Reading Ulysses

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.)

of course, all art is "an art-roots thing," in various ways---no doubt the Babylonians, Homer, Gospel-writers and (maybe especially King James's) translators were thinking to some extent, "Hey, cool material, all in the Public Domain---how can I bring out, what can I do with the best qualities?"---audiences to some extent "Go man Gogh!") But I'm trying to stay with thread-relevant specifics, however speculative.
Also, Joyce's eyes got even worse, and he came to rely on dictation, pressing his friends into service---Beckett, setting the record straight re being J.'s "secretary," which sounds like something you might get paid for, told his biographer Dierdre Barr that during one such session, another guy dropped by, and Joyce said, "Hello, Joe. Put that in: 'Hello Joe,'" and Beckett found this unnerving. But that kind of going with the flow, to whatever overall extent, might be another reason for reading it aloud, getting into it that way, in your own surroundings.

"It" being FW especially, but not only.

Think I might try reading some later Henry James aloud--the parts where he seems to be chanelling something and/or remixing on the fly, automatic writing? (Proust too, although he was one who might revise up to the last second, scribbling on galleys, layers on the fly, in search of time regained again and again, so the sense of seeming all fresh and inspired in the moment, the thing you're supposed to go for, gets screwed with, which is also an or the art thing in Modern times, to some extent: oooo, subversion!---Xgau on punks/rock&roll: "bored enough to fuck with it.")

But a form of idealism too! And sheer cussedness. Never just the one thing, which certainly seems true of Joyce.

Dow, I think the Beckett story was just that JJ said 'Come in' to a knock on the door. Maybe you read a different version. But I've also heard that this is a myth and no-one can find the relevant moment in FW.

I like both films but I couldn't quite follow your initial statement about Strick's. Both films are worth watching anyway. I never 2004's film BLOOM.

I saw the 1967 movie: on VHS, across the bedroom, it was alright, walking around downtown and going out to the Baily Optic (quote here seemed relevant re painting)...Champlin and Ebert loved it, though Kael and Kaufman found it reductive. I'd like a re-do, more imaginative Did you have a question about these comments?

The basic black & white, shades of grey realism of the film , enhanced by seeing it across the room on VHS, vs thinking of a more fluid approach, streaming on laptop and headphones, maybe more involving that way (as Strick's film might be if taken in that way)

Had a dream last night in which a friend told me that a major feature of Ulysses is "the objectification of voices" so if I ever need an English lit thesis, I'm set.

Heart the 1967 film, but obviously doesn't come close to doing justice to the book. Really liked how updating to a 1960s Dublin setting has no effect on the believability of story, characters or general atmosphere- a quietly withering take on the de Valera republic.

Sally Rooney on Ulysses.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/12/07/misreading-ulysses/

The ineluctable modality of the risible

good piece, not sure her general thesis re: ulysses debt to austen is as out there as she seems to think it is, but she's much better versed in lit crit than i

"We might propose that, or we might not."

"Let’s return for just a moment to the plot summary I tried to offer at the beginning. Leopold Bloom does this and that, I explained, while Stephen Dedalus does that and this."

Chapter 9, which is mostly Stephen putting forth an elaborate theory on how Shakespeare's work is deep down all about his uncle having fucked his wife, and when asked "do you even believe this yourself?" answering with a content "no", felt very ILX.