|
Journal Entry 1 by  Cassiopaeia from Cardiff, Wales United Kingdom on Friday, January 12, 2007
 Amazon.co.uk Review
Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it not quite obscene enough to disallow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession". None of these descriptions, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in its own way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's astonishing command of the English language.
Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is "What happens?" In the case of Ulysses, the answer could be "Everything". William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of inforgettable Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, loiter, argue and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream- of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river-- we're privy to their thoughts, emotions and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordion-folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.
Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call "Early Yeats Lite"-- will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naïve curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus
Synopsis
Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly.
|
|
Journal Entry 3 by Cassiopaeia from Cardiff, Wales United Kingdom on Monday, December 07, 2009
This JE was written by a non bokcrossing friend, which is why I am posting it. It is the longest JE I have ever had! Thank you Steve.
THE JOY OF JOYCE
OR: why every reader worth their salt should read Ulysses
BY STEPHEN GLASCOE
First of all, I have a confession to make: I too have failed with Ulysses.
Many years ago I picked it up on a whim and put it down again after a few pages. Several years later I tried again, but, intimidated like so many other readers by its complexity and obscure symbolism, I soon gave up again. When I finally picked it up again a bookmark was still in place, like a lonely sentinel forgotten by a retreating army, marking page seventy-three.
It would seem I am not alone. Along with the diary of Samuel Pepys and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Joyce’s masterwork must be one of the most famous books in the English language that everyone has heard of, but hardly anyone has read. If not that, then I have little doubt it would make the Guinness Book of Records (perhaps vying with another major contender, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time) as the book most often started, but least finished.
This is perhaps understandable. Ulysses is undoubtedly one of the most complex and intricately crafted books ever written. In order to understand every word, the reader needs must be familiar with French, German, Spanish and Latin. A smattering of Middle English would not go amiss either. A knowledge of musical theory would be useful, along with the Greek myths, Celtic legend, to say nothing of classical rhetorical and dialectical theory. Hence, if like me you are not one of the minute fraction of the population who has enjoyed the benefits of a classical education, you may feel this book is not for you. I hope to persuade you otherwise. Because while all the above is true, Ulysses is also one of the most humane, passionate, funny and moving books in the entire canon of English literature. But in order to get the most out of it some preparation is necessary, but be advised: this “homework” will be amply rewarded, leaving one with an unprecedented, even life-changing reading experience.
So having failed twice in the past, I was enthused to give it one last try by a wonderful book-crossing acquaintance. Chatting one day in a pub, the conversation drifted to “books you never finished” First we discussed the awful ones you just couldn’t be bothered with, my citing a recent example of my own; namely one of the Rebus novels. About half way through it I suddenly realized that I didn’t actually care what happened to the characters. There is no shame, of course, attached to this sort of decision. But a book like Ulysses is another matter. When we came to real cop-outs, somewhat shamefacedly I had to admit my twin failures with Joyce. To my astonishment, she said:
“Now that one I did finish”
I should explain that the dear lady herself hailed from the Emerald Isle, hence more than a little cultural pride might have been involved. As we talked a little more, I could see that she was more or less gobsmacked by my level of ignorance of my chosen subject. On both of the previous occasions when I had tried to read Ulysses, I didn’t even know that the whole book centres on the actions of a single day: Bloomsday, Thursday, 16th June, 1904. And I certainly didn’t know a thing about Joyce’s ultimate aim in his great book, to suggest that even in a “normal day”, of even the most ordinary citizen, there is an heroic voyage through uncharted and dangerous waters, in which obstacles are to be overcome in order to triumph at the end, even if at some cost: that everyman is the hero.
I made no promises at the time, but I felt so awful about my failures with the book, and the fact that this lady had negotiated it, made me steel my resolve. I bought a fresh, pristine copy and book-crossed my original copy, tainted in my eyes by the miasma of failure, though presumably perfectly fine for anyone else. My timing was immaculate: I released it in a nearby coffee shop, appropriately enough, on the morning of the 16th of June.
On the back of my brand-new Penguin modern classics edition, there was a quote from Anthony Burgess:
“Everybody now knows that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century”
Not exactly faint praise there. I began to formulate my plan for my assault on, how shall I say it, the north face of Mount Ulysses. Third time’s the charm, I thought, this time I will succeed. I came at the project with a degree of qualified optimism. After all, I had finished all nine volumes of Pepys’s diary, and thoroughly enjoyed the process. Then more recently I did the other great work out there that most people don’t seem to go for today despite its formidable reputation, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Surely, if I had the patience and tenacity to stay with those great sagas through to the end, then I could stay with this one. What I needed what strategy and tactics: how best to go about the enterprise to ensure the maximum chance of success.
But in order to achieve the summit I would need to construct strategy and tactics, gather my ropes, pitons and carabenas, as it were, to make my ascent
It was then my book-crossing friend stepped into the breach magnificently. She sent me two crucial books and a CD. Meanwhile, as a result of my own researches via the worldwideweb I had found some useful study notes.
I should say something about the books. The first was Frank Delaney’s “James Joyce’s Odyssey” Illustrated with some beautiful monochrome pictures from that era, Delaney takes the reader on a highly entertaining jaunt of Dublin’s streets, as the characters weave their labyrinthine and intertwining paths across Ireland’s great capital city. There are several maps too, and we can trace their progress around Dublin with complete precision. Joyce apparently planned these routes with meticulous care, using slide rule and compass to ensure absolute authenticity. My favourite example of this occurs in the chapter called “The Lotus Eaters” where, Bloom, our everyday hero, wanders the streets killing time while waiting to attend a funeral later that morning. Like the rest of us, his life is not as simple as it appears on the surface. As he makes his way from the quayside on the banks of the river Liffey towards the central post office, he takes a somewhat circuitous route. Delaney points out that if you trace Bloom’s route on a street map, and Joyce gives us all the information we need to do this, we find it actually traces out a huge question mark. This is no accident. As Freud once said, there are no accidents. And I might add: not in life, and certainly not in Joyce.
The second book I was given proved, if anything, even more useful in helping to unravel the meaning of a book whose structure might otherwise confuse and mystify us. We still take that strange, sometimes hallucinatory ride with its characters as they move through their interwoven lives, but Harry Blamires’s “The New Bloomsday Book” steadies and guides us through what might threaten to become an impenetrable text.
Perhaps an example or two might illustrate how Blamires can help make sense out of what at first might seem incomprehensible.
Firstly, and appropriately, let us examine the very first sentence in the book:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
--Introibo at altare Dei
What does Blamires say of this?
It is morning. Buck Mulligan, mimicking a priest approaching the alter, sings the introit and carries the shaving bowl like a chalice
OK, I see! Buck Mulligan, notable medical man and wit (actually, “too clever by half” would better describe him) is mocking the catholic mass.
Let us pull out another example, by looking at the opening of chapter sixteen, the famous (or notorious) Oxen of the Sun. Whatever it means, and perhaps no one except Joyce knows for certain, he put an immense amount of work into it. On his own reckoning he spent 1000 hours writing it, which by my calculation means that he spent about eighteen hours writing each and every page. Let’s take a look at how this chapter opens:
Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.
Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.
All right, now you’ve lost me altogether. But wait. What does Blamires tell us?
…the theme of embryonic growth is reflected in a series of often brilliant parodies (or pastiches)of English prose style, beginning with Latinized text, and moving from Anglo Saxon, through Middle English and Elizabethan styles, moving eventually to twentieth century slang.
Now it becomes a little clearer. Knowing this, I was able to take my Irish bookcrossing friend’s advice and allow the words to “flow through me” while watching out for the change in styles as Joyce parodies the writing styles of over thirty of Britain’s greatest writers, from Chaucer, through Sir Thomas Mallory to Spenser and Shakespeare, then through Pepys and Defoe, to de Quincy and Dickens and finally to the contemporary slang of Joyce’s modern-day Dublin. Incredible! Yet without this “prior knowledge”, could I have made any sense of the sixty pages of Oxen of the Sun? I doubt it. And of course it must be remembered that this is not just Joyce celebrating his huge literary talent. Gilbert’s diagram (of which more in a moment) tells us that the “technic”, or structure of the chapter is embryonic development, and what Joyce is demonstrating is the embryonic development of the English language itself.
It may seem a little extreme to have a 270 page book to help interpret a 950 page book, but in reality it could be seen simply as a set of footnotes, albeit an extensive one. But it is scarcely unprecedented: I recently read Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy; in my Penguin modern classics edition nearly a quarter of the total text was taken up with footnotes.
However, before setting out on my great enterprise, I still felt I needed more guidance. So I turned to the worldwide web, and there found “Spark notes” This site is dedicated to mystifying the great works, from Shakespeare to Swift, and including Ulysses. Its eighteen chapters are summarized in a series of seven hundred word essays; synopsis and analysis. I resolved to read the Spark notes for each chapter first, then read the actual text, and finish by reading the appropriate chapter in Blamires’s guide. The only other step required was the eighty page introduction in my Penguin Modern Classics edition.
Introductions can sometimes be illuminating, though in my experience more often disappointing, and this one, by Declan Kiberd, unfortunately tends more to the latter category. It does, however, contain one gem: the famous “Stuart Gilbert diagram”
Stuart Gilbert, long-time friend of Joyce and noted “interpreter” of his work, constructed, with Joyce’s co-operation, a “diagram”, or matrix, listing all the chapters with their original names, along with a wealth of other crucial, but intriguing data. Joyce originally gave each chapter a name, broadly, though not precisely, corresponding to a particular episode in the great odyssey of Ulysses. Inexplicably, he then withdrew these chapter titles in his final text (anarchically, I restored these names in pencil to my own copy) Gilbert listed these names, and also added seven other themes. To illustrate this, let us look again at chapter 14 as delineated in the Gilbert diagram:
Title: Oxen of the Sun
Scene: the hospital
Time of day: 10 pm
Bodily organ: the womb
Art: medicine
Colour: white
Symbol: mothers
Technic(literary form or structure): embryonic development
Following the publishing of the “Gilbert diagram”, there was a flurry of academic papers seeking to find hidden symbolism within the text of the great book. This led in turn to a fundamental debate: can over-analysis kill a book? Can the intricate dissection of any book ultimately result in the destruction of any pleasure that may have been derived from the simple act of reading it from cover to cover? To give an example, there is an incident in the “Cyclops” chapter where Bloom waves his cigar defiantly at the “citizen” who is goading him. Is Joyce suggesting a parallel with the scene in Homer’s Odyssey, when Ulysses blinds the Cyclops by driving a burning torch into his eye? Such a conclusion is certainly tempting, but allowing that it was offered in a rather different context, we might still do well to remember at this point Freud’s famous admonition:
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”
It was the American critic Harry Levin who finally put Gilbert’s diagram into perspective. He likened it to the scaffolding around a great building. Vital in its construction, the object is obviously to remove that scaffolding once the building is completed, and so reveal the beauty of the finished edifice within.
Throughout this fevered debate, Joyce himself remained tight-lipped about the symbolism in his magnum opus, hence many mysteries remain: who is the enigmatic “M’Intosh”, who appears several times in the book but is never explained? Who is the bellicose “citizen” who pours racial scorn on Bloom in the “Cyclops” chapter, and who is the first-person narrator, of that same chapter? Long after Joyce’s death, we will probably never know..
Just as I was about to embark on my assent of the formidable heights of Ulysses, I bumped into James Hawes, author and noted literary savant. I told him of my two failures with the book, and my resolve on this occasion to read “every word, even that stream-of-consciousness bit at the end” Bubbling with remembered delight, he exclaimed: You mean Penelope? Why, that’s the best bit!” Suitably enthused, I hurried to formulate my route up its dangerous slopes:
1. Read the Sparknotes for the appropriate chapter
2. Study the Gilbert diagram
3. Read the chapter itself
4. Read the appropriate section of the Blamires commentary
If the chapters were long, and one or two of them are, I would break mid- chapter and consult the Blamires before proceeding.
Thus, hand over hand, I made my way up the crevasses and pitches of this most demanding, but most marvelous of books.
As it happened, chance took a hand. My wife was called away for work at short notice, thereby leaving me home alone for six long weeks. This meant I really had only three priorities: go into work every day, keep our two cats alive and reading Ulysses. Hence on the first day I read no less than 105 pages (plus the appropriate sections of the commentary) in something around five hours. From then on, unencumbered by spousal responsibilities, I was able to devote no less than three beautiful, uninterrupted hours a night to my grand project. True, it was a considerable lay-out of mental energy and concentration, but what rewards! I have never read a book in this way before, but then Ulysses is a book like no other. It is a book of wonders, glittering like a cask of treasure in a pirate’s cave. Each night I embarked on a new chapter; each night I plunged my hands into that gleaming treasure chest and pulled out a new sparkling jewel, each one more precious and beautiful than the last. The three weeks swirled past in a cyclone of images, concepts and insights. And at the end of this time, as I reached the wonderful affirmation of life that is the end of the book, I experienced one of those transcendent moments that is so rare in life, and rarer still through the medium of the printed word. Weeks later I was still glowing with the sheer wonder of it; now I can unashamedly proclaim that reading it is one of the great experiences of my life.
But there was one final piece of the lexicon to be completed: to listen to the words read aloud, as many people have believed is the way to absorb Joyce’s words. Just a few days later I had to drive to France and back over a weekend, and the long, straight and otherwise dull E routes of northern France were filled with the lilting, velvety tones of Irish voices. My only regret was that marketing constraints (I assume) led to the product being heavily abridged. Whole chapters are missing; those included are heavily edited. Even so, the effect was phenomenal. You really do seem to understand the words more when they are spoken. And throughout its amazing energy and displays of genius, runs the fundamental thread: Ireland, its land, its waters, its cities and its people. The people! It is as if all Irish life is there, from drunkards to dreamers, cuckold to conman, hero and fool. Sometimes it is all there in just one man, and therein lies its greatness. Like Lear or Hamlet, it speaks to all of us in deep, ineffable ways. But speak it does.
All of which brings me back to the sub-title of this little piece: that everyone who takes their reading at all seriously should place this book on their reading list. So, put aside your Dan Browns and John Grishams for a while; leave that chick-lit and celebrity biog on the shelf a little longer and give yourself a real reading boost. You’re worth it!
Copyright Stephen Glascoe
November 2009
References:
1. Ulysses by James Joyce, first published in Paris, 1922, by Shakespeare and Co. My edition: Penguin Modern Classics (re-issue of Bodley Head text, 1960) 2000, with an introduction by Declan Kiberd
2. James Joyce’s Odyssey by Frank Delaney (with photographs by Jorge Lewinsky) published by Grafton Books 1983
3. The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires, published by Routledge (Taylor and Francis group) 1966 (my edition 1996)
4. Sparknotes www.sparknotes.com
5. Audio CD, Naxos Audiobooks, narrated by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan. Abridged and produced by Roger Marsh
6. And finally: special thanks to bookcrosser Cassiopeia, for inspiration, guidance and resources.
|
Ulysses (Penguin Modern Classics)
