Reading Ulysses

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.

So to "understand" Ulysses in the common sense of the word is impossible. All you ever do is get better acquainted with it. The fact that it points you at other facts, that you can learn about it from outside of it, is just a fact of the intertextuality of knowledge. Which is an interesting and often overlooked point about knowledge, I think.

Dublin is obscure, in a sense, possibly, the first time you go there. Especially, perhaps, if you don't take any guide books or maps. But less so if you live there, I imagine.

Maybe something somewhat parallel can be said of the book.

Some people, for example steve, find that not understanding large chunks of a novel are not a barrier to enjoyment: others, myself included, generally do. This is surely obvious enough. What interests me more particularly is that people will tend to assume that if steve likes the novel better than I did he must have understood it better. That obviously doesn't necessarily follow: but as I say the assumption is frequently made.

My point is a general one and not specific to Ulysses, a book I incidentally feel very ambivalent about.

As I recall the story, Joyce was in a social situation and another guest complained to him about the convolution and opacity of Finnegans Wake, asking, (I paraphrase) "Do you really expect me to spend my whole life puzzling this out?"

Joyce answered, "Yes."

A better-educated friend of mine read Ulysses around the same time as I did and understood much more of it. He said he thought it was basically garbage (which is what I think of Gravity's Rainbow).

Joyce was so deeply involved in his own work that he honestly thought WWII occured because not enough people read his book (FW).

i like steve's remark about unknowing.

I can empathise with this, having felt similar things around the same age when I started to get interested in "literature" (not having been interested in much except girls, beer and playing in bands in my late teens). Ulysses was definitely part of that: I was quite dazzled and slightly obsessed by Joyce for a time and read everything about Ulysses I could get my hands on - although there were other infatuations that hit me just as hard or harder (Rilke, Wordsworth, Lawrence). I think at bottom though there was the idea that if only I could grasp this stuff properly there would be an almost spiritual enlightenment at the end of it (I was fascinated by neoplatonism and similar rubbish). Joyce, more a aesthete and less of a would-be sage than the others, probably looks like a slightly awkward fit here, but he was pressed into service all the same.

Also, 'You will', and 'I will'?

Ulysses isn't that mysterious to me anymore, but it retains a place of significance in my life because it forever changed my relationship to my own ignorance and confusions. Since then I have tended to embrace things I don't get (but feel vague attractions to), rather than feeling defensive about them. Sometimes a massive waste of time (the economics/politics of Ezra Pound fr'instance), but often rewarding. It's not limited to works of art either (I learned how to fix cars mostly because it was so out of my aesthete-type character).

Substituing pot, etc. for beer my experience was like frankiemachine's.

oh yes, so OTM and well put.

except that now i'm filled with unknowing again since, for some reason, i can barely follow the plot of a TV show. novels are much easier though.

Well done with your reading, Jaq.

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.