Liking or not liking anything is quite personal. I'm not sure there's a lot of point in discussing it. I read Ulysses in more or less in one go. I was stranded in a tent in Tunisia waiting for the next ferry with no money. I think I read it in 3 days (this was 48 years ago) I had read Joyce beforehand and it it is not as difficult as Finnegans Wake. I have had arguments with people about music in a similar vein. Some people, apparrently quite a lot, like Abba. Me, I can't stand it. I had an interest in atonal jazz for a while, but I've grown out of that. Your comments of sexism/ feminism etc are worth discussing. I had noticed that you rarely refer to female writers. Your comments on heroines only wanting a husband are indicative of the social circumstances of the time of writing. I have always regarded Hardy as a feminist (especially Jude the Obscure). Sorry this is a bit disjointed.
I’ve never read any of Joyce, but I’ve heard so much good stuff about him that the contrarian in me was turned off by all the praise. And so, it should come as no surprise that the contrarian in me loved this article!
Both Troy’s and Eleanor’s words were witty and insightful — and it helped reinforce my lazily conceived bias that, at least for now, I’m giving Joyce a miss.
I feel I should explain why I 'liked' this post, because I disagree with almost everything Eleanor has said. The reasons are twofold: firstly, there isn't a button for "I have read this and acknowledge its existence"; secondly, I very much appreciated Eleanor's passion. There's nothing like starting the day with a good rant, even if a vicarious one.
The first thing I didn't like was, as Eleanor puts it, "playing the feminist card". This strikes me as intellectually lazy. Additionally, and related, Eleanor's proposition is such that (as I see it), if I agree with her about the so-called patriarchy then I'm admitting the existence and influence of the patriarchy, and if I disagree with her that's because I'm a bloke, and therefore a member of the patriarchy, and so, to borrow from Many Rice-Davies, I WOULD say that, wouldn't I? It's a bit like asking someone of they are still beating their wife.
I have an alternative explanation for the publication of Ulysses, which is that, despite what others such as @kate Waller and @ehud might say, it's a classic case of the emperor's new clothes. If someone produces something that is so 'outre' that nobody understands it, people will praise it in order to avoid looking like uneducated illiterate slobs. I intend to elaborate on this theme in my own newsletter, although you article has boiled my blood to the point that I may have to lie down in a darkened room first.
You say, "To publicly state, This book is shit is to stand on a soap box at Speaker’s Corner and have a personal go at the artist...". No it isn't! Some books objectively ARE shit. As for " If you’ve nothing nice to say, don’t say it, and a scathing review says more about the reviewer than the reviewed." No! If a book is rubbish, the reviewer has a duty -- I might even go so far as to say a SACRED duty -- to tell would-be purchasers not to waste their money or time. Otherwise one is merely shirking one's duty.
And now: "I want to know how you feel, what drives you, where it hurts and who hurt you. I want you to speak of love and loss and all that you’re yet to learn. I want to hear you say what you don’t know yet, where the blurred edges are, how confused and lonely you get and then I want to see you doing something about it." Why? I don't see why I should bare my soul in public. Firstly, there are enough people already doing that and, frankly, like the feminist/patriarchy thing it just gets boring. Secondly, I already DO do that when I think it might be beneficial, either to myself or others. Thirdly, I actually LIKE the way we men don't emote all over the place (cf my seminal work on the subject: https://terryfreedman.substack.com/i/144557118/male-bonding-vulnerability-and-man-hugs-oh-puh-lease).
Finally, although this counter-rant may well be a reflection of me, it is NOT intended to be a personal attack, and I hope you won't have taken it as such. I actually enjoyed reading the article. And, for what it's worth, I've never read it either. Dubliners, yes, gold star. But this? No thanks, life's too short.
Ha! Good to hear your thoughts. Just one point, for the record, the patriarchy is not about men vs women. The patriarchy fucks is all, it does none of us any favours in the end.
I took a whole course on Joyce in grad school. Read Ulysses, read Finnegan's Wake (or let my eyes pass over several hundred pages of words, anyway). Thank you, Eleanor for giving voice to my suffering (suffering I absolutely could not give voice to as 27 year old grad student) and its causes.
I actually think it's quite ridiculous to impose either of these on students (unless of course it was an elective.) Whatever else it is, it is too unique to provide much real instruction on literature imho. Thanks Emily.
And, technically, I chose to take the course because I needed credits in 20th century British lit. (I much preferred 19th). I'd only read Dubliners at that point, so had no idea what I was getting into. I agree!
I can't comment much here because I haven't read *any* Joyce, although I have skimmed the first few pages of UIysses when browsing in a bookstore. I've always been intrigued by it, but something made me hold off.
Love your intro, Troy, you really set the scene well.
Love your thoughts here, Eleanor. You don't hold back. Much respect.
Praiseworthy was already on my TBR, but now it's even *more* on my TBR. ;)
I cannot praise Praiseworthy enough. It was so interesting me though, in terms of underlining the matter of taste, how Sam Jordison didn’t connect with it, which Ulysses to him is a god-work. It helped me understand better my own feelings around what I engage with.
I liked your "coming out to the public" with such a confession. You write as you think, without inventing the forms of words and sentences. I am interested in your thoughts. I am interested in Joyce because I love the phenomenon of word formation itself. But I am against the snobbish respect called deference to authorities (I study this as a philosopher). There is literature for writers, just like poetry for poets, which may not be interesting to writers and poets themselves, but they find some conceptual tools there. For me, literature and art have no gender. But not always; sometimes, it matters. It was interesting to read you
Eleanor, Joyce seems to be a straw man for another battle you are waging. And what is with the charge of alcoholism? And by all accounts he edited, and edited, and edited, driving the printers crazy. In short he knew what he was doing, and did what he had set out to do. If you were saying these things about Finnegans Wake, you would find in me a sympathetic listener. Ulysses? I do not consider it a novel. Pail after pail of wet sand is dumped into a pile, and the sculptor pats it down here and there, and near the end, you stand back aways to watch the finishing touch, finally beholding a towering kingdom. Like that disk that was sent on the the pioneer spacecraft that held a digital encyclopedia of humanity, Ulysses has recorded for posterity what life was like in Dublin on that day. What it felt like, smelled like, looked like. Human life is a big subject. Ulysses captures it well.
I do not hold him up as an example of a great writer. He is something else, maybe one of a kind. I am a very simple-minded reader. I want to read stories as if I am listening to them being read to me. If a writer feels the need to make demands of the reader, the writer must be very careful or the reader shuts the book. Joyce went overboard with his demands, and I think that maybe that is the source of you seeing him as representing the Patriarchy. But he did not differentiate between male and female readers: all felt and feel the unfair weight of those demands. We did not grow into adulthood in order to have a Jesuit school teacher looking over out shoulders as we read, guiding us, slapping us on the hand with a ruler if we should go astray. The question becomes: is the education he forces down our throats worth it? I think it is, but like Mr. Troy Ford said in another comment, “Joyce trims my tree.”
I do not return to Ulysses often, but the last time I did, in order to prepare some pieces pertaining to Judaism for my substack (it’s always Jews Jews Jews with me), I found my much older self giggling at times as I read. It could not have been easy while writing Ulysses to smile upon humanity, but smile it does.
As for a defense of Joyce, if one is interested, go no further than @John Pistelli and his series of lectures on Ulysses:
He does not spare Joyce when Joyce deserves no sparing, but he makes a case for reading Ulysses.
As for my pieces on Joyce and Ulysses, if anyone is interested to read the results of a feverish twenty-one-year-old mind who produced a paper accepted, but ultimately rejected by The James Joyce Quarterly, a paper that then sat in a drawer for forty-eight years until Sunstack appeared, here be those results:
I love John Pistelli's first episode - I'm about 1-1/2 hours into it, and a few things stand out.
You are quite right when you say he doesn't spare Joyce - he points out quite plainly the "marketing" trick of naming it Ulysses in the first place, even going so far as to say we wouldn't be reading it today if J hadn't in a sense pretended that it was the literary culmination of the Homeric epic, and that, in the end, it really doesn't rely on that correspondence especially heavily. Interesting.
He also mentions how, ultimately, even very well-read and erudite people can't make heads or tails of it, that it is not relying on erudition but on a very personal, anecdotal, idiosyncratic complexity of references (as you say "one of a kind") and so J himself provided much of the early annotation and keys to interested parties in order to ensure that his language would be understood. Not, by the way, an opportunity that many authors nowadays are afforded, but good for Joyce.
The last thing that occurs to me - and this, for the first time, begins to pique my interest - is how the encyclopedic nature of his references and puzzles and so forth were meant to be taken up by a host of other people, that no single individual could hope to unravel his Gordian knot, which Pistelli says even J could not entirely account for and was often only interpreted by him retroactively to contain schema and symbols which he didn't consciously put in, nor could he always remember.
This becomes interesting to me in a new way because he poses for us a problem that can only be solved with the help of others - in a way, he has created the first (the only?) book which must in some sense be read as a community, and as a human enterprise - much like playing a sport or a game - there is value in that coming together. As I said before, the discussion around J interests me greatly.
So I thank you, Ehud, for pointing out Pistelli - and I thank Pistelli for pointing out m.joyceproject.com with it's hyperlinked annotations.
I still don't think, ultimately, that Eleanor's article is as concerned with Joyce's views on women (which were not especially modern) or his women readers as it with his position of male privilege and the leeway and indulgence afforded to him by the people who first championed his cause.
I will also point out that of the 50 people who contributed to the Joyce Project website, only 4 are women. ;)
Anyway - Cheers, Ehud - I've enjoyed this discussion. I will be sure to look at your own paper.
Isn't Pistelli something? And this: " in a way, he has created the first (the only?) book which must in some sense be read as a community, and as a human enterprise - much like playing a sport or a game - there is value in that coming together." "Crack!" I never thought of it that way but now that you have said it, there seems no other way. Thank you for that, Mr. Troy Ford.
Ulysses trims your tree, Ehud, and that's great. Different strokes for different folks. But Eleanor as much as said it's not really about Joyce. A man's great "joke" (his own words) is taken for high art while a woman's is ignored. Jasmine Joyce and Shakespeare's sister are encased within that straw man, and getting burned alive. The KINGdom of sand we applaud ignores the Queendom of pearl submerged beneath the waves. Joyce himself admitted that he was joking when he said Dublin could be rebuilt from the pages of Ulysses. He would also have happily replaced the multitude of voices on the Golden Record with just his own if he could have got away with it. Also: any (recovering) alcoholic will admit they were full of shit while they were drinking.
One of the wonderful things about art is the almost genetic way it keys to some people, and not to others. Joyce would be thrilled to know how much you enjoy his work, and equally thrilled by how irritating others find it. The important thing to him would be that we are still talking about James Joyce one hundred years later. Thanks for weighing in, your perspective is greatly appreciated.
I recently set myself the task of re-reading ‘Ulysses’, also for the third time but over 30 years since the second. I’d read it before uni, then while there, and the first time had been on a boat on a 10 day voyage with nothing else to do, and little else to see but flying fish and the occasional coastal patrol speeding out to check we weren’t smuggling ‘pineapples’. My memory is of loving it, of being absorbed and awash with its language and stream of consciousness flights into life’s miraculous minutiae. But this time it made me really angry. Angry at being forced to spend time inside the head of a dirty old man. At having to listen to his tedious ramblings for tens of pages at a chapter. It felt self-indulgent and really as though Joyce was just thoroughly taking the piss.
I so agree with your idea , Eleanor, that it just sounds drunken, unedited. And I kept wondering- ‘why aren’t I re-reading Mrs Dalloway?’ - Woolf’s perfect riposte, saying ‘this is how you do it’.
I'm sure this is a vast oversimplification, but reading it (parts anyway) sometimes feels like being held hostage by the drone of the resident stool warmer at a pub. Thanks Michelle
I'm not a James Joyce fan. Probably because I had to study him for my English Literature A Level. But somebody once said that I should read the last 5 or so pages of Ulysses.
I did. I found that passage of text is so full of wonder that I am passing on this recommendation to everyone reading this. For me, it was enough to read it, as poetry, without trying understand Ulysses on a greater level.
I only began to enjoy Ulysses once I released myself from the burden of trying to make sense of it. Joyce was, after all, a complicated man who received some choice words from none other than Carl Jung, who later treated Joyce’s daughter for schizophrenia.
Seriously. Interestingly, Eleanor and Sam Jordison were just talking about "Lucia" by Alex Pheby, a fictional account of Joyce's daughter which I'm DYING to read.
I've never read Ulysses and never felt a big urge to try, and now it's too late. I don't have the time - 700 pages that might bore me to death ... Not having gone through the English/American education system, the GREATS were never on my horizon, so I feel no FOMO guilt! On the other hand, I can testify that I absorbed huge quantities of Balzac (psychologically bracing), Hugo (loooove it, digressions and all), and Zola (a tad tiresome) ... none of them struck me as self-absorbed males, probably because they had too much to say politically.
Yes, no reason to invite death by boredom. I want to say I quite liked Nana, though maybe the lesson Z taught her in the end was a bit harsh? Thanks Martine
I love Eleanor and you, Mr. Troy Ford, in ahl yer human weaknesses, malfeasance, and misguidance, as I hope you'll love me en moyn. Now, ah'll really rile youse up. Finn again!
I too am in the “Love Dubliners” camp, but have no particular attachment to Ulysses. I recall being told I had to venerate Ulysses—it was part of the requirements for the English degrees I received once upon a time—but that requirement was enough to make me indifferent to the book. I’d love to hear what Eleanor would do with Gravity’s Rainbow!
I was such a masochist in grad school that I read it twice … the second time because I just couldn’t make sense of it the first time but by god I wanted to be able to act like I could make sense of it. Did I like it? I don’t freaking know, to tell you the truth. I was too caught up in performative intellectualism at the time to even ask whether I enjoyed the book. And I don’t know that I care to go back and try again. Too many other things to read.
Liking or not liking anything is quite personal. I'm not sure there's a lot of point in discussing it. I read Ulysses in more or less in one go. I was stranded in a tent in Tunisia waiting for the next ferry with no money. I think I read it in 3 days (this was 48 years ago) I had read Joyce beforehand and it it is not as difficult as Finnegans Wake. I have had arguments with people about music in a similar vein. Some people, apparrently quite a lot, like Abba. Me, I can't stand it. I had an interest in atonal jazz for a while, but I've grown out of that. Your comments of sexism/ feminism etc are worth discussing. I had noticed that you rarely refer to female writers. Your comments on heroines only wanting a husband are indicative of the social circumstances of the time of writing. I have always regarded Hardy as a feminist (especially Jude the Obscure). Sorry this is a bit disjointed.
I’ve never read any of Joyce, but I’ve heard so much good stuff about him that the contrarian in me was turned off by all the praise. And so, it should come as no surprise that the contrarian in me loved this article!
Both Troy’s and Eleanor’s words were witty and insightful — and it helped reinforce my lazily conceived bias that, at least for now, I’m giving Joyce a miss.
Thanks you two :)
For reals - if people weren't swinging the word "GREAT" around so much, we prob wouldn't even be having this conversation. 😂 Thanks Michael
I feel I should explain why I 'liked' this post, because I disagree with almost everything Eleanor has said. The reasons are twofold: firstly, there isn't a button for "I have read this and acknowledge its existence"; secondly, I very much appreciated Eleanor's passion. There's nothing like starting the day with a good rant, even if a vicarious one.
The first thing I didn't like was, as Eleanor puts it, "playing the feminist card". This strikes me as intellectually lazy. Additionally, and related, Eleanor's proposition is such that (as I see it), if I agree with her about the so-called patriarchy then I'm admitting the existence and influence of the patriarchy, and if I disagree with her that's because I'm a bloke, and therefore a member of the patriarchy, and so, to borrow from Many Rice-Davies, I WOULD say that, wouldn't I? It's a bit like asking someone of they are still beating their wife.
I have an alternative explanation for the publication of Ulysses, which is that, despite what others such as @kate Waller and @ehud might say, it's a classic case of the emperor's new clothes. If someone produces something that is so 'outre' that nobody understands it, people will praise it in order to avoid looking like uneducated illiterate slobs. I intend to elaborate on this theme in my own newsletter, although you article has boiled my blood to the point that I may have to lie down in a darkened room first.
You say, "To publicly state, This book is shit is to stand on a soap box at Speaker’s Corner and have a personal go at the artist...". No it isn't! Some books objectively ARE shit. As for " If you’ve nothing nice to say, don’t say it, and a scathing review says more about the reviewer than the reviewed." No! If a book is rubbish, the reviewer has a duty -- I might even go so far as to say a SACRED duty -- to tell would-be purchasers not to waste their money or time. Otherwise one is merely shirking one's duty.
And now: "I want to know how you feel, what drives you, where it hurts and who hurt you. I want you to speak of love and loss and all that you’re yet to learn. I want to hear you say what you don’t know yet, where the blurred edges are, how confused and lonely you get and then I want to see you doing something about it." Why? I don't see why I should bare my soul in public. Firstly, there are enough people already doing that and, frankly, like the feminist/patriarchy thing it just gets boring. Secondly, I already DO do that when I think it might be beneficial, either to myself or others. Thirdly, I actually LIKE the way we men don't emote all over the place (cf my seminal work on the subject: https://terryfreedman.substack.com/i/144557118/male-bonding-vulnerability-and-man-hugs-oh-puh-lease).
Finally, although this counter-rant may well be a reflection of me, it is NOT intended to be a personal attack, and I hope you won't have taken it as such. I actually enjoyed reading the article. And, for what it's worth, I've never read it either. Dubliners, yes, gold star. But this? No thanks, life's too short.
I... Um... Uh... Tea?
Ha! Good to hear your thoughts. Just one point, for the record, the patriarchy is not about men vs women. The patriarchy fucks is all, it does none of us any favours in the end.
I took a whole course on Joyce in grad school. Read Ulysses, read Finnegan's Wake (or let my eyes pass over several hundred pages of words, anyway). Thank you, Eleanor for giving voice to my suffering (suffering I absolutely could not give voice to as 27 year old grad student) and its causes.
I actually think it's quite ridiculous to impose either of these on students (unless of course it was an elective.) Whatever else it is, it is too unique to provide much real instruction on literature imho. Thanks Emily.
And, technically, I chose to take the course because I needed credits in 20th century British lit. (I much preferred 19th). I'd only read Dubliners at that point, so had no idea what I was getting into. I agree!
Oh lord - like confusing kippers and capers... 😂
😆
My pleasure. I feel like this piece has opened up a whole box of confessions. Glad I’m not alone.
Yes, good to have company!
I can't comment much here because I haven't read *any* Joyce, although I have skimmed the first few pages of UIysses when browsing in a bookstore. I've always been intrigued by it, but something made me hold off.
Love your intro, Troy, you really set the scene well.
Love your thoughts here, Eleanor. You don't hold back. Much respect.
Praiseworthy was already on my TBR, but now it's even *more* on my TBR. ;)
Praiseworthy straight to the my TTBR too (Top of the To Be Read pile ;) Thanks Nathan
I cannot praise Praiseworthy enough. It was so interesting me though, in terms of underlining the matter of taste, how Sam Jordison didn’t connect with it, which Ulysses to him is a god-work. It helped me understand better my own feelings around what I engage with.
I'm an Irish writer and I haven't even read it : ) I recommend Dubliners
Thanks Richard
I liked your "coming out to the public" with such a confession. You write as you think, without inventing the forms of words and sentences. I am interested in your thoughts. I am interested in Joyce because I love the phenomenon of word formation itself. But I am against the snobbish respect called deference to authorities (I study this as a philosopher). There is literature for writers, just like poetry for poets, which may not be interesting to writers and poets themselves, but they find some conceptual tools there. For me, literature and art have no gender. But not always; sometimes, it matters. It was interesting to read you
This is great comment, Nataliia. "For me, literature and art have no gender. But not always; sometimes, it matters." -- I really like this.
Thank you Nataliia, and for your comment. As you now know, I kick against snobbish respect called deference. Good way to put it.
Thank you, Nataliia - glad to have you here
Eleanor, Joyce seems to be a straw man for another battle you are waging. And what is with the charge of alcoholism? And by all accounts he edited, and edited, and edited, driving the printers crazy. In short he knew what he was doing, and did what he had set out to do. If you were saying these things about Finnegans Wake, you would find in me a sympathetic listener. Ulysses? I do not consider it a novel. Pail after pail of wet sand is dumped into a pile, and the sculptor pats it down here and there, and near the end, you stand back aways to watch the finishing touch, finally beholding a towering kingdom. Like that disk that was sent on the the pioneer spacecraft that held a digital encyclopedia of humanity, Ulysses has recorded for posterity what life was like in Dublin on that day. What it felt like, smelled like, looked like. Human life is a big subject. Ulysses captures it well.
Good to hear that defence.
I do not hold him up as an example of a great writer. He is something else, maybe one of a kind. I am a very simple-minded reader. I want to read stories as if I am listening to them being read to me. If a writer feels the need to make demands of the reader, the writer must be very careful or the reader shuts the book. Joyce went overboard with his demands, and I think that maybe that is the source of you seeing him as representing the Patriarchy. But he did not differentiate between male and female readers: all felt and feel the unfair weight of those demands. We did not grow into adulthood in order to have a Jesuit school teacher looking over out shoulders as we read, guiding us, slapping us on the hand with a ruler if we should go astray. The question becomes: is the education he forces down our throats worth it? I think it is, but like Mr. Troy Ford said in another comment, “Joyce trims my tree.”
I do not return to Ulysses often, but the last time I did, in order to prepare some pieces pertaining to Judaism for my substack (it’s always Jews Jews Jews with me), I found my much older self giggling at times as I read. It could not have been easy while writing Ulysses to smile upon humanity, but smile it does.
As for a defense of Joyce, if one is interested, go no further than @John Pistelli and his series of lectures on Ulysses:
https://grandhotelabyss.substack.com/p/the-invisible-college-james-joyce
He does not spare Joyce when Joyce deserves no sparing, but he makes a case for reading Ulysses.
As for my pieces on Joyce and Ulysses, if anyone is interested to read the results of a feverish twenty-one-year-old mind who produced a paper accepted, but ultimately rejected by The James Joyce Quarterly, a paper that then sat in a drawer for forty-eight years until Sunstack appeared, here be those results:
https://www.pisgahsite.com/p/ulysses
I love John Pistelli's first episode - I'm about 1-1/2 hours into it, and a few things stand out.
You are quite right when you say he doesn't spare Joyce - he points out quite plainly the "marketing" trick of naming it Ulysses in the first place, even going so far as to say we wouldn't be reading it today if J hadn't in a sense pretended that it was the literary culmination of the Homeric epic, and that, in the end, it really doesn't rely on that correspondence especially heavily. Interesting.
He also mentions how, ultimately, even very well-read and erudite people can't make heads or tails of it, that it is not relying on erudition but on a very personal, anecdotal, idiosyncratic complexity of references (as you say "one of a kind") and so J himself provided much of the early annotation and keys to interested parties in order to ensure that his language would be understood. Not, by the way, an opportunity that many authors nowadays are afforded, but good for Joyce.
The last thing that occurs to me - and this, for the first time, begins to pique my interest - is how the encyclopedic nature of his references and puzzles and so forth were meant to be taken up by a host of other people, that no single individual could hope to unravel his Gordian knot, which Pistelli says even J could not entirely account for and was often only interpreted by him retroactively to contain schema and symbols which he didn't consciously put in, nor could he always remember.
This becomes interesting to me in a new way because he poses for us a problem that can only be solved with the help of others - in a way, he has created the first (the only?) book which must in some sense be read as a community, and as a human enterprise - much like playing a sport or a game - there is value in that coming together. As I said before, the discussion around J interests me greatly.
So I thank you, Ehud, for pointing out Pistelli - and I thank Pistelli for pointing out m.joyceproject.com with it's hyperlinked annotations.
I still don't think, ultimately, that Eleanor's article is as concerned with Joyce's views on women (which were not especially modern) or his women readers as it with his position of male privilege and the leeway and indulgence afforded to him by the people who first championed his cause.
I will also point out that of the 50 people who contributed to the Joyce Project website, only 4 are women. ;)
Anyway - Cheers, Ehud - I've enjoyed this discussion. I will be sure to look at your own paper.
Isn't Pistelli something? And this: " in a way, he has created the first (the only?) book which must in some sense be read as a community, and as a human enterprise - much like playing a sport or a game - there is value in that coming together." "Crack!" I never thought of it that way but now that you have said it, there seems no other way. Thank you for that, Mr. Troy Ford.
“The first (and only?) book which must be read as a community” - that’s fascinating. That interests me.
You took the words right out of my mouth.
Ulysses trims your tree, Ehud, and that's great. Different strokes for different folks. But Eleanor as much as said it's not really about Joyce. A man's great "joke" (his own words) is taken for high art while a woman's is ignored. Jasmine Joyce and Shakespeare's sister are encased within that straw man, and getting burned alive. The KINGdom of sand we applaud ignores the Queendom of pearl submerged beneath the waves. Joyce himself admitted that he was joking when he said Dublin could be rebuilt from the pages of Ulysses. He would also have happily replaced the multitude of voices on the Golden Record with just his own if he could have got away with it. Also: any (recovering) alcoholic will admit they were full of shit while they were drinking.
One of the wonderful things about art is the almost genetic way it keys to some people, and not to others. Joyce would be thrilled to know how much you enjoy his work, and equally thrilled by how irritating others find it. The important thing to him would be that we are still talking about James Joyce one hundred years later. Thanks for weighing in, your perspective is greatly appreciated.
I recently set myself the task of re-reading ‘Ulysses’, also for the third time but over 30 years since the second. I’d read it before uni, then while there, and the first time had been on a boat on a 10 day voyage with nothing else to do, and little else to see but flying fish and the occasional coastal patrol speeding out to check we weren’t smuggling ‘pineapples’. My memory is of loving it, of being absorbed and awash with its language and stream of consciousness flights into life’s miraculous minutiae. But this time it made me really angry. Angry at being forced to spend time inside the head of a dirty old man. At having to listen to his tedious ramblings for tens of pages at a chapter. It felt self-indulgent and really as though Joyce was just thoroughly taking the piss.
I so agree with your idea , Eleanor, that it just sounds drunken, unedited. And I kept wondering- ‘why aren’t I re-reading Mrs Dalloway?’ - Woolf’s perfect riposte, saying ‘this is how you do it’.
Yes quite! Agree!
Smuggling pineapples!? That sounds fun.
I'm sure this is a vast oversimplification, but reading it (parts anyway) sometimes feels like being held hostage by the drone of the resident stool warmer at a pub. Thanks Michelle
Totally this - and I’ve met far more interesting people in Dublin pubs!
I'm not a James Joyce fan. Probably because I had to study him for my English Literature A Level. But somebody once said that I should read the last 5 or so pages of Ulysses.
I did. I found that passage of text is so full of wonder that I am passing on this recommendation to everyone reading this. For me, it was enough to read it, as poetry, without trying understand Ulysses on a greater level.
That’s good advice.
Great advice, Nicholas, thanks for the tip. Maybe I'll do it at a cafe, then snap the book loudly closed and exclaim, "Done!" 😉
Ha. Exactly!
Jasmine would’ve loved Greenham.:)
Ha! She so would.
I only began to enjoy Ulysses once I released myself from the burden of trying to make sense of it. Joyce was, after all, a complicated man who received some choice words from none other than Carl Jung, who later treated Joyce’s daughter for schizophrenia.
That's a good strategy! Although with the world being what it is currently, we hardly need to go to a book in search of more nonsense. Thanks Val
Please write a book with the pseudonym Jasmine Joyce. 😂
On it 😂
Seriously. Interestingly, Eleanor and Sam Jordison were just talking about "Lucia" by Alex Pheby, a fictional account of Joyce's daughter which I'm DYING to read.
I want to read it.
I've never read Ulysses and never felt a big urge to try, and now it's too late. I don't have the time - 700 pages that might bore me to death ... Not having gone through the English/American education system, the GREATS were never on my horizon, so I feel no FOMO guilt! On the other hand, I can testify that I absorbed huge quantities of Balzac (psychologically bracing), Hugo (loooove it, digressions and all), and Zola (a tad tiresome) ... none of them struck me as self-absorbed males, probably because they had too much to say politically.
Yes, no reason to invite death by boredom. I want to say I quite liked Nana, though maybe the lesson Z taught her in the end was a bit harsh? Thanks Martine
Still wiping the coal dust off my forehead from Germinal.
haha Yes? I feel I got enough coal from Sons and Lovers...
There are many coal mines in our literary past, How Green was my Valley comes to mind, and The Citadel ... tales of the industrial revolution...
I love Eleanor and you, Mr. Troy Ford, in ahl yer human weaknesses, malfeasance, and misguidance, as I hope you'll love me en moyn. Now, ah'll really rile youse up. Finn again!
Oh god, okay maybe I’ll try… 😬😂
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Ha! And we love you, AJA - enjoy your club while it lasts... 😘
I too am in the “Love Dubliners” camp, but have no particular attachment to Ulysses. I recall being told I had to venerate Ulysses—it was part of the requirements for the English degrees I received once upon a time—but that requirement was enough to make me indifferent to the book. I’d love to hear what Eleanor would do with Gravity’s Rainbow!
There’s a good chance that if it didn’t have the Must Venerate sticker attached to it I’d be more inclined. (*looks up Gravity’s Rainbow)
Really I feel the MV sticker is the biggest part of my skepticism - don't tell me who to worship, ya know?
Hoo boy - there's another one I've got sitting on my shelf, scowling at me.
I was such a masochist in grad school that I read it twice … the second time because I just couldn’t make sense of it the first time but by god I wanted to be able to act like I could make sense of it. Did I like it? I don’t freaking know, to tell you the truth. I was too caught up in performative intellectualism at the time to even ask whether I enjoyed the book. And I don’t know that I care to go back and try again. Too many other things to read.
"Performative intellectualism" - I love it. A very colorful and exhausting dance.