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.

Hi @Coffeesaurus - join in! I'm certainly no expert but I am enjoying reading Ulysses in the company of this thread enormously!

I'm heading to work now & will post the episode info shortly.

Thursday 03 August - Thursday 10 August
Episode 8

Lestrygonians

Time: 1.00pm
Scene: Lunch
Colour: blood
Technique: Peristaltic Prose
Correspondences: Hunger = Antiphates; Food = The Decoy; Teeth = Lestrygonians
Science / Art: Architecture
Meaning: Dejection
Organ: Esophagus
Symbols: Bloody sacrifice, foods, shame, constables

I am looking forward to reading this episode. In early June I was in Dublin and I did a 'Following in the footsteps of Bloom' walking tour organised by The Joyce Centre. It was led by a Trinity College Joyce Scholar and we walked the route as outlined in this episode and his insights were brilliant. I'm happy to share as many as I can recall once I've re-read the chapter?

I can't shake off the last bit either @Bideshi - and @ValentineGreen, thanks for asking after me!

I'm finishing off the chapter today, but am thinking again about the positioning of Bloom in this novel. Some Joyceans have viewed him as a pragmatist, aligning him with the contemporary philosophy of William James; whereas the Jesuit Stephen is more inclined toward Aquinas and Aristotle. He rejects the Hegelian Absolute, but despite his apparent rejection of idealism, does seem to adhere to some of its key tents.

Bloom is a typical embodiment of modernist outsiderdom and alienation. He's Jewish in a predominently Catholic city and less invested in nationalism, hence the row with the Citizen in the 'Cyclops' eposide. Whereas Stephen has aspirations to grandiose aesthetic theories and the lofty status of The Artist, Bloom works in the newspaper advertising industry. He also exists very much in the domain of physicality: his odd dietry habits and voyeuristic predilections being evidence of this (and very much against Christian doctrine that cautions against greed and carnal appetites).

The balance between popular and highbrow culture is everywhere here: the music hall songs scattered throughout the text, Bloom's occupation, etc. Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies is an interesting contrast here: haven't read it for years but in the opening pages the protagonist is returning to Britain with a copy of the banned Ulysses in his luggage and I think is apprehended for it. The Bright Young things and their prominent place in the media seem to embrace the pop culture side - quite probably taking a pop at modernism at the same time. Like U it's very satirical and funny and is, I think, Waugh's best work.

I haven't been able to find a critical comparison between those two books, but would love to read one! (Or write one).

The Habsburg connection is really fascinating! I keep meaning to come back to a reading of Joyce's notebooks. There have been no updated editions published since the Workshop of Daedalus to my knowledge, but I read somewhere that Macduff (or it might be O'Rourke) are publishing an up-to-date critical edition. Looking forward to that!

Please do! And I'd love to do that tour. Would you mind sharing details of this please?

Hi @SerafinasGoose the info on the walking tours is https://jamesjoyce.ie/book-a-walking-tour/

I thoroughly enjoyed it and it was also great to look around the centre itself.

I really want to do the walking tour at some point when I've finished the book! Interesting link with Vile Bodies - have added to my list of books to (re)read. Hope everyone is continuing to recover.

Re the meaning of the Parable of the Plumbs, @CryingAtTheDiscotheque - it’s possibly intended to ‘keep the professors busy for centuries’ as Joyce once remarked (I’ve seen academics dig deep - the plums are testicles to the column’s phallus, that sort of bollocks). My take is that it’s part of the episode’s wind and that - like Stephen’s nonsense-riddle in Nestor - it doesn't mean anything. Just Stephen the artist's observational composition that doesn’t hold anything deeper. He came up with some elements during his Sandymount walk and possibly ‘completed’ the vignette while on the tram, ready to show off to the other windbags. If it has any ulterior meaning, maybe it satirises some of Jesus' more enigmatic parables (the 10 virgins being the obvious one)?

Lots of interior monologue in Lestrygonians. Thoughts, often disjointed (as thoughts are), sometimes not literally verbal (again, as thoughts are), eg "swish and soft flop her stays made on the bed". Observation moves from superficial-impressionistic to profound-incisive ("No-one is anything").

I found it interesting that Bloom's wandering thought touches briefly on the 'urinary lease' which seems to have still been in place for Dublin's female population in 1904: "Ought to be places for women".

Have come back here for encouragement as I’ve finished Part II, after a lengthy break, but am fast losing interest. I read it as an undergraduate and have found it more readable a few decades on. I just find Joyce comes into my mind rather than his characters and he’s not someone I’d like to be stuck on a long journey with after all. I will read the final section but wonder if you are all still delighted with JJ?

I see it the other way round! In A Portrait, Stephen imagines the artist, like the god of creation, "within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails”. In Dubliners, A Portrait and much of Ulysses the narrative style adapts to the characters - using the voice of the characters rather than the voice of the author (who is invisible etc etc).

In Ulysses I think this situates us strongly in the everyday lives of ordinary people - their thoughts, habits, hopes, fears. And contributes to the sense of meaning and humanity, of their lives lived. For me it’s very much about them - the good, the bad, the ugly - and not about Joyce.

Life and work have got in the way of reading a bit over recent weeks, but I have just finished Lestrygonians... really enjoyed this chapter, the writing is vivid and I like the character of Bloom and once I got into the flow of it, I enjoyed being "in his head". Lots of earthy references to food and bodily functions/sensations, very evocative.

I recently read two other books and thought afterwards that they that reminded me (a bit) of Joyce. The first was The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, which has quite a few passages of stream of consciousness (and is set in Ireland)... The second was Lincoln in the Bardo (actually I listened to this on Audible which was FAB) - it is a chaotic collage of different voices and put me in mind a bit of some of the chapters so far in Ulysses.

Hoping others are continuing to enjoy the book - I am going to keep going with it.

I have found some of the writing difficult and inaccessible, partly because I dont get all the references...but I do think I get a very strong sense of the character of Bloom and his slight uneasy/outsider status. I also like the details about the sights and sounds of the Dublin streets and homes, makes it easy to imagine the characters wandering around... I think what I am saying is that I sort of skim over the esoteric references but can still "get" the heart of the book (though I am in no doubt that a Joyce scholar would have a much richer understanding and appreciation!)

I'm currently lost at what episode we are at; just been away on a US road trip and am playing catch up (reading 'Wandering Rocks' right now).

Is anyone else still here? 😀

👋I'm guessing everyone's on a summer holiday (US road trip sounds brilliant, I want to do that!)

I think next up is Scylla and Charybdis, we could post a schema soon in Valentine's absence??

Hello!
I'm still here but feeling v guilty as I've fallen behind. Work got v busy with a major deadline which I completed this week so looking forward to getting back to reading ulysses again!
Should I just keep going with the schema from where we left off?

I read lestrygonians & have loads of thoughts. I have a long train journey tomorrow & will post then.

The Coranto is apparently an Elizabethan dance, but does anyone know what "twicreakingly analysis" means?!

No idea! But I'll try to find out ...

I've just found myself at the end of 'Nausicaa', which I read back-to-back with 'Cyclops'. I always enjoy Cyclops: it's the episode that often makes me wish I could have met Joyce as it's written with such wit, verve and humour. He must have been interesting company to say the least.

It's also the episode I usually teach alongside the corresponding chapter from The Odyssey, as the parallels and parody are very clear in this episode. The narration's also interesting. It's told in the present tense by the sort of first-person omniscient narrator we tend not to find in modernism, but it's unmistakeably modernist. I love the BIZARRE digression into the list of guests at the forest wedding, which contains nothing but trees and seems a weird sort of skit on Burnham Wood/Fanghorn Forest, but without the battle elements. I'll have to reread the Homer as I don't remember any trees in that one!

The seismic ripples after the citizen chucks the biscuit tin are also superbly done and so funny.

As for Nausicaa, I have to love the characters of Cissy, Edy and Gerty. It's clear on rereading this eposide that Bloom fulfils her fantasy as much as she fulfils his, but through his stream of consciousness we learn that had he known she was 'lame', it would have killed any desire in him. His reflection that 'A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn't know it when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same' says something less than attractive about Bloom's character at this point.

It’s far from the only thing I didn’t follow in Scylla and Charybdis. The dialogue is too writerly and dense to be natural conversation, even within its particularly refined social circle of 1904 Dublin. Best’s triple pun on Hughes is just an obvious example of something that doesn’t work in spoken form. It’s not alway clear who’s there, who’s saying what, and what Stephen thinks or actually says. The name-dropping and obscure allusions becomes tiresome. Eglinton and Mulligan are quite witty, but Stephen tends to talk pretentious bollocks.

I like some of the self-conscious interior monologue (eg “Said that”; “Listen”; "Folly. Persist”). And I confess (father) that Mulligan’s lewd prayer to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque made me laugh! But generally I don’t like the episode much and can understand why we seem to have collectively hit the buffers here - maybe we can skip it now?!

Yes, @SerafinasGoose, the Homeric parallels are well-drawn in Cyclops (along with Hades I think it was one of the original short stories). The Plato & Aristotle riff as Scylla & Charybdis not so much.

Just watched the second episode of David Olusoga’s excellent BBC series ‘Union’ and was shocked to discover that Nelson’s Pillar was blown up by the IRA in 1966.

Yes, that's right. My mother was sixteen at the time. She isn't from Dublin, but it was news everywhere.

Just read a piece from yesterday's Observer about a Joyce book club that took 28 years to finish Finnegans Wake!

Reckon we can finish Ulysses in a year😸

I read that too @BaronMunchausen ! Amazing! And it made me feel very guilty for abandoning this thread which I started.
Life sort of got in the way but I am keen to keep going. I shall re-read the last chapter I was on tonight and will keep going until I catch up with you all.

In another act of madness I joined an online reading group for Dubliners with the James Joyce Centre. There's over 70 online participants and in the first session a man exposed himself to the whole group and had to be removed. It was shocking and funny and I think Joyce may have enjoyed it!!

Still here, but I've been swallowed up by life too. Where are we at? I'm happy to have a reboot!

I think we're up to Wandering Rocks??

The online reading group sounds good, @ValentineGreen . Though something of An Encounter about it...can people not be prosecuted for indecent exposure if it's online?

I don't know anything about what happens in cases like that (thankfully) @BaronMunchausen but I assume the organisers are looking into it!

We're only 1 week in but so far it's been very good and I am enjoying the conversation around Dubliners too.

I stopped reading at Lestrygonians so I need to read Scylla and Charybdis in order to catch up.

Was there a chat about that episode or would people like me to post the info as I had been doing for the other episodes?

I too would love to get back into it as I had been enjoying it immensely.