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.

Actually I agree with you @LaGiaconda I have read that ulysses is a recognition of life & hope for better but I need to read on myself to see if that's ultimately what I take away from it too.
I am reading a chapter per week to allow time to read any additional texts relevant so l'm still only on episode 2 so far. We shall see!

Reading along and really appreciating this thread and all the historical and classical background. I need to properly look up the Telemachus/Nestor story. Were “average” readers in Joyce’s time just better educated or would they have had to research the references too I wonder.

I sympathised with Stephen in chap 2… felt his discomfort/ennui and frustration. The underlying theme of conflict added to that. Agree with PP’s comment that we all know a Deasy and a Mulligan!

The casual anti semitism is jarring, I guess typical of the times though.

I've thought about that too @CryingAtTheDiscotheque & I think the education curriculum was very different in 1904 & in general people were versed in the classics & Latin so I think a lot of the references would have been understood more readily.

A lot of the historical/ political stuff was contemporary then or in the not too distant past & they too were things people would have gotten but that we have to work a bit harder at now. Things like Deasy's reference to Kitty O'Shea, the woman who 'caused the downfall' of parnell as an off the top of my head reference. That was hugely topical & everyone knew about it etc

I think the passage of time & the vastly changed political, social & cultural & religious landscape in ireland plus a general move away from a classical education has made this complicated book even more complicated to understand today

But even in 1922 I think joyce intended that there would be references people had to tease out too..

I have just been speaking to someone who is involved in this project which looks incredible https://ulysseseurope.ue/
If any of you are planning trips to any of the partnering cities it would be worth checking out!

Sorry there's a typo in that link. It is
https://ulysseseurope.eu/

What a fantastic project @ValentineGreen !
I was thinking I must visit Dublin when I’ve finished the book - I’ve never been.

I would be very happy to give you some Dublin recommendations if you decide to visit!

I'm blown away - not to mention envious - by that Ulysses digital project. To be co-funded by the EU is incredible. I wasn't even aware EU funding was available for the digital Humanities.

@ValentineGreen - if you know one of the collaborators of this project would you mind very much asking them who the other financial backers were, and how they managed to go about applying for funds from the EU? (I have an inkling, though, that this option would now be closed off to the UK thanks to Brexit) ...

I love the performative element especially. I'm currently trying to do something similar, albeit on a smaller scale, with another modernist project, but that will depend on securing funding. And that is HARD in this climate: currently what they seem to want is work on contemporary gender, climate change or AI, and a lot of applications that don't fit that mold are being knocked back.

I'm also wondering whether there's been any collaboration with the James Joyce Society?

Congratulations to them for an absolutely brilliant project.

Thursday 15 June - Thursday 22 June 2023

Episode 3 - Proteus

Time: 11am
Scene: Strand
Colour: Blue, Green
Technique: monologue (male)
Correspondences: Primal matter=Proteus; Kevin Egan =Menelaus; Cocklepickers=magapenthes
Science / Art: Philology
Meaning: Prima Materia
Organ: none
Symbols: Word; Tide, Evolution; Metamorphosis

So, here we are on week 3 and heading into one of the first streams of consciousness and I am looking forward to getting stuck into it over the next day or so and to reading everyone's thoughts on here as we go.

@SerafinasGoose it is indeed a really good project. I read about it last year some time as it was initiated by 2 Irish men.
Here's an article from the Irish Times about the project
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/joyce-homer-and-an-epic-centenary-celebration-across-18-cities-1.4842213

I was speaking to one of the international partners about another project and somehow this one came up and we ended up having a great chat about it.

I am looking at the schedule for the 18 cities and hoping I can make it to some of them, I too am interested in the performative elements.

Really looking forward to this chapter. Apparently it's where most people who dip their toes in the water give up. But we are made of sterner stuff!. Actually I have started and am loving it. It's a wonderful intricate maze and the writing is sublime.
Bloomsday tomorrow👌

Thank you @ValentineGreen that is very kind.

onwards then to chapter 3! Looking forward to getting into it and hoping it will not overwhelm!

Happy Bloomsday to you all! ❤️
Mcswenys Pharmacy Dublin from my last trip there

Happy Bloomsday. For various complicated reasons I have quite a lot of reading time at the moment and so am racing ahead.

Some of the episodes ahead are extremely funny. I've just finished Cyclops and am on the first few pages of Nausicaa.

I am quite interested in reading some biographical and critical stuff on Joyce - though may leave this till I have finished. But that will help me as there are so many different allusions that inevitably I'm only picking up on a percentage of them. Even so, it's turning out to be an incredibly rich experience!

https://i.giphy.com/media/3orif6wFmLKkB89SDu/giphy.webp

I've had one of those bars of soap from Sweny's for years @ValentineGreen , seems a shame to actually use it (sure there's always the gulfstream for washing)!

I realised I posted without coffee earlier and it is Sweny's, I automatically added an erroneous Mc - eeek!

I have a soap I am reluctant to use too, and orange blossom water from there too.

Yes, Stephen's interior monologue is less relatable than Bloom's. A polyglot with a classical and religious education who's not averse to showing off to himself...it makes for difficult reading. Most readers will think "I don't think like that!" There is a fair bit of humour in Proteus, but Stephen is a difficult person, as Mulligan suggested. It's a shame if Proteus stops a lot of readers from progressing to the next chapter. Telemachus' wrestle with the sea though has to come before we see Ulysses in Calypso's home.

The opening reminded me a bit of modern mindfulness meditation. Then the monologue switches between the interior and exterior - and the narrator intercedes now and again. It is interesting that the narrator and Stephen both allude to Hamlet - Joyce' narrative voice often adapts to the idiom of the person it concerns.

Yes, good point about the mindfulness. 'You are walking through it howsoever. I am, a stride at a time'. Self-consciously in the present.
Funny, I remember as a child wondering if the world ceased to exist when I shut my eyes or slept. I had an idea that the whole world was a product of my imagination. Illusions of grandeur. Didn't hear of Bishop Berkley for another decade or more.
Hamlet, I suppose, is solitary self-questioning, self-absorbed , inhibited from action (or achievement perhaps) by overthinking. Beset by usurpers and false friends. It's not surprising that Stephen fancies himself as a bit of a Hamlet figure. Towards the end of the chapter his 'Latin-Quarter Hat' becomes his 'Hamlet hat', his mind switching backwards and forwards between scenarios, linking and unlinking.
It's very dense in its allusions because Stephen is ..well, Stephen. But it's also sensual in that he is experimenting with the senses. He ruminates on the theories of Aristotle and Berkley about the nature of the senses, but also tests them in a simple, almost childish way, shutting his eyes, listening to the popping and cracking of the sea wrack, being conscious of his hand-me-down boots.
Then, memory, the past, imagination, flights of humour (a phone call to from Kinch to a navel-less Eve). Fluidlity, elusiveness, tangents, reality and illusion, transparity, a mind running (flying?) free. But an exceptionally erudite mind at that.
The Paris section is so clever and so evocative. The little misunderstanding because to the French ear, Irlandais and Hollandais sound almost the same. No, not cheese! Much absinthe - de rigeur for those with bohemian pretensions and the hats to match. Another oblique reference to anti-semitism through M. Drumont, leading anti-semite and one of the persecutors of Dreyfus.
Oh, it's all so dense, rich, complicated. You could spend a year on this chapter alone and keep finding new things.
The dog riff: 'Dogskull, dogsnlff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogsbody's body.' could have been written by Beckett. And now I come to think of it it reminiscent of 'Alas, poor Yorick.'
Anyway. enough.

Sorry, don't know what happened to paragraphs there

Happy bloomsday, am trying the RTE audio on Spotify. Never actually listened to an audiobook, it's very different to reading.

Some things in Ulysses are easier listening to it, the school part went rather better than on the page but I feel you lose from not having the ability to slow down when the writing is dense.

Looking forward to to Blooms breakfast!

I've just read it cold now. There are lots of references I don't get but will very happily read up on over the next few days.

Over all it was not as difficult as I remembered, to get the gist of it.

The writing is so beautiful. I read it out loud & the play on words & sounds & images is incredible.

I loved the notion of the phone call back through time!

I am enjoying this experience immensely I have to say.

I'll be back again once I've re-read it & grapple with some of the allusions & references.

I hope everyone else is getting on OK & that we haven't lost anyone at this point.

Stephen is so lonely & I really got the sense that he doesn't know where to turn, in all senses, at this point in his life.

The passage where he remembers seeing the girl looking in the window of Hodges Figgis bookshop & he's imagining something happening 'soft, soft, soft hands. Touch, touch me' . He's so yearning for connection . And possibly a nod to joyce meeting nora barnacle for the first time on that date too.

I've started reading up on the references in Episode 3 today and thought this was interesting:
http://m.joyceproject.com/notes/030051kevinegan.html#:~:text=%22Kevin%20Egan%22%20is%20Joyce's%20fictional,revolutionary%20actions%20of%20the%201860s.

The language is sublime. When I read it I hear a very heavy Dublin accent in my head. It's also a good deal more disjointed than the rich, but ultimately more confident soliloquy at the end. It's full of abjection - and SD is still fixated on the revolting turfcoloured bathwater at Clongowes School (there are no fewer than four references to it in Portrait), in which he always seems to be drowning.

Stephen seems alienated, not only from those surrounding him, but from his own self. The whole episode, with its slippage between first- and third-person, past and present, speaks of a man ill-at-ease with himself, whose grand ideas about his artistic destiny have started to totter and waver.

Consubstantiality is an oft-repeated theme, suggesting his earlier religious doubts and quest for intellectual independence are still far from resolved. In giving up his RC faith he's relinquished none of its constraints or the stranglehold it has on his aspirations and inhibitions, but now simply has none of its comfort or reassurance. Seems he's opted for the worst of both worlds, and by the end of the novel he's still wandering aimlessly with no real sense of direction.

And I agree the emphasis on touch - as compared with SD's obvious lack of it - is notable. His corporeal anxiety is still very much present.

I have more sympathy with this strange, remote character in this episode than at any other time in Joyce's novels.

'I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet' - sounds like a more salacious, less idealistic hark-back to the bird-girl with the hoisted-up skirt who inspires his earlier epiphany.

And the focalization on the dog is SO bizarre! Very like Kafka, in fact.

On a happier note, Bloom's eating habits in the next episode always make me want to vomit .... 😀

I can see why many readers stop at this episode, and I do think it’s too literate and needs too much decoding for authentic stream-of-consciousness. Even for a pretentious artist as a young man! Also, the narrator voice and the internal monologue are entangled with each other.

There is a lot of allusion for the reader to either let go of or track down, but Stephen's mind comes through nonetheless. Do the themes - transformation of matter, along with the search for form, self and connection - emerge without tracking down every obscure reference? I would say so. Knowing who, say, Drumont or Perkin Warbeck are, doesn't add much to the reading of it.