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.

This last bit v true, we're not writing essays about it, just ( hopefully) enjoying it.

I'd rather keep the flow than stop and start to see someone's theories about what I'm reading

Re Stephen and whether he washes enough. I think the point is that he lives in his head. He is preoccupied with abstractions - and there is a certain amount of self-neglect. Bloom, when we meet him, is much more aware of the body, the (mainly pleasurable) world of the senses.

I think that is true and it's possible to read and enjoy it on all sorts of levels. But, being old, and having had an old-fashioned education (and having read it before) I don't look up much yet still get a good proportion of the allusions. O-level Greek and A-level Latin turned out to be much more useful than I imagined (plus a husband raised Irish Catholic.) I think the interesting bit is how much Joyce would have expected us to 'get'. He likes to tease and frustrate I think.

On the other hand I think we have all known a Buck Mulligan and a Mr Deasy so his delineation of character is spot-on and totally accessible.

I read Episide 2 yesterday morning but had a family event after so only getting to post now. Its been v nice just mulling it all over in my head as I've gone about my day.

@DiDonk you are, of course, very welcome to readalong here with us & you are absolutely free to read at whatever pace & to whatever depth of analysis you desire..

However I started this thread for people who were interested in sharing a reading experience where we could discuss to our hearts content both the wider themes & the minutely specific if we wish.

I 'read' Ulysses in a 'go with the flow' manner in my 20s & despite bring irish, raised Catholic & Trinity College Dublin educated I do not have a classical education & I did not learn Latin so the vast majority of the allusions / references were totally lost on me. I did not enjoy the reading experience hugely.

I am now in my 50s so i have a different perspective on life & I have read a lot about joyce & his life & his other books & I have a desire to read it again. This time I really want to delve into the richness of the book.

I have enjoyed everyone's thoughts & opinions & links shared & already, only 2 episodes in, it's a radically different experience for me. I understand so much more already.

I can't see why anyone would have an issue with that to be honest?

So...my thoughts on Episode 2. I am not finding Stephen insufferable or unlikeable which surprises me!

I feel empathy for him. He's an academically gifted young man from a disadvantaged background, trying to make sense of the society he finds himself in.

He's working in a dead-end job, teaching a subject he's not interested in, to rich, privileged unmotivated kids whose lives contrast with his own..

He recognises something of his own outsider character in Cyril Sargent. It both irritates him & sparks something more protective. I think his thinking about Sargent's mother is reflecting his own mother's love for him even though he was ultimately a disappointment to her in the end.

I totally agree with the point already made that it's difficult to convey or understand just how big a step it would have been in 1904 to reject Religion & Catholicism. How hard it would have been to navigate a path outside it whilst still retaining a connection to family & society. In Stephen's case its a class signifier & broader terms it's all bound up in colonialism. Irish catholics were banned from practising religion for so long it became even more entrenched in many ways & was so embedded into the cultural norms that Stephen struggles to break free despite wishing for it

Deasy is probably typical of the other 'type' in Dublin at this time - pompous, out of touch, racist, sexist pro Empire. Again as an Irish person born in the 70s it's v hard to reconcile this character with notions of 'irishness'

There are some lovely moments of Stephen's humanness - when he tells himself to 'say something' & that his money box would be empty.

Also hating himself for wanting to impress Haines but still drawn to trying

I read up on the classical references & found them interesting.

In conclusion Stephen seems like an honourable yet untethered, troubled young man who is struggling to find a 'place ' or perhaps his purpose in life at this moment.

Yes I especially like the "say something" aside to himself! Recognisable stream of consciousness like this is one of the great things about Ulysses.

Deasy would identify as not-Irish, or Scots-Irish. Stephen's thoughts reference the plantation of Ulster etc. I wonder what he'd make of the Star of David flags fluttering around loyalist east Belfast today! His assertion that Ireland never let Jews in, btw, comes in the very year that the Limerick Boycott of Jewish businesses was started by a local priest.

V interesting @BaronMunchausen I felt Deasy would have identified with the establishment notion of Irish (within the British Empire). I know he has Scottish lineage but if asked his nationality in 1904 would he have said British, Scottish or Irish?

Yes I am probably projecting modern ideas onto 1904. Or confusing Anglo-Irish with planter views (the former memorably expressed by the Duke of Wellington, who denied being Irish as 'being born in a stable doesn't mean you're a horse'). Deasy, who has 'rebel blood' on his mother's side, does explicitly say "We are all Irish, all kings’ sons".

I know what you mean & it's what I was trying to say myself. It's so difficult to separate all that we know now regarding the outcome of the yet to come war of independence etc from what the reality of ieland in 1904 would have been like.

I think Deasy would have considered himself as irish as Stephen did yet they had radically different understandings of what this actually means

Deasy calls Stephen a Fenian.which again is a signifier. Buck represents yet another version of Irish which is different to Stephen etc

And I was reading that this episode has a lot of references to war / fighting / battle / conflict & quite gruesome imagery. Its set in 1904 but it was written in 1917 in the midst of world war I.

In reality the children Stephen was teaching would have gone on to the trenches of work war I just 10 years later..

I find it really fascinating why he chose 1904 (apart from the romantic nod to meeting Nora). It was a moment before cataclysmic change in world order as well as the upheaval of the status quo in ireland. Yet none of that could have been known by Stephen who was suffocating in the stultifying oppressive atmosphere of Dublin as an outpost of the British Empire...

WWI

Deasy's "all kings' sons" quip casts a light on modern ideas of Irish nationhood. Some query the notion that Ireland ever existed as a unified nation (no "a nation once again", no reunification), but this Ulsterman's reference to Ireland as a historical collection of regional kingdoms is actually a rather nuanced claim to Irish nationhood.

Reading as non-Irish (but Jewish) person. So welcome Valentine's perspective. In some ways realise I was reading a-historically - as if it were contemporary. Reworking for the present.

Which makes Stephen a kind of 'woke' student. The sort who would now want his pronouns respecting. Who had - perhaps as a result of his parents' efforts - a 'good' education, but is now drifting. His only current employment is pretty much a dead end. Whose parent/s don't understand what has become of their promising clever boy, who has got in with a dodgy crowd.. Who thinks himself superior but has little to show for it.

You could argue that Stephen's saving grace would seem to be that he is conscious of all this. He just doesn't know how to move forward and the Dublin of his time does not seem to be offering him many/any good options.

(It all reminds me a bit of my daughter after university.)

We can only speculate as to what happened to Stephen after Bloomsday....

Yes but Dublin wasn't an outpost of the British Empire. Technically it was part of the mother country, as was Edinburgh. And yet at the same time it wasn't because Ireland's always had ambivalent status. Not a colony, yet not quite at the top table either. Part of the family but a sort of poor relation.

Deasy would be of plantation Scots ancestry - protestant Scots, mostly from central Scotland and the borders, relocated to Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries as a 'civilising' dilution of the population. He would have considered himself Irish, but in a slightly self-conscious way. He sounds as if he's justifying himself somewhat to Stephen, yet at the same time he would have considered himself superior to the mass of the Irish population.

Stephen is an enigma as a highly intelligent intellectual who is not only a Catholic but also an impoverished one. He has also lived abroad and therefore must be 'sophisticated' despite his threadbare appearance . I think Deasy doesn't quite know how to read him. I wonder if the anti-Semitism is a sort of feeler to try and locate Stephen in the complicated Irish caste system. Is he one of us?

I haven't got the book with me so I can't remember the context of the use of 'Fenian' but it was never used in a good way. Even then it was a sort of codeword for extremist. Both Queen Victoria and her son survived assassination attempts by 'Fenians'. Is it Stephen's father in Portrait of the Artist who weeps and cries 'Poor Parnell. My dead king.'? So, strong support for Home Rule in Dedalus family then (though perhaps not Fenian). Parnell was (and actually still is) such an emotive figure in Irish history. There was plenty of Irish misogyny directed at Kitty O'Shea. Deasy would have been typical in that respect.
Chilling think of those hockey-playing boys going off to the trenches barely a decade later. The hockey match is described as a joust which is a rehearsal for war.

Ah@LaGiaconda. You slipped in. I think you are right about Stephen. He and Bloom are both outsiders, both seekers after something even if they don't know what. The other lurking presence I suppose is Modernism - not only the form of the book itself, but partly embodied in the character of Stephen and his possibilities (or lack of). Then there's Freud who changed how we thought about who we are; Joyce must have been familiar with his theories and those of his followers. He would have had a field day with Stephen.

"Fenian" is a very strong slur now for Irish Catholics - back then it was closer to the original Fenian Brotherhood, but songs using it as a slur date back over a hundred years ("up to our knees in fenian blood"). Like many ethnic slurs it has deniability built in ('I only mean republicans') and Deasy is very unlikely to have reason to believe that Stephen is actually a republican insurrectionist.

It's such an interesting time on Irish history & I think Ireland's relationship with Britain was / is super complicated. There had been several uprisings & attempts at gaining freedom before 1916.

Parnell is an incredibly important character in irish politics & history.

I found it made me stop & take stock when Deasy comments that he remembered the famine. Again an enormous tragedy that radicalised those who survived & this is why the turning away from Catholicism would have hern such a brave step for Stephen at that time time.

I have been thinking about the commrvy that Stephen was today's equivalent of a 'woke' student & I'm don't really agree.

Stephen is an intelligent young man who cannot find a place for himself in the oppressive regime that was Dublin in 1904. He serves as a mirror I think, reflecting back the myriad of ways of being irish then. Even by the time joyce was writing this he was aware of 1916 & the bloody aftermath which created the appetite for freedom not to mention on a global scale the chaos of WWI..

Don't agree that a modern day Stephen would be woke either (in the personal-pronouns sense), inasmuch as he intensely rejects his society's focus on identity. OTOH in A Portrait he is very dismissive of more collective progressive politics, as advocated by McCann. Joyce's model for McCann, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, who was murdered by the British during the Easter Rising, was a true gem of a man. More dissident than Stephen/Joyce in ways that were social and altruistic rather than individual.

*McCann is name-checked in Nestor, in the list of Stephen's creditors, don't think he's mentioned elsewhere in Ulysses.

I think my 'woke' analogy is more from the Telemachus section where he doesn't mind Mulligan calling his mother 'beastly dead' but does object to being dismissively referred to as 'only Dedalus'. He seems to combine fragility with a sense of his own importance/superiority, that reminds me of confused, well-educated people today. (He respects himself but not other people? Perhaps he mixes being superficially progressive with being reactionary. Overthinks. Probably needs some more good meals, some affection mixed with honesty and rather more sexual experience.)

Some great backdrop about Irish politics and nationalism (and Parnell). I've just managed to grab a cheap copy of a book about Carson, who I've encountered in the work of Joyce's contemporary who harks back to an Ulster Presbyterian family and who was distantly related to the second PM of Ulster, John Miller Andrews. Admittedly I don't know much about him, which is why I was intrigued to read further.

This comment from @ValentineGreen jumped out at me

Stephen is an intelligent young man who cannot find a place for himself in the oppressive regime that was Dublin in 1904. He serves as a mirror I think, reflecting back the myriad of ways of being irish then. Even by the time joyce was writing this he was aware of 1916 & the bloody aftermath which created the appetite for freedom not to mention on a global scale the chaos of WWI.

There's a lot in here. The mirror metaphor again, for one thing, and there's the idea of the exile, a common one in modernism. Then there's the strange trajectory of his literary career: he started life as Stephen Hero, then was unceremoniously demoted to a 'Young Man', although along with this came the accolade of 'Artist' which judging by Joyce's writing he valued more highly than that of a hero. But the artist aspiration still seems to be unrealised. He's devoted a lot of study to a complex aesthetic theory he relates to Aquinas, but at the end of POA all he manages to produce is some flimsy poem. His journey through 'the inferno' ended up being just as ironic as that of Dante, his literary predecessor. Now, he's 22 years old and in an unsatisfying teaching job he seemingly hates. This is a young man whose aesthetics sound original and interesting in theory, but whose supposed destiny into artistry still eludes him.

By the point of Ulysses Stephen represents the stasis that's a key theme in Dubliners, and seems as silly, pompous and out on a limb as Gabriel in 'The Dead'. In the first line of 'Nestor', he alludes to Blake's 'wings of excess': likely a desire to be free from constraint and particularly parental constraint - hence the connection between Daedalus/Icarus and the wings.

As to the reading of Freud: there's a lot of crossover between Freud/Jung and the contemporary philosophers: particularly Pragmatism and Humanism. Joyce reviewed Schiller's 'Humanism' at an early stage in his career. His philosophy wasn't just rooted in the ancients, Aquinas and Aristotle but also in writers like Wm. James and Schiller - I've seen a few pointers re. Bloom and even Stephen himself being pragmatists.

The Centenary Ulysses is a colossal volume that's about the size of a table top! But there looks to be some great paratextual material in there. I expected a normal-sized volume: goodness knows how much this huge thing cost to post!

@LaGiaconda I can see that now alright - Stephen is very much an "it's all about me" chap, which chimes with that sense of 'woke' as about personal identity. In the more positive sense of 'woke' I found myself very much on McCann's side when he challenges Stephen in A Portrait. Stephe does chalk up what one might describe as 'sexual experience' in the earlier novel - an experience (paid sex - he's not so poor either) that very much confirms what you say about him respecting himself but not other people. Joyce himself chose 16.06.04 to mark the first time Nora masturbated him.

@SerafinasGoose I've got that Centenary slab of a book too, it's great!

There's so much to think about following all these recent posts & pesky work is getting in my way!

Totally agree about Francis Sheehy Skeffington being an extraordinary person & of course a friend & fellow student of Joyce's Dublin days. By the time Joyce was writing Stephen's list of creditors in 1917 he was aware of poor Skeffy's murder following the 1916 uprising & I can't imagine how he might have felt writing him in as someone stephen owed a debt to...

They were dark, desperate, brutal times in ireland & in the wider world which makes Ulysses's central themes of love, live & hope all the more remarkable I think.

Life

I'm planning to get the centenary edition!

I don't know about the love, life, hope. At least I shall have to read on some more. At the moment we have Stephen haunted by his mother's death, and - I am several episodes ahead - Bloom has attended a funeral and reflected on the short life of his son and his father's suicide. I think it's more about the complicated mixture of the celebratory and the elegiac. But I do agree that the richness of the text is in itself an act of celebration