Ulysses – Episode 13 (Nausicaa)

I have little to say about Episode 13, Nausicaa – in which Leopold Bloom is at the beach, masturbating (good thing he didn't do it in the tub this morning, as planned, eh?) while watching a young woman named Gerty who is turning him on by lifting her skirt to reveal her thighs – is at the very least an easier read than the last several episodes because it's written (mostly) in full sentences and involves only four characters to keep track of and, (in my humble opinion), is a breath of fresh air because it involves a majority of female characters and feminine perspectives, which have been sorely lacking thus far in the book. It doesn't even bother me that Joyce is making fun of women and what he evidently suggests is their habit of romanticization of everything around them). 

The question at this point, though, is still... does anybody care? (Besides Joyce scholars and Bloom nerds, of course.) 

I know I don't. I wouldn't read Joyce again if you paid me. Life is too short, and there are too many other good books in the world. Not that I'm going to quit, but I do NOT recommend this book.

Ulysses – Episodes 11 (Sirens) and 12 (Cyclops)

What a bunch of gibberish! Episode 11 is essentially an hour's worth of reading sentence fragments and nonsense sentences that must make the reader question whether Joyce is really just having a joke or had writer's block the day he wrote this section and decided to just write his own stream-of-conscience garbage on the theme of Homer's mermaids ("Wise Bloom eyed on the door a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves." P. 253) and music ("There's music everywhere." P. 270) while puppeting his characters, Bloom, Dedalus, et al. throughout. 

Case in point: 
"Can't see now. Remember write Greek ees. Bloom dipped, Bloo mur : dear sir. Dear Henry wrote : dear Mady. Got your lett and flow. Hell did I put? Some pock or oth. It is utterly impss. Underline imposs. To write today." This is Bloom writing, but is it also Joyce commenting on his own writing? I think so. And the joke's on us, the unwitting readers who bow our heads in reverence to the supposedly brilliant James Joyce, wordsmith, prankster. This episode ends with a fart. I mean, c'mon.


As for Episode 12, well, it's pretty much more of the same as the last two episodes, but this time takes place in a pub, and is from a first-person perspective of an unnamed narrator. There's a lot to do with Irish nationalism and other political and religious elements, which can all be found much better explained by Sparknotes here. 

On a scale of enjoyment with 1 being a root canal, and 10 being a birthday party with balloons and cake, I'd put reading this section of Ulysses at about a 3. However, I'm not going to quit reading this book because a) Joyce definitely had a sense of wit, which comes out a lot in this episode, and which I did find myself enjoying at times, and there are some lines that are pure poetry and almost make it worth the read, and b) I'm more than halfway through the book, and it's been on my bucket list for years, so I'll be damned if I don't read every frigging word in it. Next up is Episode 13 – Nausicaa. 

Ulysses – Episode 10 (The Wandering Rocks)

Episode 10, which is right in the middle of the book, is known as The Wandering Rocks, which is an Odyssey reference, of course, as well as a reference to the overview of various characters going about their business, walking around Dublin. If Ulysses were a Baz Luhrmann film, this would be the sequence in which the camera zig-zag pans over the ensemble cast, giving quick snapshots of their random doings and conversations. I didn't like it, just as I don't like Baz Luhrmann's particular directing style. But I will plow on, and see if the next episode has anything more readable in it.

Next up: Episode 11 – Sirens

Ulysses – Episode 9 (Scylla & Charybdis)

Halfway through!

Episode 9 reintroduces Stephen Dedalus as the main character, and this is the first episode in which Stephen and Bloom encounter one another on this day, June 16, 1904. The action of the episode takes place entirely in one room at the library, among Stephen and Buck Mulligan and a few other men. Stephen is trying to convince the older men of his theories of Shakespearian writing, specifically of Hamlet, and what the play says about Shakespeare's own life and relationships. Stephen has a hard time convincing anyone of his ideas or his proposal to have his theory published. Again, much convoluted, intricate writing in this episode, heavy on themes of Shakespeare/Hamlet – fathers & sons – and Homer's Odyssey, specifically of Odysseus' dangerous quest to sail between Scylla, the six-headed monster on a rock, and Charybdis, a deadly whirlpool. (Hence the title of this episode.) There is mention of women in the men's conversation, but no female characters appear in this episode. Interestingly, the idea that men can give birth only to ideas comes up with this line regarding Buck Mulligan: "He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands." (Episode 9, p. 200)

And, of course, there is a lot of philosophizing going on throughout:

"The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring." (Episode 9, p. 177)

"Hold to the now, the here, which all future plunges to the past." (Episode 9, p. 178)

and my favourite...

"In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be." (Episode 9, p. 186-187)

Whoa. Heady stuff. Tomorrow, Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks

Ulysses – Episode 8 (Lestrygonians)

After a month away from the book, I'm back to Ulysses, and my plan is to read one episode per day until I finish the damned thing. It's just such a weird book. I can't say I'm enjoying it as a novel, but I guess I'm still kind of digging it as a text study/analysis project. 

My quick and dirty plot summary of Episode 8: Bloom is wandering the streets alone, looking for somewhere to have lunch, buys a piece of bread to throw crumbs to the circling seagulls, runs into a woman he once dated and chats briefly with her, finds a pub to have lunch, eats and chats with some men he knows there, uses the bathroom, and leaves. 

Dublin, 1906

The thing about Ulysses is that the narrative voice is mostly the main character's interior monologue running most of the time, except when it jumps to the third-person omniscient. In this particular episode, Bloom is the main character, as we've seen in the previous few episodes, but of course it was Stephen Dedalus in the first three. So there's not really a single protagonist in this book, and there's really no single narrative perspective. Which is interesting, but can get kind of old, with all the sentence fragments and nonsense that flits through Bloom's mind. Again, not much actually happens in this text. It's just a lot of random thoughts and observations and memories much of the time. However, it is undeniably well-written. Even beautifully written, in parts. 

"Stuck on the pane, two flies buzzed, stuck." (Episode 8, p. 167)


Next up, Episode 9: Scylla and Charybdis

Ulysses – Episode 7 (Aeolus)

I listened to episode 7 online while reading along in the book this time, which was nice. The whole of Ulysses is on YouTube, and read by different voices, which helps to distinguish the characters and the narrative voice. 

However, this episode is by far the most confusing, convoluted, and difficult to get through. All I understood of it was that Bloom and Stephen Dedalus finally encounter each other in a busy newsroom/printing press, and there are a bunch of other men there, and they've all got something to say, most of which is completely cryptic. Oh, and the sections are separated by what seem to be headlines. 

I enjoyed it not at all. Except for the self-references to text and language. "His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smokes ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech... Noble words coming. Look out." (p. 136) And the one guy telling the other to "kiss my Irish arse." That was enjoyable. I think this episode, like the rest of the book, is meant to be funny, but the humour was entirely lost on me, save for the arse joke. 

Next episode: Lestrygonians 

Ulysses – Episodes 6 (Hades)

June 16, 1904

I missed Bloomsday! Dammit! June 16 slipped by me and I meant to update the blog even though I haven't read a word of Ulysses since my last post on May 17. Alas, I've been working crazy hours at my new job and completely forgot about the most important day of the year for Joyce fans.

Had to drop out of the Ulysses reading group last month because I was just swamped. I realize work is a lame excuse for not doing something, but reading Ulysses is not like reading just any other book – it requires careful close reading and analysis, and I really had neither the time nor the inclination at the end of many 12-hour work days. 

But I'm back at it now because the craziness of the job has died down, at least for the summer... I hope. Unfortunately I won't have the support of the reading club, since they're probably nearing the end of the book by now, and I've just finished reading episode six. But I aim to read and study one episode per week on my own now, and I think that will take me till about mid-September. But I will get there. If there's one thing I am good at it's stubborn persistence. I've read the Bible and run a marathon, and both take time and persistence, if nothing else, so I know I can make it though this challenge. 

I'm just going to be blunt: I did not enjoy episode six, the "funeral chapter." I may be an English major, which means I'm supposed to love gin and tonic and "difficult books" and author signings at bookstores but none of that is true in my case. I'm not loving Joyce at the moment. Or maybe I'm just sleepy and his writing is irritating when one is not wide awake. But I digress...

Here's my quick and dirty plot summary of episode six: Bloom gets in a carriage (a cab) with three other men and they make small talk on the way to Dignam's funeral, and then attend the funeral. That's it. Of course there's a whole lot of Bloom's thoughts, and there are many thematic elements of death and aging, and father-son relationships, and youth and life and all these grand themes that can be found in any "great novel," but there's also the continued Joycean mundane bits like Bloom's knee hurting as he kneels in the chapel, or his thought that tombstones should read not just a person's name and dates of birth and death, but who they were and what they did in life, (an idea which I am actually quite taken by,) but this was definitely not my favourite chapter in the book so far. It was a slog to get through. Either I don't "get" Joyce or Joycean fans are just faking it... or have a few screws loose. It felt like a bit of a waste of an hour on a sunny Sunday afternoon reading this particular episode. And it was depressing because it's about a funeral. With Bloom's thoughts of maggots and rats, chewing through corpses. Gross. Morbid and gross. 

Or maybe I'm just less inspired without the weekly group discussion at the coffee shop. Regardless, as noted, next week I will read/study episode 7, aka "Aeolus," and report on it here. 

Happy belated Bloomsday!

Ulysses – Episodes 4 (Calypso) & 5 (Lotus Eaters)

This week we were introduced to Leopold Bloom, who ostensibly is the main character of Ulysses, and followed him through Episodes four (Calypso) and five (Lotus Eaters).

Bloom is quite different from Stephen Dedalus in his looks (Bloom is tall and in his late 30s, as opposed to Stephen's early 20s and shorter stature), and in the way he thinks (Bloom focuses more on things in the world, outside of himself, while Stephen is more internally focused and intellectual). Where Stephen is the brain, Bloom is the body. Indeed, these two episodes which focus on Bloom are very bawdy, detailing his thoughts of masturbation and his prolonged act of defecation and urination. 

As with everything else we've read so far, the plot is thin (there is really very little action in the book) but there are layers upon layers of dense text describing and illustrating the characters' internal thoughts. Here's a quick and dirty summary of Episode 4: Leopold Bloom goes out to buy a mutton kidney for breakfast from the meat shop, comes home, prepares breakfast-in-bed for his wife, Molly, gives her a letter delivered from their daughter, Milly, who's just turned 15, and a card from Molly's manager (she's a singer), goes downstairs again to eat his breakfast while reading his own letter from his daughter at the kitchen table, then goes to the outhouse to have a long, leisurely poop and wipes himself with a page torn from the magazine he was reading. And in Episode 5: Bloom walks to the postoffice where he meets a guy he sort of knows and makes small talk with him, gets a letter from a woman he's never met but with whom he's having a sort of epistolary affair, tears up the letter, letting the pieces scatter to the wind, goes to sit in on a Catholic church service, then goes to a drug store to get a prescription filled for Molly, then runs into another guy on the street with whom he again makes small talk. 

Joyce's writing of Bloom is very sensual, with a lot of imagery of food and scents and animal movement and sounds. Bloom himself is animalistic in some ways, with eyelids that close halfway "as he walked in happy warmth" (p. 55). Bloom is also very sexual, noticing women wherever he goes; their hips, their legs, their lips. He notices his wife Milly's ample bosom when she sits up in bed to read her letter from her daughter, and he thinks of his daughter's "ripening" body and vain attitude as she is just becoming interested in the opposite sex. There is also a lot of text in this episode devoted to the discussion between Molly and Bloom of metempsychosis, or reincarnation, which, according to our group host, is a major theme throughout Ulysses. 

Episode 5, or The Lotus Eaters, is layered with flower imagery (playing off Bloom's pseudonym, Henry Flower), as well as themes and imagery of sedatives, hinted at with reference to the sedating effect of the Catholic church on unthinking followers, and references to actual drugs, as in "Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping draughts. ... (p. 81)." This chapter, as with the previous, is filled with bodily imagery, euphemisms, and layers of Bloom's thoughts, often written as sentence fragments. 

A question in my mind now, after it was brought up in group discussion that Bloom seems overly (perhaps inappropriately) aware of his teenage daughter's budding sexuality, is whether this book had any influence on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which is a novel about the sexual relationship between a (step) father and his obsession with his pre-pubescent step-daughter. Bloom seems a bit too preoccupied, when reading his daughter Milly's letter, with thoughts of her body and sexuality and potential relationships with boys, which makes me wonder, was Nabokov inspired to create Humbert Humbert from his reading of Leopold Bloom?

On another note, I'm seriously expanding my vocabulary in reading this book. Here are a few gems:

gelid = extremely cold, icy (pronounced "jellid") 
jakes = an outhouse (pronounced like "jacks")
scut = the short tail of a deer, rabbit or hare

Next week we're on to the next two episodes: six (Hades) and seven (Aeolus). 

Ulysses, Episodes 2 (Nestor) and 3 (Proteus)

James Joyce

There are some books that require a study guide if you're going to truly get anything out of them. Ulysses is definitely one of those books. I've been reading it along with the Sparknotes, and I stumbled upon this really great free podcast from Frank Delaney that I've also been using as a supplementary guide. I read the first episode as an online PDF, but then decided I prefer to have a paperback in hand that I can make notes in, and besides, it's just nice to read an actual book with pages you can touch and turn. 

This week the group met to discuss episodes 2 ("Nestor") and 3 ("Proteus"), which continue the storyline of Stephen Dedalus and his very ordinary day, June 16, 1904. Except it's a Joyce novel, so it's anything but ordinary when you get past the plot and consider the intricacies of the language. 

But let's consider plot first. Here's my quick and dirty summary of Episode 2: Stephen's teaching a group of boys at a school and tells them a riddle just before they leave the classroom, the answer to which is that the fox buried his grandmother. (Neither the boys nor I have any clue about this one.) It's a half day at the school, so the boys go off to play hockey (field hockey, as we'd call it in Canada) and Stephen sits down with one student to help him with math, and then goes to the headmaster's (Deasy's) office to chat with him and the headmaster types up a letter to the editor about cattle, which the headmaster asks Stephen to take to a couple of newspapers for him. Episode 3 is even simpler: Stephen hangs out on the beach, watching a couple of women he recognizes as midwives, then a couple collecting shells with their dog in tow, then he writes a short poem on a scrap of paper he tears off the letter from the headmaster, and then he urinates, and then picks his nose and looks around to see if anyone saw. 

Episode two is shorter than three, which is odd, considering how little action takes place in the third episode. In episode two, the reader is immediately and without the aid of descriptors for setting, thrust blindly into a scene in which it is slowly and vaguely revealed that Stephen is teaching in a classroom of boys. The reader is always, it seems with Joyce, left to sink or swim: figure out right quick where you are and who's thoughts you're following or you're sunk and you might as well just get out and stop swimming altogether (I mean, reading). See, reading Ulysses really is like being immersed in a deep ocean!

Anyway, episode two seems to deal a lot with learning and teaching, oceanic imagery, history, and the interesting contrast between lofty thoughts and base bodily functions. And I have a theory about a possible connection that Joyce was making between Deasy's writing on foot and mouth disease and his own inappropriate (sexist and racist) rantings about women and jews... is the implication perhaps that Deasy puts his own foot in his mouth, as the saying goes? I guess there's no way to know if that was a subtlety intended in the text or not, but I think Joyce wouldn't be against the idea of making these kind of conjectures about his book, which itself is nothing if not complex and multi-layered in meaning and symbolism. 

Episode three is really all about Stephen's internal thoughts. Not really stream-of-consciousness, but a blurring of the lines between the identity of the narrator and Stephen himself. The paragraph in which Stephen writes his poem is interesting because he (or the narrator? or Joyce? Or all three?) questions, "Who watches me here? Who ever anywhere will read these written words?" More than telling a story, as a novel is usually thought to do, this novel, or perhaps more aptly, this text, is a meta-analysis of "the novel," of language, of consciousness, identity, and art. I also think it's interesting, and undoubtedly meaningful, that Stephen writes his text on the page of another text, borrowing part of the page, as Joyce writes his own text (the book) alluding to, borrowing from, and hinting at Shakespeare's Hamlet, Homer's Odyssey, and the Bible, to name just three of the major works he blends with and uses to create his own in this grand meta-text. 

Joyce also plays beautifully with language, in the third episode especially. Of the dog he observes running around on the beach, he says/thinks/writes, "Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting from his jaws." What a gorgeous line. There is a lot of onomatopoeia and alliteration and poetic prose (or is it prosy poetry?) throughout this chapter, through which the reader is privy to the inner workings of Stephen's mind; the mundane and the profound all mixed up together. The depth of layers, or dimensions, is incredible in Ulysses. This book is kind of like the Magic Eye of literature. 

And with that ends the first of the three sections of the text. Next week we will get on to section two, which begins with episode 4 (aka "Calypso").

Ulysses, Episode 1 – Telemachus

The study group met this afternoon at a coffee shop just a couple blocks from my house.

Today began my deep immersion into what has been touted as the most challenging book in the English language – Ulysses, by James Joyce. Written between 1918 and 1920, and originally published in Paris in 1922, it is a very dense, but evidently very funny story of a day-in-the life of a couple of guys (Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan) in Dublin on a very ordinary day, June 16, 1904. Until today all I knew of this book was that it was written by a famous Irish writer in a kind of stream-of-consciousness style and that it's a "difficult book," so of course I had to add it to my bucket list. But I've made it through Moby Dick and the entire Bible already, so I figure this can't be impossible. (Frankly, I found the first chapter a much less confusing and more enjoyable read than the first chapter of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and that doesn't get as much press for being so challenging.) 

I found a copy of Ulysses broken up into episodes online and read the first of the 18 chapters/episodes, entitled Telemachus, this morning on my laptop, as well as the Sparknotes and a New Yorker article about it. Technically not a lot happens in this first chapter. 

Here's my quick and dirty summary: A couple of guys living in a tower by the sea get into a conversation while one gives the other a straight shave, and then they have tea with this other guy and a woman comes by to deliver milk, and then the three men go for a walk down to the water and one goes for a swim and another eventually leaves and they all decide to meet up that night at a pub for drinks. 

But that's just the plot. There's a HELL of a lot of other stuff going on. Allusions to Shakespeare (Hamlet) and Oscar Wilde and of course Homer's Odyssey, plus all kinds of references to the historical and political context of Irish subservience to England, and Irish art and symbolism, and religion, and all these in-jokes and puns and dialogue I don't understand, and loads of other things. Sparknotes was helpful. But I'm sure it gets at just the tip of the iceberg. 

I've wanted to read this book for years, mostly to be able to pretentiously quote from it and be able say I've read it, but I wasn't sure when I would get around to it. Fortunately, the opportunity presented itself recently when I found a notice posted in the Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador newsletter by a local academic who wanted to start up this study group here in town. So I jumped at the chance to join and engage in stimulating discussion with a guy who did his PhD on Joyce. How perfect is that? He's not at all pretentious, and he's really excited about Joyce, and it's really fun to be involved in a little academic club like this. It's nice to be intellectually charged up again. 

There are six of us, and we're going meet every Saturday to discuss episodes (chapters) of the book, until we make it through to the end. The host (the Joyce scholar) says "You don't so much read Ulysses as immerse yourself in it. Like the ocean." I love this idea of sinking deep into this text, figuring out the characters and plot and context and digging through the layers of language and symbolism and chewing it over for a good long while to get a good overview, if nothing else. Some say it's the most difficult book in the English language. Some say it's the best book ever written in the English language. And some say it's way too hyped up. Whatever the case, if I actually read it, I'll be able to have an opinion, and for someone with a Literature degree, that's always a good thing. 

I've just dipped my toe, so this week I'll be wading deeper into the Joycean sea. Thalatta! Thalatta!