Game time!
So, I’m trying out something new. This is perfectly silly and supposed to be fun. Serious and/or whiny people, please go away (for the time being). I owe Tom and Lorenzo from Project Rungay for the idea. They have this contest/game-type thing called Virgins versus Vixens, in which a classic Hollywood starlet is pitted against another classic Hollywood starlet, except one has a ‘virgin’ image and the other a ‘vixen.’
I want to do a literary version of that with dead white male canonical writers. (We can try dead white female writers, suicidal poets, dead Beats and Dan Browns later, I promise.)
Why dead white male? Because it’s a list long enough for this to go on for a while. And really, these guys get it so easy, faffing around in syllabi across the world. Let’s make them work a little for their fame.
(All complaints about how this is perpetuating the canon, juvenile, evil, etc, will be treated with disdain. Unless you want to write me a really nice email. : D )
The purpose of the game
is to determine the dead white male among all dead white males in the literary canon — a writer of such virtuosity, universal appeal and general importance to our collective writing and intelligence, and all significant life decisions, that he deserves the title of Canon King, voted through a mostly dubious democratic process.
Here we go!
Our first battle –
James Joyce
versus
TS Eliot
Both are modernist giants. Both names are uttered today with a mixture of awe and revulsion. Both published revolutionary works in the year 1922. Eliot‘s The Wasteland — a masterpiece of allusion and disillusion — continues to be read by literature students and aspiring poets (often one and the same), although not as thoroughly as the copious footnotes that accompany the text. Joyce‘s Ulysses — where does one begin — has allowed us to value incomprehensibility over, well, comprehensibility, and has lead to all kinds of experiments with the poor, unassuming sentence — so far left alone to its own devices while the world poked and prodded at the poetic line and stanza.
Of course, neither Eliot nor Joyce were known solely for these works. Eliot exploded on the scene with The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock in 1910, thereby heralding, some would say, the beginning of modernism. Besides his contributions to theatre, poetry, criticism and publishing (with Faber & Faber), Eliot has bestowed us with the delightful catch phrase ‘April is the cruellest month’ for (Inter-)National Poetry Month and inspired the even more delightful musical Cats.
Joyce, on the other hand, is a lesson to all fiction MFA students: don’t break the rules until you’ve followed them. ‘Remember Joyce!’ says the professor quivering at the thought of having to read twenty mangled — sorry, stream-of-consciousness — short stories of unfortunate length and ambition. ‘Remember Dubliners! You’re not ready to write a Finnegan’s Wake! By god, I hope you’re not!’
It may be argued that with only eight books published during his lifetime, Joyce has been less influential than Eliot, that he was less of a writer for being so spare with his contributions to our exploding canon. On the other hand, Eliot was a poet. He was also, apparently, an anti-Semite, a misogynist and a devout Christian.
Battle away/How to vote
Leave your vote in a comment at this blog post, or if you want to be anonymous, send it to me in an email (aditimachado (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) in)
Feel free to defend your heroes or slur the opponent. Really, feel free.
Voting ends a week from now (midnight GMT, December 25, 2009 — that’s Christmas!).
I shall not be voting.
If this catches on, the winner of Canon Wars: Part 1 shall face a new opponent and so on and so forth. I want to give it a year. (Oh, also, send me names of dead white guys, in an email preferably? I get the feeling I might run out.) (And does anyone want to donate any artwork?)
Eliot. I don’t like the deliberately obtuse.
Gotta give it to Eliot. He had a way with being condescending that’s on his own level, well above the rest. Joyce only came that close to being condescending when referring to how much he hated Ireland.
I’m totally down with Joyce.
Joyce.
I can’t choose. They are both my heros. Kindly include the third son-of-a-bitch: Beckett. No sensible chap can say he is a poet or short story writer without engaging with these towering bastards. Both revolutionized the way of writing and thinking about their respective art forms. But I will give an extra credit to James Joyce, simply because he was working with a genre- prose fiction- which was not taken as seriously as an art form as poetry was. Poetry has been around since centuries . Joyce took fiction to a level where it could boast of having a contemporary masterpiece. The question is not whether you love them or hate them, the question is whether you can OUTDO them by taking the form beyond the frontiers they have taken it to.They took the genres to their limits. We haven’t been able to cross those limits. Who cares for their politics?May be politicians will. But I am an artist. So this canon cant be undone simply by belonging to marginal ethnic communities or genders and writing about my life. It can only be undone if I create possibilities within the form which had never existed earlier.
Eliot. With bonus shout-out to Homer for Ulysses.
this is the way to end the year! yay! but question: are you more or less going face people off by generation/century/period?
i don’t like how joyce is losing this (so far) but i have to give it to eliot, simply on account of having read a greater variety of his work.
besides, you know, the man has stood as the third who is always beside me at all kinds of moments in my life, so what to do.
eliot.
Joyce! Joyce! Joyce!
Sumant, Trevor, Miguel, Vicky, Falstaff, Julie — Thanks for the votes!
Sachin — You’re being serious, aren’t you? : P
Don’t worry, Beckett will be part of the battle.
You said you couldn’t choose, but you also said that Joyce has an edge. Want me to count you as a Joyce supporter?
Space Bar — Not exactly. I want to go through everyone there is, which would take years. Let’s say Joyce wins this one. He’ll go against someone else. If he wins again, he’ll go against another DWM. To be honest, I want it to be never-ending.
But yes, each pair will have some sort of connection. Like I picked Eliot and Joyce because of 1922 and being modernists and all.
Someone once said to me, at a party, that Eliot was the finest user of the English language since Shakespeare, which was presumably supposed to provoke a lively discussion but actually plunged me into a reverie while I tried to work out who I thought it was — someone must be, after all.
My conclusion, later, was Joyce. I’m not entirely sure that Ulysses manages to be more than the sum of its parts, but in terms of the sheer brilliance of his manipulation of the language, it’s hard to think of anyone who compares: Dickens? Milton? Donne?
Eliot is a very fine poet, better than most of his contemporaries, but I think Joyce is an absolutely towering talent.
I suggest this poll is closed as soon as Joyce takes the lead!
@ Harry
You attend some fancy parties, I must say! Welcome to BP. : )
@ Miguel
Hah, my democratic process is not that dubious.
_____
Here’s how the votes stack up so far:
Joyce: 4 (5 if Sachin agrees)
Eliot: 4
It’s pretty close!
“You attend some fancy parties, I must say!”
The conversations-about-Eliot are comfortably outnumbered by drunken-Britney-Spears-karaoke
For a poet it would have to be Eliot, anti-Semtitism notwithstanding, and essentially for The Waste Land. But it would be very hard to do without Ulysses, which is in fact a richer, more humane, more comprehensive, not to say compendious, work. If it had been Pound instead of Eliot, Joyce would easily have got my vote. But The Waste Land occupies a more lightning-torn, unforgettable, vivid space in the mind, and the lightning illuminates a landscape I distinctly recognize.
But then this is really a choice between poetry and prose, isn’t it? The Waste Land does what poems do: it is the poetry machine under stress. Ulysses is a marvellously scholarly, serious-comic romp through Litterachewer that ends up with desire. Nevertheless, it is still prose.
ELIOT. Do caps count for more than one vote?
Yes, Harry, Joyce was a finer user of the English language. Too bad he wasn’t so big on communicating with it.
Eliot.
Eliot.
Eliot.
Otherme: http://scavella.wordpress.com (where this post is gonna be linked).
Joyce. I don’t like the deliberately acute.
And he was totally the dead-white-male stud (in comparison with Eliot): http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/exhibition/dublin/literary/full/M_Joyce.jpg
Eliot was a dork (in comparison with Joyce): http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/authors/2007/09/10/eliot460.jpg
Eliot. And not for The Waste Land necessarily: for Prufrock and Ash Wednesday and Journey of the Magi and the sheer meticulousness of his corpus.
I don’t think Waste Land Eliot is any more of a communicator than Joyce, though. In fact Ulysses seems to me entirely more communicative (as we usually take communicative to mean) than Eliot’s acclaimed sequence. Just my view, of course…
J
I’m going to say Eliot, but mostly because I’ve read and reread more of his work than Joyce’s.
It might, of course, be worth mentioning the somewhat opposing religious convictions of each, Joyce being a lapsed Catholic and Eliot converting to Anglicanism. Also, people always forget that Eliot was born an American, and he was born in my home state no less. So props to that!
JOYCE.
Joyce wrote filthy scatological love letters. Joyce gave John Cage something to do. Joyce may have been insane. Joyce made the word “epiphany” secular.
Eliot had Pound in the background who really was insane but not in a grand way. I’m allergic to cats.
As a schoolboy in an English Grammar school I was exposed to Eliot, but was pummelled with Joyce.
I developed a reluctant admiration for the Irishman, that plus the hysteria surrounding the banishment of Ulysses in parts of North America, made me envious. I wanted to write a book that could be nationally banned, but you know, in a good way – for being innovative, irreverent and original.
TSE hung out with Virginia Woolf and therefore always seemed stuffy to me. I felt his constant allusions to obscure classics pretentious, like he was showing-off his literary education, but then what did I know?
Well, really, at the time, next to nothing, but I didn’t like him rubbing my nose in it. Yet, ever since, I have been trying to emulate his knowledge, or at least the knowledge I suposed him to have had. Then again he really didn’t have that many choices for entertainment did he?
So, for me, Joyce is the DWM of choice here, mainly because I think it itakes a huge amount of concentration to hold the concept of your novel in your head long enough to get it down on paper. A man with TSE’s education, background, living in an era without distractions like Avatar and HBO, can scribble out a Wasteland in a slow weekend. It takes a good many crates of Scotch to write Ulysses.
Geoff
Joyce.
I haven’t read either thoroughly and I’m not a big fan of what I have read. I say Joyce because he went crazier than Eliot, and that’s as much a staple quality of canonical writers as the towering artworks.
Eliot. Fucking love Prufrock. The Wasteland is cool, too.
@ George S
‘For a poet it would have to be Eliot, anti-Semtitism notwithstanding, and essentially for The Waste Land.’
So Eliot then? : )
‘But then this is really a choice between poetry and prose, isn’t it?’
It is. I didn’t realise it until now, but it is. Apparently Joyce wrote poems too, but I’m sure I’ve never read any of them.
@ James
I agree with you entirely. Well, not so much about Ulysses because I haven’t bothered reading beyond the first few pages. I would vote for Eliot based on Ash Wednesday alone.
@ AR, Billdozer, Geoff, Jon, Lane, K
Thanks for voting
_____
Votes so far:
Joyce: 8 + Sachin?
Eliot: 8 + George S?
Yes, Aditi – Eliot then, but only by a narrow squeak. Joyce’s poems are pretty poor stuff really. There is a thin volume, ‘Pomes Penyeach’, which shows, on the whole, the skittery side of Joyce. Celtic Twilight with a few knobs on. So he is, for me, clearly a prose writer, albeit a great one, even though I find the balance in Joyce between fribble and whimsy on the one hand and sheer exultation in language and the density of human life on the other a problem. I often think Joyce is loved and sold in sentimental fashion in Dublin, in much the same way as Burns is in Edinburgh.
Put me down for Eliot and those bats with baby faces in the violet light. I’m sure I have seen them.
Eliot.
Hi, Aditi, and here’s wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas.
Joyce, baby! Eliot was like a one-page stand ‘d much rather forget.
Eliot.
Votes:
Joyce: 9 + Sachin?
Eliot: 11
Joyce, hands-down. Much more fun. Does Eliot have a day of his very own like BloomsDay, celebrated all over the world? (Yes, even here in the Antipodes, at Molly Bloom’s pub in Melbourne). Are there guided tours of the route his work traverses? Does he have a tower to call his own?
No he does not. Methinks this is because he lacks a sense of humour.
Lisa Hill, ANZ Litlovers aka Ulysses, Disordered Thoughts of an Amateur
PS Votes that admit to not having read both should be discounted by a percentage just enough to ensure that Joyce wins.
Did I say The Waste Land was communicative? It isn’t, but then there’s Prufrock, Ash Wednesday (ahhh), and (above all) Old Possum. Forget the stuffy exterior and think of Skimbleshanks, the Rum Tum Tugger, and of course Macavity. Joyce just doesn’t have that range. You have to be grown up, and between the ages of, say, 20 and 45, to really enjoy Joyce — you need energy and active brain cells to do it. Eliot I read to my two-year-old cousin and he has NEVER forgotten Old Possum at all.
Eliot. Eliot. I admire Joyce but wouldn’t go to sleep with him on my nightstand. His is a reading-in-the-carrel sort of genius. Eliot you can read on the plane.
Did I make myself clear? Eliot.
Oh, well, if reading on the plane or to children are the criteria, let’s have Dan Brown & Dr Seuss…
So Joyce has a shelf-life, eh? A use-by date? I wonder what NicoB thinks might be suitable reading for ‘inactive brain cells’ like mine then, because 45 was a while ago for me, and I’m reading Joyce for the 3rd time. And he’s on my bedside table too.
Lisa H: I really don’t think someone whose points in support of Joyce are Bloomsday, guided tours and a tower (all of which means only that Joyce’s work is more squarely married to physical place and time) is in any position to criticize other people’s criteria.
And for the record, some of us would argue there ought to be guided tours of the route Eliot’s work traverses – see here
*chuckle* Falstaff!, methinks you failed to note that ’tis JJ’s *sense of humour* that expresses itself in joyous recreations of his art i.e. towers and tours and shared readings on B’Day. Is it not a wonder that a ‘modernist giant’ can make you laugh out loud? Yea verily, reading Joyce is jolly good fun. Better than cryptic crosswords. (Even with aging brain cells LOL)
Lisa
For goodness’ sake. Absolutely Eliot.
While Joyce has some gems, like “The Dead,” he peaked early and went downhill from there. Of course his later works are genius, but there’s a reason they’re not better read. It’s the same reason Eliot’s Four Quartets aren’t esteemed nearly as much as The Waste Land and Prufrock–if people can’t understand your art, what good is it? It’s like a technology that does something fabulous that you don’t know how to use. Interesting question to pose–can art be great if no one understands it?
Eliot broke ground over a wider literary range than Joyce. Joyce picked a direction and got lost somewhere.
Final tally.
Joyce: 10 + Sachin?
Eliot: 12
____
So Eliot wins (by a squeak), even with Sachin’s vote.
[...] Eliot, with his confusing roots and less than appealing looks*, is not entirely without merit. In fact, he beat James Joyce at this game. Let’s not repeat his virtues; you can see all the action here. [...]
well, based on personality (because neither of their writing appeals to me on a visceral level), i’d go with Joyce. true irishman over pseudo-englishman.