James Joyce - classic or dud

I was too young for 'Ulysses' (17) so reserve comment. I think it needs to be read fast, is all.

"read an article in the sunday times abt a soon-to-be-published biog of joyce's daughter"

Yootha?

Also I picked it up and started reading it again when I was staying with Starry & Lixi last year, so I would say that it is entirely possible to enjoy reading Joyce. Er, my attempts at Ulysses weren't enjoyable though.

After that, I had no inclination to waste my life with Ulysses.

STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

--INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

--Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about
and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the
awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent
towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered
the bowl smartly.

--Back to barracks! he said sternly.

He added in a preacher's tone:

--For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.

First, I'm thinking he's indoors, a natural assumption when he's carrying shaving equipment. Not till I get to the gunrest bit do I realise he's outdoors, though "mild morning air" confused me. He calls for Kinch, but Dedalus comes up. And it's not clear at fiorst where Dedalus is: I thought he was down on the ground because Mulligan is standing on the gunrest blessing the countryside. The whole is written in, for me, a nerdily inflated prose, with redundant adverbs and elgant variations like "aloft", and there's a religiose feel to it that reminds me of the one part of "Portrait" I didn't like: the sermon.

Do you?

Bunged: There is an ingenious theory that ch 1 is deliberately badly written.

Zappi, your not thick for not getting FWake, so few people do.

Pete s, you can hear some of joyce reading some of FWake at www.ubu.com (the best site on the web?) When he reads it i can (just about) understand some of the gist.

http://www.ubu.com/sound/joyce.html

"There's few other books which understand and empathise with human emotion better, and with warmth and sympathy. It places these things in context, that's it's whole trick. It says awareness, of things larger than yourself and the solipsistic universe in your head, will make you laugh, will make you cry. And that's the point of being alive, isn't it?
It's one of the funniest books ever written."

I got a copy of that the other month. I liked it.

Joseph Campbell wrote a 'guide' to Finnegan's Wake called 'Skeleton Key'; I don't know if it's still in print.

Yea, pretty much. :^0

(I have a recording of john cage reading it, an extra track on 'roaratorio')

JAMES JOYCE - THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS/EUGENE JOLAS - JAMES JOYCE
[sub rosa] CD + 116 page book £19.99
On the CD, Joyce reads from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (rec. 1924 & 1929); Jolas's book is a first publication

(I am almost reminded of... myself.)

The DV knows full well that some people have got a lot out of Joyce; perhaps he is... struggling to convince himself that he wouldn't? Or is he just toying with us all?

Actually I hope that I don't manage to persuade the DV to stop protesting too much about Joyce; it is endearing.

But TS: "lame-o textual analysis" (DV, other thread) vs "careful, attentive, appreciative reading"; and who gets to draw the line between them?

Possible interpretation of my last sentence really means is: 'just reading straightforwardly for pleasure' is great, but sometimes the claim to be doing that can be a deflection from a more reflective reading that would actually be more pleasurable.

i *think* i've read "portrait...", but i'm not sure, i may be confused...

*

As to the claim that Joyce's daughter helped him write, this seems to amount to no more than the testimony of a visitor to Joyce's house, who noticed that the daughter often went to the writing room with Joyce and danced there as Joyce wrote. I think Joyce was just looking after her; she had problems.

I've never heard of her. I went to Amazon to read an extract; not possible. So, my curiosity is aroused. Anyone read her? Is she worth reading?

--INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI.

Okay. You're not wrong about the "religious" bit: What's going on here is that Buck Mulligan (Stephen's roommate) is pretending to celebrate a Black Mass to piss off/amuse Stephen, who has turned his back on Catholicism but still can't quite shake the habits of his Jesuit education. It's early morning, Mulligan has got his shaving equipment out, and he's making like it's the chalice for a Mass. Instead of a priest's robes, he's got his dressing gown on, and it's "ungirdled," i.e. he's naked and it's flying out behind him in the wind. (Also note how the first sentence goes from "stately" to "crossed": church and state!) He's standing at the top of a set of stairs, and calling down to Stephen, who's within the tower where they live. "Kinch," or "Kinch the Knifeblade," is Mulligan's personal nickname for Stephen, as we'll find out shortly--he's the sort of person who makes up nicknames for everybody, tells the same jokes again and again, etc.

"Introibo ad altare dei" is from the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar. As Hugh Kenner points out:

"Mulligan... is tastelessly pretending to be a Black Mass celebrant, who is going through the motions of an Irish priest, who is reciting from the Ordo, which quotes from St. Jerome's Latin version of Hebrew words ascribed to a Psalmist in exile... So we might see the first words spoken in Ulysses inside six sets of quotation marks - ' " ' " ' "Introibo ad altare Dei," ' " ' " ' - a multiple integument of contexts to contain this Hebrew cry for help amid persecution. (It is spoken by the least persecuted man in the book.)"

Irvine Welsh does it as well. And the French.

I don't really see the difficulty with 'Telemachus'. This really is a storm in a shaving bowl.

<>

Do you mean to not openly set the scene as such before starting the action/dialogue? The way I see this, this section acts as a shortcut to drop the reader right into the world of the characters, bewildering though it may be at first. I am simplifying a bit here, but how many people could walk into the morning events of a group of closely-tied people and immediately know all of what's going on? It's not quite as in a film where plenty of things would be observable (the martello tower, etc) but I think Kenner is right on about the quoting aspect there...that's something that the reader can sense, the presence of those quotes, without really knowing their meaning at first, but that sense-of-a-presence still influences the meaning of the scene and helps to set it.

Hope that makes sense.

x-post with the blissfox also. I will stop quoting when I dunno how.

No, it probably wasn't that.

what do you mean by this?

http://mcsweeneys.net/2003/12/22bihl.html

(letters from Joyce to his brah)

August 26, 1928

Stan-

Hired a new secretary named Beckett. Writes letters for me. I read them and I have no idea what he's talking about. One to the phone company starts "The bill. The bill. The bill. I can't talk about the bill." What the hell does that mean? It means I am in hell.

jj

I have this record at home, I think

More than liked it.

I dont understand anything of the debate about Hamlet in the Library, thats just wa-a-ay over my head.

But possibly I am wrong. I am finding it hard to find examples of what I have just said that are 100% convincing. And anyway, I am genuinely unsure whether I "understand" hardly anything.

Still, I think that 'understand' is not quite the relevant word here - if we apply Cage's rule to culture in general, pop etc. Something about in / exhaustibility and continuing suggestiveness is; perhaps something about enduring mystery. Whether mystery is strongly related to understanding or not (yet) understanding, I am unsure.

Tell me I'm not the only one who found this hilarious. Bunged must be JJ's ghost!

Jed, "Cyclops" is grebt! I hated it at first too, but the catalogues aren't that long and boring, and the fun of them is to play "Which of these things is not like the other?"!

that's most good poetry, btw.
basically joyce was a poet whose amazing technical facility didn't extend to writing in verse* and he lacked the attention span.
that's why i must confess myself to be frankly annoyed/disturbed by
joyce's 'position' as a novelist, and the agonizing over his influence on the subsequent history of the novel: if i sit down to read a novel, i ideally don't want it to read like finnegan's wake.
it's an epic poem, as is ulysses which is modelled on one.
perhaps it's joyce most mischeivous hoax, out of all the tricks he played, to get these works on the novels shelves of the bookshop.
hence you get your unwitting readers focusing on narrative, meaning and characters while your sly linguistic trickery is flowing into their subconscious. there is nothing in ulysses that doesn't parody something, but most of all it parodies your desire to understand it.
read it like a novel and it's practically pissing itself laughing at you.

*the very odd exception in pomes penyeach; the holy office, gas from a burner.

http://www.arlindo-correia.com/140504.html

"Carol Shloss believes that Lucia’s case was cruelly mishandled. When Lucia fell ill, she at last captured her father’s sustained attention. He grieved over her incessantly. At the same time, he was in the middle of writing “Finnegans Wake,” and there were people around him—friends, patrons, assistants, on whom, since he was going blind, he was very dependent—who believed that the future of Western literature depended on his ability to finish this book. But he was not finishing it, because he was too busy worrying about Lucia. He was desperate to keep her at home. His friends—and also Nora, who bore the burden of caring for Lucia when she was at home, and who was the primary target of her fury—insisted that she be institutionalized. The entourage finally prevailed, and Joyce completed “Finnegans Wake.” In Shloss’s view, Lucia was the price paid for a book."

a) did I just see a problem of transition - the omission of something (an action, a movement from one room to another) that really ought to have been there, in accordance with the rest of the chapter (17)?

b) if so - and that remains *very* hypothetical, virtually dismissible - would it have been picked up by a sympathetic reader, a second pair of eyes, on the like of which many authors surely rely to guard the quality of their output?

c) did JJ not really have people to read the text for him before he put it out? OK, Budgen, Weaver maybe; Pound and Eliot, of all people; and those French printers. But apart from Pound with whom he did not even bother to disagree, did any of these really act as correctives, clarifiers, people to get JJ to revise? I think not - I think that he was his own only real reader: in which case...

d) how did it emerge so close to (if 'close to' is no slight) perfection?

Unimportant? Yes, and I know the book omits much else. But this chapter is so (at least pseudo-)allinclusive, it seems a queer lacuna.

(I don't remember Bloom 'coming across Molly's underwear'. Are you getting confused with Bloom's beach scene with Gerty?)

(I did not want to make that joke meself: thanks for doing it for me.)

- I think that was my sequence.

The trick with FW is that it overloads the references so much that dereferencing properly becomes impossible, and the whole thing collapses into a pile of cultural shards -- which seems much more appealing to me than Ulysses, which maintains its integrity and its position as vast enigma which you could understand if only you'd paid a bit more attention in class.

In the sense of Ulysses as Serious Literature, I imagine that Joyce would laugh his ass off on finding how reverentially it was regarded 100 years after Bloomsday. The book is clearly a joke - albeit a brilliant, hugely verbose one, and I think that regarding it primarily as a scholastic work and only tangentially as an entertaining one does it a mortal disservice. Well... maybe a venial disservice (ha! stupid jocu-catholic humor!)

And the notion of dereferencing Ulysses before enjoying it is a somewhat silly one, I think. It's not a book one needs to explain - that's its brilliant conceit. It's a highly projective text that will 'push back' at any level in which one chooses to challenge it. As pulpy beach reading it's highly enjoyable on the level of narrative, at a scholastic level it's enjoyable as an immensely porus and arguable text (and one in which first time readers can project all sorts of undergraduate dichotomies re. their field of study: Joyce is/isn't proto-feminist. Stephen is/isn't queer, Bloom's upstanding/weak-willed, Molly's a Commie etc., etc.,) and it's even enjoyable on an historic level as an encyclopaedic compendium of day-to-day Dublin life in 1904.

Ulysses isn't Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses isn't Infinite Jest. The complexity of the book and all its surface and structural manipulations are trappings a reader MAY choose to puruse after a 'just for content' read. And it's there that the book demonstrates its brilliance. The mistaken notion that one has to 'get' Ulysses is something that's an unfortunate product of its academic appropriation. It's a brilliant fucking novel, and I sincerely believe anybody that if more people read it we'd have a better planet and that goatse.cx would never have been taken down.

dubliners, portrait, ulysses, [stephen hero, exiles, joyce's letters, ellman's biography], finnegan

i dont think thats silly AT ALL, you can dereference it and purely enjoy the beauty of the language or you can go the other route and immerse yourself in the connections. either of those approaches is fun!

That's how he designed it. Richard Ellman: Joyce said of Ulysses "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."

NB.
Funny: I made two typos on my first message above. One of them was where I added anybody near the end, and the other one was a mispelling of pursue which seems to be morphing (Finnegan-like) into an equally appropriate peruse. Would that I were channeling the man, ehh?

Again, pointing to a post Douglas made:

Like the whole routine in chapter 4 with the letter and the hat: why doesn't Bloom remember where he put his hat when he came back in? Well, Joyce has been keeping very careful track of EVERYTHING Bloom thinks... so we go back to where Bloom came back to his house, in search of a reference to a hat, and notice that Joyce doesn't mention it, but does mention that there's an envelope addressed to "Mrs Marion Bloom"

...etc. The style of Ulysses, its "in the moment"-ness, requires you to step back and figure out the motivations, figure out where everything is happening, figure out everything. Anything important has been buried under several layers of references -- both references to external things (like the multilayered quotes of the latin that Douglas mentions above) or to internal things. Pinefox's concern about dereferncing the missing actions en route to the bedroom reenforces this -- oh, something wasn't mentioned, that must be a clue that needs to be solved-- it's a reference (or a lack of reference) to something else in the story that needs to be dereferenced for it to be meaningful, and it will probably prove meaningful.

That's the way Ulysses is constructed -- it's the point of the book. The plot, as such, of Molly cheating on Leopold -- Joyce clearly isn't mainly concerned with getting that across, since it's obfuscated as all hell and the most salient part of the plot, the thing that the emotional heft of the book weighs upon -- Molly's infidelity -- is something that it's very easy to miss on your first reading.

Similarly, although he's interested in "what was going on in the minds of Dubliners in 1904", that sort of thing, and about the nature of consciousness and knowledge (and the sorts of things people misremember or misinterpret), if he wanted that to be the focus of his book, he could have written it in an entirely clearer style -- it would have been much clearer if there had been an omniscient narrator to let us know when the characters get some detail about Irish life or about science wrong, rather than suggesting that we suss it out. Of course, that would ruin the jokes, right?

Because the whole structure and style of the book is set up on those kinds of jokes, on those devices -- Bloom thinks something about thermodynamics and gets it slightly wrong in an interesting way, but Joyce isn't going to tell you the facts about thermodynamics, you have to know it yourself (or have the Annotations handy). Joyce certainly isn't going to go out and tell you that Buck and Stephen are living in a tower, not until he gives you plenty of time to try and guess it for yourself.

At a certain point in my life (which we'll call "college") I was more intrigued and sympathetic to that sort of structure, but reading FW (where this technique is taken to the nth degree, where you can no longer derefernce the palimpsest, so to speak) and feeling oddly liberated by the fact that no matter how much dereferencing I did, there was no way to be sure whether I had done it right or if there wasn't another layer -- you never get any closer to anything like "the truth" or "the meaning" in FW, but it always seems tantalizingly close to being unlocked.

If you want beautiful language, there are plenty of writers who write things more beautiful than Ulysses (even FW is far prettier as pure beautiful language than U's dependence on awkward consonant clusters -- with the exception of the last chapter of U, which is pretty durn beautiful) and don't have that puzzle wankery always waving above your head, "oo aren't I a clever boy" kind of thing.

but w.ulysses it's SUCH a well-trod thoroughfare, w.armies of (bored?) grad students ushered down the same way you've just "discovered", so that THAT part of the fun at least has evaporated a bit - to be replaced by worries abt inadequacy? (as in WHAT IF I MISS THE MOST IMPORTANT KEY TINY DETAIL ABT THE PLOT WHICH EVERY OTHER IDIOT NOTICED EXCEPT ME?!)

Dereference that, ideally without using Ned's help. I may be proving myself a hypocrite.

Ulysses is joy whichever way you cut the seedcake. The sweetness is in the candy, the swoon is in the tongue, the fire is in the belly, the knife is at the throat.

I never said this. The best short story in the English language is "It's a *Good* Life" by Jerome Bixby.

I will say nothing.

+ 'Bixby'? Jayzus.

But even were it not, I have a feeling that ED is not, neither.

By the way -- even I am not sure that 'The Dead' is the greatest story, though I'm not sure what might be if not that.

And if you're not interested in doing that kind of excavating, then U comes off as a smug and self-satisfied exercise in "aren't I so clever?"

(Which is probably how certain people who aren't privy to a certain other slice of the universe might regard a certain other hyperreferential text that I made reference to, and which I'm known to be a fan of. But I'm starting to theorize that the hyperreferentiality is actually a secondary joy of that text, whereas it's clearly the primary joy of U, despite all the claims to its beautiful language as a primary joy.)

The book includes much detail - as does life. That's one reason why the book touches, amuses and provokes: it is detailed, like life.

In life, and in U, we know, understand, or notice some details, or others, and maybe not all. That's understood.

I don't think I am going to try to convince anyone to like the book who has taken agin it (apart from perhaps the Vicar himself, one day?). I think diversity of taste is good. I suppose that the reason I continue to disagree is that the description of U's pleasures that you give feels inadequate as a description of my pleasure in it, which may also to be say my love for it.

It's like a big adventure game, you know. You have to slog away at random creatures in the forest for a while before you can make it through the first level of a dungeon.

Pinefox's concern about dereferncing the missing actions en route to the bedroom reenforces this -- oh, something wasn't mentioned, that must be a clue that needs to be solved-- it's a reference (or a lack of reference) to something else in the story that needs to be dereferenced for it to be meaningful, and it will probably prove meaningful

I was saying that I thought there might be an omission - even an 'error' of writing at that point, in terms of storytelling and getting characters from A to B: *not* that the omission was significant or needed explaining in symbolic or hermeneutic terms.

Yet that idea is a tad suspect, and it is also true that more informed readings since have maybe been richer. But informed by 'facts'? Yes, partly: but also by suggestions about how to read - about how the text is working - about techniques - about overall patterns of function and significance.

I am not going to start downplaying the small details and the densities of recognition involved: they are vital to the texture, perhaps. But still, I do not think of them as primary to my engagement with the book.

(Hi PF)

*re-adjusts baker boy hat and dashes off*

Dash!

Bartleby the Scrivener.

thats what i based my judgement on too!!!

!

the pinefox wrote a breathtaking post in the other joyce thread (scroll up to the top); i might have to read ulysses much sooner than i had planned.

i like that faux but i can't help but read it (also) as an external realization of the "impalpable and vindictive" force felt and foreshadowed previously, as well as the last layer of dust over the open coffin that is ireland. the image is too transcendent, majestically formidable, all-embracing to represent merely the fragmentation of one poor sap's soul.

i agree w/ you mir, i just took it far ther

hope you're happy

Fully braced for the first wave of Ulysses Centenary Appreciations this week, before an altogether more deadly wave arrives in June. If the eggheads pull together and really set about killing the book, we can get to #ZeroJoyce before winter.

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) January 29, 2022

oh good, the hundredth anniversary of opinions

friendship ended with DUBLINERS now FART LETTER is my new friend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLvWdrLAkc0

lol mark s

Lol at article linked in OP.

And maybe the OP as well.

Classic.

I've never read anything by Joyce, and I've never really got the impression that he is the kind of writer people actually enjoy reading. Am I wrong?

early ilx in a nutshell, right here

Joyce is someone who has done a terrific job and is being recognized more and more.

I prefer his pal Beckett.

If your Twitter handle is something like “Elvis Buñuelo” I know I can safely just skip past whatever you’re tweeting and save myself the trouble of being annoyed as fuck.

You sound annoyed already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPd_awQuH4o

Good post

the more i read about James joyce, the more i respect him for writing finnegans wake even though almost everybody he spoke to (with the exception at first of eugene jolas) told him he should give it a rest and stop wasting his talents

— andrew key (@rolandbarfs) February 22, 2022

Here comes almost everybody.

On my fourth read through of Ulysses (the first since 1995 though), should be wrapping up just before Bloomsday this year, which I am planning on spending in Dublin for the first time ever.

Thanks for the Heads U.P.!

The full 1967 film version is available on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7xAM_eXuuk

This is the most insane printing of Dubliners I've ever seen pic.twitter.com/Ce4TqcmVB8

— frank o'hara's MoMA gig (@angrydichter21) June 12, 2022

Gene Hackman looks vicious on that sleeve.

it blankets without prejudice -- the living who walk the streets are equal to the dead who lie in the cemetary

I've always read it as a conscious echo of Matthew 5:44-45: "But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."

Instead of all the novel's events happening on the same day, they all occur simulaneously outside of time. Every day is Proustday.

— Steve Mitchelmore (@Twitchelmore) June 16, 2022

This is a coastal town

Happy Bloompsday

Re: those Pulp the Classics covers - I feel like they'd be fun enough if they were just photoshop lols on the internet, but actually getting together the money to print and sell them? Fuck that, jesus.

important material for ilxors to argue abt, unpaywalled for #bloomsday2022: william empson in the lrb on ulysses (part two here)

I bought a new toilet handle today, which seems apropos.

https://theviewfromsarisworld.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/james-joyce.jpg

I like the part where he's frying the sheep's kidney, and it smells faintly of urine when he pokes it with a fork

happens to me when I have sex iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1WwK92kT3c

Re: those Pulp the Classics covers - I feel like they'd be fun enough if they were just photoshop lols on the internet, but actually getting together the money to print and sell them? Fuck that, jesus.

that empson piece is good

https://x.com/johnstonglenn/status/1792150960690581507

twitter links don't embed anymore?

anyway

https://i.ibb.co/tXrZP7s/Screenshot-20240520-155449.png