Reading Ulysses

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.