Ulysses by James Joyce

[Sara]

I was warned about this book but clearly did not understand the severity with which the warning was given. So I picked it up last night and read a few pages. I put the book down in complete shock and my first thought was, there was no reason for this book to be banned in the United States. Why would anyone want to read it in the first place? Apparently, it's popular/famous. So my questions are, has anyone read this book and if so, did you enjoy it and why; should I press on; is it worth the "pain" and constant confusion?

[Joy H., Group Founder]

Hi Sara. I like this topic! :)
I've never attempted to read _Ulysses_ by James Joyce. It sounded too daunting.

You might want to refer to CliffsNotes analysis at:
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/L...

I like your words "constant confusion". So many of the modern novels are like this in their ambiguity. I've never been able to tolerate ambiguity. Evidently some people can stand it. :)

Ambiguity seems to be a characteristic of many modern highly-acclaimed novels.

Go to the following article at the NY Times and read the part about Ulysses:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage...

The article is by James Atlas and was published on March 16, 1997. You will see that you are not alone in your feelings about James Joyce's _Ulysses_.

[Joy H., Group Founder]

PS-Sara, you might find the following article interesting as well:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107...

It's an Atlantic Magazine article written by B.R. Myers in 2001.

[Joy H., Group Founder]

PPS-I see that the link to the NY Times article doesn't work anymore. Fortunately I've saved the web page on my computer. So I've been able to post James Atlas' words below.
James Atlas said:
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"Let's talk about ''Ulysses.'' Hands up, how many of you have actually read the whole thing -- or read it with pleasure? A friend of mine confesses that she lugged a copy of Joyce's masterwork to jury duty and then had to make herself read it. It is tough sledding. Deeply moving in places, I admit: Stephen Dedalus's pained recollection of his mother's death (''Weak wasting hand on mine'') or Bloom's thoughts on the finality of death at Paddy Dignam's funeral (''Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really? Plant him and have done with him''). But the only reason I got through it was that I studied with the estimable Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann, who could make even ''Finnegans Wake'' sound like a compelling story. Under Ellmann's rigorous but patient tutelage (and with his guide, ''Ulysses on the Liffey,'' by my elbow), I made it all the way to Molly Bloom's soliloquy -- no doubt urged on by the rumor that it had dirty parts.

"So what's the problem here? Is it me or is it literature? I don't have any trouble reading 19th-century fiction: the Brontes and George Eliot and Balzac and the Russians. Or a lot of 20th, for that matter: I greatly admire Conrad and Lawrence and Forster. The smoking gun, I submit, is modernism -- that moment when literature retreated from the accessible style that had made it such a popular form and turned inward, to the exploration of consciousness. In the hands of James, Joyce, Proust and Virginia Woolf, literature became a means of registering states of mind rather than telling a story. In Woolf's ''The Waves,'' the style of interior reflection is an effort to mime the very process of thought -- it's six characters in search of another character who never appears on the scene. If it was hard to read, that was the point. So is the human mind.

"The poets went even further. I'm amazed that so few readers object to the obscurantism of ''The Waste Land,'' that celebrated ''private grouse,'' as Eliot himself once characterized the poem. Parts of it are haunting; in high school I used to sit in my room transfixed as the poet intoned ''April is the cruelest month'' in his lugubrious voice on my Caedmon poets album. But let's face it, there's something annoying about the fact that if you happen not to know Sanskrit or German, you're just not going to know what certain passages mean -- literally. Ditto for Pound. His ''Cantos,'' a work of intermittent genius and terminal obscurity, makes ''The Waste Land'' seem as obvious as ''Hiawatha.'' Scraps of Greek and Latin, Chinese and Japanese, even Provencal -- is this, as Pound's masterly decipherer, Professor Hugh Kenner, suggests, a ''patterned energy'' or a display of ostentatious learning for its own sake? Even the honorable Helen Vendler, our leading authority on modern poetry, confesses in a recent issue of Paris Review that she can't make any sense of Pound's enterprise.

"Why did literature become so difficult? I have a theory, and it's not the one put forth by critics like Kenner (in his ingenious but irritating book ''The Pound Era'') that society suffered a breakdown faithfully mirrored in the discontinuity and fragmentary character of the great works of modernism. ''The guns of August, and September, and October, the guns of 52 interminable blood-drenched months, destroyed morale, destroyed a generation, destroyed Europe,'' Kenner writes. The revolution in language that began with James and culminated in the modernist revolt against conventional form was a response to this social disintegration. Literature was difficult because life was difficult -- and getting harder all the time. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. . . . And so on."
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The above excerpts are from an article in the New York Times on Sunday, March 16, 1997. The title of the article is "Literature' Bores Me". It was written by James Atlas

[Sara]

Joy,

You are a wealth of knowledge and resources. Thank you for doing the research for me :)

Life IS difficult, at least sometimes; but then doesn't it stand to reason that we should strive to make it less so - possible through our leisure activities, like reading? I think I will stick to reading ABOUT Ulysses and (it pains me to say this) leave the actual reading of the book to the experts...

Thanks again. :)

Sara

[Joy H., Group Founder]

Sara, I too find that reading ABOUT the books is helpful, as opposed to struggling with the reading of certain difficult ones like James Joyce's _Ulysses_.

Here's a quote which says it well:
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"What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge, and to tolerate ambiguity.
In the end there are no certain answers."
-Martina Horner, President of Radcliffe College
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Of course, it goes without saying, that only by reading the actual book do we get a true sense of it. But I was never one to keep hitting my head against a stone wall... not unless I was enjoying it. LOL

PS: Another quote:
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"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." -Logan Pearsall Smith
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:-)

[Nina]

Sara wrote: "I was warned about this book but clearly did not understand the severity with which the warning was given. So I picked it up last night and read a few pages. I put the book down in complete shock..."First I have to say that you,Joy, come up with the most interesting adjuncts to our discussions..How do you manage this? You must have been a resourcer in your other life to accummulate all this knowledge of what's where???? And now to the topic at hand; Ulysses: I can't claim I have read the entire book but I will say what I did read was easier for me to digest after attending a mini conference on just that. How to read and understand what you were reading. I took many notes and it helped. OUr leader was a Jesuit scholar who had studied Joyce. Interesting that the book was banned but was almost taught by a Catholic priest...Aside from my trying to get a grip on Ulysses in my own home I particitpated in a group reading at a Rare book store near us that celebrated Joyce's birthday by having a reading marathon of Ulysses far into the night. Some did his book justice; I fear I didn't as really had trouble with the dialect of some of the characters but oh what fun it was! Some day maybe I will get back to the book on my own again..nina

[Joy H., Group Founder]

Nina, you really ARE ambitious, to take on James Joyce's Ulysses! Imagine having to practically take a course to understand one book! LOL

_Ulysses_ is one book I have no desire to read. I once tried to read _Tropic of Cancer_ by Henry Miller but I didn't get very far. That stream-of-consciousness business was too far out for me. I didn't like it at all.

As for my "adjuncts" (g), I'm just naturally gaited that way. I suppose you'd call me the "studious type". I want to know everything about everything. I'm just plain curious. Unfortunately, my reach is well beyond my grasp. LOL So I've learned to limit my fields of interest. I don't enjoy being in over my head. :) A person could drown that way! :)

[Nina]

You will never drown in all your knowledge because you have a life raft of facts to keep you afloat..nina

[Joy H., Group Founder]

Nina wrote: "You will never drown in all your knowledge because you have a life raft of facts to keep you afloat..nina"

Thanks to the Internet! LOL

[Sara]

Nina,

Thank you for your insight. Now I know that returning it to the library was a good choice. I'm an avid reader, but I don't think that I will be joining any study groups for this particular book any time soon :) Like I said before, I think I will resign myself to reading about the book rather than reading the actual book. Your comment made me feel a little less guilty about this decision.

Thanks!

[Joy H., Group Founder]

You're welcome, Sara.

If you're anything like I am, you probably prefer to finish a book you've started and feel bad when you bail out for one reason or another.

These days, with the books tumbling in at me at such a great rate, I find that they have to compete with one another to get my attention. They sit piled up on the table beside my recliner, calling out: "Read me! Read me!"

Naturally, it's impossible to read them all and also keep up with my DVDs from Netflix, with which I recently signed up . So something's got to give..

Therefore, I'm adopting the philosophy of taking it one day at a time. Whatever gets done, gets done. If not, so be it.

In life, we find that all the necessities get done sooner or later. So sometimes we have to put our pleasures first... in the order of the degree of pleasure we derive from the thing. (All within reason, of course.)

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"Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation?" -Jane Austen
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