Reading the 20th Century discussion

Welcome to our long read of James Joyce's Ulysses: we'll be starting on or around the 1 March 2022 and reading a chapter a week through till the end of June. This slow pace will, hopefully, allow us time to unpack some of the allusions and references that make up Joyce's dense text, as well as catch up on the Irish cultural and political context with which the book engages. Oh, and we'll be having fun while doing this :)

Literature, as Joyce tells us through the character of Stephen Dedalus, 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, Ulysses has survived bowderlization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishingly wide-ranging allusions confirm its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction Ulysses is 'An endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.'

Everyone is welcome, as ever, and there's no need to know anything about Joyce or this book in advance.

If anyone is interested in some background reading, a few books mentioned by group members already are:

The Odyssey
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which first introduces Stephen Dedalus who features in Ulysses
Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties
Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce

This thread will remain open for any chat or comments - looking forward to March already!

A number of the people in Ulysses are found in various stories in The Dubliners.

Richard Ellmann has two biographies of Joyce - Ulysses On The Liffey and James Joyce. (I went to school with his son some years ago.)

The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, Ulysses Annotated are good books for first time readers. James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study is a good book for second/third time readers. I used Bloomsday and Annotated when I read it with my local library.

Other books include The Scandal of Ulysses: The Life And Afterlife of a Twentieth Century Masterpiece
James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses
Stanislaus Joyce's My Brother's Keeper.

On my second reading I got stalled in Book II.

Thanks for those suggestions Jan. I think the Dubliners' characters are mostly cameo appearances though, so not as central, but it's a great collection so worth reading anyway. As is 'Portrait' which was a huge favourite in my teens. Also worth knowing at least the outline to "Hamlet" which plays a part in a pivotal chapter. There are also a fair few Biblical references. And knowing a bit about Ireland around 1904, and who Parnell was is useful.

I think I'm going to go more for the primary texts, don't want to be swayed too much by other interpretations, and I really like the other two Joyce books and The Odyssey anyway, so an excuse to revisit. But I'm very tempted by this which is out in a new edition, and in Penguin paperback, in January Terence Killen Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion To James Joyce's Ulysses I'm also going to finally pick up another book that's been on my shelves for ages Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923

But I think that people could get away with an annotated edition of 'Ulysses' and/or Wikipedia.

Kit look at an edition like the Alma Classics annotated one, should give you what you need without too much hassle/homework!

I have James Joyce ‘s Ulysses A Study by Stuart Gilbert and Harry Blamires’s New Bloomsday.

I’ve got the penguin and also the vintage version of Ulysses to hand.
Portrait n Hamlet - ok✅
Bible - passing ✅ I think

So that leaves The Odyssey to read and poss brush up on Ireland history. Glad The Dubliners is optional especially as it actually is closer to 300 pages on rechecking.
I’m starting to feel like a schoolgirl again. Not sure if in a good way yet. Not committing to committing to this yet.

Btw anyone read Finnegans Wake?
Looking it up on GR for me shows:
4 I follow have read it:
2 - 0* with diatribe
1- 2* with diatribe
1- 5*
1- defeated by it

Great suggestions here - like Alwynne, I don't want to be too confined by 'official' interpretations, so plan to just dive in to Ulysses itself! No-one should feel daunted, it's just a book read in company :)

Absolutely R C!

I agree with both of you, I wasted so much time reading critical approaches and explanations of Ulysses and got nowhere. During student days also I always went for the original text. So this time I too will dive directly in the original text.

Yes Nidhi, I only want to read some Irish history because it was skipped over in school, and although I know a bit about things like the later Easter Uprising, the black and tans etc - which don't come into this btw - I'm a bit sketchier than I'd like to be, so it's a way of making sure I fit in something I was planning to read but never manage to get around to...but I don't think it's necessary. Just something I enjoy on a personal level, I quite like projects. And, as on the other thread, whether I'll actually manage to read anything other than Ulysses is still up in the air!

Alwynne, if you love Woolf ‘s writing I.e Stream of Consciousness technique, you will go through this work very easily, No need to read Odessey, just plot frame is taken which you can google, the character Stephen Daedalus has been taken from The Portrait, still its not necessary to first read The Portrait then Ulysses. This is a stand alone book. My GR friends who have read this book say that you have to read it twice even Marquez read it twice, first time he couldn’t understand it second time he declared it as masterpiece.

About the Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is a marvellous book on Stream of Consciousness technique, I would recommend it highly but not necessarily as a preparation for reading Ulysses .

Oh dear, I don’t like Woolf’s stream of consciousness style.. This is shaking out to be definitely only a tenuous maybe for me.

Missed off from previous post - 1 person I follow gave Finnegans Wake a 5

Nidhi wrote: "Alwynne, if you love Woolf ‘s writing I.e Stream of Consciousness technique, you will go through this work very easily, No need to read Odessey, just plot frame is taken which you can google, the c..."

Thanks Nidhi, that's really nice of you but this'll be my second read, so I'm okay on that score. I want to re-read 'The Odyssey' for personal reasons, I studied Ancient Greek at school and I'm interested in different versions/translations of it, and have the newer Emily Wilson waiting for me. Also really love 'Portrait' and 'Dubliner's so fancy revisiting those too!

But I do enjoy modernist work although I'm probably a bit annoying because I prefer to tie the stream of consciousness technique to Dorothy Richardson, her work originally inspired the term and she influenced both Woolf and Joyce, as did May Sinclair to a lesser extent. Both are horribly under-read and under-appreciated.

https://maysinclairsociety.com/may-si...

I too like greek mythology, currently I am reading Ovid’s Metamorphosis and enjoying it very much, I used to think that it is an epic like Odessey and Iliad but I was surprised that its collection of stories.

I am glad this is your second read, it gives me encouragement to finish at least once.

I have never read May Sinclair, thanks for the recommendation. Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage is on my Tbr, If they are selected for group reads I will join.

Nidhi wrote: "I used to think that it is an epic like Odessey and Iliad but I was surprised that its collection of stories."

Well... Ovid's Metamorphoses is written in hexameters which were recognised at the time (and later) as the epic metre, and the narrator says right at the start that it is a 'perpetuum... carmen' or continuous poem, so it's worth thinking about its form beyond a collection of stories. It's also deeply in dialogue with the Aeneid.

Alwynne wrote: "But I do enjoy modernist work although I'm probably a bit annoying because I prefer to tie the stream of consciousness technique to Dorothy Richardson, her work originally inspired the term and she influenced both Woolf and Joyce, as did May Sinclair to a lesser extent. Both are horribly under-read and under-appreciated."

I plodded my way through the first volume of Pilgrimages and even started the second in hope that something might lift it but no... may have been timing but I abandoned Richardson, I'm afraid. I haven't read May Sinclair.

I read Ulysses last year and I found it useful to read it along with guides. Some guides, like the New Bloomsday book, give you lots of detailed information, but I personally found those too overwhelming for my first read. These were the resources I found most useful:
* https://www.ulyssesguide.com
Ulysses Guide, which guides you through each chapter, giving a broad overview and giving just enough information so that you understand the chapter on your first reading without getting bogged down in details
* https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/l...
Shmoop chapter guides, which explain almost every line and are most helpful for those chapters which don't seem to make any sense
* https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-a...
Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/show/2hsuRzg...
This audiobook read in Irish accents is absolutely incredible. Lots of Ulysses plays on sounds and you get more out of it if you can hear it in an Irish accent. I typically read through the chapter first with the above guides to understand it, then listened to the audiobook reading of the chapter.

Thanks Maggie, those are very useful links.😃

Since we'll be reading it in the centenary year bound to be a lot of shiny new editions and related books coming out in the next few months.

Ha, of course, 1922 - as if we had planned it ;)

I had a look at the current Oxford World's Classics edition which is helpfully, but not obtrusively, annotated - but I'll start with the Penguin which is just text and see how I get on.

Btw, has anyone read anything on Nora Joyce? I'm finding myself increasingly interested in her but the biography is out of print. There is a novel, Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce, and also one by Edna O'Brien: James and Nora.

Also a couple of recent novels featuring their daughter: Saving Lucia and Lucia.

Details here of free podcast and other events associated with the Ulysses centenary: https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

And a Colm Toibin article on Ulysses in the Weekend FT arts section.

www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/29...

Anne Enright on Ulysses

Getting very excited about this Buddy read.

The comments to the Toibin article I cited above include a reference to a reading of the book that may be helpful to us.

"If you find the book intimidating but are still ensorcelled by Joyce's magic, try listening the 30 hour reading from the in-house drama team of RTE, the Irish state broadcaster.
It's available at https://www.rte.ie/radio/podcasts/ser... but also in several other locations.
This was a live round-the-clock broadcast in 1982 to mark the centenary of Joyce's birth."

Oh, me too! That's a great link to RTE, thanks.

I planned Ulysses this year, but wanted to read The Odyssey first. I’m going to have to take a day off of work and wrap up The Books of Jacob so I can read The Odyssey then catch up with Ulysses. I’m quite sure I will need the support of a group to get all of Ulysses.

Book blogger @tony_malone made me aware of this guide to which sections of Ulysses correspond to The Odyssey. I don’t know how accurate it is though. http://www.levity.com/corduroy/joyceh...

It's not quite March yet but as it's the weekend I thought I'd kick off our slow reading of Ulysses: a chapter a week through to June in this, the centenary year, and a great opportunity to tackle for the first time or reread this book in good company.

Chapter 1
My Penguin edition doesn't have named chapters but chapter 1 is usually associated with Telemachus, Odysseus' son, and the time is around 8 am.

As a quick reminder, in Homer's Odyssey, Telemachus has grown to young manhood in the twenty years that Odysseus has been away (ten years fighting in Troy, ten years wandering on his way back to Ithaka) and is beginning to assert himself as 'man of the household'.

What are your first impressions of the book?
How do you think Joyce uses the idea of Telemachus, the young man and heir of a missing father?
How Irish a book does this feel to you?

Thanks so much for getting this started RC. Some initial thoughts but I will return to this chapter and your questions again.

1. My first impression was disorientation and confusion, but after reading the first few pages a few times I began to get a clearer sense of the situation and the bantering conversation and started to understand it better and appreciate the humour.
The wordplay is wonderful and if I can accept not understanding every reference I'm sure I will enjoy that aspect.

3. This feels very Irish to me in the language, the poverty, the connection to Catholicism and the difficult relation to the English.

My question is what this initial chapter says about the project for the book.

I've started the first chapter but not finished it yet so rather tentative thoughts in relation to your post, Ben:

As you say, the banter between the young men is lively and entertaining. Buck Mulligan's satire on the Catholic mass kicks in pretty much from the opening lines with the 'crossed' shaving implements on the basin of water, and the Latin.

That idea of starting 'in media res' is a characteristic of classical epic which Joyce clearly adopts here so yes, it takes us a little time to orient ourselves.

I don't think it's necessary to pick up all the references (I don't suppose any one person can) but I enjoyed the allusion to Xenophon: 'thalassa, thalassa' ('the sea! the sea!') and as the original was about a Greek mercenary army stranded in Persia and trying to get home, I read it as an allusion to the British in Ireland. Also fun the 'snot-green sea' as opposed to the Homeric 'wine-dark' sea, a frequent epithet.

Have you read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which first introduces Stephen Dedalus? I haven't so am still trying to get to grips with the characters.

It's interesting that Stephen's mother has died recently, as opposed to Homer's Telemachus whose mother is Penelope. No mention of a father yet.

More to come when I finish the chapter.

I read A portrait of the Artist .... years and years ago, but don't recall any of the characters continuing on to Ulysses other than Stephen Dedalus. My other memories of the book are dim, other than thinking always that Stephen was a fish out of water wherever he was.

Here too, Stephen is uncomfortable with Buck's irreverence, with Haines's Englishness, the old woman's ignorance and subservience and in his own thoughts, guilty at his refusal to pray as his mother asked, but refusing to compromise on his intellectual principles. He is the "impossible person".

I wanted to read The Odyssey before I read this, but I don’t want to get behind the group. A chapter a week of Ulysses isn’t too much (I write hopefully,) maybe I can devote all of March to both.

I have, but have not yet read another Ulysses inspired novel, Dedalus . It’s gotten good reviews.

Thanks Wendy - Dedalus looks fun!

I love Henningham Family Press books, which is why I bought this, now I’m really glad I did. I made good progress in The Odyssey last night, Emily Wilson’s translation is amazing, so I’ll be starting Ulysses by the end of the week.

Ben wrote: "My question is what this initial chapter says about the project for the book."

I was thinking some more about what I've read so far (about half of the first chapter) and realised how many references there are to father-son relationships: Dedalus as an allusion to Daedalus and his son Icarus in Greek mythology where the son disobeys his father and both suffer as a result; the Trinity, almost the ultimate father/son story!

At the start of the Odyssey, Telemachus is in conflict with Penelope about what to do to deal with the suitors who are occupying their home - Stephen Dedalus also was at odds with his dying mother, though refusing to pray for her on her deathbed feels more significant. His vision of the shade of his mother visiting him looks forward to Odysseus' visit to the underworld where he tries to embrace the ghost of his mother.

And the predations of the suitors in Homer might be transformed into the English in Ireland. One strand of Homer's poem is about Telemachus' journey into manhood which is tied up with him recognising his father and, eventually, fighting at his side. So is Stephen Dedalus also starting on a quest to find a father-figure?

My understanding is that Joyce was interested in finding the extraordinary in the pedestrian and everyday so this sort of juxtaposing of three bantering students with Greek myth and epic alongside Christianity is both an undercutting and a comparison.

Thank you for that RC. I will definitely get more out of reading Ulysses with observations like this from readers much smarter than me.

That's great RC.

I am missing quite a lot as a result of my lack of familiarity with The Odyssey and with Catholic doctrine and ritual. My legal background won't make up for it. So I do appreciate the connections you draw out, RC, and look forward to what WndyJW can add from her reading this week.

I didn't recall the sections about Dedalus's actual father from A Portrait of the Artist from when I read it in university. I reread portions of it this morning and found a few sections that go with Stephen being in a sense fatherless.

This is from a conversation between Simon Dedalus and Stephen.
"I'm talking to you as a friend, Stephen. I don't believe in playing the stern father. I don't believe a son should be afraid of his father. No, I treat you as your grandfather treated me when I was a young chap. We were more like brothers than father and son."

Further on, Stephen is recalling a pub conversation between his father and his father's friends, who are asking Stephen about whether Dublin girls or Cork girls are prettier. Simon halfheartedly tries to protect his son from their banter, saying
"He's not that way built .... Leave him alone. He's a levelheaded thinking boy who doesn't bother his head about that kind of nonsense.
Then he's not his father's son, said the little old man.
I don't know, I'm sure, said Mr Dedalus.

I know the books can be read independently, but of course in Joyce everything is connected!

Thanks, Ben - those are great catches on Stephen and his father.

Reading your post reminded me of Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce by Colm Tóibín that I've been meaning to get round to reading.

Knowing that there are connections in Ulysses, I am paying closer attention to where Odysseus goes and who he meets. Up until about Book 7 not much happened, but Book 8 Odysseus starts telling the stories of the lands, creatures, gods and goddesses he met on his travels.

WndyJW wrote: "Up until about Book 7 not much happened"

Haha, that made me smile! What about when Telemachus stays with Helen and Menelaus and we see what they're like together at home?

I was surprised to see them happy together! I should say not a lot in terms of action and drama compared to all the action in The Iliad which begins with a kidnapping, Apollo sending down a plague, and Athena soaring down from Mt Olympus and seizing Achilles by the hair to stop him from killing Agamemnon. The first few books of The Odyssey is a lot of talking and telling stories. Even the adventures Odysseus relates aren’t told with the drama of The Iliad. I’m recalling enjoying The Odyssey, but I loved The Iliad.

Yes, I'm also an Iliad rather than Odyssey person :)

Just going back to the father/son theme: Hamlet's getting bandied about a lot, another fatherless son who has a difficult relationship with his mother.

Aargh, I've got myself into a muddle as I've just realised the Penguin edition I'm reading doesn't have chapter divisions, just a wavy line, and so I thought I was still in chapter 1, turns out I'm now up to chapter 4, according to the schematic!

So in case anyone else is in the same situation, chapter 1 finishes as Stephen agrees to meet Buck Mulligan in the pub at 12.30, and ends with the single word 'usurper' - a nice tie back to the Odyssey.

So the last couple of things I want to say about chapter 1: that thing about the key which gets transferred from Stephen to Buck Mulligan and then Stephen thinking that he can't go back to the tower, is essentially homeless, ties him further to Telemachus but also makes him a bit of an Odysseus too.

And we've mentioned the references to Hamlet, but there are also allusions here towards the end of the chapter to The Tempest: 'There's five fathoms out there' and the image of the drowned man which we can compare with this from The Tempest:

'Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes: / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.' - And it's from the song that Ariel sings to Ferdinand about his lost father supposedly drowned in the storm.

Interestingly, this also can be read as an intertext with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, another groundbreaking modernist text which was published in 1921 (if I recall correctly), the year before Ulysses, and in which we get 'those were pearls that were his eyes'. As an aside, Sylvia Plath reuses this Tempest imagery in her poem 'Full Fathom Five' which may also be read, at least partly, as obliquely about her troubled relationship with her father.

So lots of lovely nested allusions pointing backwards and forwards here :))

Chapter 2

Do feel free to continue to post about chapter 1 but having read chapter 2, I'll kick off. This one is associated with Nestor and takes place in the school where Stephen teaches.

In the Odyssey, Nestor is the wise old man who had sailed with Odysseus in the past. Telemachus visits him to find out if he knows anything about his father. Wendy, do correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he tells Telemachus that Odysseus is alive, trapped with the nymph Calypso on her island, and to continue his search.

Joyce mischievously makes his 'Nestor', Mr Deasy, the schoolmaster and Stephen's boss, a kind of anti-Nestor with his crude anti-Semitism and misogyny. He also quotes from Shakespeare, Othello this time ('put but money in thy purse') but uses it hopelessly out of context as Stephen immediately recognises by taking it as advice to save!

Importantly, Stephen resists Deasy's anti Jewish sentiment (and Leopold Bloom, who we haven't met yet is an Irish Jew), when he says, 'A merchant... is one who buys cheap and sells dear, Jew or Gentile, is he not?'

In the grander scheme, this anti-Nestor still leaves Stephen searching for a mentor or father figure, still feeling isolated and directionless.

What did you think about Stephen as a schoolteacher and his relationship with the boys?

What do you think about Stephen Dedalus as a character so far?

I found this chapter less engaging than the first chapter. I didn't think either the schoolboys or Mr Deasly brought out much of interest in Dedalus; they were too transparently his inferior. Neither the classroom interaction with the students, nor being a teacher appear to hold much interest for him. He seemed to be fulfilling his duties mechanically.

Like the fairly insipid comments Haines had made in the first chapter, the reactionary, anti-semitic rantings of Deasly seemed to me too much like a straw man to create any real contrast with Dedalus, although I recognise that Joyce is setting the stage for the Jewish Bloom. But I thought Dedalus's exchanges with Mulligan and even with the old woman bringing the milk were more dynamic and created much more dramatic interest.

What I am enjoying most is Dedalus's mind, whether in his spoken words or the paragraphs of his thoughts. I love the language, the invented compounded words, the leaps his mind makes, as in the paragraph that goes from the shouts of the boys on the playing field after a goal to "Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spearspikes baited with men’s bloodied guts." As a man he seems negative and out of sorts, but as a mind and a voice his negativity is creative and exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing where it is going.

Good points, Ben. I think that technically Joyce continues to bring out the tensions between Stephen's inner and outer lives. He's a surprisingly dull teacher, as you say, and there's no excitement in the classroom which is all about answering more or less by rote. All the life is in his inner commentary that runs alongside his external actions. We shouldn't forget how textually innovative this was at the start of the twentieth century.

I was going to ask what you thought about the old milk-woman - she felt like she was a significant figure but I wasn't sure why or what she might represent more figuratively. That bit where she thinks Haines is speaking French when he's showing off his Gaelic was amusing - but it was the English who prevented the learning of Gaelic so he seems to have forgotten his history.

Yes, like you I'm loving the linguistic energy which begs to be read, almost chanted in places, aloud. That wonderful description you quote is all the more chilling if it were written during WW1, even if Joyce, as a pacifist, didn't fight.

I like your idea of his negativity being the source of his linguistic creativity. There's also a strong Irish cadence throughout.