Reading Ulysses

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.

I can extend the similarity a bit, Steve - I could easily have written the following sentence after ploughing through Kenner and and the rest:

Sometimes a massive waste of time (the economics/politics of Ezra Pound fr'instance),

Maybe the difference is that I'm much, much less likely nowadays to be interested in self-consciously "difficult" art (although define-yer-terms may be a fair riposte to that because, for example, Cecil Taylor's Conquistador is on constant rotation on my cd player as I speak). The enthusiasm of Jaq, Pinefox and others, and the thread on favourite sentences, has even got me semi-interested in re-reading Ulysses, although perhaps not.

I, too, have found myself less interested in difficult-because-it-aspires-to-be art as well, but to me there's a distinction between that which arrives at difficulty organically (like Cecil, Ulysses-era-Joyce, or Messiaen) and the I'm-so-clever kind. As a phase of development, Kenner was important to me. I'm glad I did all that, not from what I took from it in terms of substance, but that it gave me confidence in sharpening my critical apparatus enough to understand the difference between complexities that proceed from expressive neccessity and those which are deliberate -and maybe pointless- displays of mental agility (kind of how I feel about FW, even though it makes me laugh).

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,1091216,00.html

does anyone know anything about a japanese film from a couple years ago: ulysses relocated to the red light district in tokyo except with an underpinning of japanese paganism replacing the classical references? i remember reading about this but people keep saying "that sounds like something you'd make up"

now, how would you film chapter sixteen?

xpost: like a 70s home movie with skronky film, jumpy edits and a final "flick flick flick flick" as it comes off the projector. Chapter 14 would be super duper fun.

Has anybody else seen the 1969 (?) version? All I can say is - it stays faithful to the story.

honestly, it'd be a great miniseries.

i remember 'bloom' being called 'bl.,m' on the website. or was that another one? regardless it's a useless title, guy gets to be called like twelve names, yo. VOICEOVERS. eahrrh.

i want someone to make a case for chapter sixteen as not being alarmingly uncharitable! please!

(I have just reread it, coincidentally.)

I am happy to agree quite strongly with the people who think Ulysses should be on TV, in a series. I remember saying so, enthusiastically, to a bloke at a bus stop, about 10 years ago, maybe more, and he unleashed his spleen against me. I did not use the word 'miniseries', though. Maybe that would have helped.

how would you televise it?

we also discussed whether "miniseries" would be the correct term.

Yes, I've seen it. It's, um, bad.

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.