Bright Young Things discussion
Substance Reads (1900-1945)
>
Ulysses - Episode 1 - Telemachus
message 1:
by
Ally
(new)
Jan 23, 2011 11:49AM
Mod
Ulyssesby James Joyce
reply
|
flag
Mod
Are we going to operate under the assumption that you've very likely finish the episode before you hit the thread or do we need to deal with spoilers warnings (or the new nifty spoiler html coding)?
Mod
The reason I want this to be a 'spoiler zone', where people can comment freely, is that Ulysses is perceived as a difficult read. Many people need the heads up while reading if they have any chance of understanding the stream of consciousness narrative. Plus I'd like members to be able to ask questions about what certain parts of the text mean and for answers to be illustrative and helpful.
Hope this os OK with everyone. If not, I'm happy to discuss it more.
Ally
That works for me. Sometimes I question whether something is truly a spoiler, so I send to be safe rather than sorry. And I wanted to ask so that we all have a common understanding going into it and no one gets mad later. (I've seen it happen and it's such a discussion killer) Thanks for coordinating this Ally!
Some questions to think about - courtesy of the Evanston Public Library, Illinois1. What are your first impressions of Stephen Dedalus? What do you think of his companions? Buck Mulligan? Haines?
2. Consider the recent death of Stephen’s mother. Why would Stephen have refused her last wish to “kneel down and pray for her?”
3. What are some of the major themes first introduced in Episode 1? How are they symbolized?
4. How does Episode 1 parallel Homer’s The Odyssey?
5. Who is the “usurper” Stephen refers to in the last line of Episode 1?
Just started. It's been a long time. I first read this on the bus to work. That was in a hardware store and I would go down into the basement on my lunch hour and sit behind the pipe threading lathe under a hanging bulb. It was like it went straight in, skipping my eyes. The glorious poetry. Why was I such a fool not write this myself?
Not sure if this will help everybody with "Telemachus" but the EPL gave us link to Ulysses "Seen" - kind of a comic of it. http://ulyssesseen.com/I know it helped me a lot. This may be the only episode that is online. Not sure.
I read pretty quickly through the three introductory Dedalus episodes. Joyce applied a different narrative method to each episode -- this one is "narrative". I fail to see the difference between the "catechism" of Nestor and the "monologue" of Proteus -- which is an interesting commentary on how Joyce has permeated our contemporary understanding of how to tell stories. On another point, I have never bothered to sort out the many exotic words and obscure references in the book. I just blew by these before, but this time (in Proteus) I'm finding it hard going in this respect. Should we be explicating all these?
So far as the three characters are concerned, they're different, aren't they? Dedalus is to me the least likeable, secretive and sullen. Mulligan is the pub roisterer but kind. Haines is earnest. BTW, how did Haines get into the martello? He doesn't pay rent. He appears not to have any family leverage. Did he just show up one day and move in? Impossible to think so.
I think he is a friend of Mulligan's.[But it has been a while since I read Telemachus]
Mod
Charles wrote: "So far as the three characters are concerned, they're different, aren't they? Dedalus is to me the least likeable, secretive and sullen. Mulligan is the pub roisterer but kind. Haines is earnest. B..."Re-reading your comment I'm not certain that I see Mulligan as kind or Gained as earnest.
I will admit that there was much in Telemachus that had me confused.
Jan C wrote: "Charles wrote: "So far as the three characters are concerned, they're different, aren't they? Dedalus is to me the least likeable, secretive and sullen. Mulligan is the pub roisterer but kind. Hain..."When I read Ulysses before I didn't much like Mulligan, but this time I see through the jibes to the concern for Dedalus in some of his remarks. I guess I've become less sensitive to that male style which covers up dangerous emotions with constant joking. As for Haines, by earnest I meant like humorless, uninterested in trifling.
I am mainly going on memory since I am at Oxen of the Sun right now where Mulligan does make another appearance.
Maybe it's me, but I still think this has got to be one of the most enticing opening chapters anywhere. There's solemnity and ceremony, bantering, irreverence, friendship and not-so-friendly, three very distinct people, one of them an old acquaintance, a charming old working-class woman, hints of problems and issues moral and philosophical, a personal crisis ongoing, the hopefulness of morning and the beginning of a day, an anticipation of marvels in the offing -- all packed in this little space. It makes me weep with joy.
My recollection is that I was kind of confused. A lot of the action with Buck et al had to do with Catholicism - of which I have little or no knowledge.
Jan C wrote: "My recollection is that I was kind of confused. A lot of the action with Buck et al had to do with Catholicism - of which I have little or no knowledge."Yes, and where Stephen is concerned there will be more of that. We should put some experts on retainer.
Mod
p.s. I am a Catholic and I still don't get half of it!!!
I absolutely must ask what is confusing. Possibly I am overlooking something. I don't want to set myself up as knowing anything because I don't, but I'm really curious about how you-all read this, and what it is that puts people off the track, or causes them to think they are off the track.
It may be the first scene that puts off where Buck is doing a take-off (?) on the Catholic rituals. I didn't get that scene at first - that was why I posted that link to Ulysses seen - which is essentially a cartoon of it. But I think the further I go in the book, the more I begin to think that maybe it shouldn't be taken that literally. Years ago I read a mystery, The Death of a Joyce Scholar by Bartholomew Gill, and the character, an Irish policeman, decides that it is "just a bit of crack". Not sure if it is just that but maybe we don't need to get quite so bogged down with all of the symbolism ... unless we want to.
Well, these people are all Catholics in a Catholic country, with Jesuit educations deep in the Greek and Latin classics, exposed daily to the Latin mass. Dedalus is a solemn fellow given to casuistry (Kinch, the knifeblade) and ripe for being made fun of by Mulligan, a ribald medical student. Mulligan seems to make light of all such sententiousness, but the ceremony of the opening is a seemingly mocking but quite serious salute to the dawn. Not a symbol to be seen. My point is, siding with Jan C, that it is quite possible to read this purely as story without any attempt to parse the underlying structure. As story, of course, we have here a very different time and culture, but any more alien than Austen?
There is much here besides the story, but I think it a shame how people are put off the wonderful story by all that infrastructure. Do you suppose it's the reputation of the book that leads people to worry they don't get it when really they do?
By the way, does anyone know what "kinch" means? My dictionaries are no help.
From Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford "After kinchin, or child (William York Tyndall, "A Reader's Guide to James Joyce"); or "in imitation of the cutting sound of a knife (Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey). In an essay, "James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist," Oliver St. John Gogarty remarks, "Kinch calls me 'Malachi Muligan.' ... Mulligan is stage Irish for me and the rest of us. It is meant to make me absurd. I don't resent it, for he takes 'Kinch' - 'Lynch' with the Joyces of Galway, which is far worse" (In Mourning Becomes Mrs. Spendlove)."
Does that explain anything?
Jan C wrote: "After kinchin, or child... Does that explain anything?"Yes. It explains the name, and some of the tension between the two which is buried in the name. It also reminds me that everything in Joyce is over-determined. You don't seem very confused. :->
I took that from Ulysses Annotated. I was confused at the time that I read it. I wasn't using the Annotated book at that time. Episode 14 drove me to having to look things up.
Mod
I'm ashamed to admit it but for me I'm sure I've been slightly overawed by the reputation - I once read about a science/social experiment where two groups of people were given the same puzzle. One group was told it was a primary school level puzzle and the other group was told that it was a post graduate level puzzle. The ones that were told it was easy found it easy the ones that were told it was hard really struggled.
Maybe we need to populate a new myth that Ulysses is a breeze!
Ally
Mod
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde when it talks of the 'rage of caliban not seeing his face in the glass...'
This has to be one of my favourite pieces from all literature and really pinpoints for me some of the 'reason for being' of art and literature in the human world.
Here it is...
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
-- OSCAR WILDE - Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
Ally wrote: "The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."No fair! I would write an essay on each of these points. About this one, however (I'll skip the essay on beauty, reluctantly) -- when people complain that something is 'mannered' they mean what Wilde says about concealing the artist. Of course, people have at times demanded the opposite -- but what occurs to me at once is this: is Joyce mannered (in Wilde's sense)? All that swaggering about, challenging the reader with symbols and allusions to solve, always changing styles and sticking things in the way of getting on with it, and so clearly malicious -- I'm sure those who thought so would find the book formidable and difficult. Some people get quite angry.
Mod
In terms of the quote Charles has chosen - I think Joyce has deliberatley chosen to reveal the artistry in this consciously new 'modernistic' literary project.
Ally wrote: "I find this very interesting - Ulysses is quite clearly considered, in the world of literature, to be the pinnicle of artistic expression. - Joyce was consciously creating something new and at the ..."What I find awe-ful about the book is Joyce's ability to manage this massive infrastructure of ideas and allusions and whatnot, down to incredible detail such as the name of Kinch and the famous bit of research about how many inches was the drop from the street into the area of some particular building -- and not destroy the story. It's no wonder it's a one-off and many writers have spent their careers trying to ignore or disown it (the which thought making me want to consult Bloom's The Anxiety Of Influence again... sigh, it's never-ending)
And then he went and increased the size of the book by a third when it was in proof because he could never stop it's efflorescence. Always seeing new connections and elaborations. Yike! It's superhuman. And yet there's that story, everything in service to the story.
Mod
1. What are your first impressions of Stephen Dedalus? What do you think of his companions? Buck Mulligan? Haines?..."
My First Impressions of Stephen Dedalus are of a very straight down the line type of person. He has his own way of viewing the world and seems a little closed minded as to alternative ways of viewing things and a little 'self' orientated. He seems at the moment slightly deviod of humour. I base this primarily on his discussions with Mulligan about the death of his mother. Mulligan seems to be a 'lighter' character and flippantly talks of Stephen's mother as 'beastly dead'. Stephen, rather uncomprhendingly takes this as a slight to himself rather than a mockery of the memory of his mother. The fact that he refused his mothers last wish to pray for her in the way of Catholic custom tells me that he has strong feelings about his own beliefs but that he is 'haunted' by his mothers ghost also shows me at least some level of human (perhaps Catholic) guilt - Stephen's a little conflicted. I don't think I've made enough of Haines yet to develop a strong opinion. He's more of a 'device' at this stage to help highlight the historical problems of English/Irish relations.
2. Consider the recent death of Stephen’s mother. Why would Stephen have refused her last wish to “kneel down and pray for her?”..."
Stephen seems to be rejecting orthodox Catholicism - the reasons are as yet unclear. For the reasons I've written above I don't see it as a slight on his mother.
3. What are some of the major themes first introduced in Episode 1? How are they symbolized?..."
Water seems to play a part in the symbolism - the sea, the shaving bowl, the refusal of Stephen to wash! - I suppose this to be linked to Catholic rituals such as baptism and parts of the mass. Religious symbolism itself is an obvious rather than underlying theme. I'm yet to understand the links to Homer's Odyssey but that is because I'm not a classical scholar (..I hope someone in this thread may enlighten me!). Death and human relationships are highlighted as is the economics of rich vs poor and historical political struggles between the English soverign 'ownership' of Ireland and the Catholic republican standpoint. Literary allusion is also there in abundance, we've already mentioned Homer, but ther is Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare's Hamlet.
4. How does Episode 1 parallel Homer’s The Odyssey?..."
Help needed! - I understand from my study guide The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses by Harry Blamires that the yet to be introduced character of Leopold Bloom is the equivelant of Homer's Ulysses, that Stephen corresponds to his son Telemachus, "who finds himself dispossessed of his mother in his own father's house and sets out in search of the lost Ulysses". That the 'equine features' and hair like 'pale oak' are to point us in the way of the wooden horse and linked treachery.
5. Who is the “usurper” Stephen refers to in the last line of Episode 1?..."
From the 'equine features' and the story of the seige of Troy I'd have to say Mulligan at this stage but its very early days. Of course Usurper could have strong religious connotations.
I'm chary of making too much of Catholicism. Of course it is important as a factor concerning Dedalus, where we have a straight sequel with Portrait Of an Artist in which we see the struggle for integrity which shows up in Ally's remarks. But the underlying Ulysses tale is not Catholic. Catholicism has been mapped onto it, not the other way around. This circumscribes the wider significance of Catholic references to contexts such as Stephen's struggles and Mulligan's irreverence. Outside these contexts I would argue that Ulysses is a secular book, and when Bloom shows up, a Jew, it becomes much so. I believe Stephen's quarrel is really with Ireland and Irishness, and Catholicism comes in for it as part of that.
As regards the usurper, I read it this way (following Gilbert) -- In the palace of Telemachus's absent father Odysseus in Ithaca, the suitors of Penelope are in possession. Likewise, Mulligan lords it in the tower. The suitors mock Telemachus and spend his money. Likewise Mulligan, who keeps the key to the tower even though Stephen pays the rent. Stephen declares in Portrait that his only arms will be "silence, exile, and cunning" -- likewise Telemachus, unarmed among the suitors. Gilbert has a good deal to say about Stephen's character, but interesting to me in particular is Joyce's practice following Homer of assigning to each character an epithet or tag, which for Dedalus is something like "Telemachus gave thought and then replied with deliberation" which tells much.
Mod
I, too, think the Usurper line refers to Mulligan, for taking Stephen's key and money. At this point, I don't see much of The Odyssey in the story. I'm wondering who to like least, Mulligan for essentially bullying Stephen, of Stephen for taking it.
I wouldn't say Stephen is spineless. He doesn't have, and deplores a little, Mulligan's brash barroom bantering -- Stephen is cautious, deliberate, private (silence, exile, cunning). He's also depressed. And he's not anti-Catholic, though he himself is not practicing. He is anti-Irish, and blames the role of Catholicism in Irishness. That's what he means by saying he is of Britain and Italy. Isn't it glorious how complex these people are, with their deep connections, affinities, contradictions, transparency and opaqueness? In a few pages what a lesser writer would need a whole novel to do.
Mod
I think that the way it is written isa lmost contrary to the way we've learned to read novels. We're looking for the speech marks, we're looking to be told who is speaking, we're looking for narrative and descriptors that point towards setting or characterisation. In this novel there is no narrative, no narrator, no notification as to who is speaking and no descriptive passages. Instead we are reading only speech (or thought) and have to work out for ourselves the demarcation lines!
In some respects it reminds me of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury where the reader has the sensation of groping around in the dark because the world of the novel is not completely clear at first. Although this may well have been written first.I think it only gets worse in terms of who is speaking and whether they are in the real world or some fantasy world of their own.
Ally wrote: "I've been pondering again what I've been finding so difficult about this novel and I think that Jennifer has hit the nail on the head in saying she had difficulty regarding who was speaking."Might I suggest that no one is speaking? Where there is reported speech it is marked in the French way by the em dash. Otherwise speech is as we receive it through Stephen's consciousness. However, this neat system is confused by the presence of ordinary narration, as in the opening "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" which Stephen could not have seen. Joyce has cut himself free of the purely conventional constraint of a single narrative strategy, as Bartok and Stravinsky dispensed with key and time. The organizational logic is different.
Personally I am as vague in French about who is speaking -- I've never disentangled the em dash from the double brevet quote marks, for example, and the hyphen marks only the beginning; the end is up to you. (Someone fluent is going to have to speak :-) author-itatively here.)
Jan C wrote: "whether they are in the real world or some fantasy world of their own. "I'm going to have to demur, here. In what way is the internal world of thought less authoritative than the external one? They are both experienced, and we have good evidence that the external world is in part created in the act of encountering it (or entirely created, as Buddhists have it). Joyce discovered he could map the (mere) external world onto the internal one, reversing the valence.
Hmm. I don't like my tone -- too much pronunciamento. Sorry. Somebody sit on me.
Mod
You see this is part of the problem - the whole question of Ireland & Irishness is not so easily delineated from Irish Catholicism/English Protestantism. I think this is particularly true in Northern Ireland but the Republic of Ireland too has a long history. - Does anyone here know much about the Irish troubles and how this history impacts on this novel?
Mod
...he said that Joyce never wrote Ulysses initially to follow episodically Homers Odyssey and that it was never originally published in these distinguishable episodes. Instead, he'd given his friends a separate 'guide' as they read the pre-published book that related to the Osyssey but that this was never intended for public consumption.
Is that true (either fully or partially) or is my friend pulling my leg!
Ally
Ally wrote: "I mentioned to one of my firends that I was reading Ulysses and also bemoaned that I should also read the Odyssey in order to fully understand what I'm reading and then my friend dropped a bit of a..."Your friend has got it wrong. There are plenty of accounts from his publisher Sylvia Beach, Ellmann's biography, and others around him to contradict this. There is a sort of truth, though. When Joyce was living in Trieste he met up with Pound in Milan, and out of that meeting came the decision to move to Paris and finish Ulysses. The state of the book at that time was not fully realized and the Odyssey framework, I believe, still under construction. It is also true that the present organization of the text was less distinct. In Paris, he read publicly from the book often, as he was also to do from Finnegan's Wake, and I believe it is correct that there were cribs, and that Larbaud had something to do with this. (Larbaud translated the book after publication.) This material contributed to Gilbert's exegesis of the book in 1930. It is also true that Joyce was revising the book even after it went to the printer, but the revisions were contentual rather than structural.
The book grew out of the Dedalus character he had created in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce clearly knew he was creating something radically different and it naturally took him a while to work it all out and to discover the implications in his material as he went along. Of course the Odyssey connection was under development the whole time, as you would expect in the case of anything as unprecedented as this.
I no longer have the necessary books at hand to substantiate this, and my memory may not be quite right in the details. Someone else?
Mod
Ally wrote: "Do you know anything about the effects of the banning of the book? - I had heard that it was published by a french publisher because of modesty laws in England and Ireland that refused to publish i..."What I know is that Sylvia Beach published it (in English) in France on February 2, 1922, with 1-6 typographical errors per 732 pages, with an errata slip from the (heroic) printer. Many of these remained uncorrected until the 1986 Gabler edition. It was published in France because it could be and because Sylvia Beach offered to do it. It was immediately banned in England, as Joyce's previous books had been, and stayed banned until (I think) the fifties. In America in 1933 the ban was lifted in a landmark case which established the basis of the present law on pornography. It was, of course, often smuggled in in the intervening years. Parts of the book had been published in 1914 and 1918 by Harriet Weaver in the Little Review, for which she suffered. The book nearly bankrupted Sylvia Beach and I'm not sure when, if ever, she recovered her investment. There was a second edition published in 1926 by Harriet Weaver from the original plates. Albert Morel, supervised by Valery Larbaud, translated it into French in 1928. Aside from the court case, I don't know that the censorship issue was of any more moment than that of, say, Henry Miller or DH Lawrence. It was the thing. People sought it because it was banned. One wonders how many smugglers actually read it.
More. The book was banned in England before it was published, based I suppose on the Weaver extracts and manuscripts. Shaw thought it was revolting. The printer Darantiere was selected for his low price, not to escape censorship in France.
Regarding the "usurper" thing, I must admit I'm a little confused. I'm wondering if it could not perhaps be both Haines and Mulligan, since in the Odyssey, there were more than one usurper.In the opening part of the chapter, it becomes clear that Haines is the latest addition to come and lodge in the Martello tower, and like other posters have said;- he is the outsider, the 'occupier'; the Englishman.
Also, at the start of the chapter, Stephen tells Mulligan that he wants Haines to leave because of how Haines' nightmares are disturbing to Stephen.
..but there are other direct references that makes Mulligan seem like the usurper - he is the one who gets the key from Stephen, and the word "usurper" comes up what seems to be in direct relation to Mulligan's voice heard while he is swimming.
I must admit that I am finding the punctuation (or lack thereof) rather difficult for me to follow who is talking as well; - as if this book wasn't difficult enough already with all it's allusions!
I've been wondering about the following paragraph:
"Symbol of the apostles in the mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ's terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who held that the Father was Himself His own Son."
I'm finding I need some outside illumination as to exactly all of what is being referred to here and in context of this paragraph, the paragraph that follows it.
I'm also a bit puzzled by the following reference to Nietzche and Genesis."—My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the Uebermensch. Toothless Kinch and I, the supermen."
Adam the original biblical man, and the ubermensch or superman/transcendental man of Nietzche, the man who announced the death of God. The first man and the developed man of the future. An interesting juxtaposition...
Ah, wait a bit - he mentions only that he himself and Stephen are 'supermen'. Haines is not included. Could he be mockingly referring to the fact that they are Irishmen?
Bright Young Things
Books mentioned in this topic
Ulysses (other topics)Ulysses Annotated (other topics)
The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses (other topics)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (other topics)
Ulysses Annotated (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Harry Blamires (other topics)Oscar Wilde (other topics)
Don Gifford (other topics)
Bartholomew Gill (other topics)
James Joyce (other topics)
