Reading Ulysses

the ending is very different - bloom chooses compassion and empathy, seeing the excitement of the early stages of romance with molly - mirrored in molly’s exciting infidelity with blazes boylan (does she notice his exemplary humanity? idk depends how you interpret the last bit of the last chapter)

odysseus goes john wick

frederik the “tale within a tale” thing is what the professor called “novel of everything”

other examples are like divine comedy, decameron, canterbury tales, arabian nights (ayyo pier paolo), don quixote, balzac’s books, moby dick etc

i think the idea is it’s purporting to show “the broad sweep of humanity” through these episodes. idk if that idea has any traction but it’s key (or was in my prof’s mind, rip) to why he chose a story about a spectrum of human folly vs something like oedipus rex, which might be focused on just hubris etc

he* being joyce, choosing specifically odyssey over say iliad or antigone

so for him it was not just an archetypal epic but a very specific certain sort of one.

we talked a lot for example about about how it (ulysses, don quixote) is sort of like a bildungsroman (another “archetypal epic”) but also not actually a bildungsroman (that was portrait of the artist anyway)

Right, and the 'everything' in The Odyssey is a lot weirder then I suspected. The world is still steeped in trauma from the Trojan war - nobody can have a conversation without mentioning someone who died there, it seems - but it's also at the cusp of it becoming history. A new generation, including Telemachos of course, weren't there. They just still live with the aftermath, with Ithaca still being in chaos, and the whole thing begins with news that Orestes has FINALLY slain Aighistos and avenged the murder of Agamemnon. It's like a time of anarchy is closing, but also a time where the heroes saw wonders and magic in strange places - including Menelaos meeting and capturing Proteus.

My standard line has been that these sort of Modernistic 'everything' works - Ulysses, Proust, The Waste Land, The Cantos - are trying to put the world back in order after WWI, but Joyce seems more complex. I read Finnegans Wake last year, and I got the feeling that it was quite significant that it was begun at the time of the Irish Civil War. I'm wondering if it means something, that Joyce is writing Ulysses and FW while Ireland is going through it's birth, which is traumatic, but in extremely complex and evershifting ways as well. He never really makes order, he creates shapeshifting and ever-changing worlds, where order is always fleeting and still fought over.

That is, he seems more postmodern than modern already.

loling at repeated use of "hey, presto" in the bull chapter

xp to frederick that's getting into the part that they reserved for the follow up class. this was like an upper division "interest check" class for a senior seminar taught by the same guy that you might take if you are considering entering "joyce studies" or "irish lit" ... and so he really focused more on situating it in modernism vs getting in-depth into the cultural history parts (which i believe they did in the follow-up)

i do remember the professors pushed the line that it is not the "birth" of modern ireland, it is the "rebirth" of an irish heritage, in the same way that modern day zionism purports to be a rebirth of the original jewish state (and which, in their own ways, both bloom and stephen walk away from, then spiral back into)

or, if you prefer, spiral out of, into (yes) a world wider than our (his) experience of modernity

one of the big hurdles in oxen of the sun is wondering why all these young men have chosen to go on a massive bender in a maternity hospital.

Heh

A couple of them are students there iirc

yes, and on shift, and the others are paying them a visit. it's not wildly implausible, but still odd. it honestly was a factor in me giving up on my first attempt many years ago, without any online guides. sure the language was the main thing but i just didn't have a handle on the big picture. they're having a big piss up? but they're in a hospital?

I imagine the standards of the day were somewhat different

Lol

Boys but don’t think I don’t know what you are about in that hospital of yours!

I read it at 16 without any guides too and yeah, they are necessary for any number of reasons. But I still enjoyed the headiness of it all.
On my recent reread I availed myself of Harry Blamires, Jeri Johnson etc. Cleared up loads of mysteries.

Re the hospital, I don't know, my assumption is that as it's a teaching hospital there are facilities/spaces for the students to eat and drink (and even board as well?), and as NV indicates, the kind of status that male students had in those days, and the leeway they were given, is rather different from today; so the place feels halfway between a college and a hospital, essentially. I could look up what took place at Holles Street Hospital, but this is what i take from it, and I trust Joyce is not inventing it.

To me Scylla and Charybdis feels more incongruous, the other fellas are clearly not all that interested in what Stephen has to say, they have stuff to do, and yet they indulge him in his monologue. I very much doubt Stephen cannot see their bored or unamused expressions, but he ploughs on, probably trying to impress AE. I feel Joyce's desire to express his Shakespeare theory trumped his sense of the veridical, and he knows someone would likely have told Stephen to pipe down.

“After 10 attempts at reading and completing James Joyce’s magnificent ‘Ulysses’ and only making it to page 10 each time, on attempt number 11, I finally did it! Hallelujah! ‘Ulysses’ should be a real inspiration to anyone interested in breaking the rules in any art form.” -Ron📚 pic.twitter.com/m0Hhdavi6y

— S P A R K S (@sparksofficial) April 26, 2024

He finally made it to page 11. Now for the rest of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOO5S4vxi0o

well that may inspire me to pick it up again

"The Lady is Lingering" on Indiscreet borrows some lines from a Henry Miller book, Ron can make something out of literary inspiration.

Nearly done with Circe. Honestly a bit underwhelmed this time around. The connections to the Odyssey don't really add that much, without that the structure falls a bit apart. And without the structure, it seems like a bunch of experiments brought together, and some of them work a lot better than others. Those that work, though, are obviously incredible, I''m not hating. But reading Finnegans Wake two years ago was a bigger experience.

I've never managed to make it very far in the Wake.

tbf neither does the Wake

I keep finwake as an open window on my phone and re-read bits of it when I have time. The annotations are great. I like to read it aloud to myself, half the enjoyment is in the mouthfeel of it

what annotated version are you reading on your phone?

I told a Joyce professor I met that I was afraid of the Wake, he laughed and said "be afraid. I've spent 50 years programming myself to read this book." So that was encouraging.

Two things I took away from the Wake:

1) Even though all the words stayed mostly incomprehensible throughout, it's often easy to grasp the tone/discourse of the text. If it's a lesson, a flirty conversation, if it's satire, elegy, mystery, etc. So in some way you can just float along, and get an emotional experience out of it. And enough things recur to get a sort of grip on a sort of plot.

2) Nobody understands Finnegans Wake anyway, so you're free to just make up your own interpretation. While Ulysses seems a lot more settled, the meaning of Finnegan's Wake is still up for debate. To me, it seemed to be about the Irish Civil War in a lot of ways. Or something like that. About trauma, the way so much modernism is about trauma, but a very different trauma than WWI.

finwake [dot] com!

The book comes alive when you read it aloud to yourself, it’s as much music as it is text