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.

Absolutely @Maireas
Buck uses a lot of Catholic Latin phrases- perhaps because English Haines is there?
Haines seems slightly concerned by this when he speaks about it to Stephen.

There's quite a bit of mirroring & repetition too.

And he describes Bucks physical appearance numerous times. We don't get much of an idea of what Stephen or haines look like.

Maybe that's to suggest that buck is more physical where as Stephen is more cerebral?

I had to look up what kinch means & it's knife blade suggesting that Stephen is skinny compared to stately, plump buck!

I'm back! I have been mulling over Episode 1 since I read it last night. And I am puzzled by the relationship between Stephen and Buck and some of the references which might suggest that it was possibly more than a friendship?

Perhaps I am reading too much into things (which I didn't think was possible with Joyce ) but Buck mentions wanting Ireland to be a 'Hellenic' state. On the surface I take it to mean that Buck is more enamoured with ancient Greece than ancient Rome? But I also think it has a double significance - implying more open to homosexuality? Do I have that totally wrong?

Buck also mentioned Wilde twice and since the book is set in 1904 and Wilde only died 4 years previously in the midst of a huge furore around homosexuality etc it's certainly alluding to something?

Buck calls Stephen 'my love' which doesn't strike me as something young men in 1904 regularly called another man?

Aside from all of that, what I am taking away from this episode is that Stephen is a troubled, sad, academic young man who lacks many of the advantages of his companions. He is a student, equal to them in that regard, but he is poor and appears (so far) to be the only one of them working to support himself. Money weighs heavily on his mind. He is dressed in secondhand clothes and cast-offs and even then his appearance is somewhat shabby and dusty. By comparison we meet Buck in a 'robe' and Haines has a straw boater hat etc

Buck says Haines is rich and Buck himself seems careless with (other people's) money and is free and easy with it. He is shown as being larger than life and comfortable in his own skin and at ease with his 'position' in life. He's a likeable showoff who loves the attention and is the extrovert to Stephen's introvert. He's tactless and not hugely emotionally intelligent, he really doesn't seem to be able to grasp why Stephen is upset about the comments that he killed his mother etc

The colour green features a lot in this episode and the descriptions of Stephen's mothers illness / death are pretty grim.

I am sure Stephen becomes more unlikeable as the book progresses but all in all I feel empathy for him at this stage. And I don't recall feeling that before when I read it.

There's a section towards the end, where they're going for a swim and Stephen appears to be thinking about something, it's difficult to understand (and I was reading it when I was tired) so I'll re-read that bit this evening and if it's still impenetrable for me, I'll look it up.

I also found the comments about the milk not bring the old woman's own and that the trousers should be called 'secondleg' funny!

Hope everyone else is enjoying the first episode?

https://web.sas.upenn.edu/ulyssesseen/tag/hellenization/

Ooh, now. There's something I didn't spot, @ValentineGreen ! You may well be on to something!

Thanks for the link @LaGiaconda. It's interesting.

So fascinating to try to divorce what we know of modern day independent itemsld as a state & what the characters would have known in 1904.

I think its also interesting that by the time this was published ireland had been through huge violent turmoil- the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence & was in the throes of The Civil War.

Joyce obviously knew about these events from world news & correspondence with family & friends back home but he chose to set the book in 1904 . The last year he'd lived there. Before the catastrophic nation forming events to come.

And of course a significant number of the literary circles remaining in ireland were pushing an idea of mystical, romantic celtic revival. Which joyce rejects in favour of being European

Ireland- apologies on my phone

I've had a couple of wines 😀and haven't read more than a few pages at present, as I'm consulting a few other sources as I go along. But some of your observations @ValentineGreen resonate with me.

Most striking is the element of water: the 'snotgreen' sea and the swimming scene. This is reminiscent in the 'turfcoloured' bathwater at Clongowes in POA - a description repeated 4X in the text. It's picked up again in the scene just preceding the bird-girl epiphany when Stephen sees his school-fellows swimming in the Liffey and is disgusted by their white nakedness. He then has a form of epiphany, quoting this one:

his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs

Very birdlike, and following the elemental theme, this one is full of images of air and flight. The connection with his namesake of Icarus is unmistakable here. It's Stephen's Greek name Buck is taking the piss out of when he refers to the Hellenic theme, which JJ has nicked from Homer and plonked slap in the middle of Dublin on one nondescript June day.

The disgusting, slimy water theme is very abject and seems in both novels to be associated with a form of anti-baptism. SD is also still struggling with the renunciation of his faith and associates that with the death of his mother. His ambivalence is strange - he no longer believes, but still believes it's sacrilegious to pray, which seems a contradictory position. Despite his secular epiphany at the end of POA, he hasn't really moved on much.

The text's full of abject language - as was Portrait - and the 'epiphany' of Stephen Hero (not in POA) about the death of Stephen's sister Isabel, based on the death of JJ's brother Georgie. Her funeral seems to be echoed in Paddy Dignam's later funeral in U. There's abject language of oozing body matter here too, which is echoed in the description of his mother.

I picked up the Wilde references too, not only as a connection to Ireland but the implicit homoeroticism you also noticed. The handing over of the key from Stephen to Buck might also subtly allude to that.

I'll read the rest over the weekend.

I wonder if the homoeroticism is a modern reading. We tend to queer everything. In a repressive society, men see women as Madonna's or whores. Either way they are distant and fantastical. Young men are only really free to relate to one another. We are only just into the 20th century and in some ways it's more like the continuation of some 19th century boarding school novel. Stephen also is obsessed with the religion he rejects. He strikes me as heady rather than carnal. Also frightened of the fleshly world, as represented by his dying/dead mother -!and perhaps somewhat repelled by his boisterous male companions. (Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt...)

Yes, that's a great point @LaGiaconda about how young men of that era related to one another. Whilst it's not full on homoeroticism it's definitely revealing something about their relationship I feel.

They clearly had a very intense friendship at one stage & now it seems to be slipping a bit & stephen feels ousted somewhat by his own grief & internal turmoil & of course the presence of Haines.

I've just read the spark notes for episode 1 that you linked earlier in the thread @LaGiaconda & found it v useful. Off now to have another mull over it all.

I can't tell you all how much I am enjoying this thread & the opportunity to read & discuss as we go!

This is a brilliant idea - thank you very much. I was listening to Ulysses as a radio programme and found it much more accessible so will try and reread along. I've also dug out my copy of the Odyssey and am going to try and read that alongside so I have the context.

Welcome @jotunn !
I was considering getting a copy of the odyssey too (have never read it)
Now I think I'll def get one over the weekend.

Great point on the homoeroticism.

At that point, as far as I've found it was still contingent. The crime was still 'sodomy'; the concept of 'gay' was yet to become an external identity but I think its seeds were planted with Wilde. He played the overt part of 'camp' publicly - that's what caused his downfall as opposed to what he did behind closed doors. And a censorious press completed his oppression.

I've traced this process before. It seems to me to have morphed from the Wildean dandy to camp to 'queer' - a term first traced as a pejorative for homosexuality to a US government pamphlet of 1926. D H Lawrence certainly wrote of the homoerotic. Several writers of the day - Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, D H Lawrence and, obliquely, Mansfield - were writing fairly explicitly about Sapphism. Interestingly enough the sex historian Jeffrey Weeks claims that it was still some decades until lesbianism reached a corresponding degree of articulacy with that of male homosexuality.

James Joyce, incidentally, read Havelock Ellis and would have been well aware of his concept of 'sexual inversion' - his term for homosexuality - and 'mixoscopy', which he used to describe the voyeurism that permeates JJ's work.

We also know that of the better-known modernists Woolf and Hall were lesbian, Mansfield was bi, D H Lawrence and John Middleton Murry were quite likely bi too, and that's just to name a few.

I think there's mileage in @ValentineGreen's suggestion, whilst taking on board the point that these days we tend to 'queer' everything. That's true. We do. So gods help poor old Bloom when we reach the 'Circe' episode .... 😀

RTÉ Ulysses for those who want to listen rather than read this seems to be considered a good version.

I got my copy (Oxford Classics) yesterday, and I’ve read the first episode twice: once “cold” and then again after reading the notes and commentary.

On homoeroticism, you’ve said what I was going to say @LaGiaconda: society was much more homosocial in 1904. Undergraduates thought nothing of walking around arm in arm, and upper- class teenagers were almost expected to have crushes on each other at their single-sex schools, but of course you were also meant to “grow up” into heterosexual marriage, even if you lived much more separate lives than modern couples. As you say @SerafinasGoose, modernists, particularly the Bloomsbury group, are associated with sexual non-conformity. I wonder what the effect was on Joyce of living in European countries where homosexuality was not illegal.

Anyway, my first impression, never having read Joyce before, is to admire the quality of his writing, his characterisation of the three young men through their conversation and their appearances/actions.

I also admired the detail eg the little episode of the two men watching the boat searching for the drowned man. A characterisation of the sea rather different from the ‘great sweet mother’. And that final phrase: ‘Here I am’.

Welcome @ChannelLightVessel, great to have you reading along too!

I absolutely take on board the point that young people's behaviours were shaped by the environments they were in and that 'pash's' or 'crushes' were common, especially in upper class boarding schools etc.

But knowing how deliberate every single reference / word is in Joyce's writing my interest was peaked by the two references to Wilde etc.

Having said that, I don't think Joyce shied away from writing about all aspects of being human and if he wanted Buck or Stephen to be homosexual, he would have written them that way?

I, too, have reread some of the descriptive sections more than once due to the beauty of the writing.

I am also finding myself reading it out loud in a sort of whisper because the sounds of the words spoken is also gorgeous. I, close the door to the room I'm reading in so dh can't hear me..!

I meant to say, I have been doing the double-read too, once cold and then a second time using the notes / looking stuff up.

Okay - chapter 1 read. I found it helpful to read out loud as otherwise my brain skids on the wordplay and poetry - even though it is prose, there is a rhythm to it as though it is meant to be declaimed aloud!

It was interesting reading alongside the Odyssey. I'm trying to match the books a bit so the first book of that is the goddess appearing to Telemachus to tell him his father is still alive and he should be worthy of him, and cleanse his home of the suitors who are eating and drinking him into ruin. I liked the parallels - the anxiety about filial piety (and Stephen's refusal to meet his mother's wishes), strangers turning up and shaking up the world etc.

I particularly liked the reference to Hamlet sandwiched in - Telemachus has lost his father believed dead, and he is worried that he isn't man enough to replace him, Stephen put his conscience ahead of his mothers dying wish, even though the Catholic Church still has him, and hamlet who avenges his father's murder and drives himself mad (like Orestes.)

It can't be read quickly - I think the weekly chapter will be about right!

Yes, RTE's 1982 dramatisation really brings Ulysses to life. It's also freely available (and much more) via the RTE website.

Another resource which also brings Telemachus to life is the Ulysses "Seen" Project, which intended to turn it into a graphic novel! I'm not sure what has happened to the project, but the Telemachus chapter is available via the Internet Archive at <a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20131217083249/ulyssesseen.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20131217083249/ulyssesseen.com/

Interesting little wordplays like 'the snotgreen sea' instantly referencing Homer's 'the wind-dark sea.'
The bird/flight thing comes up again with Buck's (actually quite offensive but very funny) song about Jesus: 'My mother's a jew and my father's a bird.'
He has fun too with the milk woman, authentically Irish in her attitudes and cadences but unable to understand Haines speaking Gaelic. The only person speaking Gaelic is (of course)the Englishman. Stephen's aphorism about Ireland being like a servant's cracked mirror: Is it clever, or merely glib? What does it even mean?

I am enjoying Telemachus on RTE. It seems important to enjoy the book on an aural level, and just experience the dramatic flow of the narrative. The Odyssey would have been recited/performed originally

I think it is possible to focus too much on looking up every reference and illusion, treating the text as a huge cryptic crossword.

Can I join you? Ulysses has been on my TBR for years. I recently was at a 100th birthday celebration for a family friend. She had set herself the challenge to read Ulysses by her birthday. She read a page a day. She is an inspiration and it has been on my mind since so this thread is exactly what I need.

The "cracked looking glass" quip probably says that Irish art is distorted by colonialism. Most obviously British, but also the other master Stephen complains about in A Portrait - "the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church".

Welcome @Goodiewhemper delighted to have you join! Your friend sounds amazing & I hope she both achieved & enjoyed her goal of reading Ulysses!

I might give the RTE reading a go although I'm really enjoying reading it outloud myself.

I agree with you @LaGiaconda that it reads out loud incredibly well & that seems to bring it alive in a way. Other than poetry I have never felt the urge to read others novels out loud so that's interesting to me.

I think I know what you mean about not treating it like a giant cyptic crossword puzzle however I absolutely think there's a lot to be gained by taking time to ensure an understanding of each section.

I've 'read' ulysses once before. As in just sat & read the words but did not look anything up (pre smart phones!) Or research anything..I was significantly younger then with less knowledge / perspective in general & I'd say I missed 90% of the meaning or references. And this made the book impenetrable for me at that time.

Having read a LOT about joyce & the actual writing of the book & the schema etc I'm already finding it a far more enjoyable experience.

I hope that this thread will be a place for people to delve as deep as they like or skim the surface of the text as takes their fancy?

I def think there will be episodes coming up where i certainly will need to solve some of the puzzles.

It seems to me that some things are deliberately opaque by Joyce's design & some references which would have been commonly understood in the 1920s have been obscured by the passage of time & changing education curriculum etc so we might have to work a little harder at it (speaking for myself only!)

Perhaps the cracked looking glass of art might reference the divide that was emerging in ireland at this time about the future of Irish nationality & culture with Yeats & cohorts advocating for a revival movement looking back & joyce himself firmly looking forwards?

There's a section v close to the end of episode 1 where Stephen says to Haines 'I an the servant of two masters' & after Haines says 'We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame'

Then there's a paragraph I can't understand referencing Photius. In the grand scheme it prob doesn't matter but its so strange to read a paragraph & not understand it.

https://www.bloomsandbarnacles.com/blog/2018/09/08/decoding-dedalus-heresies-in-telemachus

I found this useful.

I do think looking stuff up enriches our experience. I think what I'm wary of is the sort of critical approach that my daughter was supposed to use at A-level, where fixed meanings are attributed to absolutely everything. I suppose I'd like to keep an element of fluidity and openness to it all. It's about a kind of meeting between the reader and the text, so that different understandings are possible.