Posted on 11/30/2014 3:59:51 PM PST by re_nortex
I'm well into my 70s and checking off an item on my bucket list is finally getting around to reading Ulysses by James Joyce. It was never assigned reading in high school or college (I went to a Christian school, which may be one of the reasons). So, at my advanced age, I'm attempting at long last to tackle this work.
I have a long attention span and am not easily bored nor discouraged. I've read long, involved books and have found most of them gripping, such as The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Faust by Goethe and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
But I may have met my match with Joyce's work. I'm only up to page 36 where Deasy and Stephen are conversing and, frankly, it's just not clicking this far and reading seems like a chore in contrast to Mann where I couldn't wait to turn the page.
Given that the smartest people in the world congregate here, are there any suggestions about pressing forward on this book? Was it maybe proclaimed a "classic" by leftists and, in reality, just isn't worth reading? Or am I approaching it wrong? The lack of quoting and Joyce's strange punctuation add to the challenge.
Ping to you three since you’re among the brightest of the bright here in Freepworld and I’ve always enjoyed your literate writing here.
Sounds like a proof-of-concept for the lefties to me. Spike anything with a generous load of profanity and you can get people to call garbage profound.
no-doz.
Thanks, much appreciated.
It’s a tough read, but very good.
It will take a while.
My best advice for reading Joyce is - become a fan of the run on sentence.
...loved “Crime and Punishment”!
Three times I started reading this. It may be well-nigh impossible. But if you do manage to finish it, You must be of an intellect on an order of magnitude beyond us mere mortals. Good luck!
Is there an audio version available? With certain books, audio is the only way I was able to get through them (I can pay attention to audio books while driving, working out, running, walking or washing dishes).
Use a guide-type book as you go. It’s the only way if you’re trying this without an instructor to help.
From Camp Granada by Allen Sherman (1963)
It’s a difficult book, frankly.
Probably one thing you need to do is to read the earlier works first: the short stories, and The Portrait of the Artist, to familiarize yourself with the background and charaters.
And if you haven’t already done so, you should read Homer’s Odyssey, which it plays games with. No harm doing that, since The Odyssey is a wonderful work in itself—lots more fun than The Iliad.
You’d be better off reading the biography of Ulysses S. Grant. It was printed and edited by Mark Twain.
CC
I forced myself to finish it, a form of self-flagellation.
Get a copy of A Skeleton Key to Ulysses by Joseph Campbell.
This helped me tremendously when I took a course in Joyce.
Each chapter relates to an organ of the body. The book is divided into 3 parts. The first part is Stephen, then Leopold, then Molly.
I read Ulysses five times while in college, and wrote my undergraduate Honors thesis on it.
The key question is what is your background, how much do you know? The Stephen Dedalus chapters are full of intellectual fireworks based on Irish history, Catholic theology, and scholastic philosophy. Nearly everyone in 21st-century America will often be at a loss.
Then when Bloom comes in, it is current events and popular culture....in Dublin in 1904. Again, not easy.
I found Weldon Thornton’s ‘Allusions in Ulysses’ a most helpful cheat, back in 1974. Nowadays, with the internet, you could Google a lot.
But I suggest just reading along and going with the flow. It is surprising how much you can pick up once you get into it. Then you can check back if you want.
If it’s any solace, Finnegan’s Wake is much tougher....
This BBC dramatization is very good. It also helps to hear the narrator go back and forth between actual conversation and inner monologues. That’s what threw me when I read Ulysses for the first time, differentiating between a real conversation and a conversation that was going on in a character’s mind.
You can read along or just listen
http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Dramatised/dp/B006VR4SSQ
I tried to read it once.
I couldn’t understand a thing he was saying.
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