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.

Um, who wrote that?

i was gonna say "do we have a thread for people boasting about the limits of their interests?" but lol do we have *one thread* what was i thinking?

My post was xpost, in case you are wondering

I read (or actually mostly listened to) Ulysses during lockdown, and loved it.

wrote a few thoughts about it here - https://centuriesofsound.com/2020/04/13/james-joyce-ulysses/

I'm reading a good ton of stuff over the last couple of months. Imagine just putting on old football matches where your side lost on penalties and boasting about it.

The irony is that Ronay overwrites like mad and he could do with reading Ulysses.

i find it hard listening to other people read for some reason but thanks for that link to the RTE broadcast, accents definitely add important layers to Joyce

I like Barney on the football weekly podcast, but that article is a classic example of "here are 500 words as requested"

i don't even hate Ronay but the tone of those opening paragraphs, the shit-eating faux norminess, the unchallengeable assumption that everybody would find Friends "easier to engage with" than Ulysses

it's just lazy bullshit wordcount stuff but the fact that there's no need really grinds my gears

Has he weighed in on seeing the Picassos at the modern art museum yet?

the unchallengeable assumption that everybody would find Friends "easier to engage with" than Ulysses

my last stab at the cantos was prompted by an episode of x files so bad it made me dissociate. i still didn’t get past about the fifth or sixth but it felt better on some level or other

Was that when we had a book club thread for them?

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?

(Full disclosure: I'm pretty sure the reason I have this thread bookmarked is bc I found Ulysses hard to engage with last time I tried.)

i don't think that's a fair meaning of "engage with" and it's a stupid generalization. i've thought about picking up Ulysses a bunch of times during the last 2 months, i've never thought that about Friends in my life. i haven't thought about rereading Ulysses as a challenge but because it's a comfort and a pleasure in a way that Ronay is suggesting only Friends can "truly" be

(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.