Reading Ulysses

Ignore the jokers who tell you to just go with the flow and let it all wash over you like tonic wine over a drunk's vest, unless you're really sure you know where the cruise-control is on your psyche. I'd recommend reading it in conjunction with a good guide. Harry Blamires' 'The New Bloomsday Book' is very good. Almost everything is much more fun when you understand what's going on and, as Joyce was far smarter than you, me, and everyone we know put together, it's nice to have someone to tell you exactly what you understand and why, and to take that knitting needle out of your ear immediately.

I suggest you just read the entire thing aloud on June 16th, which will be exactly 100 years after the day on which the book takes place. And I am told it takes about 24 hours to read aloud. So.

But Ulysses does have these meta structures and it is fun and instructive to learn what they are. Joyce might not be that much smarter than us, as Casuistry says, but he's shart as a whip, funny as can be and maybe too clever by half. So after you've read it the first time then get the books the DM suggests and go through it again.

Curiously, this is not quite true. I have now spent almost twice as many years reading it as JJ spent writing it.

You might say that I did not spend them 'solidly' reading it. That would be partially true. But really, I have spent a lot of time reading that book; and when I wasn't reading it I was usually thinking about it, or about whether Pat van den Hauwe was worse than Terry Fenwick or vice versa.

1. Joyce takes his lavish revenge on the English language and aspects of English culture, in a project which casts a steelpencold critical eye on history yet also abounds in utopian promise.

2. Van den Hauwe is worse.

I'm not suggesting that Joyce wasn't smart, though. Just that he wasn't intimidatingly smart, as far as I can tell. Or, I mean, no smarter than several of the people on ILX.

Well, I found it funny. Despite all the fun stuff for lit-majors and such the tone is generally pretty light.

I look forward, to finding out.

I wonder if anyone has tried to count the words in Finnegans Wake.

i have reread parts w/o a companion text, but i can't imagine figuring it out on the first go round

Of course, I am reading Ulysses as part of my own literary death match, put forth by Engineering Sux. Taking the contenders in alphabetical order, I read Gravity's Rainbow for the first time a few weeks ago. I may read other Pynchon in the future, but I can't imagine picking up that puerile, slapstick work for pleasure ever again. Ulysses won the match in the first 50 pages.

Which raises an interesting question - how much of a book do you need to understand for it to be enjoyable? I suspect this is largely a question of temperament: Reader A can understand 80% of a book and find it a pleasurable read; Reader B understands 90% and finds it frustratingly obscure.

But he / she is slightly and understandably wrong on one count. The Citizen borrowed Garryowen from Giltrap, who is Gerty's grandfather. The narrator of 'Cyclops' tells us the first of those two facts.

Yes that's my point - I just can't do that. I'm not saying I need to understand a book 100% before I can enjoy it but I have a relatively low tolerance of obscurity.

he did give himself a good long while to write Ulysses, more than any of us have given to reading it, you know?

Curiously, this is not quite true. I have now spent almost twice as many years reading it as JJ spent writing it.

Someone told me that Joyce once said (I paraphrase) "all that I ask of my readers is that they devote their lives to the understanding of my work". I've never seen it written anywhere, but the guy who told me this wouldn't have made it up (it's just possible he had been misled himself).

I'm not entirely sure "meaning" or "understanding" can be quantified. But even if you do understand "80%" of a text, what if it's the wrong 80%? What if you understand 100% of a text, but your understanding diverges with everyone else's, including the author's? A text like "Lolita" you can read all the way through and feel as though you "understood" it and then go back and reread it and discover there was a whole secret code going on during the novel that you might not have known to see the first time.

Finepox: Jaq is a lady-style person.

I don't disagree with any of that & in fact anticipated the objection. But I decided I could spend long enough trying to refine what I'm saying to remove this kind of ambiguity, probably still without total success. If we get into philosophical discussion about semantics none of us will ever get out again. I think my basic point is clear enough.

(a stupid generalization by Ronay, sorry Sund4r :D )

glancing at its pages is likely to produce feelings similar to being stabbed through the eye with a knitting needle dipped in industrial glue.

Very strange.

For one thing, what is industrial glue? Has BR seen it? Why would it make a knitting needle worse?

For another, being stabbed in the eye with a knitting needle would (supposing you lost your sight) be so bad that comparing anything to it is tasteless.

For another, Ulysses has nothing do with any such feelings. I am going to be participating in a 2-hour close reading of it later today, as I do frequently. It will be quite nice to read as it always is. It can raise ambiguities, but it's mostly not very difficult.

The quotation gives a general impression that BR knows nothing - either about reading or about industrial glue.

I should probably read his actual article to check, though.

I feel that way about Pierrot Lunaire but I'd still say it's more difficult to engage with than "Wonderwall" for a new listener (in the sense that I described, not in the sense that it would make someone collapse on the couch and crave "All Star" by Smash Mouth). That said, the excerpt is totally idiotic otherwise so yeah. I was just thinking about the obstacles and ways into Ulysses more than about a stupid sports column, I guess.xp

I was actually just thinking that as my concentration is coming back I might have another go at Ulysses this year. I am not up on Joyce at all really, only read DUBLINERS for the first time pretty recently. I dip into Finnegans wake pretty often tho as it’s very easy to engage with in quite a superficial way, its pleasures are obvious and immediate. Actually reading it all the way through and making meaning from it would be trickier for me.

I always loved the line from Harold Nicolson’s diary about when he met JJ: “he has the loveliest voice I know — liquid and soft with undercurrents of gurgle” this quote has always been in my mind when I’ve read any Joyce

xp

ulysses is demanding but it is beautiful and humane and anyone who thinks it is an example of a "punishing" kind of modernism doesn't know what they are talking about

there is art that is meant to shock or provoke discomfort. ulysses isn't an example of that.

being stabbed in the eye with a knitting needle
Somewhere in this video which I can't watch I believe there is an impression of this sensation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCenwG3iUVU

I did love Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist btw.

Haven't changed my position since this post: Reading Ulysses

This unabridged RTE dramatisation is excellent, if anyone wants it in that form

https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook

Thanks. I have the version read by this guy

I've now read the Ronay article itself.

Odd thing is it's hard from this to tell whether he has actually read Ulysses. You would think he has, but nothing he says about it gives that impression.

There are three apparent 'quotations' spaced through the text. The first is not a real quotation, more a paraphrase of (or gloss on) what's in the book.

His whole conceit would have been a lot neater and more meaningful if the match had been played on 16th June - as of course many World Cup matches have been.

I was in Dublin on 16.6.2002 and watched Ireland vs Spain in a pub. This was almost certainly even mentioned on ILX at the time.

the last time i was in a room with him i tried teasing the always very teasable zappa&joyce fan b3n w4tson by saying that i much prefer reading finnegans wake as a twitter account and he totally owned me to saying "twitter is the best way to read it, yes"

I dm’d james joyce and he agrees

does he say ulysses is bad and he wishes he hadnt written it? thats what he told me

😮

I mean, isn't that true about Friends vs Ulysses, at least for people who have reference points for 90s American culture? It's easy to dislike Friends (which is still engagement) but surely it asks less of you in terms of being able to watch and understand?

― Feel a million filaments (Sund4r), Tuesday, 26 May 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Different medium and all but the striking thing about Friends is how it asks absolutely nothing of you? You can put it on for hours and not remember a thing after, or barely move a muscle. It's quite an achievement btw.

Only other thing that seems like it is Big Bang Theory.

YOU WERE ON A BREAK

BBT eventually - sooner rather than later - asks of you, the viewer, why you put up with and engage in laughing at some deeply unpleasant characters*, Sheldon first and foremost. It's probably bcz the audience laughter out of a tin directed you to do so. You'll stop doing it yourself once you realize you're being had.

* Not remotely in any way like Seinfeld btw

I don't think I would have made it to the end of Ulysses if I hadn't taken a class on it as an undergrad. Then again, I was too immersed in a Darkly Tragic mental paradigm at the time to even begin 'getting' it.

xp this is also my problem with Friends, I cannot stand them, therefore it is bad background TV for me.

Friends has almost ruined friendship for me tbh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Iwmcs1hps

+1 for the RTE audio dramatisation. I would listen to it all day at work then switch to the text when I got home. The mix of mediums kind of felt like the perfect way to absorb it, one of my favorite reading experiences.

I've never listened in anything like full to the RTE, but BBC radio 1991 is my own gold standard for this.

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

perfection.

Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's oncoming. Of Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.

Sirens?

Oxen of the Sun i think

yes indeed.

ICYMI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1WwK92kT3c

A terrific review of Ulysses from Edmund Wilson, July 1922.

https://newrepublic.com/article/114325/james-joyces-ulysses-reviewed-edmund-wilson

I think he really gets to the heart of the matter in his critique of both Cyclops and Circe, which I found as tedious as he does. Maybe I'd feel differently now. BUT he admires the book immensely, for all that and feels humbled by it:

Ulysses has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy. Since I have read it, the texture of other novelists seems intolerably loose and careless; when I come suddenly unawares upon a page that I have written myself I quake like a guilty thing surprised.

Yes, I like that last statement a lot. It points to something important.

But 'Cyclops' is one of the least tedious things I've ever read.

#OtD 26 Aug 1934 Karl Radek denounced James Joyce's Ulysses at the Soviet Writers' Congress as a "heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope". It was here that Socialist Realism was adopted as the official literary style of the USSR pic.twitter.com/RtrqT4JhVz

— Working Class Literature (@workingclasslit) August 26, 2020

xp cyclops and circe are the funniest chapters in a funny book

I thought something on a run the other day about the two modernist novelists I think about the most.

Stream of consciousness is not a good way to describe the narrative style of this book. It is language, not consciousness, that contains the poetic mystery, that is always moving in a “stream,” that keeps reality always in a state of becoming. Consciousness, in the book, where it is represented at all, is a numinous presence, behind the thoughts, which are made of language. Consciousness is intersubjective too, that’s why the narrative moves among minds.

Faulkner is more of a stream of consciousness writer. For him, the human mind is the source of depth, mystery, and misery—guilt that reaches beyond the self and into history. Joyce locates this stuff in language more so than the individual mind.

Consciousness, in the book, where it is represented at all, is a numinous presence, behind the thoughts, which are made of language.

FWIW I don't think I see this, as it seems to me that the distinction between language and cs 'cancels all the way through'.

That is, as this is a book made wholly of words, cs can *only* be visible to us in language, so even if JJ does think there's a cs behind language, he couldn't really show it to us.

A good way to pursue this might be to think of the distinction between say episode 8 and episode 13.

Episode 8 contains 3rd person narrative, dialogue - and interior monologue (which I take to be a representation of cs).

Episode 13 contains that in its 2nd half (so come to think of it you don't even need to look at episode 8 for comparison), but in its 1st half it contains an ornate, excessive, stylised language (Gerty, romance, etc). It is often said that this depicts Gerty's 'consciousness'. But this seems to be half-true at best -- because we must actually assume that, as a human subject in the same place and time as eg: Mr Bloom, she really has an interior monologue similar in form to his. So 'her' language is really something else: an openly artificial literary projection playing on the kinds of thing that affect her cs.

The use of this is that it gives us a point of comparison and contrast, within the book, between something that is notionally real (interior monologue, directly representing cs), and something that isn't, and isn't to be taken as such (ornate parody, 'representing' cs at a distance). That leads me toward the sense that for Joyce, the basic interior monologue (as in episode 8) *is* to be taken as, let's say, 'as close to consciousness as we can get'.

As for the narrative 'moving between minds': well, it can show *different* minds, by different interior monologues -- though it rarely does this, ie: we rarely get one character's cs and then cut into another, and back again. For instance we don't see Haines' or Mulligan's interior monologue at all in episode 1, and we don't see Josie Breen's, during her conversation with Bloom in episode 8; we only see his, thinking about her.

If you mean something like 'blurring the difference between minds', which sounds closer to 'intersubjectivity', then the one very good example of that I can think of is episode 11, where there is a real and challenging sense of this. (Woolf had notions of group consciousness that may be relevant here.) I don't so much recall that in other episodes, except 15 which is rather a special case as it mostly doesn't purport to show anything real but rather a vast re-projection of the contents of the text.

Your quote of the "Woodshadows" passage, and treeship re use of language, had me thinking of Joyce using language as painting---in oils, say: nothing that would dry very quickly, and still look wet/ready for another go x years later, like the Van Goghs I very eventually saw in person----but then I also started remembering the context, and thought of him as painting on scenes from the novel-as-novel, frames of the movie----I saw the 1967 movie: on VHS, across the bedroom, it was alright, walking around downtown and going out to the Baily Optic (She gazed out towards the distant sea. It was like the paintings that man used to do on the pavement with all the coloured chalks and such a pity too leaving them there to be all blotted out, the evening and the clouds coming out and the Bailey light on Howth…
Champlin and Ebert loved it, though Kael and Kaufman found it reductive. I'd like a re-do, more imaginative (getting more inside my head on laptop and headphones?), but mainly it's probably better to make your own movie, as the story comes through the painting process (with the "classical" starting points as storyboard, or parts of it).
Also maybe better to read it aloud---thinking of the film Passages From Finnegan's Wake, and how Joyce's eyes were so bad, and he was known to some extent early on for his musical talents, so that sonic properties of his imagery, and use of dynamics, counterpoint, fugue, characters as instruments---? I haven't seen that flick, but always read good things about it, maybe overall better regarded than Strick's Ulysses, anyway I read some of this:
https://www.filmcomment.com/article/mary-ellen-bute-passages-from-finnegans-wake/
Looks like at least some of her film can be streamed here and there; Ulysses too.
I'll try some of those passages aloud when they're at hand, local library no longer has FW though. (Feel more motivated to continue w Faulkner at this point.)
Oh yeah, also seemed like something painterly about Dubliners and Portrait, the former more in placement of figures in shading, planes, but nothing static about any of this, or if/when so, well-timed.

How weird re this thread revive. I reread Chapters Two and Six last weekend.

Also, that article starts with a quote from the old folk song about Finnegan's wake, so this film, from 1966, could be seen as the 60s art-roots thing, like Dylan, The Band, Beefheart, Art Ensemble of Chicago's "Ancient To The Future" theme, ditto Sun Ra etc.---which is a roots thing itself, going back to early 20th Century development of jazz, also Picasso's fascination with African masks etc., also Joyce going beyond Dubliners, back to folk and even more ancient world classical elements, towards something new.

(The film, as described in this article, incl. scenes from folk song and book, also it was released in '66, so that's why I related it to Dylan etc.)

of course, all art is "an art-roots thing," in various ways---no doubt the Babylonians, Homer, Gospel-writers and (maybe especially King James's) translators were thinking to some extent, "Hey, cool material, all in the Public Domain---how can I bring out, what can I do with the best qualities?"---audiences to some extent "Go man Gogh!") But I'm trying to stay with thread-relevant specifics, however speculative.
Also, Joyce's eyes got even worse, and he came to rely on dictation, pressing his friends into service---Beckett, setting the record straight re being J.'s "secretary," which sounds like something you might get paid for, told his biographer Dierdre Barr that during one such session, another guy dropped by, and Joyce said, "Hello, Joe. Put that in: 'Hello Joe,'" and Beckett found this unnerving. But that kind of going with the flow, to whatever overall extent, might be another reason for reading it aloud, getting into it that way, in your own surroundings.

"It" being FW especially, but not only.

Think I might try reading some later Henry James aloud--the parts where he seems to be chanelling something and/or remixing on the fly, automatic writing? (Proust too, although he was one who might revise up to the last second, scribbling on galleys, layers on the fly, in search of time regained again and again, so the sense of seeming all fresh and inspired in the moment, the thing you're supposed to go for, gets screwed with, which is also an or the art thing in Modern times, to some extent: oooo, subversion!---Xgau on punks/rock&roll: "bored enough to fuck with it.")

But a form of idealism too! And sheer cussedness. Never just the one thing, which certainly seems true of Joyce.

Dow, I think the Beckett story was just that JJ said 'Come in' to a knock on the door. Maybe you read a different version. But I've also heard that this is a myth and no-one can find the relevant moment in FW.

I like both films but I couldn't quite follow your initial statement about Strick's. Both films are worth watching anyway. I never 2004's film BLOOM.

I saw the 1967 movie: on VHS, across the bedroom, it was alright, walking around downtown and going out to the Baily Optic (quote here seemed relevant re painting)...Champlin and Ebert loved it, though Kael and Kaufman found it reductive. I'd like a re-do, more imaginative Did you have a question about these comments?

The basic black & white, shades of grey realism of the film , enhanced by seeing it across the room on VHS, vs thinking of a more fluid approach, streaming on laptop and headphones, maybe more involving that way (as Strick's film might be if taken in that way)