Reading Ulysses

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.

#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.)