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Ulysses
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Chunky Read ULYSSES with reading schedule
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Meg
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Apr 01, 2012 06:34AM
How cool you are. I had read this and planned on doing some research, not only did you save me time, but you helped tremendously. I am so glad you are part of our group.
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I think if you have an idea of the overall structure it helps. Have faith! The book is gloriously dense - reference upon reference - just know in these first three chapters you are meeting Stephen and learning about him.
I want to participate, but I'm confused on the version of the book to read. Can someone point me to a correct ebook version to purchase?
Meg wrote: "How cool you are. I had read this and planned on doing some research, not only did you save me time, but you helped tremendously. I am so glad you are part of our group."Thank you! I'm a little passionate about what was my personal research project last winter.
Allie wrote: "I want to participate, but I'm confused on the version of the book to read. Can someone point me to a correct ebook version to purchase?"Hi Allie - It looks like Meg is using Vintage International/Random House. I used a Penguin edition on Kindle that is no longer offered on Amazon's site.
What is everybody else using?
I'm in. I have been trying to read this book since last fall ... and it will be great to start fresh and go through it with this group.
What a great group I can't wait!
Mod
Mine is called "The Gabler Edition" (edited by Hans Walter Gabler) and was published by Vintage Books/Random House.
So far it seems that the difference we noted is that my version has the actual court case as the beginning of the book.
I have the "free" Project Gutenberg version. Just skimming it, it seems to start off with a priest and Stephen and Buck Mulligan.
So I read the case against James Joyce and his letter in response.It goes back to the bigger question and that is banning books, choosing what should be allowed to be published and what should be in libraries. What are your thoughts on this? I think about this every banned book month....
Mod
A book being "banned", especially a classic book, will encourage me to want to read it.
Mod
Meg, is this pretty much the same synopsis that was in your book?
***
Ulysses was first published in serial form in The Little Review, starting in 1918. Several years later, in 1921, the serialized form of the book was first seized and challenged in a New York court with the result that the court ruled against The Little Review and its Ulysses excerpt.
The controversy surrounding the book did not end with its first complete publication in 1922. This time, instead of simply taking the book to court, New York postal officials seized and burned 500 copies of Ulysses.
Copies of the book were distributed in bootleg-fashion until 1932, when Customs once again seized a copy of Ulysses, which was being sent to Random House. Since the publishing house was intending to publish and distribute copies of the book, the press came to the book's defense.
In his decision, Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in favor of Random House, stating that the book was "not pornographic," and that "Joyce has attempted--it seems to me, with astonishing success--to show how the stream of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries..." Judge Woolsey further said that Joyce "shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing."
Judge Woolsey's decision was upheld by the circuit court of appeals, with Judge Austus Hand explaining the decision: "We think 'Ulysses' is a book of originality and sincerity of treatment, ant that it has not the effect of promoting lust."
The case was not appealed to the Supreme Court... and Ulysses could finally be obtained in the United States by legal means.
Two years later, in 1936, the novel was finally legalized in the United Kingdom.
Yes this is what was in my book. It is a very interesting situation and really makes me want to read the book. I agree with you Sheila, the more they talk about the reason to ban a book the more interest it spurs in me.Thank you for the synopsis.
The question of book banning is an interesting one. My knee-jerk reaction is to reject any banning. But, when I stop to think, I realize that there are topics that would offend me if I saw them in publication, and anger me if I thought my tax dollars were purchasing them for a library (e.g. a book that promoted racial hatred, that argued for the exploitation or rape of a child, that taught people to inflict terrorist violence on a population group, etc). I guess the question is where to draw the line, who gets to decide, can a society agree on standards or should any thought have the write to appear between the covers of a book. I believe in freedom of speech, but not the right to shout fire in a crowded theater. What is the literary equivalent of such a principle?
I keep trying to read the chunky reads...I am going to download this to my kindle and attempt to read it.
I "read" the Odyssey in high school...stumbled through while understanding very little is more like it! There's a reason why I am a history teacher and not an English teacher...I'm trying though!
I think that is the beauty of us all doing this togetherWe are not being graded, we can take risks and it is ok if we don't understand something or we don't all agree on something.
Stacy - it is so funny how our teachers can impact what we end up studying. I had history teachers (not that you are!) who made fascinating subjects like American or World history a dry recitation of dates and conflicts. Where my English teachers made the language come alive. Now - I love learning about both, and wonder how they managed to make it so miserably dull.I agree with Meg about exploring this as a group. Ulysses is a glorious challenge.
Knowing that the book is based on "The Odyssey" is interesting, but certainly not crucial to understanding the book. It's like thinking you can't enjoy the movie "Brother Where Art Thou" without knowing "The Odyssey".
I'm curious - has anybody listened to some of the podcasts by Frank Delaney called "Re: Joyce" - or pronounced "Rejoice"? His love of the work is infectious. Maybe its because my heritage is Irish/Scottish, but the use of words and rhythm of the words are incredible.
I love Frank Delaney and I haven't heard of RE:Joyce. I will have another thing to explore. Thank you!
Mod
We are not being graded, we can take risks and it is ok if we don't understand something or we don't all agree on something."
Wonderfully said, Meg!
Becky Colorado wrote: "Maybe its because my heritage is Irish/Scottish, but the use of words and rhythm of the words are incredible.
I have to admit, Becky, that I am loving the language in this book. I think that I might really end up enjoying this one. I was reading last night and the book was actually making me laugh. Even the blasphemous song about Jesus sung by Buck Mulligan in chapter 1 cracked me up, and I am a Christian:
I'm the queerest young fellow that every you heard.
My mother's a jew, my father's a bird....
This book is making me feel stupid. I am having the darndest time trying to figure out what is happening, who is speaking and what they are trying to say. The electronic copy I am using on my computer does not have page numbers and I have not found a chapter number yet, so I don't know were I am. One minute we are out for an early morning swim and the next minute we are in a classroom and I don't know how we got there or why. From provocative ditties, we have a kid who has copied sums into an exercise book, but does not understand what he has written. I gave up there.
Mod
Chapter 1 was them having breakfast and then the early morning swim. Chapter 2 is the classroom.
Chapter 3 (which is what I am up to) starts with:
"*Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least if no more, thought through my eyes."
(and I have NO IDEA what that means, yet)
Chapter 3 ends with "He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstress, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship."
(wow, I have no idea what that means either...chapter 3 must be an "interesting" one!"
Chapter 4, which will be the start of next week's reading, starts "Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls."
Sometimes it helps reading the cliff notes to make sure you are getting the gist of what you are reading until you are hooked. I know cliff notes are probably politically incorrect but it helps with the focus. Just an idea Irene.
I agree, Meg. Cliff Notes or SparkNotes are a great guideline if you're confused about what's going on in the story.
I should probably try to locate a study guide of some sort because I am totally confused. I just read what appear to be the third chapter and have absolutely no idea what was said. Does anyone know how we got to the classroom and/or why? The section after Stephen leaves with his money seems to be a long rambling set of thoughts as he wanders along the shoreline. He seems to think about mothers and horses and literature and... Is there anyone smarter than me that could give me some quick sense of what I was supposed to get out of this section?
Chapter One cliff note summary (Kopper, Edward A. CliffsNotes on Ulysses. 15 Apr 2012.
At about eight o'clock in the morning of June 16, 1904, on the stairhead of the Martello Tower on the beach bordering Dublin Bay at Sandycove, about seven miles south of Dublin, Stephen Dedalus has just awakened. He is living in the Tower (which he rented from the government) with Buck Mulligan, a Dublin medical student, and with Haines, an Oxonian, who is residing in Ireland while studying Irish folklore. Stephen is about to leave the Tower, and Joyce will liken Stephen's leaving to that of Homer's Telemachus, the son of the Greek hero Odysseus (Ulysses). Parallels with the Greek Odyssey are loose throughout Joyce's novel, but they serve as structuring devices which permit Joyce to carry through his mock heroic purpose in Ulysses. In the Odyssey, Telemachus decides to leave Ithaca to seek his long-lost father so that he and Odysseus (Ulysses) might return to drive away the suitors who are despoiling the kingdom while courting Penelope. In "Telemachus," Stephen Dedalus feels that he is being forced out of the Tower by Haines and Mulligan; and, in the last word of the chapter, he sees Mulligan as a "usurper."
Chapter Two cliff note summaryhapter 2 takes place at Headmaster Garrett Deasy's school on Dalkey Avenue in Dalkey, about one mile southeast of the Martello Tower at Sandycove. Stephen would undoubtedly have walked the short distance and would have arrived just after nine o'clock, a bit tardily. His conversation with Mr. Deasy ends just before 10:30 a.m. The time of the Nestor Episode is traditionally set at 10:00 a.m. because this is the hour at which the boys break for their hockey practice, during Stephen's history lesson.
The chapter begins with Stephen's calling on Cochrane, a student whose lack of enthusiasm typifies the feelings of Stephen's unruly class, whose members would rather listen to their teacher's riddles and jokes (which they ridicule). The lesson is about the Greek hero Pyrrhus, another victim of a usurper, who, like the archetypal Irish prophet, remained faithful to a lost cause to the end. After he dismisses the class, Stephen spends time helping the inept student Cyril Sargent; he realizes that the boy's mother must once have loved this tired child in spite of his inadequacies, and Stephen is reminded again of the loss of his mother, Mary Dedalus.
A short time later, in Mr. Deasy's study, Stephen listens to his headmaster's moralizing, then accepts his meager salary from Deasy. Mr. Deasy also gives Stephen a letter which he has written about the foot and mouth disease of livestock, cattle in particular. Stephen has friends among editors, and Deasy feels that there will be no trouble in getting his (clichŽ-filled) letter published in the newspaper.
Yikes...I have not even started this yet....
Chapter Three Cliff notes summary"Proteus" takes place at about 11:00 a.m. on Sandymount Strand, which is approximately nine miles from Mr. Deasy's school. Stephen wanders along the beach to spend time before he meets Mulligan at The Ship pub at 12:30 p.m. He considers visiting the home of his Aunt Sara and his Uncle Richie Goulding (his mother's relatives), but then he thinks of the ridicule that his father, Simon, has heaped upon Uncle Richie in the past and what Simon might say about today's visit, and he decides not to make the trip. Thus the lengthy description of his visit to the Gouldings concerns only an imagined event.
The first two paragraphs of "Proteus" are especially difficult unless one realizes that Joyce, through a stream-of-consciousness technique, is recording the complexity of Stephen's thoughts as he muses upon the question of what is real, and what is not merely appearance. Stephen is a well-read young man, conversant in philosophy as well as in literary theory, and the first two paragraphs mirror his preoccupation with the processes of knowing and being. Although there is probably no exact source that Joyce used for the opening words of the chapter ("Ineluctable modality of the visible"), opening words of the chapter ("Ineluctable modality of the visible"), the subject matter of the following allusions is found in Aristotle's De Anima. Aristotle taught that we are first aware of bodies through their translucence or transparency (diaphane), then through their colors. Dante judged Aristotle to be bright and called him maestro di color che sanno, "master of those who know."
I hope this helps. Let me know as this can help in our discussion if you feel this is worthwhile.meg
Not to worry Marialyce, we are reading it slowly and I might have even make the reading schedule slower if necessary.
Thank you Meg for that summary. What is an Oxonian? I realized that Ch 3 was a stream of consciousness, but it made absolutely no sense to me. I figured that I was missing the allusions, but sentences seemed to start and stop and change focus mid thought. I could not figure out if there was any point or if Joyce was just trying to create the feel of the way thoghts can sometimes travel in odd random paths.
Oxonian is a person that is studying at Oxford University, He is living in Ireland at the moment because he is studying Irish folklore. I would say Oxford is about on par with Harvard.
Thanks, I am familiar with Oxford and its reputation, but never heard the term oxonian. I thought that maybe it might have meant an Oxford student, but knew that I was sufficiently confused in this book that I had better ask.
Meg wrote: "I hope this helps. Let me know as this can help in our discussion if you feel this is worthwhile.meg"
Meg, I found this very helpful. It opened up some of the sections for me in a way some other notes did not. Thank you very much!
I am so glad we are able to clear some things up. This is a new adventure for me too, I wish I was a Joyce scholar so I could help you all more!
Mod
Irene, chapter 3 made no sense to me either. I read it last night and was thinking "what is the author trying to get at???" I was wondering if the guy was on the beach sleeping and dreaming? Or if he was on drugs and this was the authors way of showing what drugs do to your brain? And then I starting thinking maybe the author was on drugs when he wrote that chapter. :o)
Thank you Sheila. Ok it seems the group is interested in the chapter summaries and I will definitely do that. So, if you are far behind it will be posted as to what chapter it is. Also, for some, it helps to read it first before reading the book, others, after. I think we have a plan!
Meg - I think the chapter summaries make a lot of sense. I read it with Don Gifford's book "Ulysses Annotated" because it does have all sorts of musical, people, biblical, Irish history and folklore references.
Sheila, I am so glad that I was not alone. It was like I knew the meanings of each word, but had no idea what each was doing standing next to the others. LOL, I loved the brain on drugs image.
Becky if you want to share the annotated pieces as we go along we would all be grateful.
I will try - I'm going through it and trying to pick out some of it that I think are most relevant. Keep in mind there are about 300 annotations per chapter. Chapter 1 - Telemachus
The setting - Why a Martello Tower, and what the heck is a Martello Tower?
This particular tower was built by the British in 1804 as a defense against Napoleanic invasion. Joyce stayed here in 1904 with friends - including an irreverent medical student, Oliver St John Gogarty who is Buck Mulligan in the book. Joyce is placing many jabs at Gogarty during the book.
The song that Sheila referred to is based on a widely circulated poem called ""The Song of the Cheerful (but Slightly Sarcastic) Jesus that Gogarty wrote in 1904. It also starts some of the antisemitic themes in the book, which you'll see more of with Leopold Bloom.
Gogarty had rented the tower because he felt it was the Delphi or navel, or center of Ireland, and he was the Oracle. So it starts a lot of "The Odyssey" reference. The word "omphalos" means "navel of the sea".
"Mulligan" is Irish slang term for all of us. In some ways Joyce deeply loved Dublin and all the people he brings into the book, but then again, he has exiled himself as he wrote "Ulysses" in Paris.
Much of Chapter 1 is biblical, and reference to the Catholic mass that Mulligan mocks.
There are also many references to Hamlet. Stephen Daedelus thinks of himself as Hamlet as he is in deep mourning - it also helps with explaining chapter 3 - he isn't on drugs, but he is deeply depressed. References to "Elinore", and wearing black, "Yet there's the spot". Also calling Mulligan a "usurper" refers to Hamlet, and also Joyce's scorn for Gogarty.
Finally - lots of references to popular songs - my audiobook did include these, which was a hoot - "I am the boy/ That can enjoy? invisibility" is from a play called Turko the Terrible, "Oh won't we have a merry...On Coronation Day", "Ned Grogan" (Irish Ballad), "For old Mary...her petticoats" (a bawdy Irish song),
Some references to Yeats and Oscar Wilde - admiration of other Irish writers/poets.
Wow! that is a lot of great information, thank you so much Becky!!!
Hey All - let me know if it gets to be too much.
Mod
I would never have guessed that the song was based on an actual poem. I just looked it up on Wikipedia and found the whole thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song...
It will be great to have all of this extra info (Cliff Notes Chapter Summaries and the annotated notes from Becky). I think it will make this book much more understandable!
Chapter 2 - NestorJoyce was taught by Jesuits, and because of his father's alcoholism, he was pulled from school and had to attend a Christian Brothers school which he hated - the unruliness of his class probably comes from this period. He eventually got back to the Jesuits at Belvedere College and then went to University College.
To make a joke of riddles - Dedalus quizzes the class with riddles that nobody could know the answer to.
In "The Odyssey", Telemachus asks Nestor for advice. Deasy is Nestor. Name may come from "The Deasy Act" which was a pro-English, anti-Catholic law to give land to the English. In this section Joyce discusses Irish nationalism, and history of Ireland.
Chapter ends with more antisemitism ("Because she never let them in". In 1904 there were only about 4,000 Jews in Ireland.
I also found this. It is a short biography of Joyce. James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882, the eldest of ten surviving children. He was educated by Jesuits at Clogowes Wood College and at Belvedere College (just up the road from the Centre) before going on to University College, then located on St Stephen’s Green, where he studied modern languages.
After he graduated from university, Joyce went to Paris, ostensibly to study medicine, and was recalled to Dublin in April 1903 because of the illness and subsequent death of his mother. He stayed in Ireland until 1904, and in June that year he met Nora Barncale, the Galway woman who was to become his partner and later his wife.
In August 1904 the first of Joyce’s short stories was published in the Irish Homestead magazine, followed by two others, but in October Joyce and Nora left Ireland going first to Pola (now Pula, Croatia) where Joyce got a job teaching English at a Berlitz school. After he left Ireland in 1904, Joyce only made four return visits, the last of those in 1912, after which he never returned to Ireland.
Six months after their arrival in Pola, they went to Trieste where they spent most of the next ten years. Joyce and Nora learned the local Triestino dialect of Italian, and Italian remained the family’s home language for many years. Joyce wrote and published articles in Italian in the Piccolo della Sera newspaper and even gave lectures on English literature.
1914 proved a crucial year for Joyce. With Ezra Pound’s assistance, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s first novel, began to appear in serial form in Harriet Weaver’s Egoist magazine in London. His collection of short stories, Dubliners, on which he had been working since 1904, was finally published, and he also wrote his only play, Exiles. Having cleared his desk, Joyce could then start in earnest on the novel he had been thinking about since 1907: Ulysses.
With the start of World War One, Joyce and Nora, along with their two children, Georgio and Lucia, were forced to leave Trieste and arrived in Zurich where they lived for the duration of the war. The family had little money, relying on subventions from friends and family, people like Harriet Weaver in London and Nora’s uncle in Galway. They often ended up living in cramped, squalid accommodation as Joyce persisted in writing Ulysses. In fact, Joyce never really had a room or an office of his own in which to do his writing, and far from trying to block out the world around him while he wrote, Joyce included things going on around him as part of the book. So characteristics of friends of his in Trieste, Zurich and Paris are given to characters in the book, and, most notably, Nora’s characteristic language and writing becomes the voice of Molly Bloom in the novel.
Though Joyce wanted to settle in Trieste again after the War, the poet Ezra Pound persuaded him to come to Paris for a while, and Joyce stayed for the next twenty years. The publication of Ulysses in serial form in the American journal The Little Review was brought to a halt in 1921 when a court banned it as obscene. Shortly after, Harriet Weaver ran out of printers willing to set the text in England, and for a while it looked as though Ulysses would never be published.
In July 1920, Joyce met Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate living in Paris who owned and ran the bookshop Shakespeare & Co. In 1921, after the American ban, Beach offered to publish Ulysses and finally, on 2nd February 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday, the first edition of Ulysses was published. Beach continued to publish Ulysses through 1930.
After Beach gave up the rights to Ulysses in 1930, much of Joyce’s business was taken over by Paul Léon, a Russian Jewish émigré living in Paris. As a close friend of Joyce and Joyce’s family, Léon also became Joyce’s business advisor, looking after his correspondence and dealing with his literary and legal affairs. The Léons’ apartment became a centre for Joyce studies, and Léon and others met Joyce there to discuss translations of Ulysses and the early serial publications of what became Finnegans Wake.
For the next ten years Joyce and Léon were in almost daily contact and Léon came to assume a role as necessary and important to Joyce and his work as Sylvia Beach had played in the 1920s. Not only did he manage Joyce’s legal, financial and daily existence,
much as Beach had during the years she published Ulysses, Léon played an essential part in the composition and proofreading of Joyce’s last work.
Joyce’s last and perhaps most challenging work, Finnegans Wake was published on 4 May 1939. It was immediately listed as “the book of the week” in the UK and the USA.
In 1940, when Joyce fled to the south of France ahead of the Nazi invasion, Léon returned to the Joyces’ apartment in Paris to salvage their belongings and put them into safekeeping for the duration of the war, and it’s thanks to Léon’s efforts that much of Joyce’s personal possessions and manuscripts survived. Joyce died at the age of fifty-nine, on 13 January 1941, at 2 a.m., in Schwesterhaus vom Roten Kreuz in Zurich where he and his family had been given asylum . He is buried in Fluntern cemetary, Zurich.
Chapter 3 - ProteusProteus' daughter of the "Ancient of the Sea" tells Menelaus that Odysseus is marooned and in bondage on Calypso's island.
This chapter is the first that stream of consciousness was used. And, it is very dense and difficult to understand. Annotations on this are about twice what was in the previous two chapters.
"Ineluctable Modality of the visible" -
- "Ineluctable" - That cannot be escaped from
" Modality" - The quality of being limited by a condition
So this is an Aristotle type of argument - What we can't escape, and what we can't perceive or see because we are limited, or in some ways are blind.
It's almost a spiritual blindness - Joyce in his early 20s - really smart, but trying to make sense of it all - the death of his mother and more. Think Hamlet, and Stephen is searching for his father to guide him and confused by everything - world history, Irish history, literature, biblical stories.
References to Aristotle, biblical, some German poets, Blake and then back to the navel (mystic monks contemplating their navels, Eve in Cabalistic tradition had no navel, she was not born of woman), more Hamlet.
"A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness" is about Jonathan Swift who suffered from a disturbance of the inner ear. "Furious dean" also refers to Swift. "Houyhnhnm horsenostrilled" is a reference to Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
Continued references are from Catholic mass, nursery rhymes, ancient Egypt, Hindu, Italian Renaissance, Hamlet, King Lear, Spanish armada invasion of Ireland, recent Irish history, French literature and speech,
"Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan". Wild geese are Irish who expatriate rather than live in Ireland ruled by English. Kevin Egan represents Joseph Casey, a Fenian involved in violence to set other Fenian leaders free in London.
Several references to Irish ballads, including "Wearing of the Green" (funny - this is really a song of revolution and the Protestant/ Catholic battles of Ireland).
People and buildings mentioned are often people/placed in Dublin.
Let's just say he throws in just about everything but the kitchen sink.
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