A couple of questions but primarily, which publication of Ulysses provides the best onboard notes for the text, and in addition which companion text is the most comprehensive and/or user friendly?
My second question is which other works should I have read in order to "get" the references and structure of the novel.
I have read Portrait of the Artist and intend to read the Odyssey. I've heard Ellman's biography is helpful as well.
Thanks
Reading the Odyssey is a must before attempting Joyce's novel ....
The Teaching Company has a course on Ulysses which has 18 lectures on the novel. These are 1/2 hour lectures for a total of 9 hours. The lectures are on dvd and an outline booklet comes with the lectures. The teacher is a prof with a Phd in literature. Google the Teaching Company and this course will be described and the cost given to receive the dvds and course outline. My library has quite a few of the courses given by the Teaching Company so I didn't have to pay for it. I highly recommend the Teaching Company and this course. You will learn more from this course than from any book you can get. But you still should read The Odyssey first. I'm from the old school and prefer the Alexander Pope translation in rhyme. If you want a faster read, try the T. E. Lawrence prose translation (Lawrence of Arabia). Once you have set through this course, you'll be able to read the novel easily. There are all kinds of allusions which Joyce makes, but these are personal things he knows about Dublin. There is a book on these, but it is thicker than the novel. When he (Joyce) makes an allusion to a butcher shop he used to go into, you don't have to know about this to read the book. I think he made these to confuse the pedagogues. You don't have to read any other book by Joyce before reading Ulysees.Good luck!
I read Portrait of the Artist and the Odyssey and Ellman's biography. They were not sufficient preparation. Ulysses is several orders of magnitude more difficult than these works. I found the Odyssey (Rieu's translation - much easier than Pope or Lawrence) a bit tedious & lengthy - Joyce himself recommended people read the redaction "The Adventures of Ulysses" by Charles Lamb, his main influence on the legend.
Ellmann's biography is superb. I much preferred reading it to Ulysses itself
I found two versions of Ulysses with inbuilt notes - Oxford World Classics and Penguin Student Edition. The former did a much better job of translating Joyce's obscurities for the first few pages, so I bought that.
But Oxford World Classics is the unedited 1922 version and, as I found, some of the errors definitely hinder the reading. The notes point out some errors, but this is a very unfriendly approach for the general reader. Not only do you have to try and understand Joyce you need to edit the text into a more readable version before starting! I spent several minutes trying to understand the meaning of one sentence, but when I looked in the back the editor pointed it out it was a printing error. Once corrected the sentence was simple! I can see the use of the 1922 text for experts who want to see Joyce's 'first version'. But the general reader deserves something more user friendly. (Even the editor agrees with me in the introduction! I can't understand why Oxford chose this version for publication.)
Also the print in the Oxford Classics version is the smallest I've ever seen in a paperback. And the notes aren't really sufficient for when you get beyond the first few pages. So if I were to attempt Ulysses again, I'd probably start with the Penguin Student edition and use the big doorstep encyclopedia "Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses" by D Gifford when necessary.
But I've decided to give up and read something else...
Last edited by mal4mac; 07-03-2010 at 06:45 AM.
I tried a course on Ulysses from the Teaching Company recently, and didn't like it. Maybe it was a different course because mine had 24 lectures. Anyway, the teacher went into these fairly in-depth analyses talking about things like phallic symbols and whatnot. Under normal circumstances, I hate this kind of analysis that picks apart every single word the author wrote. And it was made even worse by the fact that at times, I simply had no idea what Joyce was trying to say. Forget analyzing the novel, I couldn't figure out what half the words meant, who/what the people and events referred to were, which parts of the books were stream of consciousness and which parts were actions, etc. . . Also, the teacher would talk about what a certain part of a chapter meant, and when I read it afterwards, I would wonder how he could possibly know that that was what Joyce meant. For example, he would talk about how a character would be mean to Leopold Bloom and this was supposed to be an instance of antisemitism. In some cases, that was fairly obvious, but others I was saying "are you sure this is antisemitism? Couldn't the other guy just be a jerk?"Originally Posted by dfloyd
Anyway, I decided to stop reading Ulysses and listening to the lectures after I got to chapter 8 and realized I couldn't remember a single thing that had happened in the book. Now I'm reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I may go back to Ulysses later on with some cliff notes and a dictionary and try to at least get through the book without worrying too much about understanding everything about it.
Must have been a different instructor ....
The lectures I saw made none of the statements to which you allude. They have a lot of different instructors in The Teaching Company, and I have run into some bad ones and some excellent ones. The lectures I watched on Ulysses helped me to get through the book, if not with ease, with a sense of accomplishment. It is a difficult book, and you have to want to read it. The instructor said, a friend of his who was a literature professor had a hard time with it and didn't finish the novel.
Last edited by dfloyd; 07-03-2010 at 10:25 PM.
I bought a separate "Ulysses Annotated" by Don Gifford. That is an excellent book to have, plus I didn't want my Ulysses to be muddled because I like to write in the margins myself.
Hamlet
Familiarize yourself with the Bible, especially Elijah.
You have to read the Odyssey to really get what Joyce is doing. I found it helpful to read them simultaneously, chapter with corresponding chapter. Which was fine, since I hadn't read The Odyssey in a few years.
Most of all, enjoy the book. Yes, it's a task to read but once you GET it, it's brilliant--but remember, they're still trying to figure out all the hidden stuff. LOL!
Can you give an example of how Ulysses is brilliant and how to get that brilliance? There are many books that you can just read "right off" and that many people regard as "brilliant". I gave up on Ulysses because I wasn't enjoying the heavy lifting and ongoing hidden perplexities. Dickens,Twain and dozens of other authors are brilliant without imposing a hard slog on their readers. So why bother with Joyce?
I'd have to have it in front of me and list examples, but I can summarize a bit. First of all, it ain't an easy read. Brilliant doesn't always mean enjoyable either. lol! Bach, I'm sure, many consider brilliant. However, not all of his works are enjoyable IMO.
So, brilliant can be a piece of work that is a fantastic read, easily accessible by the masses; or it can be a piece of work that is structurally amazing, but not popular, or even liked. Ulysses is the latter.
One thing that I found amazing was the final chapter and how it relates to the action that is happening "at the same time" in The Odyssey. I don't want to give anything away, so I'll just say there's a great contrast between Penelope and Bloom's wife which then points to the differences between Bloom and Odysseus. The bed and the symbolism there is really fascinating. "Yes. Yes."
Also, the "Proteus" chapter (3) is amazing. This is commonly where people give up on Ulysses. But it's Joyce's way of making you hold on (like Odysseus did Proteus) to get through.
Um, the "Circe" chapter was pretty cool too if I remember correctly. The symbolism of swine and whatnot.
Also, Joyce wasn't in Dublin when he wrote this. He had details of the city down to shops and distances all in his head (maybe he had notes), so that in itself is pretty freakin' brilliant. There's a carriage scene that has to do with distances and the streets (anyone wanna help me remember this?).
There's no guarantee you're going to like Ulysses. And people are not stupid or uncool if they don't. But try and read as much as you can and use an annotated guide to help. "Why bother with Joyce?" Well, that's personal preference. If you're a fan of literature and you like absorbing knowledge, then I believe he's a must-read. But, you could certainly go your whole life and never read him, and stick with others like the ones you listed. I have yet to read Don Quixote. I own it, but haven't found the will to read it. In the end, it really comes down to you and what you like.
Hope I helped some.
I really like Bach. I've had to listen to some pieces several times. Sometimes I've had to try different performances before learned to appreciate them.
I've read really hared works of philosophy fropm beginning to end (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Aristotle's NE) This was a struggle, but (unlike with Ulysses) I finished them and was impressed by their brilliance.
Having read "Portrait" (brilliant!) and a hundred pages of Ulysses, and several out-takes in Ellmann, and the like I realise Ulysses is brilliant in parts - but, for me, the intermittent brilliancei s outweighed by too much heavy lifting. I read novels for pleasure, and kind of expect them to be easier to read than Kant.
The only way I would read Ulysses is if someone convinced me "the brilliance" was greater than that to be found in any other novel - something I've not been convinced of - not by Ellmann, not by any forum, not by Joyce himself.
Ellmann has accounts of how he did this - for example, writing to huis aunts or using maps and a Dublin A-Z (I doubt Joyce could perfectly judge distances!) I can remember most iof the shops I visited in mty home town as a kid. What's so great about that?
I'm a fan of literature and I like absorbing knowledge, but I don't believe Ulysses is a must-read. I don't think anything is a must read. Only a God of litearture could declare something a "must read".
I read Don Quixote just before attempting Ulysses and had no problems with it - it's a very straightforward and fun read.
Bottom line, I can't really be bothered tackling works of literature that can't be read straight off, with at the extreme (Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Joyce's "Portrait"...) perhaps referring to a few notes at the bottom of the page.
Ulysses requires you to put up with too much boredom - that is, you have to read a mass of boring background scholarship, produced by second rate minds, to understand Ulysses. Instead you could be reading the first rate products of the greatest literary minds, even greater than Joyce by reputation, (Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, Cervantes ...) They don't require you gaining access to a library of pedantic scholarship.
Most academics seem untiringly engaged in praising Ulysses and I too read a few chapters and yet I always got saddened at what I felt after leafing through a few pages. This books exhausts our minds and dulls our sensitivity and as a such I loath the book. There are better books, of course even War and Peace, a big sized book, Proust, the Brothers Karamazov, even Sartre's Being and Nothingness, Kafka. I simply can not understand what stuffs they get to write volumes upon volumes in praise of this eccentric writer. This is they claim art or inventiveness or experiments. This is nonsense. The objective of a piece of literature is to entertain and instruct at the same time and it does not gratify both ends. Most readers feel nauseated after going through a few pages of the book. People or critics or some of the bizarre academics become engrossed in the book but the majority have an aversion to it. I made several endeavors to complete the book and took help of some notes but to no avail
“Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature””
“If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation.
Well, in my last post you'll see, mal4mac, that I said "In the end, it really comes down to you and what you like.". I don't like Dickens. No one will convince me otherwise. I also don't like cheese on my hamburgers. There's some later Coltrane I can't stand. It's all taste. I very much enjoyed Ulysses, although it was a struggle at times.
I thought you were asking why some think it's brilliant, not asking me to prove why you should read it. The only reason I said it was a must-read book, is for the literary notch in your lit belt. I also think Don Quixote is a must-read, but I may never read it. Nothing bad will happen to me if I don't. And no, there's no god of literature--that I know of.
Last edited by damondarkwalker; 07-11-2010 at 05:52 PM.
Publish a novel about it, and maybe someday someone will try and explain why.
Mal,
The actual events are relatively banal in most of Joyce's work. The burning desire to 'unlock what he means' and elucidate what's actually going on tends to lead to anti-climax. His subject matter (in terms of tangible goings on) is mundane, but his aesthetic & command of allusion, mental meanderings & the written word (in all its contexts, duplicity, triplicity & variant languages) is what makes his fans goo-goo ga-ga over his work. He's a painter of words. His brush strokes may seem gratuitously difficult to view w/ much depth, but they are littered w/ beauty if you appreciate his aesthetic.
The thing is- if you don't appreciate his aesthetic, the pleasure-pain principle will weigh heavily in favor of the latter & not be worth it, to which end you'll likely conclude that there's way too much great literature out there to waste your time on something so masochistic (and subjectively, you'll be right).
http://unidentifiedappellation.blogspot.com/
joyce said there wasn't a single line in the book that was serious.
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