We might hope for many more such absurd and extravagant books

May 10, 2020 6:56 PM

The Politics and “Pretentiousness” of Reading James Joyce
posted by Chrysostom (30 comments total)

‘Part of the reason, perhaps, that Buttigieg and Corbyn can casually impose the same content-less “people are just people” reading on Ulysses is that it’s not a very political book, really. There’s some ongoing mockery of the idiocies of both empire and nationalism throughout Ulysses, but the book is primarily interested in the relationships between characters on an intimate scale, and doesn’t have much to say about larger social structures.’

some of the more political readings of Ulysses, such as andrew gibson’s joyce’s revenge or christine van bohemeen’s joyce, derrida, lacan, and the trauma of history, are definitely sidelined here in stating that the book is “primarily” about characters’ relationships... there’s no way to account for all the ways the Big Blue Book can be read but i guess i prefer a reading that emphasizes its attempt at inexhaustibility and doesn’t try to depoliticize it. trying to make it out to be about the relationships between characters “primarily” sort of rankles me; it seems like an attempt to domesticate a profoundly wild thing
posted by LeviQayin at 7:48 PM on May 10, 2020 [6 favorites]

I disagree that it is a political book, but certainly it came inform one's politics. I also disagree that one shouldn't use a "guide to Ulysses" book. It really shouldn't be considered "pretentious" although appreciating the broad themes requires familiarity with the Odyssey and Hamlet. In reality, the humor and commentary is fairly low brow and populist. The problem is that Joyce satirized politics and popular culture of his day which are fairly obscure to the modern reader and really require a guide.

I'll admit that the first time I read it was with a passionate Joycean scholar for a class who was able to bring the book alive. I seriously doubt I would have appreciated it without that kind of support reading it. The book requires *attention* which is something none of us in the age of the internet have anymore. The second time I read it was aloud with a girlfriend who also had some familiarity with the novel and I have to say, aloud is the way to go with this book. It all makes much more sense translating from the stream of consciousness into ordinary conversation. And it is a very easy to follow, very funny book on the surface. It's art that passes as entertainment. It makes as much sense to call "Pulp Fiction" pretentious as it does to call Ulysses the same.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 7:51 PM on May 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

Check out the movie, The Young Lions, based on the novel by Irwin Shaw. Starring Brando and Montgomery Clift, who plays a soldier mocked for reading Ulysses. Seeing this movie when I was 14 got me to the library to see this dangerous book. You had to be 18 to check it out. So I got this other book by the same guy called Finnegans Wake. That book became a monkey on my back. And ten years later I finally read the whole thing. After a trip to Dublin, I came home and read Ulysses. This article has great pointers for joining the world Joyce created. I’ve enjoyed it for fifty plus years, as I continue reading his books for all the new things to discover.
posted by njohnson23 at 7:51 PM on May 10, 2020 [5 favorites]

[Sheepishly resumes an abandoned reading of Ulysses, immediately encounters a fart joke]
posted by rodlymight at 8:05 PM on May 10, 2020 [13 favorites]

I disagreed with all of her suggestions on how to read except #5. It's a book for those who want to read it. It's about language,and words and life and death and joy and sorrow and love and sex and for those who say yes I will YES.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:16 PM on May 10, 2020 [6 favorites]

One of the main takeaways from my honors course on Ulysses (that I took way back in the day) is that if you want to be a Joyce scholar, it really helps to want to sing. So many songs in that novel. So many!

Also we studied it for an entire semester and didn't get all the way through it. There's a lot there.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 8:36 PM on May 10, 2020

There’s some ongoing mockery of the idiocies of both empire and nationalism throughout Ulysses, but the book is primarily interested in the relationships between characters on an intimate scale, and doesn’t have much to say about larger social structures

It's, uh, in the title that what happens in the book will evoke a wide view, inspired in part by Vico's perspective on history--a foundational source for social science. The references to Irish history / the Boer War in the shadow of the Iliad and the Odyssey aren't really minor themes. Also, the 'Wandering Rocks' chapter is an especially influential image of lives intersecting on an intimate scale to simultaneously add up to a social scene; for example, that chapter plus the general idea of formulating a research program to follow another 'plot' that precedes it were both key influences on this overview/proposal for multi-sited ethnography, fairly well-known in cultural anthropology (>9k citations). Maybe there's a sort of 'methodological individualism' to Joyce's approach in the social science sense, but this is very similar to contemporary cultural anthropology where the local/particular is the main thing people try to represent, though it's presumed to link up to something large for sure.
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:45 PM on May 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

I was lucky enough to see Dermot Bolger's wonderful stage adaptation in Dublin (on Bloomsday!) a couple of years ago. Ulysses is a smorgasbord of language, and the performance was rousing, bawdy and brilliant. It's a book that demands to be read out loud, it really is.

Also, I am not entirely certain that “the ineluctable modality of the visible” is not a fart joke.
posted by oulipian at 8:57 PM on May 10, 2020 [3 favorites]

I would say "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” in the words of Joyce's 'literary alter ego' Stephen Dedalus, is a little pretentious, yes.

But Joyce's readers aren't required to adopt his pretensions as their own, and they're better off if they don't.
posted by jamjam at 9:10 PM on May 10, 2020

(Additionally, while perusing photostats of James Joyce’s notebooks at my college library—as one does—I found the word “Rennix” written very clearly in Joyce’s handwriting, so I’m still waiting to be drawn into the rogue wormhole/civilization-destroying time paradox that explains this.)
posted by doctornemo at 9:34 PM on May 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

But Joyce's readers aren't required to adopt his pretensions as their own, and they're better off if they don't.

The reader is invited to mock Dedalus’ self-absorbed seriousness, simultaneously making Dedalus sympathetic and also taking the piss out of him.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:53 PM on May 10, 2020 [3 favorites]

What, exactly, is the difference between a “leftist” and a “liberal”? To what extent are these groups ideologically, as opposed to aesthetically, distinct? How far can they trust each other? Are they implacable foes with fundamentally irreconcilable worldviews? Do they have enough shared goals to make political collaboration feasible?

Current Affairs 🤦🏻‍♂️ Only y’all could consider Jeremy Corbyn a Marxist and use him to compare/contrast with Pete, and without a single mention that Pete’s father was a co-editor and translator of infamous Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and a scholar of the man, who is probably one of the most prominent and important Marxist theoreticians of the 20th century. And with the first paragraph asking these questions nonetheless! So I’m curious about whether this was something maybe Pete’s dad gave off to him—a Marxist or political reading and analysis of the novel—or if this was a natural progression for him. On the flip side, I can’t help but read into his interpretation with a cynical view, him being a McKinsey consultant.

Cool article, I had no idea Ulysses was so controversial all of a sudden. I haven’t seen anybody talking about it myself or bringing any of this up when Pete and Corbyn’s respective campaigns were still going.
posted by gucci mane at 10:27 PM on May 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

Can I just say that I imagine JJ would have held up his hand and giggled behind it at the very mention of a man named Buttigieg.

And also that to get a real grip on the rank humid fart that is modern politics one should of course read JJ's Letters to Nora. [NSFW language, a lot of it.]
posted by chavenet at 1:30 AM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

The strategy I take with all fiction is "5. If you don’t enjoy it, put it down"—usually without the part about picking it up again. Never read a book you don't enjoy unless money is changing hands.
posted by pracowity at 4:00 AM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

A friend of mine explained Ulysses to me by explaining The Simpsons. Imagine someone fifty years from now, in the year 2070, who is not a native English speaker. Someone from a non-Western culture, like Iraq or Malaysia or Belize or Cameroon. Let's call him Hugo. Hugo is educated and intelligent and intellectually curious, and only passingly or superficially familiar with America from 70 years ago. The cool, pretentious hipsters Hugo knows is always talking about how important a cartoon from back in the day was a show called The Simpsons.

Hugo watches an episode and finds it bewildering. He can barely follow the references, and each one is a rabbit hole, referencing this or that in American culture three generations ago. But Hugo does it. He jots down the puns and jokes and endless references that make up The Simpsons canon. It's work, though. And when his hipster friends ask, "Isn't The Simpsons just so funny? So hilarious." Hugo found some things about The Simpsons amusing, but not in a laugh out loud way, more of a tongue in cheek manner. His enjoyment of it is dependent on how much he wants to invest in learning and living in that world in the past.

That's what Ulysses is like to me. The enjoyment I get out of it depends on how much I'm able to glean from the world Joyce lived in, which is a few worlds away from mine. I read most of it, which I guess means I'm still reading it, and the annotations and footnotes explain details about single words or phrases that I would've otherwise just breezed by. In that respect, a lot of classical literature falls in this category; Dickens has a lot of historical references I would never have known about if I hadn't read the footnotes.
posted by zardoz at 5:14 AM on May 11, 2020 [13 favorites]

I love Ulysses more than just about any other book, but I will agree that it is not for everyone. I was once asked to put together a bar crawl based book club (we met at a different bar at every meeting) to do Ulysses and half of the readers dropped out by the second meeting because they accused me of hazing (they wanted to read it, mind). I kind of feel like you either get into its groove or you don't, sort of like jazz or noise or (god forbid, but I accept that other people love them) jam bands. And in general, as a voracious and deeply affectionate reader of many "pretentious" books, I kind of wish we could talk about novels more like we talk about music (and sometimes I wish we could talk about music more like we talk about novels). Because I think the "important" language really rankles and leads to a lot of unfortunate, ultimately pointless conversations about taste that become needlessly divisive and polarizing. It also turns people off books they might otherwise enjoy.

And as relates to music: listening to Ulysses is a pretty great way to get into it, even if you only want to dip in for a minute with that full-cast BBC abridged version with Andrew Scott/Hot Priest voicing Stephen--I know, right?-- from a few years back, before going all in.

Also, I don't know about Ulysses, but I there are plenty of books (and records and films) that I've been like, "Nah, not in a million" the first time I tried and then come back to some time later to find it really reasonated. Like, I thought I hated--HATED--Henry James (and for that matter, George Eliot and Doris Lessing and "Moby Dick" and Ornette Coleman and Sci-Fi and superheroes and weird British folk music and country music in general, all of which, I have since come to love at least some of) until one day I was stuck at a lake house at thirty-five years old with Wings of the Dove and it just fucking took. That's all I can say about it. The reverse is also true. I mean, how much shit from my past has aged terribly? (Like, have you actually tried to reread Kerouac recently? For me it was basically unreadable. And I used to think I loved that shit!)

Anyway . . .
posted by thivaia at 6:39 AM on May 11, 2020 [7 favorites]

I haven't read Ulysses, but I'm going to take a poke at the idea that Bloom isn't an "everyman" because he's a Jew (perhaps especially because he's a Jew in an anti-Semitic environment) and because he has the specific grief of having lost a child.

I suspect that a high proportion of people are outsiders some way or other, and people's lives generally have some specificity to them.

What would an "everywoman" be? An "everyperson"?

Perhaps part of what makes him an "everyman" is the way his mind includes all sorts of stuff, a lot of it not fully conscious.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:42 AM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

The first time I "finished" Ulysses, it was only in the sense that I read the words that were printed on the paper without throwing it aside in frustration at the opacity, and it was only because I'd visited the Joyce Center in Dublin and had two things happen there -

1. When you go in, before you explore the rest of the place they make you watch a little film about Ulysses. That film mentioned that the specific date Joyce picked was the day of his first date with Nora, and that a lot of the other references in the book - the Bloom's address, the various pubs Stephen went to - were largely drawn from his and Nora's life and acquaintances. When I picked the book back up, that let me write off any reference that I didn't understand as "ah, okay, that's probably just an in-joke between Joyce and Nora, then, I bet I'm not supposed to get it anyway."

2. I struck up a conversation with the owner of the place who saw me photographing a mural about Ulysses and asked if I'd read it. I blushed and said I hadn't gotten through it yet. "It's alright, it's a bit of a tough thing," he reassured me.

"Yeah, but....I've tried four times and I still haven't finished."

He burst out laughing. "Ah, darlin', it took me twelve tries!"

I later learned that that guy was one of Joyce's nephews. That also reassured me that "if Joyce's own family found it tough, it's no wonder I do as well."

….So, I did finish it. I know that there is lots I completely didn't get, and which completely didn't register. I simply put that aside as "maybe I'm not supposed to 'understand' this anyway", whether because of time or age or experiences or who I am or who Joyce is, or any one of a number of things. The totality of our own minds are often not really even understood by us, much less someone who isn't us.

I wonder what would happen if I tried again. Maybe it's time for a re-read.

Seeing this movie when I was 14 got me to the library to see this dangerous book. You had to be 18 to check it out. So I got this other book by the same guy called Finnegans Wake.

Heh; some years back there was a small flurry of articles about this guy who'd successfully translated Ulysses into Mandarin Chinese. That was a task many had considered nearly impossible, just because of the richness of the lingual tricks Joyce had used; but this guy had figured out how to capture just enough of the the wordplay and puns and language that scholars said that he'd done a decent enough job. Most of the articles ended the same way - with the interviewer asking if he was going to be tackling Finnegan's Wake next. And each time, his answer was the same - "are you kidding?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:45 AM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

I've read Infinite Jest and 2666 in their entirety. I've had trouble getting into Gravity's Rainbow. How much more challenging is Ulysses in comparison to those three?
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:27 AM on May 11, 2020

So many songs in that novel. So many!

I saw Sonic Youth in 1986 and when they performed Secret Girl, I was startled to hear lines about “the boy who can enjoy invisibility.” I asked Kim Gordon about it after the show as the band was packing up and she confirmed that yes, it was lifted from Ulysses, and no, they didn’t know the tune of the original song that Joyce was quoting.
posted by newmoistness at 7:32 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Finnegans Wake was translated into Chinese by Dai Congrong (the first third, anyway) - successfully enough for the first printing of 8000 to sell out immediately.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:42 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

(re: Ulysses compared to Infinite Jest/ 2666/ Gravity's Rainbow: my view is that Ulysses is maybe the most challenging to get into the groove, but the most rewarding & most likely to be re-read (in parts at least). Also, I found Finnegan's Wake to be a pretty tough nut. YMMV)
posted by ovvl at 8:24 AM on May 11, 2020

I've read Infinite Jest and 2666 in their entirety. I've had trouble getting into Gravity's Rainbow. How much more challenging is Ulysses in comparison to those three?

Of these I've read IJ and GR (and all the rest of Pynch) as well as Ulysses. We each bring our own universe of experience into reading these challenging works, but for me Ulysses was the most pleasurable read, and seemed the most straightforward. There are few dead-ends and Mcguffins , and the language has a poetry to it that once you find its rhythm becomes lovely to experience. I've managed to read it three times over the years, likely will read it again. That being said I'm still only a third of the way through the Wake.

IJ takes place in our lifetime, but the wordplay is a lot more navel gazey to me. DFW wants the reader to know he's smart, Joyce just is genius, and when he shows off it's less gaudy. IJ is not a book I've ever wanted to re-read.

GR is not my favorite Pynchon. When it's funny it's really funny, because the territory is familiar, but I guess Catch-22 and all those years of MASH nail home those themes in a way that grinding through the other parts isn't something I'm willing to do again. I've read a number of his other books multiple times.

None of these books, however, was as daunting to me as The Recognitions (Gaddis).
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:38 AM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

OMG, the Recognitions.

Now that was a whole summer project.
posted by thivaia at 8:42 AM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

OHenryPacey: "None of these books, however, was as daunting to me as The Recognitions (Gaddis)."

I have said this before here but if you want a good way in to the world of William Gaddis, listen to one of the audio books voiced by Nick Sullivan (he has done The Recognitions, J R and Carpenter's Gothic). The books are long, but Sullivan helps you realize they are not, in fact, difficult. (Per the Gunning-Fog Index, Gaddis is less difficult than Franzen (who called Gaddis "Mr. Difficult" in a particularly ridiculous piece in the New Yorker.
posted by chavenet at 9:07 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

I read and (as far as I remember) mostly enjoyed reading Ulysses in my teens, but then I hate-read my way through Finnegans Wake the same way I sometimes force myself to beat a particularly unfair video game. You think you will have the feeling of having achieved something, but you just end up hating yourself.
posted by Dumsnill at 11:45 AM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

I've read Infinite Jest and 2666 in their entirety. I've had trouble getting into Gravity's Rainbow. How much more challenging is Ulysses in comparison to those three?

Getting immersed in Ulysses, including reading the trots, the bios and the scholarly studies, was ultimately a total pleasure for me. The pleasure part required 4 attempts at actually reading it end-to-end, the successful 4th after the research immersion. So later, when I took a crack at GR, I realized it had to be read similarly to Ulysses, ploughing through the thing first, and then once again, after some research at the Borders Literary Criticism shelves and the state library.

Overall, I feel fortunate I'm a speaker of American English. Early 20th Century Irish English was the initial hurdle in Ulysses, but at least Pynchon spoke my language. And then, GR can be understood as kind of a surreal movie. (Pynchon frames this right away, with the first-page evacuation that's all theatre, and the last-page placing you, dear reader, in a movie house with a rocket about to explode into it.)

My personal journey of finding deep appreciation of Ulysses really opened the door to the rollicking enjoyment I found reading Gravity's Rainbow, and then V. These 3 are my favorite novels.
posted by Droll Lord at 1:25 PM on May 11, 2020

If this author is surprised by Joyce scribbling her last name in his notebooks 100 years ago, check out this little bit from Finnegan's Wake:

"So snug he was in his hotel premises sumptuous
But soon we'll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumpery
And'tis short till sheriff Clancy'll be winding up his unlimited company"
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:50 PM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

re: Finnegans Wake -- I was lucky enough to have taken a graduate-school class whose subject was Joyce and Beckett. It was taught by a Joyce scholar -- Margaret Solomon -- who had the looks and demeanor of Bewitched's Elvira (if I remember her name correctly), and who recited FW passages in a delightful faux-brogue. (Joyce himself wrote that FW was best grasped orally using "soundsense.")

I did manage to read the full FW, here and there apprehending small and somewhat larger parts, otherwise enjoying the tossed salad of multilingual puns as best I could. Ironically, I suppose, of all those FW pseudowords, I still smile at Joyce's summation of, it would seem, all western philosophy, behavior, art, scholarship and religion, in this laden three-word FW phrase -- "He Can Explain."

Coincidentally, I was born into a family of German neighborhood-tavern owners. I've tended bar there, back in a time when those truly stumbling-drunk could meander their way back to their digs safely on foot. More than once our patrons' half-comprehensible conversational devolvement brought FW vividly to my mind.
posted by Droll Lord at 1:52 PM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

In related, I recently read Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. I had thought that I'd read it before when I was young, but turns out that I actually only vaguely skimmed the back half, much of which is long transcripts of wierd Catholic sermons. The concept is hilarious.

For the idle curious, I'd highly recommend glancing again at the first few pages of the book (Stephen Dedalus childhood impressions) which is pure genius writing.
posted by ovvl at 4:34 PM on May 12, 2020 [2 favorites]