Have you read Ulysses?

[ValentineGreen]

Or War & Peace?
I read Ulysses a few years ago but since then I've read a lot about it & now feel like I would like to reread it..

Just wondering if many others have read it?

Too true 😉!

I'm a researcher in modernism, although I make no pretensions to being a Joyce scholar. I AM a Joyce lover, and Ulysses - whilst I do 'get' the protestations against modernism in general as pretentious literary onanism and Joyce among the worst of it - is really up there with my favourite novels/epics of all time.

Every episode is different, based around rich, intricate contemporary discourses. It's about as close a snapshot of 1922 life as it's possible to get. The discourses blend and clash. Old-time music hall music, gender-bending and breaking of stereotypes, defecation, masturbation, philosophy versus snippets from the advertising industry, Irish nationalism, Judaism, urban stagnation and alienation, the sacred/profane and the secular, sexuality and pornography, parodies of the classics, prose, stream of consciousness, play. Yet the apparent jostling between them is seamless enough to create cohesion. It's an amazing literary achievement.

I've had one copy fall to bits from overuse, have a shabby second copy, keep meaning to pick up the 2022 centenary version, and have an Audible version with a great rendition of music hall songs between episodes. As to the classical epic backdrop, the 'Cyclops' episode with the railing citizen and the hurled biscuit tin is a brilliant parody of Homer.

Bloom is a glorious celebration of all things physical but he's also a voyeur. What tends to go unnoticed is that the scene with Gerty Macdowell in Nausicaa is strangely reciprocal - she knows exactly what he's up to with his hand in his pocket and reclines backward in a flirtatious pose. Bloom's orgasm incidentally happens at exactly the time of Molly's assignation with Blazes Boylan. We know the Blooms haven't had PIV sex for a decade, but they have had sexual contact; perhaps for contraception, perhaps for other reasons. In 'Circe' he has the bizarre fantasy of watching Molly and Boylan through the keyhole in increasing excitement. Molly knows exactly what his predilections are. In 'Penelope', she says she knows he's 'whoring me out'. The women in Joyce are by no means sexually naive.

Stephen's a pompous prig and makes a nice foil to Bloom in this book. But I'll shut up now. I could spew out screeds of text on this book.

Thanks so much for posting this thread @ValentineGreen. I love it!

Don't shut up, @SerafinasGoose - everything you've written is really interesting! Great points.

Seconding the plea to 'please don't shut up!' More!!
And please join the reading group (which I have yet to set up)
I am obsessed with this thread

I have always loved the agency Joyce gives to the female characters

Yes, the women are rounded people. I love Dickens, the books are fantastic, but he always fails with the women's characters, in my opinion.

I started War and Peace. I found that I really enjoyed the society chapters, but found the battle sections a bit dull and I wasn't reaching for it. I feel like I would appreciate a York Notes style companion for it.

There's a readalong on Reddit where you commit to a chapter per day for a year which I may restart one year. Or at least 7 chapters a week maybe.

I liked Ulysses! Not so much War and Peace, Tolstoy is a bit preachy with his "gentleman farmer who appreciates the simple things" characters in every book. BBC adaptation was good.

Another plaudit for @SerafinasGoose. How good would it be to do a read along with you?
I love this thread.

This thread is great! Love hearing all your insights.
I've tried Ulysses but gave up... would love to make a second attempt and will watch out for read-along.
I have read War and Peace and quite enjoyed it - not that my menopausal brain can remember any of it...

I think lots of people have expressed interest in forming a 'read-a-long' group now so I will set one up.

I think it's probably best to move over to the 'What we're reading' section. Please follow me over.....🙏

Brilliant 👍

@Maireas it's set up and live!
I don't know how to structure it but reckon we can see how many join and between us we can agree how we'd like to do it?

All welcome!

That's a turn-up! Usually it's the other way round - people trying to get me to shut up instead of talk more ... 😀

As a result of this thread I've now just ordered the centenary edition.

I love Russian writing, Dostoevsky and Chekhov in particular - but confess to not having read War and Peace. I'm not at the end of Don Quixote either - mainly time-factor and having to read a lot of other stuff - but it's a very entertaining read and a laugh a minute.

A Portrait is also more closely modeled on Dante than I first realised. I've just re-read both that book and the draft MSS, Stephen Hero, in some detail. Most people have noticed that the hell sermon happens right in the middle. But on a closer re-reading a lot of the humour in that book rests on the sending up of the earnest Stephen, and (as with Ulysses and the Homer) this stems from its epic roots.

I'll try to find your other thread!

I'm so delighted that you have found the other thread @SerafinasGoose and I'm really looking forward to hearing more from you as we read through the chapters.
And please - write as much as you like about it all on these threads, I have no one in real life who's as interested as I am in this. Dh (feigns) interest up to a certain level but then I know I lose him...

He's going to be very glad I have these threads now.

I dragged him and dc to Trieste a few months back for my (secret) Joyce pilgrimage. Dc refused to engage in that part of the trip by dh manfully tolerated the self guided Joyce tour of their rooms there + the berlitz school etc. It was very poignant and in lots of ways moving to see those vistas and plazzas and cafes etc

piazza

@SerafinasGoose

ok, seen as you mentioned Stephen Hero as well would you consider this -

in my thesis, I proposed that Stephen’s epiphanies were created by music - for each epiphany, if you read back a few pages he encounters something musical - a tune he half hears, etc.

Knowing that Joyce considered music the highest, purest form of art and that he was quite the tenor himself ( I may have got a bit lost in the pubs when doing my research in Dublin) I was convinced that music was the cause of the epiphanies.

My tutor felt otherwise.

I think it sounds a brilliant argument. I really do.

When you consider in U, the 'Sirens' episode is written in the style of music reels and there are music hall songs permeating the text, music is a big part of this. The epiphanies in that book are weirder for sure, but they're very much present.

Anything can 'cause' an epiphany - a boring object, a sound, a snippet of conversation. If anything, the question boils down to 'is everything too easily "epiphanic?"' I think anyone attempting an elongated study of these theme needs by necessity to tackle this question, and not all epiphany studies do.

For a tutor to close that way of thinking off entirely seems really reductive to me. I'd have encouraged this to be developed, not shut it down. Some of the more old school Joyceans get really aeriated when others in their view 'misappropriate' the epiphanies and make claims for them they think JJ never intended, as though any of us could ever know that. And they claim they only exist in the little collection in The Workshop of Daedalus - whereas the main one in Stephen Hero is very definitely designated an epiphany.

My own take is that, far from its grand spiritual pretensions, the epiphany is base and very much bound up with sex. I've written several variations on this theme, but intend for it to form the basis of a longer text. It's a pattern I've spotted in a lot of modernists, not just Joyce.

But I'd be interested to see a claim that music was amongst the triggers for the epiphany - sound and modernism is quite a big conference theme at the moment so I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already done it.

I haven't been to Dublin in years. It's 'Bloomsday' soon and I really want to go back. Maybe next year!

@SerafinasGoose

sound and modernism is quite a big conference theme at the moment so I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already done it.

Ahem! I did it! 30 years ago. 🧐😆

but sadly my brilliance was unappreciated.

Interestingly enough I was challenging the view that it was about sex ( although Nora’s yes, I said yes, I said yes, stream of consciousness at the end of U is clearly so but my point was that, like Eliot in The Waste Land, Joyce had alluded to the tiniest chance that there may be more, on a spiritual level, out there and I thought his epiphanies, musically inspired ( almost divinely so) were his link to that.

But as I say, my view was not shared by my professor.

I always seem to end a conversation☹️ Just when I thought I’d found my people

I loved studying that era and Midnight in Paris was a real treat to watch. Did any one catch Transatlantic recently. It featured Peggy Guggenheim!

It was an interesting tale on the 30s - a bit it in places but shot beautifully in Marseilles.

@LeonardCohensRaincoat I've just finished work & am on the way home. You do

Sorry hit send too soon!
You didn't end the conversation at all. It's just starting!
I'm not sure if you saw that I started a thread over on 'what we're reading' to read ulysses together so please join if you've any interest in doing that?

I loved midnight in Paris (but joyce should have been in it)

More when i get home

Oh no, I’ll head over, thank you

I failed to read much of Ulysses years ago. Since then I've read and enjoyed Dubliners so might try again. I enjoyed War and Peace and prefer Tolstoy to other Russian authors,

I’ve been approaching Ulysses in ever-diminishing circles basically all my adult life. I’ve owned a copy for more than 30 years…
Lived and studied in Dublin where many places pride themselves on Joycean connections and now I live in Trieste where much of Ulysses was written. There’s a huge cult around the book here and DB visited for the Joyce Week last year. He re-read my copy in 10 days, but stayed up reading late into the night.
I have a feeling I’d love it for the jokes, the cultural references, the Irish turn of phrase but alas! my reading stamina has been ruined by social media… maybe this thread will inspire me.