I'm about to start this. What am I in for, and any tips?

I'm about to start this. What am I in for, and any tips?

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For someone who had a genral grasp on Joyce (because of Veeky Forums) and read Portrait, i would say that a intense, creative and almost exoteric levels of obscurantism. The prose, ideas and themes of everything in the book, including the book itself, are trying to convey something. Joyce tried to be a new age, modern version of a encapsulator of a language (like Camões, Shakespeare, Goethe). In that his goals were to create meaning and generate a new reality that convey with his ideas - a more optimistic and creative view of reality.

>bumping after 13 minutes
You will absolutely never make it through.
When you fail don't post here about t being a bad book.

So what you're saying is you never read the book?

Yes and dont intend to. Just like everyone else on Veeky Forums.

Frank Delaney's ReJoyce Podcast

Exoteric is the opposite of esoteric, you pseud.

It's pretty boring. Read GR instead.

>comparing Ulysses to GR
>stating that GR is a better read
You're either on 20 levels of irony or a complete moron

I hope I'm not the only person on this thread who's read it.

Ulysses is a monstrous son of a bitch and it's difficult--for reasons that are interesting on their own accord-- in knowing even where to start talking about it.

Ulysses started as a short story, and at the end of the day it really is a simple little day. All the events unfold naturally and are all interconnected with one another in such a dense little tapestry of causality that you just sort of...."trust"... the hyperealism of the setting. I don't know all the streets in Dublin; I don't know which apartment was on what street or who was a well known surgeon at the time or god knows what else. (I DO remember Dalkey was a street but that might be on account of the publishing company).

Another thing to remember is that there are really only three central characters, and whenever you feel lost in the sea of moving characters and voices, try to remember their relationship to Bloom or Molly or Stephen.

(I'm going to continue in a response to this post)

Back to the "hyperrealism": this is sort of central to the whole book. Bloom is the everyman's Ulysses, he faces death and trial and beauty and lust and hope and redemption all in one day. Joyce'll give you insane lists of objects and names and places all with their own subtle jokes and allusions to sort of "saturate" the text. This is NOT dissimilar to how in the Recognitions Gaddis, with his huge lists of objects, hammers in the realness (and arguably the intimacy) of Bast's apartment, or how DFW similarily "saturates the text" but with more of a paranoia then the abandon that joyce has.

Track objects, especially in the more disjointed sections like Wandering Rocks, where the narrative is told from the point of view of objects, being passed back and forth between characters, their conversations overheard and contradictory. Then there are objects like Blooms hat and jacket and the possessions in his pocket. Also we have Stephen's walking stick. And a million others I can't remember off the top of my head.

Read slowly, then reread quickly. Some parts of the book move by so quickly it's amazing; Cerce especially does this just in how fast the night moves along, and the dancing and switching partners in the little whorehouse just makes it delightful. Ulysses really is meticulously enjoyable as well. There are little pockets of mood and tone that sometimes come into a perfect focus--"what is the age of the soul of man"-- before falling apart again. This is one of the reasons why the text is not so easy to "quote" in the traditional sense. You can't really pull a random sentence from Ullysses (as opposed to literally anything by Beckett) and hold it up to stand on its own. It's all intertextual.

And back to the mention of Circe: Ullysses itself can arguably be said to have a subconsious of its own. Information comes from sources that are at times extremely private and even unnamed (like the antisemite dude), or much more fluid and seeming to acknowledge and absorb all thoughts at once.

If you don't understand a little phrase in french or latin or greek, look it up. This is called doing your homework.

It's useful to have read the Odyssey (and honestly you probably just should for a million other reason), but not absolutely necessary. I don't have the energy right now to explain its relation to Ulysses but you should be fine with reading the wiki summaries for the episode in question through google. You'll end up running into helpful analysis probably in the way anyway.

Note that Joyce only the on the Odyssey mythos after the fact

These are good posts. I really like them, having read Ulysses twice.

Sometimes I feel like well-written posts on lit are better than most of the tripe you get from people whose jobs it is to review books and criticize them. I mean, it's not quite Samuel Johnson, and maybe I'm biased because these little nuggets of posts are much more bite-sized and easy to read, but I like good posts on Veeky Forums like these.

you the homie, I'll keep going:

The real mystery of the book is the identity of the man in the macintosh, who's this dude who appears throughout the novel always haunting bloom's thoughts. Nabokov supposedly taught his students that the man was or had to be Joyce himself, while other people might say Bloom's shadow or projection or some other character from dubliners. I'm stealing from here:

lithub.com/the-man-in-the-macintosh-one-of-literatures-great-mysteries/

>Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now, I'd give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of

Other interpretations go with Hamlet's ghost? especially with bloom's dad showing up in his hallucinations? More on this here (You'll need jstor access)

jstor.org/stable/pdf/25476199.pdf

And the last thing that comes to mind (at least for now) is to pay attention to temporal details, or at least little references to how far along in the day it is. The order in which you read it may not be the actual one in which they unfolded, so this becomes this whole little casual mess. It's hard to think of examples off the top of my head but I'm pretty sure Oxen of the Sun (the beheamoth that it is) where you're dealing with that girl's birth you're kind of thrust into the scene wheras later on you get a much more casual conversation about her having been made pregnant. The meaning of this statement changes depending on if it happens before or after the birth. Side fact: think of oxen of the sun as the birth of the english language and its evolution to whatever the hell it ends with.

You may be gone now, but I thought I'd just pop in to say that I appreciated these posts, and it's a shame they've received so little attention. Thanks for sharing, man.

...

>Nabokov supposedly taught his students that the man was or had to be Joyce himself
Given that both Stephen and Bloom are really Joyce, this seems like overkill. The purpose of the mystery figure is probably to give commentators something to argue about. Joyce deliberately set up paradoxes and mysteries to confound the critics.

>go with Hamlet's ghost
The man in the macintosh representing the ghost of Bloom's father is probably the most likely interpretation. Considering Hamlet is so integral to the novel as well as relationship between father and son it makes sense, add to that that Bloom is seeing this man at a funeral. Typically Bloom's thoughts and subconscious are given to us straight from the source, but here maybe they are being projected outward and taken in again as some sort of hallucination. Given the shadowy and mysterious nature of the character I wouldn't be surprised if it was Joyce representing the darkness of our subconscious juxtaposed with our waking consciousness and so instead of Bloom thinking about his father and that being told to us through text, he is trying not to think of his father but his subconscious is creating the illusion of his father in the form of a mysterious and dark figure that is only really seen at a funeral.

I agree, these posts are very informative and helpful to someone unsure whether they are ready to tackle Ulysses. Thank you very much!

I licked the part with the pissdrinking and forced feminisation/cuckolding/femdom.
Also that camel with the turban with a fez on it.
And the bar of soap that speaks.

Yeah go ahead and wonder if thats really in it.

yes but here we are discussing and commenting on it, an enigmatic figure, even if made to be mysterious for sake of mystery alone, is still worth investigating because it becomes a question of HOW are we/bloom drawn to this figure. I'm also a fan of the Hamlet's father theory, particularly when we have Stephen's theory about the grandfather of hammy being shakespeare himself, sort of creating himself in an image he found and could barely reach as opposed to creating the image in the first place. Remember that Bloom looses his son, and that stephen to him becomes a sort of placeholder for all the "i'm so excited for a son!" shit bloom had built up in his psyche/always had. There are elements here that make me want to regurgitate platonic forms and whatever else, but I really don't think that's the point (or perhaps the point is the opposite of that). I'm being confusing so I'll take a step back:

fuck causality, things in ulysses are so "tight" that it can be impossible to see what exactly implies what. Who is a victim of whom, and who is is exactly in whom's image. So think "simultanaeity" especially when considering characters who embody multiple allusions at once (Stephen is a younge joyce but also hamlet but also telemachus but also the ocean).

also based Bloom image

and to put a cap on the point I was trying to make, don't think of the man in the tosh as literally being Bloom's father but as fufilling the role in the way that stephen becomes a sort of welcome substitute for Bloom's son. The argument is that we have the "placeholders" for these figures regardless of their existence or not, that these little oedipal complexes/human "schticks" will find something to latch onto in our life because they are essentially firmaments around which our thinking occurs. The identity/name/label of the object in question is less important than what it inspires. Bloom, in telling a dude to essentially fuck off, unwitingly gives him a hint as to what horse to bet on. Bloom works as an advertiser but even he seems a little skeptical of the whole "history moving towards some great goal" thing that stephen muses over in Nestor; bloom envisions near the end of the book some sort of perfect infinite jest level of entertaining advertisement that would encompass everything he knows about asthetic theory and monetary bastardization. Note that even the "perfect object" has in it relation to money and jews "buying low and selling high." We, as the reader, end up learning a good amount about Bloom's father virag, (i think is his vaguely indian sounding name, not without its weird vedic allusions later) and that he "fits" the archetype for the man in the tosh but isn't necessarily it. There are two types of ways ulysses (or really anyone) tries to make comparison or symbolism: synecdoche and metaphor (and here I use metaphor in the more braod sense including simile you pedantic highschoolers). more on this if anyone responds/is interested

I haven't read Ulysses and so can't say if this would apply at all, but there are two obvious explanations for a person to be represented in three characters: there's the Trinity; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and there's the classic Freudian distinction between the id, ego, and superego.

good thinking, also think past/present/future, as well as subject/middle/predicate (SMP). This last one comes up if you look at the beginning of each section: with "Stately...." and....whatever words begin the other two sections. These letters also correspond with Stephen, Molly, and Bloom (poldy)

Erotic, thrilling, and full of wonder. James Joyce takes the reader on a fantastic voyage across the ocean to the United States, which at this time is embroiled in a bloody civil war Follow James where he takes on death defying stunts, saves the presidents daughter, and meets a new friend and ally, Ulysses S Grant.

It's hard, but in a different way than say Gravity's Rainbow or Faulkner or whathaveyou.

It's important /not/ to numb yourself to the absolute tumble of seemingly miscellaneous thoughts and fragments: when I felt myself getting bored with the novel, I'd go make myself some coffee or put it down for a little while; going through it with a pen and being very excited to get to the bottom of /everything/ makes for a very rewarding and -- dareisay -- fun read.

You have to be 18 to post here, my man.

for anyone who wants to view this,
twin.sci-hub.cc/890aef5efd78ab9f2db0197b10495730/[email protected]

enjoy. remember sci.hub for all your paywalled texts needs!

This is great, thanks!

Risspeckt.

Just finished it tonight. Pick up Gifford's annotations (especially if you want to make it through/past the third chapter) and read each chapter three times if you can. It isn't a very fun reading experience the first time through, but so, so rewarding. If you won't do either of those things, just push through and get out of it what you can. It's an intellectual and stylistic firework display until the very end.

Also, put down the annotations for Chapter 15. It's 150 pages long and it will become a mind-numbing slog if you try to read back and forth between the two texts.

In highschool we read the Dead (translated to spanish) and i liked it.

How much irish do i need to know to read in the original?

hahahahaha oh man you got me

The real payoff is when you return to Ulysses, several years after your first reading. It matures like good whisky.