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!

Book Club Blues

I don't know what happened. One day we were all reading, and meeting and discussion literature, and the next, we had disbanded as a book club. Two members who were involved suddenly were no longer an item, which naturally caused a rift, and then the book set Sarah ordered for us to read next seems to have just got lost in the mail. We were supposed to meet March 5, which fell through, and I have no idea what's going to happen now. I feel all adrift...

And I have a stack of half read non-fiction books piled next to my bed. Maybe this is a good excuse to get through them.

#99 - Start a Book Club

Last week I had three friends sitting on my living room floor surrounded by candles, drinking red wine and eating chocolate chip cookies while discussing Cormac McCarthy's (arguably) finest novel, The Road. Thus, the book club has begun. Another item is crossed off my life list.

Sarah, my next-door-neighbour here in Merritt, and I decided in December to start with a first meeting at her place in January. We figured two does not a book club make, however, so she, being a social butterfly, rounded up a few others, namely Jody, a local musician, Paul the Shaw Cable TV guy, and Jonathan, a guy she met on the Greyhound just after Christmas. I, of course, was also there, along with late-comer and honorary member for the evening, Cornelia, who was visiting me from out of town.

After much talk of everything except literature, and probably too much wine, we finally got down to business and each chose a title of a book we'd like to read. Sarah produced pieces of paper, pens and a baseball hat. Jonathan's choice -- The Road -- was picked as our first read. What an awesome choice that turned out to be! I could have done without the graphic cannibalism scenes, but there were so many other things to discuss...

When and where is the story set?
What was the catastrophic event?
Who or what do the boy and his father represent?
What does "carrying the fire" mean?
Is the man at the end good or bad? What IS good or bad as defined by McCormac?

These are the kinds of things we got into discussing. It was a great book to talk about because of so much being left to the imagination. At first I found it hard to take the slow-moving plot, but the writing is amazing and it really did hold me right to the end.

We ended up digressing a lot to talk about what's happening in Merritt these days (not much - big surprise), what movies are worth watching, and the hilarious nature of local Scotsman Brian Snee who was in a play with Sarah at the Legion last month.
Actually, I'm surprised we discussed the book for as long as we did. There's always a lot of other stuff going on when you get four people together in a room who haven't seen in other in a month.

I don't know what the next book will be, but I'm looking forward to meeting at Jonathan's place on March 5 to discuss it. Yay for book club!