of it, the consonance between sound, rhythm, and meaning. The only other writer I have seen come close is Pushkin but I dont care to declare one of them better than the other. Ranking things like this is pointless after a certain point; they are all geniuses.

>> No.19926392

>>19926340
>Kek I just wanted to know if he was reading them in english and if so if it was good because I was thinking of reading it.
joyce read them in Norwegian surely but i don't think it's required for the cycle or anything. Ibsen's style involves colloquial speech which I can imagine would require many liberties to translate but what Ibsen is chiefly concerned with (so far as I can tell) is not poetry (sort of unlike Shakespeare, Ibsen was not much of a poet), it's the orchestration of the situations themselves, how he sets up his characters and situations so meticulously and psychological (like a doll house really) so that the outcome inevitably expresses an often shocking (for the time) moral idea. His plays are traditional in the sense that they're kind of arguments, they have a very clear cut premise, for example, Doll House's premise is "Inequality of the sexes in marriage breeds unhappiness" now whether or not you agree with that is irrelevant, the point is that I don't see any reason why that premise wouldn't be translatable

>> No.19926411

>>19926392
>Inequality of the sexes in marriage breeds unhappiness"
Ah. Well then no I wont be reading that. That is fairly obviously the opposite of the truth. To write such a thing would require simply not understanding either female or male psychology, probably the former since he's a man. I'm sure he very artfully executes the idea but it's an incorrect idea.

>> No.19926419

>>19926344
It's the density and richness of his language that those who hold him in esteem as genius(Nabokov, Joyce, etc) praise, and it's for them reason enough to praise him as such.
And they are right. Any one can realize, by reading just an act of his plays, that there is material enough for a lifetime to give oneself into

>> No.19926446

>>19926411
Cool, except his play itself is the steely argument that you haven't responded to (and I don't expect you will)

>> No.19926456

>>19926411
>No I never ever read anything if it disagrees with my worldview
Do you understand how retarded that is?

>> No.19926468

>>19926446
Would you care to summarize the argument? Some men cruelly abuse their wives and this is bad and could be prevented by sexual equality. But the overall wages of sexual equality are a fertility rate well below replacement, sky high divorce rates, and increasing amounts of people never married, married late. What's more is it doesnt stop abuse anyway; these single mother homes with stepdad or boyfriend are extremely abusive statistically to both the woman and her children.

There are numerous reasons why sexual equality makes no sense, from the irrationality of women and their attraction to extreme domination, to the game theoretical issues of two poles of authority in one system.
>>19926456
I read plenty of stuff that disagrees with my worldview. I'm not going to read a Norwegian theatre cycle though; I fail to see the point.

>> No.19926480

>>19925745
Based Joyce

>> No.19926491

>>19926242
Borges thought Dante was the GOAT and he was right. He thought Shakes poetry was strange and bordering on homosexuality.

>> No.19926493

>>19926364
>Shakespeare is just special
No, Flaubert is just special. I am just special. Jose Mourinho is just special.
Also, consonance between sound and meaning was better achieved by the troubadours. Not to mention that dissonance is not necessarily inferior. Consonance is just a classical ideal, and it gets quickly tiresome after a while.

>>19926419
Lots of Shakespeare is just bombastic rhetoric. I'd say a lot of his scenes are mediocre (compared to other good authors, that is; not mediocre in general), and some of them, such as those pun scenes, are really bad.
He has moments of density, for sure, but it never compares to someone like Mallarmé or Joyce in Finnegans Wake.
As for those who hold him in high esteem... That's just authority. Shakespeare has been paraded as the greatest genius to ever have existed, for centuries now, so of course millions of people are going to agree with that, specially if they are English-language writers, because Shakespeare really is one of the best English writers (and is helped by the fact that his closest pre-modern competitor, Chaucer, is hard to read). If the Spanish Empire had won, Goethe's favourite author would have been Cervantes.

Just to make clear, to me it's nonsense to rank writers, but what I am trying to say is that Shakespeare is overrated, in the sense that there are other writers who are as good as him, or better, and yet you don't see their admirers claiming they "invented the human". The adoration of Shakespeare is a religion. You don't see Italians treating Dante like that, or Greeks doing the same with Homer, and if they ever do it they will be rightfully laughed at.

>> No.19926495

>>19926493
Dissonance is objectively inferior.

>> No.19926499

>>19925745
As far as language is concerned I love Shakespeare. He's up there in the Anglo patheon. But I do think that Ibsen's drama was superior.

>> No.19926503

Kind of appalling how many people here agree with Joyce
also did we ever get a source because it sounds untrue

>> No.19926506

Bardolatry

>> No.19926521

>>19926495
No, it isn't. That's just a personal ideal of yours (which was also defended by the classical tradition - a tradition which is just one among many).
I personally find it tiresome, as it quickly becomes predictable.

>> No.19926523

>>19926521
It's a personal ideal of God's, who made you too.

>> No.19926524

>>19926503
Not everyone in the world is Anglo or obsessed with becoming one.

>> No.19926532

Here we see how bardolatry is closely tied with religion >>19926523
Remember that Harold Bloom was also obsessed with religious ideals and even (rather comically) structured a book around the Kabbalah.

>> No.19926548

>>19926344
Just because a character is predictable doesnt mean they are bad or poorly written

>> No.19926573

>>19926532
Try to define any artistic value without God

>> No.19926716

>>19926548
Yes, in the end, aesthetic values are subjective. For me, the effect of surprise, or not really surprise, but rather newness, is very important, because I tend to get bored quickly. Shakespeare bores me a lot. His characters are often the same. It's all about honor, fate, love, and whatever. If they're poor, it's all about drinking, fucking and Reddit-tier wordplays. His metaphors are often like that too, and his ideas are all either truisms or old classical stuff.
But the subjectivity of aesthetic values is precisely one of the reasons why Bardolatry is so laughable, given that Bardolaters treat Shakespeare as if he was some kind of objective genius, who received his talent from a god, and is comparable to mountains and the sea.
However, even from a classical aesthetic point of view, Shakespeare is still no better than Dante, Virgil, Flaubert, Plato, and others, even Racine and Milton. Only education and propaganda makes people think otherwise.

>>19926573
You can't, and god doesn't exist. To be fair, neither do aesthetic values.

>> No.19926911
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19926911

>>19925745
And who was the better poet?

>> No.19926964

>>19926344
>>19926716
Good posts ITT, kind sir.
>good knowledge of life in general
I think this is a very important part of his stature. He covered a lot of thematic ground, and I would guess this is why people say he is "universal" (I agree that that assessment is exaggerated).

>> No.19927108

>>19926232
it was a popular opinion of his time among the literary elites

>> No.19927200

I love ibsen but I can't read norwegian

>> No.19927243
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19927243

>>19925745
Joyce knew Wagner was the greatest dramatist ever.

>> No.19927853 [DELETED] 

>>19927243
He didn't think he was the greatest ever, but he did think he was an equal to Ibsen.

>In "Drama and Life'' Joyce names Wagner and Ibsen (citing Lohengrin and Ghosts) as new dramatists who are "building for Drama, an ampler and loftier home".

>> No.19927860

>>19927243
He didn't think he was the greatest ever, but he did think he was an equal to Ibsen.

>In "Drama and Life'' Joyce names Wagner and Ibsen (citing Lohengrin and Ghosts) as new dramatists who are "building for Drama, an ampler and loftier home".

>> No.19927865

ibsen is good but not as good as shakespeare

>> No.19927945

>>19925745
Why is Harold Bloom so fat in this picture?

>> No.19928174

>>19926344
>No their overlap is purely thematic. But this is why I refer to them as a "cycle", like there are such things as "short story cycles" (for example, the Dubliners is one) in which even though the stories may not overlap per se, what they do is each short story paints a picture that each gives you one glimpse of a mountain (which is of course many-sided, being 3D), so that when you finish you have a more plural understanding of the themes being expressed. I haven't finished his entire cycle yet, I was literally just larping, so I can't yet comment on the "precise impression" he was trying to convey
midwit analysis missing the immediately intuited glory of Shakespeare's verse

>> No.19928187

>>19926493
the Italians actually do treat Dante like that, and are right to, as did the Greeks with Homer, who had a quasi-Biblical status in Greek culture

>> No.19928317

>>19927243
>>19927860
I remember seeing that Joyce was highly critical of Wagner.....did I schizophrenia that

>> No.19928423

Finnegans Wake is stupid and annoying. Anyone who cares enough about women to write a feminist play is probably stupid and annoying. Therefore I deduce that Joyce appreciated Ibsen because of his affinity for people who were like himself (insofar as both wrote stupid and annoying things).
Shakespeare is king keep dilating faggots.

>> No.19928916

>>19928317
Joyce criticised every artist in history at some point, he was very competitive, especially if they were popular.

>Some critics regard the enigmatic Exiles as Joyce's effort to exorcise the fin-de-siecle enthusiasms of his youth, and it is tempting to include Wagner among them." After all, Robert Hand's attempt to rationalize his treachery in the trite language of heroic self-expression makes him an easy mark for irony; and it is Robert who, as act 2 opens, self-consciously plays "O du, mein holder Abendstern" on the piano, drops Wagner's name in conversation with Richard, and speaks what Richard wearily calls "the language of my youth" (E 71). Indeed, Joyce's use of the phrase' "Boyrut season'' in the Wake (229.34) might support the idea that an attachment to Wagner reflects youthful ardor more than it does intellectual conviction. Joyce's introduction to one of the most fervent of Wagnerites went, according to Stanislaus, as follows:

>During this meeting ... Symons told stories of the poets and artists he had known, of Verlaine and Dowson, of Lionel Johnson and Beardsley, and, hearing that my brother was interested in music, he sat down atthe piano and played the Good Friday music from Parsifal.
>—When I play Wagner, he murmured, closing the piano and standing up, I am in another world.

>Joyce was reportedly amused by Symons' gesture, thinking it "ninetyish" (JJ 112), and he must have thought of Symons when he set the scene for act 2 of Exiles. But Joyce's amusement was directed at the disciple in Symons, not at Wagner, and Joyce felt the same irony toward his earlier, more impressionable self. About George Moore's Wagnerian The Lake, Joyce wrote Stanislaus in 1906, "I bought and read The Lake . . . The Times calls it a prose poem. You know the plot . She writes long letters to Father Oliver Gogarty about Wagner and the Ring and Bayreuth (memories of my youth!)" (L2:154). In a play that shows the mark of as many as five of Wagner's operas, Joyce may be writing off the enthusiasms of his youth, but he is not, in Wagner's case at least, writing off the object of the enthusiasm. In throwing out the bathwater of Wagnerism, decadence, and other excesses represented by Robert Hand, Joyce is careful to preserve Wagner's status as exile and artist-hero, as well as the composer's first name, for Richard Rowan. Joyce would never again be the ninetyish Wagnerite of turn-of-the-century Dublin, but he would remain keenly interested in the sensuality of Wagner's music, in the idea of a synthesis of arts, in Wagner's mythic characters, and in the artist whose career was so like his own.

>> No.19930011

>>19925745
My god Joyce is fucking based, unlike OP.

>> No.19931413

>>19928187
Not really.
Also, a lot of that has to do with their cultural work rather than with literature. Dante is a political figure in Italy.
I've never seen an Italian critic claiming Dante invented the human.