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.

i don't think there's a specific line reference here but i'd need a line # to match it to an annotation because i'm too lazy to reread it right now. i'm too lazy to even grab it. but they do detail every execution listed and every romantic lit reference (and a lot of cyclops stuff from the iliad) so i'm guessing this particular reference is not about the literal health of the land in portugal (also isn't portugal a different type of tree? more like mediterranean cypress / coastal pine type stuff?)

"is the land strong enough to support our struggle" / "do its fortunes mirror ours" ... that's the broad tenor of the romantic works referenced

like to illustrate the theme: this is the one that ends with blazes boylan bragging about boxing, i think there's a sort of pynchon-esque fantasy about him punching someone (leo?) super hard. some ridiculous physical comedy thing. or maybe it's the idea of bloom punching boylan (cyclops). but there's a similar thing: this local boy / hometown hero, muscular studly and virile (sleeping with bloom's wife) gathering this primal energy and rising up like a force of nature to revenge himself on the foreign invader (i think it's leo?)

Both countries underwent serious deforestation in the 18th and 19th centuries. The new independent Irish state started reforestation efforts (around the time of Ulysses's publication), and Portugal was reforested (more successfully) after WWII.

I think this explains it, thanks.

idk enough about irish or portugese politics but from 1834 - 1920ish portugese are having wars of "republicanism" (starts w/ "charterist rebellion" etc)

Haha, interesting to see it smushed up like that, I guess it's true but I'd never thought of this as one continous historical moment. There was a very bloody civil war between absolutist and liberal monarchists between 1832 and 1834, who were supporting different members of the royal family for succession of the throne. After that you the rest of the 19th century goes by under a relatively stable constitutional monarchy, until the country's progressively worse economic position (and failing to stand up to the big dogs in the colonial plunder game) leads to a regicide in 1908 and a republican revolution in 1910. This regime failed to change the nation's fortunes however, and of course then WWI comes in, leading to the 1926 coup that started the process of turning Portugal into the facist regime it remained until 1974. Doesn't strike me as a very good parallel for Ireland's problems, though I guess blood is blood.

i think there's a sort of pynchon-esque fantasy about him punching someone (leo?) super hard. some ridiculous physical comedy thing. or maybe it's the idea of bloom punching boylan (cyclops). but there's a similar thing: this local boy / hometown hero, muscular studly and virile (sleeping with bloom's wife) gathering this primal energy and rising up like a force of nature to revenge himself on the foreign invader (i think it's leo?)

Yes, it's Bloom, who previously claimed Ireland as his country too. The depictions of anti-semitism in the novel are another thing that I feel like I should read a few essays on before venturing any opinion at all.

idk if it's interesting. it's just the lack of knowledge about the details of this time and place. i know the basics of the history of france and italy in that century and i know everywhere else it's broadly a similar story

but i didn't mean to try to give you a definitive answer. i was more just describing my experience of "reading ulysses". i know my teacher (who was an adherent of gifford) is just describing one critical view, but i always thought it was interesting one.

bishop called it joyce's "polytropism", and he thought it was the extension of stephen's search for meaning. it wasn't so much about whether one reference or another was more apt, but rather to try to pile on denser and desner layers of reference and analogy and simile to reflect a sort of idea of what modernism and our experience of modern living is like. so the idea (that these guys had) is that it's not about the details or 1:1 correspondences of any particular parallel, but just the compulsive act of doing them over and over again, and broadly organizing chapters in thematic clusters ... in cyclops it's the cyclops, but also the idea of repelling invaders or usurpers by force, and then more generally about tests of strength, and so on. he actually lists several other "categories" for each chapter (like symbol, color, etc) but aside from following the odyssey, the idea of dividing into bodily systems and also rhetorical techniques as organizing principles resonated with me. i guess another example would be that this chapter has millions of plant references, though gifford himself doesn't list "plants" or "trees" as an overriding symbol scheme here (unless i'm missing something, the notation is a bit cryptic)

but yeah, that's just the experience i personally had of "reading ulysses", and the critical framework (one of many no doubt) that i learned, didn't mean to be presciptive

i do remember almost having an aneurysm in class because early on another student asked why we had to buy the annotations if understanding the details of any given annotation didn't matter (and i thought fair point because then by induction not knowing the details of any of the references is also okay) and the professor replied "it's like a boooofayyyy, you take what you like"

Your head it simply swirls.

yeah so that’s calypso, and the dog in proteus (i think ch 3) that runs down the strand toward stephen sort of shimmers like a mirage and changes through many forms.

my term paper ( i’m a science major ok) was an argument that that and other druggy imagery was foreshadowing the thematic structure of the novel (we’re going to try on every set of tropes for explaining our experiences until we find one that restores whatever we lost when we had a crisis of faith / became exiles / entered modernity)

iirc the path stephen takes along the strand (beach?) itself is a sort of “spiral jetty” and the prof said if you filmed the walk as a pov and sped it up it would be as if dublin was spinning around you

great moments in regurgitating back yr professors lectures! i think i have told this story before on ilx, this time i should add that although i got full credit and my paper had good mechanics etc my focus on psychedelic imagery is now personally embarrassing because i was also really into op art and strobe lights and lucid dreaming and reptilians at the time

If you can shimmy past the 'ineluctable modality' brain-riff (and you're fine that a major character, pretty much an avatar of J.J. himself, is supposed to be an irritating pseud) then the Oxen of the Sun chapter (14) is the next guardian on the threshold. It'll stamp on your foot and call your mother a drug-dealer. This is the doldrums of the bookmark where most assaults on the text short of the kamikaze end up.

I have arrived here and the first couple of pages were indeed "oy vey" but once I sussed out it's just a medieval style used as a metaphor for some more of the usual drinking and discoursing it got easier, like I've read Dave Sim's Cerebus I know how this works. Think that while a lot of what makes Ulysses obscure now was less so in its time (starting with the Roman mass for instance) some other stuff is probably more accessible now, namedropping commercials, pastiches of different styles. Bloom hasn't said "well that just happened" yet but it's surely only a matter of time.

Nowhere near the end of the chapter though and I might still have plenty of challenges ahead.

the dog in proteus (i think ch 3) that runs down the strand toward stephen sort of shimmers like a mirage and changes through many forms

still not read it. did just see this which puts it slightly higher on my to read list
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl2jiVzKmTg
outline of the story done for children. It was in the Arts Festival which just ended.
Reminds me of the 70s Paddington though no puppets used just still paper figures

we’re going to try on every set of tropes for explaining our experiences until we find one that restores whatever we lost when we had a crisis of faith / became exiles / entered modernity

all of these work ... and none of them do

yeah exactly!! the home ulysses returns to is not the home he left, even when he clears it of suitors and restores his throne, because the odyssey has changed him etc. there’s also the metaphor of … i believe the boat from the ulysses? like the farmer who’s had the axe for five generations, the handle has been replace three times and the blade twice …

that was the professor’s take anyway, without getting into too much depth the professor’s take was that “what worked” was when leo and stephen glimpse a new possibility for “restoration” when they sort of experience this brief ersatz father / son relationship (leo saving drunk stephen)

even though their crisis is different, the recognize each other as fellow travelers, kindred spirits, because they are both preoccupied with internal exile, that search, and yes love of humanity and love of language

sorry the ship of theseus

Trigger's broom, like

I'm reading the Odyssey at the moment, and thinking about rereading Ulysses afterwards, to understand how the parts match. I used to just think that Ulysses was taking an archetypal epic and turning it into everyday modern life, but wow, the Odyssey is much weirder than I thought. The Proteus story, for instance, is a weird little tale inside a tale.

the ending is very different - bloom chooses compassion and empathy, seeing the excitement of the early stages of romance with molly - mirrored in molly’s exciting infidelity with blazes boylan (does she notice his exemplary humanity? idk depends how you interpret the last bit of the last chapter)

odysseus goes john wick

frederik the “tale within a tale” thing is what the professor called “novel of everything”

other examples are like divine comedy, decameron, canterbury tales, arabian nights (ayyo pier paolo), don quixote, balzac’s books, moby dick etc

i think the idea is it’s purporting to show “the broad sweep of humanity” through these episodes. idk if that idea has any traction but it’s key (or was in my prof’s mind, rip) to why he chose a story about a spectrum of human folly vs something like oedipus rex, which might be focused on just hubris etc

he* being joyce, choosing specifically odyssey over say iliad or antigone

so for him it was not just an archetypal epic but a very specific certain sort of one.

we talked a lot for example about about how it (ulysses, don quixote) is sort of like a bildungsroman (another “archetypal epic”) but also not actually a bildungsroman (that was portrait of the artist anyway)

Right, and the 'everything' in The Odyssey is a lot weirder then I suspected. The world is still steeped in trauma from the Trojan war - nobody can have a conversation without mentioning someone who died there, it seems - but it's also at the cusp of it becoming history. A new generation, including Telemachos of course, weren't there. They just still live with the aftermath, with Ithaca still being in chaos, and the whole thing begins with news that Orestes has FINALLY slain Aighistos and avenged the murder of Agamemnon. It's like a time of anarchy is closing, but also a time where the heroes saw wonders and magic in strange places - including Menelaos meeting and capturing Proteus.

My standard line has been that these sort of Modernistic 'everything' works - Ulysses, Proust, The Waste Land, The Cantos - are trying to put the world back in order after WWI, but Joyce seems more complex. I read Finnegans Wake last year, and I got the feeling that it was quite significant that it was begun at the time of the Irish Civil War. I'm wondering if it means something, that Joyce is writing Ulysses and FW while Ireland is going through it's birth, which is traumatic, but in extremely complex and evershifting ways as well. He never really makes order, he creates shapeshifting and ever-changing worlds, where order is always fleeting and still fought over.

That is, he seems more postmodern than modern already.

loling at repeated use of "hey, presto" in the bull chapter

xp to frederick that's getting into the part that they reserved for the follow up class. this was like an upper division "interest check" class for a senior seminar taught by the same guy that you might take if you are considering entering "joyce studies" or "irish lit" ... and so he really focused more on situating it in modernism vs getting in-depth into the cultural history parts (which i believe they did in the follow-up)

i do remember the professors pushed the line that it is not the "birth" of modern ireland, it is the "rebirth" of an irish heritage, in the same way that modern day zionism purports to be a rebirth of the original jewish state (and which, in their own ways, both bloom and stephen walk away from, then spiral back into)

or, if you prefer, spiral out of, into (yes) a world wider than our (his) experience of modernity

one of the big hurdles in oxen of the sun is wondering why all these young men have chosen to go on a massive bender in a maternity hospital.

Heh

A couple of them are students there iirc

yes, and on shift, and the others are paying them a visit. it's not wildly implausible, but still odd. it honestly was a factor in me giving up on my first attempt many years ago, without any online guides. sure the language was the main thing but i just didn't have a handle on the big picture. they're having a big piss up? but they're in a hospital?

I imagine the standards of the day were somewhat different

Lol

Boys but don’t think I don’t know what you are about in that hospital of yours!

I read it at 16 without any guides too and yeah, they are necessary for any number of reasons. But I still enjoyed the headiness of it all.
On my recent reread I availed myself of Harry Blamires, Jeri Johnson etc. Cleared up loads of mysteries.

Re the hospital, I don't know, my assumption is that as it's a teaching hospital there are facilities/spaces for the students to eat and drink (and even board as well?), and as NV indicates, the kind of status that male students had in those days, and the leeway they were given, is rather different from today; so the place feels halfway between a college and a hospital, essentially. I could look up what took place at Holles Street Hospital, but this is what i take from it, and I trust Joyce is not inventing it.

To me Scylla and Charybdis feels more incongruous, the other fellas are clearly not all that interested in what Stephen has to say, they have stuff to do, and yet they indulge him in his monologue. I very much doubt Stephen cannot see their bored or unamused expressions, but he ploughs on, probably trying to impress AE. I feel Joyce's desire to express his Shakespeare theory trumped his sense of the veridical, and he knows someone would likely have told Stephen to pipe down.

“After 10 attempts at reading and completing James Joyce’s magnificent ‘Ulysses’ and only making it to page 10 each time, on attempt number 11, I finally did it! Hallelujah! ‘Ulysses’ should be a real inspiration to anyone interested in breaking the rules in any art form.” -Ron📚 pic.twitter.com/m0Hhdavi6y

— S P A R K S (@sparksofficial) April 26, 2024

He finally made it to page 11. Now for the rest of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOO5S4vxi0o

well that may inspire me to pick it up again

"The Lady is Lingering" on Indiscreet borrows some lines from a Henry Miller book, Ron can make something out of literary inspiration.

Nearly done with Circe. Honestly a bit underwhelmed this time around. The connections to the Odyssey don't really add that much, without that the structure falls a bit apart. And without the structure, it seems like a bunch of experiments brought together, and some of them work a lot better than others. Those that work, though, are obviously incredible, I''m not hating. But reading Finnegans Wake two years ago was a bigger experience.

I've never managed to make it very far in the Wake.

tbf neither does the Wake

I keep finwake as an open window on my phone and re-read bits of it when I have time. The annotations are great. I like to read it aloud to myself, half the enjoyment is in the mouthfeel of it

what annotated version are you reading on your phone?

I told a Joyce professor I met that I was afraid of the Wake, he laughed and said "be afraid. I've spent 50 years programming myself to read this book." So that was encouraging.

Two things I took away from the Wake:

1) Even though all the words stayed mostly incomprehensible throughout, it's often easy to grasp the tone/discourse of the text. If it's a lesson, a flirty conversation, if it's satire, elegy, mystery, etc. So in some way you can just float along, and get an emotional experience out of it. And enough things recur to get a sort of grip on a sort of plot.

2) Nobody understands Finnegans Wake anyway, so you're free to just make up your own interpretation. While Ulysses seems a lot more settled, the meaning of Finnegan's Wake is still up for debate. To me, it seemed to be about the Irish Civil War in a lot of ways. Or something like that. About trauma, the way so much modernism is about trauma, but a very different trauma than WWI.

finwake [dot] com!

The book comes alive when you read it aloud to yourself, it’s as much music as it is text