I’ve been continuing to watch videos about James Joyce and Ulysses.

Some have been interesting, some have been misguided, some I haven’t bothered to finish, and some short ones I haven’t even started — a fifteen-minute video on why I should read Ulysses isn’t going to tell me anything.

I did find one video which proposed three interesting techniques for people who started Ulysses but got bogged down along the way.

One was to skip the parts you have trouble with. As I’ve said before, I’ve followed this myself. After all, this is not a plot-based novel — nothing in chapter seven is going to explain who committed the murder in chapter three.

On that topic, one thing in this article from The New Yorker caught my eye:

A friend of mine told me that once, when he was talking to a group of Russian-literature professors, he confided to them that he and his American colleagues often had difficulty with the many highly detailed accounts of battles in “War and Peace.” Oh, the Russians answered, we skip those parts! So boring! You should skip them, too, they said.

I used to do that the novels of Roger Zelazny, too. Pages of semi-poetic random images and stuff. Skip!

To quote Alice in Wonderland:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?’

 
Another technique suggested in the video was to read Ulysses backwards, so you don’t miss out on “Penelope” — Molly Bloom’s amazing, 42-page soliloquy which ends the book. (As readers of Douglas Adams can tell you, the number 42 has a special significance — and now I’m wondering if that’s why Adams chose that number…)

(Update: I’ve now seen a second video which makes the same suggestion.)

The third idea was to read the book out loud, or listen to a recording of it.

I’m doing the skipping thing, and the listening thing, although I haven’t yet done the backwards thing — but I might, or at least I might listen to “Penelope.”

Two more points on Ulysses by James Joyce (plus one added later).

1) I did go to see the exhibition “One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses” at the Morgan Library and Museum.

It was really good. It was all in one large room (the walls were painted with the blue and white of the Greek flag — the colors on the first edition of Ulysses itself). There were exhibits on the walls all around the room, but there was also a central structure, with other displays on its exterior and interior walls. The result was that the entire exhibition appeared to be organized chronologically, but the time scheme seemed to be going in several directions at once, on several levels — very appropriate for Joyce and this novel.

Some parts of it were more interesting than others (to me). Photographs of Joyce and members of his family were okay, but I think that was mostly for newbies. There were some interesting artifacts, such as the order J.P. Morgan’s nephew (I think that’s who it was — I didn’t take notes) mailed in to purchase his copy of the first edition.

But the best parts for me were 1) several wonderful displays showing Joyce’s influence on the visual arts, and 2) actual manuscript pages, and heavily edited and rewritten galley proofs. It was something to see the handwritten originals of the beginning and end of the novel. And, yes, the first and last letter of the book are the same (“s”), which is almost certainly not an accident (hey, his next book began and ended with fragments of the same sentence).

I also had a further thought about the different editions of Ulysses that I talked about before. I think another reason I’m not all that concerned about all the typos in the original edition is because I’m not aware of any evidence that Joyce cared very much about them. He was certainly aware of them, but he didn’t pursue any sort of project to get them fixed (unlike Henry James, for example, who, late in his life, revised much of his body of work for the 24-volume New York Edition).

As far as I know, Joyce wrote Ulysses, he managed, with some difficulty, to get it published (on his 40th birthday, as he’d wanted), and then he moved on.

I have great sympathy for this approach. As I wrote once about Robert Altman:

Once, years ago, he was asked how he felt about that the fact that, at that time, many of his best movies weren’t available on video. He said, “What can I do? I make another movie.”

 
2) I’ve thought periodically, over the decades, that I need to really study Ulysses and understand it better than I do now.

One thing that’s always held me back is that I haven’t read enough and I don’t know enough. Professor Owens, for example, who I referred to in my last post, said that, in order to write about Joyce, he made sure that he’d read everything Joyce had read before writing Ulysses, including newspapers, and books in several languages (Joyce was fluent in five or six languages).

But, to be honest, the biggest obstacle has been that I’m always being distracted by my own writing projects. Writing is more fun than studying Ulysses (although not always more fun than reading Ulysses, I admit).

 
3) I’ve been watching videos about Joyce and Ulysses, and I just saw one which clarified why I’m always drawn to Ulysses rather than to Joyce’s earlier works, even though they’re a lot easier to read.

Ulysses is funny, sometimes wildly funny. Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are not funny.

I think it’s that simple.

I’ve been listening to readings of Ulysses, and there are points, in the “Cyclops” episode in particular, when I’ve laughed out loud. I never laughed out loud at Dubliners or Portrait — and I imagine that I’m in the majority.

Following up on my last post, I found this very interesting video: “Great Big Book Club – James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’.”

The presentation, by Joyce scholar Coílín Owens, is very good, but one of the questions particularly caught my attention. One of the members of the book club asks, very approximately, “Doesn’t the complexity of the words and the wordplay and the references and so on come in between the reader and a powerful human story, particularly in the second half of the book?” and Professor Owens’ answer (again, very approximately) is that a lot of people feel that way, and some think that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is actually a superior work, and (this is the key part) a lot of the academics who defend the book are making a living in the Joyce industry — teaching Joyce or writing about Joyce or both — and therefore their judgement might be questionable on that basis, which was nice to hear, particularly because Professor Owens himself taught Joyce for many years, and, after his retirement, wrote two books about him.

(Full disclosure, my favorite thing Joyce ever wrote, that I’ve read, is The Dead, the last story in the Dubliners collection, which is one of my favorite things ever written by anybody.)

As I say, I’m up and down on Ulysses, although there are some parts which I really like. But that’s not always an “acceptable” stance these days, on anything. For example, I’m very much enjoying the Netflix adaptation of the comic book The Sandman, but some people online appear to be starting from the idea that the comic book series was a masterwork beyond compare. I read the comics when they were coming out, all 75 issues, and some issues were good and some were great, and some were just okay. Which is a pretty good ratio, but it’s nowhere near perfection.

And, as a matter of fact, the movie adaptation of The Dead actually improves on the story in one way, as I talked about here (and, as I say, the original story by Joyce is a masterwork far beyond The Sandman).

Well, as I (semi-)predicted a few posts ago, I’m dipping into Ulysses again.

1) There’s what looks like a very interesting exhibition about the book’s 100th anniversary at The Morgan Library. I plan to go.

 
2) I studied James Joyce in college. As I recall, it was a summer course, the only course I took that summer, meeting four times a week — so it was a fairly intense few weeks.

Since then, when returning to Ulysses, I’ve tended to dip in and pop around, re-reading my favorite episodes and avoiding the annoying ones. I feel somewhat guilty about this, or at least I think (sometimes) that I should feel guilty about it, but I have college credentials which attest to the fact that I did read once the whole farkakte book from beginning to end.

 
3) Speaking of annoying, as I get older I find Stephen Dedalus more and more intolerable. What an angsty boy.

On the other hand, Leopold Bloom is as wonderful as ever — maybe even more so as the years go by.

 
4) My favorite episode is probably “Wandering Rocks.” Every new writing project I’ve started has included a note to think about doing a version of “Wandering Rocks.” This is usually impossible, because I’m so often in first person (and I think I’m done with novels now anyway), but I did a sort-of version once, in the middle of the novel U-town.

 
5) There are many editions of Ulysses. The original edition, published in 1922, by the bookstore Shakespeare & Company in Paris, was apparently typeset by compositors who didn’t speak English (let alone English as it was practiced by James Joyce), and who also reportedly drank wine with lunch. It has a lot of errors.

There have been attempts since to fix those errors, in various newer editions, but reports are that each attempt has also introduced new errors.

I like to read the original version. Exact duplicates are available, with the classic blue cover, and I’ve found that accidental typos made by francophone typesetters, perhaps a bit buzzed in the afternoon hours, are easier to catch while reading than the sorts of errors which can be created by well-meaning professional editors.

Plus, the original pages are pleasant to read. The typeface is good, and there are appropriate margins. One more recent edition I have appears to have been laid out during a paper shortage, since they seemed to have been making every effort to cram as many words as they could onto each page — readability be damned.