Ulysses

A novel that takes place during a single day, but takes several months to read.

I finally opened Ulysses after a trip to Dublin in summer 2023. References to Joyce seemed to be everywhere: the Martello Tower still standing, video of a Fontaines D.C. performance at Kilmainham Gaol, the Museum of Literature Ireland on St. Stephen’s Green, Sweny’s pharmacy, the death mask replica at the Little Museum—all indications that the book yet resonates across time. Having read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before and finally seeing the city firsthand made Ulysses less mysterious. I read the 1992 Modern Library Edition of the corrected and reset 1961 edition, based on the first American printing from 1934. (Next time show more around, I think I’ll give the Gabler edition a go).

I wanted to experience reading Ulysses with a fresh, open mind, without an intermediary, so I read each of the 18 episodes through before consulting secondary sources. (Alas, my curiosity and my ignorance got the best of me). I then listened to each episode of the Raidió Teilifís Éireann (Irish public media) performance recorded in 1982—Ulysses as a radio play, with over 30 actors, sound effects and street sounds, special effects for interior monologues, a beautiful, invigorating production. Hearing Ulysses read by Dubliners revealed more atmospheric and linguistic nuance than I could have picked up on my own. After each chapter, I also read the pertinent episodic analysis in Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses, which tracks the influence of Homer’s Odyssey and draws attention to phrases and symbols that recur across episodes.

The first thing that I noticed was that Ulysses is very funny. Many of the allusions and symbology went over my head, but there are passages of great beauty and deep feeling and dazzling intellect. Ulysses is a demanding read, but I think it rewards the work a reader puts into it. There are plenty of ways to appreciate Joyce’s astonishing achievement, what he was able to make words do and say. He left us a marvelous gift. Do with it as you will. show less

Reviewing Ulysses is like reviewing the bible, not just because--as you surely know--it encourages irrational hatred and irrational love, and should probably have more three star reviews than it has. More importantly and, if I do say so myself, insightfully, it's like reviewing the bible because the bible is not a book, it's a collection of books, many of which refer to earlier books in the sequence of books.

So, I am suspicious of those who declare their undying love/hatred of everything in here, because that would mean loving/hating an awful lot of stuff. I read the book as a snotty teenager, and 'loved' everything, almost certainly because it made me feel so full of snot. I re-read it in my twenties and got kind of bored with some show more things. I just finished reading it properly for the first time (i.e., I had some idea of what was going on) and realized that my feelings could be parsed:

i) I hate Joyce's stream of consciousness. I hate its fake difficulty, the fact that in this book it approaches pure form, devoid of any content that's even remotely interesting. I do not care, Leopold Bloom, about your thoughts on astronomy. I do not care, Leopold Bloom, to listen to you ponder gastronomy.

ii) I love Joyce's parodies in the second half of the book.

So, I imagine Joyce's writing process running like this: "I'm going to write the fuck out of Dublin and revolutionize literature by writing Dublin the way we *really* experience it, yeah... boy, I'm going to stick it to those people who said I'd never amount to anything... wow, this is getting pretty dull... nope, I'm bored. Let's throw some newspaper headlines in there and make it much funnier... nope, still bored. What about a good philosophical argument... nope, I'm no good at that. Whatever, it can stay. But it sure was nice to have more than one person involved. I wonder if I can do lots of people. Yes. Yes I can. That was cool. Let's try again. Nice. Maybe I can try out a new story-teller, story-tellers are unintentionally funny. Yes, that was funny. Also funny: bad books. Also funny: all books. Hell with it, I'll write a play that anticipates most of the twentieth century in literature... wow, I really am pretty good, that's a relief. To prove it I'll write the worst seventy pages in the history of world literature, only I'll be doing it intentionally... damn, that is *horrible*. How to wrap this up? How about a catechism and some really long sentences that will call into doubt all the excellence that I've stuffed in between the argument and the end? Perfect."

I look forward to re-reading it in my forties, when I will violently disagree with my 30-something self, rail against my immaturity and bemoan my inability to really feel the pain of Leopold Bloom.

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Now, a word about editions. I read the annotated edition, from Declan Kiberd. It is perhaps the most egregiously bad edition possible, except for the text, which is easy to read, and the margins, which are wide and allow for your own notes. Kiberd's commentary is horrific on almost every level. He makes 'difficult' mistakes (e.g., directing the reader to Plato when he should be directing the reader to Aristotle). He makes simple mistakes (e.g., telling the reader the wrong time for Boylan and Molly's humping). He distorts the book in an attempt to make Joyce a great mind.

This is a genuine problem for Joyce scholars, who like to pretend that Joyce was super-educated and really erudite and just fantastically smart. He was not. Joyce was moderately well read, and pretty sharp. Do not confuse him with Robert Musil or Ezra Pound. Those guys were *smart*. But Joyce, like Shakespeare, doesn't need the smarts because he is a beautiful-word-producing guy. His sentences, when they're not Stream of consciousness or pretending to be other people's sentences, are gloriously perfect. Of course, that sort of thing can't be analyzed in a classroom. Hence the Joyce industry turns Joyce into some kind of Derrida/Swift/Kristeva/bell hooks, hundreds of years ahead of his time, capable of intuiting precisely the politics of the late twentieth century.

Except he's not. He's kind of a shit head.

Kiberd's editorial work gets one star. One of the worst Penguins ever. The design, of course, is still amazing.

Far better are the annotations in the Oxford World's Classics edition, which are a) accurate and b) not quite as patronizing. On the downside, the text is the unreadable though historically cool 1922 text. show less

I made it all the way through. I wasn't expecting it to be as humorous as it is, was often laughing out loud. Lost patience a bit in Section 17, as Bloom and young Daedelus pull an all-nighter. The question-and-answer style wore thin. I understood what was Joyce was doing, and admire his skill in showing that the entire universe could be brought to bear on one 24-hour period in one place, as well as showing that the language to express it is as vast as that universe, but then I felt I had gotten the point. But the section ended well, and then you get to the final section, 18. After over 800 pages concerned primarily with Bloom's consciousness, secondarily that of Stephen Daedelus, Joyce's alter ego, already known from Portrait of the show more Artist as a Young Man, it was a stroke of genius to end the book inside Molly's consciousness.

Usually when I give 5 stars, it means that I believe anyone's life would be enriched by reading it. This is an exception. I think some readers would find the necessary effort to get through this too strenuous to get any pleasure from it. That's fine. It's still a great book. show less

The three books I was told to never admit loving are Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, and Gravity's Rainbow.

Re-read in 2024: Ten years and (according to library thing, 575 or so books) since I wrote the reviews linked below, and Ulysses hit much harder. The 40 year old Bloom, astranged from his wife by the death their infant son, comes up with every self destructive excuse to not go home and to not catch her with the suitor he knows is visiting. So off the lonely Jew goes through Catholic Dublin. Until finally there a chance for him to join the patriarchy, rescuing an acquaintance’s son from a night in jail, in a scene of back slapping, boys will be boys, sow wild outs privilege. When the outsider is finally a member of the tribe, at show more last then he can return to the marriage bed, as stained and broken as it may be.

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First review: http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2013/10/ulysses-first-thoughts-on-second-read....

I’m determined to read Ulysses as part of my 30 Before 30. It's one of the 4 books I've never read in the Modern Library's Top 100.

Though it's disingenuous to say I never read Ulysses, because I did read more than half of it during Spring Break of my senior year of college. I read it for fun, so there are plenty of plot points I missed then, and I'm sure there are some I'm still missing, but that's not why I'm reading it.

To read Ulysses for the plot seems a little like listening to Mozart to analyze the chord progression; sure, I could do it, but isn't that missing the larger point?

One of my favorite professors once told me that the proper way to read Joyce's masterpiece is aloud while drinking Jameson or Guinness. He is a wise man.

It's the sounds I love most, the tongue twisters and the smooth sections. But I also love the graphic side of Ulysses too: the headlines that punctuate the scene in the newspaper shop and the end of the second section which becomes a play, complete with dialogue and stage directions. I feel that if James Joyce were alive today, he'd be a big fan of Christopher Ware.

I'm nearly done with the second section, which is where I recall running out of time in college and having to return my copy to the library. This weekend, I dive into uncharted territory in one of the greatest works of literature. Life is such fun.

Second review: http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2013/10/review-ulysses-by-james-joyces.html

This is not so much a review of Ulysses (since I've already written about it twice in the last few weeks) as an effort to sum up my feelings as I finished it.

Because I think Ulysses is just about three people whose lives are a mess.

Stephen Dedalus, the young man with life before him but who is unsure of how to grasp it. His friends are unreliable, his finances are in shambles, and he's unable to bring any of his great ideas to fruition.

Leopold Bloom, the older man whose marriage is falling apart because he cannot communicate with his wife. He indulges his appetites (physical, sexual, imaginative) as a way to mask the lack of control he has over his life.

Molly Bloom, left cold by her husband's refusal to sleep with her in the ten years since their son's death.

When Carol and I last re-organized our bookcases, we split most of the fiction between "Lonely Men" and "Awesome Women" because, tongue in cheek, it seems like these could encapsulate all fiction. But here is a book that epitomizes the lonely men. Neither Bloom nor Dedalus can speak their feels to the important people in their lives. Dedalus would not kneel to pray at his mother's deathbed and now she is gone, and his father is too distant. Bloom still grieves for his infant son and cannot come to Molly's bed, and so their marriage dies.

These emotionally stunted men have no examples to draw on, no one to show them a better way of life. But, in Ulysses, Molly is no better off. When she's finally given the room to speak in the book (which is to say, when she is silent and dreaming because she never does really say what she is thinking out loud), she is a whirl of memories and mixed emotions. She is guilty, but she feels (I think, rightly) forced into her action by a decade of Bloom's inaction and grief.

And that's my overwhelming impression of Ulysses: it is a portrait of grief, of the greatness lost to three people who, despite all the words swirling in their heads, can't really speak to the people who care about them. show less

It took me 10 years to read this book, which is more time than any other book I've ever finished, and longer than the 7 years Joyce took to actually write it. I bought it from a bookstore that was closing my senior year of college, it accompanied me to 4 different countries, and I finally finished it on a trip to visit my grandmother for her 100th birthday. I can't claim that it actually resonated deeply with me, in the sense that I felt a real connection to Joyce or the world he was building for his characters, and I'm not even sure what Joyce got out of it; it's hard to imagine him just pulling it off the shelf for a light read. I didn't even like huge chunks of it, and it crossed that line between engaging me and just trying to show more dazzle me too often. But what dazzle! What a funny, rambling, flawed, impressive, never-to-be-duplicated piece of work. I've always appreciated novels that try to push boundaries, and you can't expect your boundaries to be pushed while remaining perfectly comfortable (though dozens of pages of stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences do seem artistically excessive). So while I will never love Ulysses the way I love my favorite novels, particularly reigning champion Gravity's Rainbow, I can say that I've never had an experience with any other book quite like this one, I'm glad to have read it, and I'll be thinking about it for a long time. show less

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

16 June 1904. Leopold Bloom wanders the streets and places of Dublin. Around him, everything becomes a dream, a menace, an opportunity, a disappointment, a wrath. His mind filled with thoughts of Molly Bloom, his own (very different) Penelope. His path crosses with the ‘’heroes’’ of his own Irish Odyssey. Is he willing to escape the Lestrygonians and the Wandering Rocks? The Sirens and the Cyclops? The traps of Aeolus? The seductive hallucinations of Circe? The playful innocence of Nausicaa?

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from show more which I am trying to awake.”

In the course of one day, from Sandycove to Howth Head, Leopold traces Dublin Bay, at the side of the demons in his head. In a novel that has become a symbol, a shrine of Modernism and the finest Experimental example, Joyce gives us the city adventures of a troubled soul, the interactions of the bourgeois man and the bohemian student. The outsider within the boundaries of a metropolis. The sights, the smells, the sounds of Dublin as Bloom walks on and on, the body of a man in close proximity and struggle within the body of the city that nurtures and swallows its residents. The monologues of desperation and dissolution (or are his illusions fed even more?) give food for the legends that now accompany Bloom’s wanderings. Every building, every local spot becomes a story within the story, a station and a port for Leopold’s withered ship. An Odyssey of Dublin from its pubs and houses to its hospitals and graveyards with rhapsodies of sex, fellowship, trust and betrayal in an era that changes.

Banned in the USA and other countries on the grounds of obscenity, Ulysses remains a mystery even today. In our modern era when scenes are reenacted on Bloomsday, James Joyce masterpiece still troubles, hypnotizes and fascinates us.

“Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.”

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less

Ebben a könyvben minden van. De tényleg, minden. Van vers, van dráma, van próza, annak számtalan stílusa. Van számla és kotta, hirdetés és hírek, szalagcímekkel. Van születés, van temetés. Van flört és van szex. Van kisgyerek és kisbaba, lelkész és matróz(?), tudomány és vallás(ok), férfiak, nők és sírásók. Politika és művészet, közös hugyozás, kerti budin kakálás (újsággal), menstruációs vér, férfi szőrzet, lábujjköröm-szagolgatás, Shakespeare-elemzés, sorban állás, kocsmázás, evés és ivás, könyvkatalógus és katekizmus.

Lomb Kató könyve közben kezdtem olvasni, így nem rettentett el a francia, német, latin, olasz szöveg, csak az volt a furcsa, hogy nincs benne orosz és show more kínai. Nem árt, ha az ember kicsit nyelvbuzi (nincs erre jobb szó?) a soknyelvű poénokhoz (volt, hogy nem győztem elfojtani a vigyorgást a metrón).

(Az amúgy megvan, hogy Bloom magyar? Sőt, „[a] helytörténészek kiderítették, hogy az 1800-as évek közepén valóban élt [Szombathelyen], a mai Fő tér 41. szám alatti házában egy Blum nevű család. E család leszármazottja volt egy bizonyos Virág Lipót, aki Triesztben került kapcsolatba James Joyce-szal.” http://vaskarika.hu/hirek/reszletek/13582/pecseteles_guinness_ir_kocsmazene-a_22...

Joyce mesterien bánt az angol nyelvvel. Nem tudom, mit tud ebből (és az egész zseniből) visszaadni a fordítás. (Talán el kéne olvasnom magyarul is :P) Amikor a szavak hangzása tökéletesen visszaadja azt, ahogy a tenger hullámai megtörnek a parti sziklákon, amikor egy szövegrész csupa egy szótagú szóból áll, vagy amikor éppen kétszer húsz oldalon keresztül semmilyen központozás nincs, még aposztróf sem (így lett az e-könyvben I'll helyett 111…) húsz oldal után van egy pont, valamint a legvégén. Közben bekezdések tagolják a szöveget mondatokra, de abból is csak nyolc van, amikor pöszén ír, amikor a zenéről szóló résznek olyan ritmusa, dallama van, mintha az maga is zene lenne, abban lubickolni lehet.

Nem egészen értem, hogy miért Virginia Woolf a stream of consciousness, az egy átlagos nap átlagos történései közben kalandozó gondolatokból összeálló regény nagy alakja a Mrs. Dalloway című művével, amikor az három évvel később jelent meg, mint az Ulysses. Részemről azon végig nagyon szenvedtem. Itt az első fejezeten kell átvergődni, amíg kijutunk abból a szörnyű toronyból. Utána egy kifejezetten élvezhető, sokszor nagyon szórakoztató olvasmány lesz.

Nagyon élveztem a Shakespeare-elemzést, az egészen végigfutó nyelvi brillírozást (a 'lelemény' ide nagyon kevés), a humort, a játékot, az eredetiséget. Az ilyen ötletes kísérletezést akkor is díjazom, ha egyébként az eredmény számomra nem élvezhető, de ezt nagyon megszerettem.

Nem mondom, volt, amikor igencsak felszaladt a szemöldököm (lásd az abszintos tripet a bordélyban), és a paródiáknak is csak az emészthető részén tudtam jól szórakozni, de az egész, a nehezen leküzdhető és a fergeteges részekkel együtt, fantasztikus. Nem kell félni a sok oldalas mondatoktól sem, egy nő gondolja, úgyhogy (természetesen?) sokkal egyszerűbb a szöveg, mint addig bárhol.

Amikor nagyon sokan összegyűlnek egy eseményre (kivégzés), már a kitört verekedés leírása is olyan szórakoztató, mint például Rejtőnél, de a meghívott külföldi vendégek nevein kész voltam (Pokethankertscheff, Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone, stb). Vagy milyen zseniális, amikor kérdés-felelet formában bontakozik ki előttünk a történet (bajuszbögréstül)! Olyan mainak tűnő (vagy ma is érvényes) megoldásokat találtam, mint például egy eseménysor megmutatása több különböző nézőpontból egymás után (ezt filmekben pl nagyon szeretem), vagy az „It. Is. True.” hangsúlyozás. Vagy a többször és többféleképp megjelenő szex. A nő szájába adva (pardon) a legobszcénebb. Nem csoda, hogy száz (95) évvel ezelőtt betiltották.

Minden benne van. Minden, ami akkor tudható volt, amilyen írott forma létezett, ami kimondható volt, és az is, ami nem.

A formátumról: Először e-könyvben kezdtem olvasni, nem is lelkes amatőrök által készített változatot, hanem fizetőset, de végül szívesebben olvastam a nyomtatottat, a sokkal jobb tördelés és a jegyzetek miatt. Az eredeti, egészében 1922-ben megjelent szöveg volt egyébként mindkettő.

Nagyon komplex élmény volt.
Thank you, Mr. Joyce! show less