Ulysses Reading Group 2023

[ValentineGreen]

Hi all, on the back of a thread currently in Chat 'have you read Ulysses' it seemed like it would be a good idea to form a Ulysses Read-a-long group here.

No experience required, this thread is open to anyone who fancies reading it for the first time or the 100th time!

I don't know yet the best way to structure it, as in how many pages we all agree to read given that some 'chapters' are far denser than others. I'm totally open to anyone who has set up something like this before and knows what will work well?

For some context, I did not study English Literature but have always been an avid reader. I read Ulysses once, many years ago and while I say 'read' I mean my eyes read each word but I cannot say my brain decoded them all whatsoever.

Now, nearly 30 years later, and after a lifetime of reading, including Portrait and Dubliners as well as a lot of reading around the meaning of Ulysses, I wish to re-read it. But I would love to read it with others where we can share our thoughts and interpretations and knowledge as we go.

I find myself growing ever more fascinated by Joyce and his life and I really want to 'know' this great masterpiece and understand it (if I can!)

Please don't be shy! Come and join me...

Between us we can work out the best way to structure this undertaking.

Some thoughts on Sirens. Joyce thought of the episode as a musical composition - the first 2 pages, which may look like gibberish at first sight, are analogous to the cacophonous sound an orchestra makes when it warms up and tests before a performance. The passage similarly comprises a jumble of sounds and words that recur in the episode.

Not much happens: Bloom has a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy while others sing and play the piano at the Ormond. One of the sirens/barmaids snaps her garter. And Bloom farts. Audibly of course.

Offstage, Boylan and Molly finally consummate their affair, and Bloom - like Ulysses bound to the mast forcing himself to hear the Sirens - does not avert his mind’s eye, and briefly even contemplates following Boylan (whose progress through the city is marked by the jingle of his jaunting car) when he leaves the pub headed for Bloom’s marital home.

The pathos of many of the songs reflects his inner state. "Light sob of breath Bloom sighed on the silent bluehued flowers. Jingling. He’s gone. Jingle. Hear”. The rhythm of everyday sounds is also doleful: “One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock with a loud proud knocker with a cock carracarracarra cock. Cockcock.”

The Joyce Project has the lyrics for The Croppy Boy with words and lines in bold that appear in Sirens (seems to be a mobile-specific page: so bolding may not be visible on desktop browsers). Its prominence in Sirens preps us for the satirical treatment of the Citizen’s Irish nationalism in the following episode. As does Bloom farting to Robert Emmet’s last words, framed in a shop window. It’s easy to underestimate just how irreverent this is if unfamiliar with the reverence in which the martyrdom of Robert Emmet is held among Irish nationalists. (Though it’s mild compared to the obscene mockery of the croppy boy’s appearance in Circe - and gagging a line from the song about his mother as he hangs, tongue out, is the least of it!) The croppy boy and Emmet are of course linked as martyrs who died for Ireland, and when the funeral party passed the scene of Emmet’s execution in Hades (“Down there Emmet was hanged, drawn and quartered. Greasy black rope.”) Bloom segues from reflecting on Emmet's death and burial to Dollard’s rendition of The Croppy Boy.

The rendition by world-famous tenor and friend of Joyce, John McCormack - recorded on wax cylinder around 1904 - is quite catchy I think, though it omits several verses.

The Joyce project also has a great photo of a very young McCormack with a dapper music impresario by the name of Augustus Boylan!

"The blessing of God and Mary and Patrick on you, says the citizen"!

Is there anyone out there?!

I'm here!! I feel guilty that I've abandoned this thread...but...I'm doing an 18 week online reading Ulysses course! Started in Jan & we'll finish June just before Blooms Day. We're roughly covering an episode a week over the 18 weeks - 2 hour sessions which usually run over often by 20 or 30 mins!
It's run online by the James Joyce Centre in Dublin. The course leader is a joycian lecturer from Trinity College Dublin & lots of weeks there are guest speakers.

We're on episode 9 now & honestly it's one of the best things I've done! I'm absolutely loving it.

Alongside I'm rereading Portrait as it's been a long time since I read that.

Last winter I did a 6 week reading Dubliners course with them led by a different tutor- also brilliant.

I'm planning to go to the James Joyce Trieste Summer School this Sumner....my obsession is escalating 😁❤️

Sounds great - hopefully you can 'cascade' here?! I'm only part-way through Cyclops ATM, this thread had been keeping me on-task.

It struck me in a (very) idle moment yesterday that St Patrick's Day and Bloomsday always occur on the same day of the week...

I'm struggling with a very heavy workload at present. I've read to the end of the 'Eumaeus' (and already knew 'Penelope' pretty well), but haven't had much time to process what I've been reading or write about it. I love the 'Cyclops' episode, and the close parallels it finds with Homer.

Meantime I've written a chapter on (amongst other things) Joyce and sublimation. I haven't been quite resting on my laurels, but frustratingly keep having to leave this work to one side as I focus on other stuff. Sadly, the grant applications won't wait.

@ValentineGreen - your course sounds fantastic. The more I reread Portrait, the more Dante I see there, but the more I want to wind together the more traditional Aristotelean readings with a more contemporary pragmatism. I have to get my brain in a particular zone to be able to focus on this, though, and currently there's too much else competing for attention.

A 6-month writing retreat on an island somewhere would be nice!

I'm so glad to see you're both still.around & still reading & hope there may be some others still out there too?

I'm happy to keep posting here & to share any insights I learn from the course if that's OK?

We're finishing Scylla and Charybdis this week.

We've had some fantastic guest speakers over the past couple of weeks- a food historian/ joyce lecturer for Lestrygonians & a former journalist now joyce author for Aeolus. Both really fascinating.

There's a big group of us on line- about 40 & 15 or 20 physically in the JJ Centre. So lively & interesting discussion. Some people have done this course annually for several years now which I found amazing!

I know I'd read as far as sirens on this thread so would should I wait till I catch up on the course again before we dive back in with the schemata etc?

I was in my 20s when I read Portrait & it's interesting to realise how differently I feel towards Stephen now all these years later. Mind you I'm only at the part where he's left Clongowes so plenty of time for him to irritate me yet.

Now as a parent of a teenager I feel so sorry for little Stephen alone & so young in boarding school especially when he was sick 😫

Yes, I'll willingly re-start from that point.

I want to do that course! Next year, I might. I also feel overdue a Dublin trip (but I also want to visit Belfast for a proper grub around the archives - there's another writer whose Irish connections and fellow-author cousin are a major source of interest to me!)

And absolutely yes, please do share insights.

The course starts each year around the third week of January & the 18 weeks takes it to first week of June.

I'm finding it a brilliant entry into Ulysses for sure! But I have to say I also found all our discussions on here immensely helpful as I started from the beginning again! Once we get past wandering rocks next week I'll be in the dark again & reading each episode from there cold as it were...

Good morning!
I thought I'd give a quick synopsis of the discussion we had in the last class.

We read the last 3 pages of Scylla & Charybdis & we continued discussing that chaper. We looked at the reference to Carmen & othello & the running theme of the unfaithful woman in these works.

Buck Mulligan's 'cuckoo' referening the cuckold. Hamlet & his issue with his mother Gertrude marrying his uncle & hamlets own refusal to marry ophelia. 'No more marriages'.

The line 'all in all in all' - everything is connected. Hamlet is the play of human emotions - grief, just, jealousy- all also in ulysses - many parallels

Reference to Archangel - angels transcend gender. Declan Kieberd androdgynised molly & leopold- the womanly man & the manly woman. Playing with the notions of gender roles. More fluid than we might have thought. The idea of the 3rd sex existed when joyce was writing Ulysses. They used 'bi-sexual' then for what we would call non binary today

There's lots of references to borrowing & lending money in ulysses & this is also a nod to Hamlet 'neither a borrower nor a lender be'

Buck mulligan says 'kinch was in his summer house in mecklenburg St. Mecklenburg St ran through Montgomery St 'the monto'. Which was a notorious red light district in Dublin. It was the largest in Europe at that time & even made it into the encyclopedia Brittanica as being comparably as bad as Algiers

Fresh Nelly was a real prostitute that joyce knew but didn't sleep with.

I have more but have to go now - back later

Kiberd was ahead of his time alright - but also, I think, behind. His analysis only works with very traditional views of female and male cultures (men are from Mars, women from Venus)- e.g. a man who is soft or likes to be dominated is ‘feminised’ because of course that’s what women are like! You can’t be a meek, gentle man like Bloom - you must be a woman or androgynous.

The idea of the 3rd sex existed when joyce was writing Ulysses.

Joyce was known to have read Havelock Ellis, who emphasises ‘mixoscopy’, the term he generally uses to designate voyeurism. Ulysses, and to a lesser extent Portrait, is saturated with voyeurism. Ellis’s idea of sexual symbolism is also an influence on Joyce’s depictions of his characters’ psychological lives.

I think from memory Bloom appears in 'Circe' sporting a pair of cuckold's horns. He knows what Molly is up to and he likes it. Also, for him sexual humiliation appears to be part of the kick.

Jeffrey Weeks - a historian of sexuality - might have had a few things to say about Ellis! I haven't read him in a while.

I'm away with work so don't have much time to post further until tomorrow. I was in the airport yesterday morning & posted from my notes taken during the discussions. These notes were not all from the tutor leading the discussion - the format is we all read the prescribed episode in advance & then it's mostly round table discussion of what we all thought / interpreted & the tutor adds in or expands on areas particularly literary /political / historical references.

So what I noted here was a mix of all that as people were talking/ asking questions & it's fast moving so hard to keep up without making fairly rudimentary scribbles to myself!!

It seems clear from his letters and from Brenda Maddox that Joyce wanted to be dominated by a woman - and the frisson of that domination came in part from its supposed role reversal (he sees passivity as feminine). OTOH he was practically demented by the slightest suspicion of infidelity on Nora’s part - hence presumably his fascination with the cuckold and its central role (it's possibly the only plot development?!) in Ulysses.

I think it’s these traits and views that manifest in the explicitly androgynous Bloom of Circe: "'Professor Bloom is a finished example of the new womanly man.’” It’s Bloom’s passivity in the face of Molly’s infidelity that casts him as feminine. His pronouns shift and he becomes a woman in Circe as part of a grand masochistic fantasy where Bella becomes Mr Bello the masculine dominatrix of the passive cuckold. Bello squatting and farting on Bloom’s face echoes intimate detail from Joyce’s letters to Nora. When Bloom reverts to a man he recalls trying on Molly’s underwear.

My take is that Bloom-as-woman is a mix of sexual fetish and traditional views rather than (as I think Kiberd would have it) evidence of male feminism - male paraphilia more than ‘new man’!

That's interesting @BaronMunchausen
I've been thinking about this aspect of molly & bloom & how joyce plays with these stereotypes.

Bloom makes the breakfast & goes shopping for the groceries for it.

He brings breakfast up to molly each day.

He remembers & buys molly's creams in Swenys.

He's tidier & more fastidious than she is - tidying up her undergarments etc

He knows which creams she uses & remembers to go to Swenys to buy then for her.

He's more hygienic than most of the other men we encounter- buying soap & going to the baths

He's also more particular in his table manners & is repulsed by the other men in Burtons

He's especially interested in pregnancy & childbirth - Mrs Purefoy & also the book of etchings & details about childbirth He's looking at in the booksellers.

Molly on the otherhand is more 'masculine' in her approach to life - she's touring around the country singing, she is not v domestic regarding house keeping & she's taken a lover for her own pleasure.

These feel like they might have been unusual attitudes in that era.

120 years later....

Happy Bloomsday!

Happy Bloomsday!
I am delighted to report that I have completed the reading course & have now read & discussed ulysses in detail over 18 weeks - one of the best things I have ever done! We finished week before last & I really miss it 😢

Sounds great @ValentineGreen. Some of us would be up for picking up where we left off here (Cyclops?). As well 16 June as any other day?! 📖

I'm happy to join in again too!

Also Trinity College Dublin are leading an online 'read ulysses in 80 days' group across twitter & Facebook. It's free & each Wednesday evening there's a live zoom with a guest speaker which has been v interesting so far.
They specify on social media each day which pages to to read & people discuss online. It's called ulysses80. And it only started 1st June so doubt its too late to join up if anyone here is interested. Just thought I'd mention it

I'm following the thread, just been snowed under (and shut away, grubbing about in archives). No idea where we're up to, but I'll pick up again or do random chats ...

Hello All!
Is anyone still here? I'm re-reading Ulysses as I signed up to the course again & I'm enjoying it even more this time as I'm seeing things i missed the first time

We're reading Lestrygonians this week

Still here.🤓