James Joyce

1. Don't read him. Dubliners is blank and empty of significance, the Portrait is theocentric and tedious, Exiles is an embarrassing failure and never revived, Ulysses is a homely family homily in disguise, Finnegans Wake is a self-indulgent crossword puzzle no-one should bother with.

2. Don't get distracted by anecdotes - people rehashing some apocryphal story about something that JJ once said to WBY, or something one newspaper said about U. It's astounding how untrue most of these are.

3. I don't know that anyone else had, or has, registered the movement of things like him - objects, I mean, fluttering pieces of torn paper blown on a light breeze under a railway bridge or eddying back and forth on a tide; a door opening or closing on imperfect hinges; the sort of things amid which we (still) live.

4. Not just 'things' but social processes - how many times have I been out for a night in a boozer or three and been reminded of Sirens / Cyclops / Oxen, the way that he understands how gatherings work, how geezers get together, come in at five and pop back at seven, pass a newspaper report around the table and try to find the funniest things to say about it, while someone colourfully offers another round;

5. or those ordinary actions that I was so astounded to find in U, first time around - getting up and bantering while cooking breakfast (milk, cream, lemon - simply beauties), walking home drunk in the middle of the night - things no-one ever notices about Joyce.

6. Felicities: colons: rhythms: full stops. Periods.

7. Lists: catalogues: series: sequences: successions: which interrupt a narrative and lurch sideways, out of 'time' and into frozen textual 'space', for as long as they want, until they have become as extraordinarily funny as they care to be.

8. 'Humanity' - I mean, compassion, care for 'ordinary people', interest in things that others had thought beneath them, 'daily life'.

9. Yet not just a generalized wash of 'liberalism', perhaps - noteworthy enough in itself, next to so much of the rest of modernism - but something harder and more clear-eyed in its political calculations. Wells called the Portrait a book that only an Irish Catholic could have written, a quasi-Republican complaint, a Fenian yawp: what if the mass of historical data and learning in Ulysses and maybe beyond is really an immense, dense, complex political analysis, the pen as scalpel, 'lancet of my art', casually pricking the bulbous balloon of post-Victorian imperial culture?

10. Read him: Dubliners is hard as the side of an engine (Pound), the Portrait dares to denote childhood as no-one else had, Ulysses is all we need, the Wake might be what we need when we've just about, improbably, had enough of all we thought we needed.

Got portrait from the library and I have really enjoyed it. It was very moving in places.

I'll try (i said try) to read ulysses next.

here are some notes that I've been reading on it:

http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/ulysses/index.html

I'd offer to lend you copies, but I suspect our university library is not short of copies.

And I have read nothing by Mr Joyce, and maybe never will. No one has ever really convincingly said to me "You should read Ulysses, it's a cracker". And the Joyce industry here is pretty offputting.

Best JJ anecdote evah: A bum asked him for a dime, saying he was dying for a drink. Joyce gives him the dime then turns to his companion and sez, "If he'd said he wanted it for a cup of coffee, I'd have hit him!"

I think Ulysses is the most complete book I've read, whatever that means.

actually this is the sort of thing i was gonna ask: should I read the notes before I read the actual book? I have read a brief summary but you're right: i'll just read the book instead. ''cold'' indeed!

It is kind of like this in England regarding shakespeare. but I wouldn't say i'll never touch his plays again (i think it might be 'harder' because he wrote his stuff centuries ago, and I wasn't taught english very well (prob learned more by watching TV), which completely took me off books for a long time but I started reading SF and kafka and now I'm finally getting into these things again). you just have to 'switch off' really.

''Or you could just ask ILE about certain passages.''

maybe. but I like douglas's answer.

Dubliners I don't quite get. I feel bad about that but half the stories seem insignificant and dull to me. (This is especially bad because I have a research paper on it due soon. Help! How to appreciate Dubliners in five days!)

I actually did meet someone who said "You should read Ulysses, it's a cracker". he is someone I used to work with, and he'd read it several times and really enjoys it. He read it first to get an impression of what Dublin would have been like when his dad was growing up (for all that it's set forty or fifty years before his dad was growing up). And he wasn't university educated either, which suggests that it might be a book you can just read without having to subject it to loads of lame-o textual analysis.

Getting back to the idea that Ulysses is the most over-analysed book of all time... what's the difference between wondering about characters who appear in both Dubliners and Ulysses and nerds who chortle about how Robert Bloch and H.P. Lovecraft feature each other in their stories?

That phrase is almost certainly ironic because it amounts to a question of authorial mediation, completely unavoidable because the a notion of a pure story somewhere behind or underneath the written text is illusory at best.

um, maybe you just need to be honest about it and say you don't get some of the stories and why don't you get them. what it is abt them, why doesn't it 'click'?

is this an academic research paper or a college essay?

Prude, what you say here might be a worthy topic in itself, using whatever text you want as a springboard: whether a presumably autobiographical work can be read as having transparent analogues to "real life," or what the effect of the fictionalization of something based on reality is on how we perceive reality. Just some random brane noodlings, take with a grain iof salt as I've read only 3 Dubliners stories and disliked them all. And I don't like Portrait, neither.

James Joyce
He was stupid he didn't
Know as much as me
I'd rather throw dead batteries at cows
Than read him
Everything was fine
Until he came along
He started the Civil War
He tried to get the French involved
But they wouldn't listen
They filled him up with desserts
He talked about all the great boxers that came from Ireland, like he trained 'em or something
Then he started reading some of his stuff
Right as we told him to get lost
He brought up the potato famine
We said "Your potatoes are plenty good. Deal with it! Work it out somehow!"
Then he said "America must adopt the metric system It's much more logical."
We said "No! We like our rulers! Go away!"
Thomas Jefferson said You always get the rulers you deserve.

v funny too.

but I'm sure that it will change on later readings (though i'll be reading other things now).

can anyone recommend a good book to read about ulysses before trying it. i read gilbert stuart but i'm looking for something more contemporary, even theory-tinged!

I guess "just read it" isn't an acceptable answer? I always prefer to read books without being briefed, and only turn to secondary literature *after* I've read it myself.

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Bloomsday-Book-Through/dp/0415138582

Yep. Read a chapter at a time, referring to Gilbert when you're stuck. Be careful: Gilbert places rather too much emphasis on symbolism and such.

i'm thinking of getting this quote from oxen in the son as a tattoo. upper arm, very small font. yes or no?

"It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born."

Beyer off getting any random line from "Eumaeus" IMO.

eh. i think that quote has personal significance. i am kind of a lazy daydreamer and i need to constantly remind myself to snap back into the world, to face what is at hand. this isn't always easy. it's almost like a zen thing, from what i understand of the concept of "mindfulness".

definitely read 'dubliners' and 'portrait' first if you haven't already, btw.

Did Ellman mention Finn's Hotel in his biography? I can't remember why it sounds familiar otherwise.

I don't think that you have to have read Dubliners or Portrait first to enjoy the big U, IMO. Just jump in.

i think reading them first enhances the experience of U though, because you are stepping back into a world with which you are already somewhat familiar, which can make the formal difficulties seem less impenetrable. also, it's good to know a bit about stephen and simon dedalus...

also, i mean, dubliners and portrait are essential in their own right. has anyone here made it through the wake?

i just feel like you'll probably get more out of the stephen sections of ulysses if you already know him as a character. plus the growing complexity of JJ's style is kind of awesome to behold, obv.

i really think bloom is one of my personal heroes. in a world that is mostly hostile to him, he has nothing but generous thoughts for everyone around him for the most part.

Have finished FW, couldn't say anything about it other than the last 15 pages being the most beautiful thing I'll ever read.

god dammit now i think i have to read it. i don't have a copy anymore bc my ex took back her the copy that she lent to me, and which was in my possession for years. do you find its difficulty is exaggerated the way ulysses' is or no? from what i read it seemed pretty rough.

can anyone recommend a good book to read about ulysses before trying it. i read gilbert stuart but i'm looking for something more contemporary, even theory-tinged!

― Iago Galdston, Wednesday, June 19, 2013 1:26 AM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hope you find people's recommendations here useful, but I should say that I feel the difficulty of Ulysses is somewhat overstated. Yes, it is quite dense and complicated, but it is also a very enjoyable read. I think you just have to read it at a much slower pace than you would an average novel. On the first reading I just chose to let some of the more obscure allusions and archaic vocabulary go over my head, and I think this made it more enjoyable for me.

mirostones otm. Leave the allusions and the ineluctable modalities to the scholars, luxuriate in the prose when appropriate, lol @ the dick jokes, etc.

god dammit now i think i have to read it. i don't have a copy anymore bc my ex took back her the copy that she lent to me, and which was in my possession for years. do you find its difficulty is exaggerated the way ulysses' is or no? from what i read it seemed pretty rough.

Haha, not exaggerated in the least, FW is as opaque and murky as its reputation suggests. The first 600+ pages were a slog and took me about 5 months to get through. I tried to hear the Irish brogue in my head to "translate" it, but possibly it needed to be heard as well. Caveats: I was a dumb kid when I went through it, and you seem a lot sharper than me, so who knows! Here is a thread about it when I finished, the best thing about it is that I spelled the title correctly: After half a year, I've finally finished Finnegans Wake@

cool thread! i love aimless's response, that now you can sign your name with an honorary C.F.W. (completed finnegans wake.) there are many things i'd like to read before the wake, so i think i might make a goal to read it before i turn 30 in 2019.... idk. i love ulysses very much, but i am afraid that the things i value in ulysses -- that it takes the "banal" moments of everyday life seriously, for one thing, and depicts the blooms with dignity and compassion even though they are not intellectuals -- are precisely the things finnegans wake isn't interested in. i guess i will have to see for myself though...

the recording of joyce reading aloud from finnegans wake is one of the most gorgeous recordings of the 20th century, would absolutely put it up against anything ever.

how you gonna just say that and not post a link?

have read half of portrait in the past and just started dubliners this week btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1FcSGDgU8Q

This was quite a good read:

https://newsocialist.org.uk/corbyn-joyce-and-ulysses/

As someone who was mildly amused by the background and doesn't know that much about Joyce the person.

Odd that this is news, as the interview was 3 months ago.

Yes that first bit was odd. New Socialist publish irregularly and are more of a labour of love, done part of the time when it can be done.

Crombyng sold out when he didn't talk about the Wake

Mr Corbin please give twitter account @finnegansreader a follow

Just thinking I haven't thought hard about Ulysses in a long while but you know what? Alongside his dazzling formal genius the psychological stuff is as real as any writer I know. My embarrassment as a 50 year old man who still recognises Stephen's thought patterns swilling around my brain...chef kiss.

On the first reading I just chose to let some of the more obscure allusions and archaic vocabulary go over my head

so on the second reading you got all of them?

their ineluctability compels this

I may have to try Ulysses just to see. Loved Dubliners, but I studied Portrait of the Artist... in school and don’t remember liking it very much. Intrigued by the mentions of Parnell, who i always really liked and felt sorry for (and who incidentally comes up in Portrait - absolutely despised Dante for this reason).

Parnell gets play in Ulysses, too.

I know, that’s what I was referring to (the article seems to just talk about Ulysses)

If it feels too heavy going, skip to the first Bloom chapter (4 is it? "Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish...") and start there. Go back and read the first three later.

1 and 2 aren't hard really, 3 is where he starts fucking with you, the plain reader, who be damned

The “Oxen of the Sun” section wipes me out every time I set forth on the sea of Ulysses. Must be time to try again, it’s been a while.

The “Oxen of the Sun” section wipes me out every time I set forth on the sea of Ulysses. Must be time to try again, it’s been a while.

sorry - posting using Zing and had no indication it had gone twice

shd've done the second one in Middle English :D

“…the peaceful odour of Mrs Dillon was prevalent in the hall…”
I’ve been puzzling over this all day

James Joyce was really into farts.

dammit the English language edition of Finn's Hotel is Unavailable, at least on US Amazon (they do have German, Italian, Spanish, maybe other). Link from way upthread:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/14/james-joyce-collection-published. Is it good?

"'Useless' by James Joyce". This joke's just been used in an episode of "It Ain't Half Hot, Mum", alongside the rampant racism and homophobia, and the audience lapped it up. The 70s eh?

Reading Anthony Burgess’ musings on Joyce can be more fun than reading the man himself

(xp) (the same episode has Miki Berenyi's mum playing the Sergeant Major's girlfriend btw)

"'Useless' by James Joyce". This joke's just been used in an episode of "It Ain't Half Hot, Mum", alongside the rampant racism and homophobia, and the audience lapped it up. The 70s eh?

― Renaissance of the Celtic Trumpet (Tom D.), Thursday, 29 June 2023 22:15 (ten months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm sure you know this Tom, but for anyone who doesn't: this gag was first made by Joyce himself in FW:

"his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles” (FW 179.26–7)

istr somewhere he says wrt his failing sight he has "useless eyes"

JJ gets some mileage out of "useless" in Ulysses itself, too.

I talked to Joyce scholar once and admitted I was intimidated by FW. He snorted and said "be afraid! I've been programming myself for 50 years to read that book." I'd been hoping for a more encouraging response ...