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.
If you like a sprawling work, Proust’s “In Search Of Lost Time” is a challenging read. Proust tells us about the French aristocracy, the landscape, theories of art and music, human memory and describing an entire human lifetime. All in 4000 pages.
He and James Joyce were contemporaries but Proust is admittedly far more groundbreaking in that he took the novel in a new direction because of its sheer length. Reading it all takes a couple of months and as you grow older your appreciation of Proust changes. You get a new take on “Lost Time” every time you read his masterpiece. Great works of literature have earned the right to make demands on their readers.
This is something you’ll either come to love or to hate.
Forget the book, get out and enjoy the fresh air....
That I did. It was 81 today and a great day when I was outside (after church). Among other things, I cut the grass and tidied up the yard. I think this will be last time I have to cut the grass this year. Back around 2003 or thereabouts, it was still growing and cut it on the day after Christmas.
I’ve always been pretty sure the Ulysses Allen Sherman meant was the original.
He says the man is reading it to them because he doesn’t want any sissies (how long before you can’t say that word anymore, btw), and the original is a tale of bravery, derring do, etc.
Say what you like about Joyce, but you can’t say that. So I don’t think that reference has anything to do with this novel.
Maybe dedicated to destroying the bridge that we are walking across when it disintegrates. A mundane day in Dublin is the bridge over the abyss. And the abyss is life itself.
I was hooked the moment I realized Buck Mulligan was being set up as the blasphemer. In other words, Dedalus was not.
Dedalus was almost immediately afterwards seen as the person who is used by others who have no idea of his depth or learning.
At “ineluctable modality of the visible” I was vindicated. He looks upon the invisible, or tries to. What could be more compelling? And he doesn’t disappoint.
In stream of consciousness writing, there is a lot of repetition, to reflect that way we constantly go back to our previous thoughts in order to . . . wear them out? Get sick of them? Let them lose their pain? Reflect on them further? See them in light of subsequent things that have happened? Recognize patterns?
Lesser writers such as Gertrude Stein copied this but didn’t understand it, and so created nonsense.
When Joyce was dying, someone asked Nora if they should call a priest. Nora’s answer? “I couldn’t do that to Jimmy.”
I read this same comment about Joyce 40+ years ago somewhere else, that he requires for comprehension Ph.D.'s in classical literature and English, with hopefully a minor in Irish history and cultural history. I was sufficiently discouraged that I never took it up, n/w/s that a former high-school classmate, at a pre-collegiate "setting-out" farewell party, announced for his old English teacher's benefit that he had taken up Ulysses with the intention of reading it for comprehension. He gave her no timeline for completion, which was a wise move. He's deceased now, having died 30+ years ago from a Jim Henson-like minor foot ailment which, insufficiently tended and undoctored, killed him in about two weeks. He was a junior television producer for NBC in New York at the time.
If you want to prepare to read Ulysses, I'd accept proxy_user's suggestion of reading a summary or commentary first (another poster suggested the same), and I'd add that reading the original Homer in translation, again with a companion text, would be a prerequisite. I read Padraic Colum's translation (pre-Derrida, pre-rot, pre-PC; but then I repeat myself) of The Odyssey and recommend it as readable and agreeable; and I would also suggest having handy a copy of the two-volume Robert Graves book on Greek mythology, which contains many etymologies of Greek names, which in ancient stories (dating from the Bronze Age and before) are often symbolic or anthropomorphic. Example: In the Catalogue of Ships, one of the (mostly) lost books of the Homeric cycle that is a "prequel" of The Iliad, Agamemnon supervises the sacrifice of his own daughter, Iphigenia, for the success of the expedition against Troy. Graves shows us that "Iphigenia" (Gk. "Iphigeneia") means "mighty sex organs" (iphios = "mighty", "powerful"), and that elsewhere her name is given as "Iphianassa", "mighty queen" (Mycenaean Gk. "wanax", Gk. anax, = "autocrat", "Great King", with a feminine ending -assa, as in Late Gk. abbessa = "abbess", opposite m. abbas, "abbot"). Thereby hangs a tale, Graves shows us. Both names, and their alternative use by ancient Greeks, are instructive.
Graves's two slim volumes with gazetteer would be a solid help to reading writers as heavily educated in classics as Joyce and Kinglake.
And as our FRiend commented, it is also helpful if you know something -- a lot is preferable -- about Roman Catholic catechism and morality. If you feel you are lacking there (having had a public-school education in the 60's or later practically guarantees it), I'd suggest an encyclopedia, and the online Catholic encyclopedia would be an excellent place to start. They'll be happy to get you up to speed on the difference between homoousion and heretical homoiousion, which was the basis of the "Filioque Controversy" and all that followed.
Was Joyce a genius? Yes. Was he worth the effort I put into reading Ulysses and trying to finish Finnegan’s Wake? I’m not sure, but I lean toward no.
It might be helpful to understand this analogy. Most authors tailor a fine suit; Ulysses is a fine woven fabric. Don't waste effort trying to keep the characters straight. Simply read it and enjoy the rush of events and the word play. Joyce is somewhere between an impressionist and a cubist. Perhaps.
Twin Peaks? What was that about again?
Thanks for a great morning laugh.
Oh please. There isn’t all that much profanity in it to begin with. Did you even read it? Ever section is written in a different style. If you don’t like just move on to the other. It’s a comic epic written on the head of a pin. And remember it’s all modeled on The Odyssey.
It’s high art every step of the way. Raymond Chandler is pop art.
True... the original stories would illustrate courage. This book is just silly.
Nice! I don’t know if I’d get into it but might give it a try.
The Joyce novel was about the bravery of the every day schmo trying to make his way through an ordinary day. It’s a modern twist on the mythic.
“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
“...the bravery of the every day schmo trying to make his way through an ordinary day.”
I like your thumbnail summary very much. It makes me want to read the book again.
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