Ben Mines

I can vouch for the Penguin Classics edition of Crime and Punishment translated by David McDuff.

Ouch. ....

James K. Baxter belongs in this thread, as does Witi Ihimaera.

In trying to answer this question, I realized that the desirability of being trapped in an elevator with a given writer is inversely proportional to how much I like them. If I wasn't equal to the task of making conversation with my favorite writer, I would have to live with that crushing intellectual humiliation for the rest of my life. Another danger would be discovering that he or she is a highly unpleasant person and never being able to read their books without constantly remembering those ill-fated and awkward hours you spent together in an elevator. So, to answer the question, I would like to be stuck in an elevator with that risible hack Dan Brown because he could not possibly mean more to me than the scullery maid we passed on the way in.

Poe is a writer who is underrated by critics and overrated by readers. I can understand both tendencies. Sometimes he is terribly histrionic, but he has also contributed some marvelous stories to the genre.

What's wrong with Treasure Island? If you allow that it's an adventure book for Victorian schoolboys, it's perfectly readable.

I see. Sorry BookJumper. That's quite a different box of apples, and something I can completely understand. However, just speaking for myself, I find it helps to read novels on unpleasant subjects with which I have the misfortune to have personal experience.

This is like your argument against complexity, to which all my counterarguments, mutatis mutandis, could be applied. And besides, aren't you a student of Shakespeare? I find Titus Andronicis far more upsetting than Lolita.

^ That deficiency is easily amended.

I sincerely hope you will try again!

I agree, to a certain extent. Few people seem to ask why Bloom's movements are carefully superimposed upon the adventures of Odysseus. But there is a good reason. In his study of Ulysses (authorized by Joyce) Gilbert explains that two of the book's important themes are metempsychosis and parallax: "History repeating, with a difference." This does not mean, of course, that Bloom is Odysseus redivivus. The method subtly implies the universality, or eternal recurrence, of certain elements of the human predicament. However, I do agree that it is not absolutely necessary to know Homer to enjoy Ulysses. The book can also be read simply, but still rewardingly, for its central narrative: the actions, thoughts, fears and hopes of Bloom, Molly and Steven on June 16.

Well, BookJumper, I guess there's only one solution. Next time you go to the bookstore, take one of these.

I guess I should explain myself. You are in favour of lucid prose, and it would be completely absurd to argue against that. But my point is, I think, a little more subtle. Creative writing is a paradoxical process because it requires the artist to coordinate gut-level inspiration with the cerebral act of writing. To succeed, I think the relationship between the two should be unmediated, hermetic. This is not to champion literary automatism and other such gobbledegook. An artist should be lucid, insofar as he seeks to communicate. But this lucidity should come from a free transaction between inspiration and a mastery of the craft and not as a result of preconditions that the artist brings to the creative process. And, while I hate to complicate matters further, there is a paradoxical corollary to the above: At times it is lucid to be obscure and obscure to be lucid.

This may be a sensible journalistic maxim, but as a philosophy of art, it lacks courage. And unlike you, I am not even advocating complexity or simplicity. On the contrary, I am saying that these are, or should be, incidental considerations.

A writer's first fidelity should be to their art, to the creative emotion. He should endeavor to successfully realize his vision, in whatever form it inspires. Whether his art is complex or simple must not inform this creative process. It is simply a characteristic of the product of the creative process. I energetically pooh-pooh the idea that the potential perplexity of a group of hypothetical future students, or any readership, real or imagined, should interfere with the creation of art.

Nabokov is often characterized as the cool aesthete, but in actual fact he is also a profound, though extraordinarily subtle, moralist. You're in safe hands, and it's a superb book. I think you should read it.

If you follow your argument to its ultimate logical consequences, the only prose style possible is one that is subjugated to the function of achieving optimal clarity for the greatest number of readers, which rules out virtuosity, the belletristic flourish, poetry and literature itself. What we will be left with are functional texts: news articles, instruction manuals, and cook books. Let's take the example of Ulysses again. One of the most important things to remember when reading it is that the prose style employed is appropriate to each episode. For example, in episode 14, in which the growth of the fetus in the womb is one of the main themes, the text moves chronologically through a series of English prose styles. In this way, the text is stylistically congruent with the theme it develops. Surely you are not suggesting that Joyce should have explained all this in plain English as a substitute for the aesthetic experience of reading the episode? Furthermore, you must realize that "easy to read" is a relative term. Easy to read for whom? As a writer, do you try to make yourself understandable to the lowest common denominator? This is the approach used in television programming, and the results speak for themselves. What you are saying is that writers should not go beyond the intellectual limits of their readership. There are many objections that could be raised here. The simplest of them is that such a limit cannot be determined.

But a sentence or piece of prose is not simply a means to an end. Sometimes (and especially in the case of Ulysses) the medium is a part of the message.

That's why I really like the Amazon Look Inside feature. It's only the first five or six pages, but it at least enables you to get a taste of a writer's prose style.

All she seems to be saying is that you can only properly judge however much of a given book you have read. That's perfectly reasonable. But I definitely do not think you need question the ethics of tossing a book aside. Look at it this way: Everyone (this lady included) has decided not to read a book based on the synopsis or genre. In other words, everyone decides not to read books based on far less than what you base your decision not to continue reading a book on. The only thing it can possibly say about you is that you are a careless shopper.

Strange to say, I have not dreamt about books but I often dream I am reading books. The text I dream I read is legible, intelligible, but it is also fluid, the words changing into other words that alter the meaning of the sentence. Interestingly, the word read actually means "to interpret dreams".

Yes. But all this is really a digression. The main reason I started the thread was to research my hypothesis that no one reads Ulysses.

Hi Smay, It's funny that you should emphasize the "pretentiousness" of Ulysses. Some of its earliest critics—from D. H. Lawrence to Virginia Wolf to G. K. Chesterton—railed against it for being too low and bawdy. Read the following passage, and try telling me with a straight face that Ulysses is pretentious. I'm relieved to hear that! I do not understand the dual resonance model of quantum string theory. Please explain it to me like you were explaining it to a child! I strongly disagree, as explained above. For the third time, yes. As Jeri Johnson said, "You can finish Ulysses, but you cannot finish with it."

I do understand where you're coming from, BookJumper. I also have an extremely low tolerance of obscurity just for the sake of it, or worse, when it is used to make an idea appear more complex, and esoteric, than it really is. But Joyce is not guilty of doing this. Let me give a simple example, which I think gets to the point at issue. It is possible to rewrite a recipe for French toast in prose so complicated that almost no one can understand it. You can also simplify it, but only to a certain point beyond which the idea in complete form cannot be carried. In other words, every idea, while it can be obfuscated almost infinitely, also has a point of irreducible complexity. It follows from this that there is a degree of formal complexity appropriate to the complexity of a given idea, and that a good writer is someone who draws his triangles with no more and no less than three sides. Every idea has a point of irreducible complexity. If you admit this, and also admit that complex ideas are a suitable subject for a work of art, then you must also admit that there is a place for complex works of art. Of course, this does not complete a defense of Ulysses. The question simply becomes: Is Ulysses a three or a fourteen-sided triangle? For us to have that discussion, you must first read it. But I would argue strongly that what Joyce achieves in Ulysses could not be contained in a less-complex text. As McGreevy said, it takes the reader through "the inferno of modern subjectivity," and is therefore, necessarily, and irreducibly, complex. The fact that this makes it a very difficult book to read does not make Joyce an elitist, any more than scientists are elitists when they write quantum equations the layman cannot understand. (Ulysses, let it be said in passing, is infinitely easer to understand than a quantum equation!) At any rate, I appreciate your point of view, BookJumper. My intention is not to convince you to like Ulysses. I am just trying to defend it from the charge of being, "Pretentiously unreadable." I also hope that you'll finish reading it one day so you can come back here and really pan it.