ENGL2035:
Modernism

James Joyce

Click here for a chapter-by-chapter photo-tour of many of the sites of Ulysses.

Some brief suggestions on reading Ulysses for the first time:

• Start reading it as soon as you can.  It takes time.  Don't leave it for the week before the tutorial: you can't speed-read it in a week.  
• Don't hurry it.  Reading too fast is a good way of missing what the book's doing--and a great way of making sure you won't enjoy it.  If Ulysses reinvents the ways in which fiction works, it also makes you reinvent the ways in which you read.
• Don't feel you have to understand everything before you continue.  If you've got an annotated edition, don't feel you've got to look up the notes every time something puzzles you.  Some things clear up as you move on, or gain a fuller sense in later chapters, or maybe even in later readings.  One of the great pleasures of the book is the feeling that it's always capable of surprising you. 
• The third chapter (Proteus) is a speed bump.  I'd guess that out of all the readers who never complete the book, 90% of them decide to quit at this point.  It's a dense chapter, perhaps even the densest chapter in the book, but remember it's also the shortest--and beyond it lies Leopold Bloom, who is one of the great creations of twentieth-century fiction.

Some hints for your first venture into the book (chapter 4, "Calypso", in week 2)

• Already, it seems today is not going to be a day like any other for Leopold Bloom. What is about to happen? How do you know this? Why is it never stated directly?
• Pay careful attention to the passage in which, as Bloom is coming back with breakfast from the butcher's, a little cloud covers the sun (58-59). Suddenly, apparently inexplicably, Bloom panics: "Grey horror seared his flesh. ... Cold oils slid along his veins". Why? What's happened? Is there something which is not being said here? If so, what is it, and why is it not said?

Some more things to look for: hints about the ways in which the book works

• The so-called "interior monologue" which characterises both Stephen and Bloom works in a way which is remarkably different from almost all previous modes of literary realism.  For neither character is it simply a literary technique for making the contents of a mind visible.  There are certain things which neither of them can quite bear to dwell on, or even think about, and these can leave extraordinary and sometimes alarming gaps and silences in their monologues, or even the narrative itself.  Reading becomes a matter of paying vareful attention to what the characters aren't saying, or are trying not to think of. Find some more examples of this.
• Pay particular attention to the first chapter (Telemachus, which introduces Stephen Dedalus) and the fourth chapter (Calypso, which introduces Leopold Bloom, and takes place at the same time as the first).  How are the two characters differentiated in the writing?  What has even at this stage started to link them?
• After three chapters focusing on Stephen and then three focusing on what Bloom was doing during this time, the seventh chapter (Aeolus) features both of them, though they're never quite on stage together at the same time.  And this chapter is marked by the most obvious stylistic variation of any so far: it's punctuated by those increasingly flippant and bizarre subheadings.  What does this do to the text? And why should it happen at this point?

• In Chapter 11 (Sirens, which is set between about 4 and 5 in the afternoon), Bloom will reveal that earlier that day Molly told him the time that Blazes Boylan is due at Eccles Street: "Four, she said."  But the only time Molly and Bloom have been together in the book is in Chapter 4 (Calypso), where those words are not reported.  So where do you think she says it, and why has it vanished?

Resources

The present site includes

• an online diagram of the Gilbert schema of Ulysses, which sets out the formal and technical constraints on each chapter;
• a chapter-by-chapter photo-tour of many of the sites of Ulysses.

"Selected Resources for James Joyce's Ulysses" is part of a larger site Gregg Hecimovich has made for a course he runs at Eastern Illinois University, intriguingly called "Puzzling Narratives". It includes a chapter-by-chapter summary of what's happening, including the parallel events in the Odyssey, plus commentary drawn from Harry Blamires' The New Bloomsday Book (an older edition of which is in the UQ library at PR6019.O9 U626 1966). And while we're on the Odyssey, Diana Fleming's site for her course on "Man, God and Society in Western Literature" at the University of California, Berkeley, has a book-by-book summary of its storyline and a table of the main characters.

A thorough all-round reference book is A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie's James Joyce A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work (PR6019.O9 Z533376 1995). Don Gifford and Robert Seidmann's Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce's Ulysses (PR6019.O9 U647 1974) can be very handy when you want to chase something up and find it just isn't in Johnson's notes to the Oxford edition. And for the full story on all of those minor characters, there's Shari Benstock and Bernard Benstock's Who's He When He's at Home: A James Joyce Directory (PR6019.O9 Z5259 1980). Zack Bowen and James F. Carens's A Companion to Joyce Studies (PR6019.O9 Z52717 1984) is a huge and comprehensive guide to Joyce scholarship as it stood in the mid 1980s, and is still invaluable.

For an introduction to Joyce's work in general, see The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, edited by Derek Attridge (PR6019.O9 Z52637 1990) .

For an introduction to Ulysses in particular, you still can't beat Hugh Kenner's short Ulysses (PR6019.O9 U6723 1980)--an invaluable book for the first-time reader of Ulysses, and for many later readings. It's a chapter-by-chapter account of the book with an acute ear for the stylistic changes which transform the book as it continues. Kenner's Joyce's Voices (PR6019.O9 U672 1978) is a classic study of the subtlety of the ways in which Joyce uses the instabilities of free indirect discourse. Stuart Gilbert's 1930 study, James Joyce's 'Ulysses' (PR6019.O9 U65 1963) was the first full-length study of Ulysses, and because of censorship problems was generally available long before Ulysses in most of the English-speaking world. Gilbert was a friend of Joyce, and the recipient of what's now known as the Gilbert schema of Ulysses. His book is a thorough, chapter-by-chapter reading, with full attention to its formal complexities.  It's much drier than Kenner's Ulysses, but still of great use. Michael Seidel's James Joyce, A Short Introduction (PR6019.O9 Z79446 2002) is also very useful, as is the website which accompanies his course of Joyce at Columbia University: it includes images of many of the main sites of the novel, and audio files of many of the songs.

Cyril Pearl's Dublin in Bloomtime: The City James Joyce Knew (DA995.D8P42 1969) and Edward Quinn's James Joyce's Dublin (DA995.D8Q9 1973) are two books of photographs of the Dublin of Ulysses, including many of the places which feature in the narrative. And here's a set of Joyce images well worth checking out online--a gallery of postcards of some of the places in Ulysses.

Karen Lawrence's The Odyssey of Style in 'Ulysses' (PR6019.O9 U6743 1981) is a good guide to the ever-changing stylistic features of the book.  Fritz Senn's essays are always a model of careful reading and scholarship, and can be found throughout the James Joyce Quarterly (PR6019.O9 Z637) as well as in a couple of collections: Joyce's Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation (PR6019.O9 Z7946 1984), and Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce (PR6019.O9 Z79448 1995).  Derek Attridge is always a fine critic of Joyce: see his Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (PR6019.O9 Z52523 2000).  The collection Attridge edited with Daniel Ferrer, Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French (PR6019.O9 Z78234 1984) is a fine collection in its own right, and an interesting documentation of the meeting of Joyce and "theory" in the 1980s.  And I do have a soft spot for Tony Thwaites's Joycean Temporalities: Debts, Promises, and Countersignatures (PR6019.O9 Z829 2001).

The various collections which have come out of the biennial International James Joyce Symposia are also invariably well worth looking at: holdings in the UQ Library include Benstock's The Seventh of Joyce (PR6019.O9 Z7947 1982), Beja et al.'s James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium (PR6019.O9 Z63 1986), Bollettieri Bosinelli et al.'s The Languages of Joyce (PR6019.O9 Z624 1988), Beja and Benstock's Coping with Joyce (PR6019.O9 Z52734 1989), and Cheng and Martin's Joyce in Context (PR6019.O9 Z6647 1992).

The standard biography of Joyce is still Richard Ellmann's James Joyce (PR6019.O9Z5332 1982). Brenda Maddox's Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (PR6019.O9 Z7184 1988) is illuminating, not only of Joyce's wife Nora, but of the entire circle of remarkable women--Sylvia Beach, Harriet Shaw Weaver--who supported Joyce.

There are now 2 films of Ulysses:

• Joseph Strick's 1967 Ulysses (PN1997.U45 1989) has a fine performance by Milo O'Shea as Bloom, but doesn't hold together very well as a film.
• Sean Walsh has just completed Bloom, with Stephen Rea as Bloom and Angeline Ball as Molly. It was premiered on Bloomsday (well, of course) 2003, and has been receiving enthusiastic reviews. You can get further details, including a preview, at the production's website. It's due for release in Australia some time around November, so watch this space for details.

There's also a film of Brenda Maddox's biography of Nora Joyce. Pat Lynch's Nora (PN1997.N642) stars Susan Lynch in the title role and (surprise!) its executive producer Ewan McGregor as Joyce. It's a fine film, although as far as I know it never received a cinema release in Australia.

The biggest and most thorough plain-vanilla listing of Web resources on Joyce is Michael Groden's Flying by the Net: JJ in cyberspace. It includes sections on Internet mailing lists and realtime discussion groups, electronic journals, omnibus and specialized Joyce Web sites, publications and publishers, library collections, related sites, and general literature sites which have lists of Joyce links. Groden is also the director of the immensely ambitious and exciting Ulysses in Hypermedia project, which he describes as "An electronic presentation of Joyce's Ulysses, featuring: verbal, visual, and audio annotations and explanations; a library of criticism and scholarship on Ulysses; photographs, videos, and sound recordings related to Ulysses; layered annotations and explanations to satisfy the needs of users ranging from beginners to scholars; contributions from over 115 Joyce critics, scholars, and readers; clear and easy navigation; and a visual design that exploits the aesthetic potentials of the computer medium." Unfortunately, work has now been suspended on the project because of a dispute with the Joyce estate. (The blog funferal is probably a good place to start if you want some information about the Joyce estate's actions over the years...)

Other online sites for links and resources include

• Allan Ruch's The Brazen Head, with its spectacular design
• Hans Walter Gabler and Barney Engelhart's Eurojoys, the European James Joyce Forum;
• Augustine Christopher Welsh's A James Joyce Homepage, which has several of the famous Gisèle Freund photographs of Joyce and his family.
• Music in the Works of James Joyce has audio samples of some of the many songs which run throughout Ulysses, performed in the style of the time.

The National Library of Ireland (the setting for the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses) mounted a spectacular exhibition on "James Joyce and Ulysses" for the Bloomsday Centenary in 2004. The Cornell University Library is the home of a large collection of Joyce's letters and manuscripts, including much of the material Richard Ellmann used for his biography, and currently has some of this on display. Their websites let you see some of their holdings.

Split Pea Press in Edinburgh publishes Joyceiana, including a free downloadable version of the Dublin Evening Telegraph for 16 June 1904 (which is the newspaper Bloom reads in the cabman's shelter in the Eumaeus episode). Their Ulysses tables are invaluable, too (and again free). As you've no doubt noticed, there are many different editions of Ulysses, all of which have different paginations. This can be a real problem when the criticism you're reading is using a different edition from the one you have. These tables simply correlate the page numbers of all the English language editions of Ulysses. How could you do without it?

The International James Joyce Federation is the main international body for Joyce scholarship. Its main international journal is the James Joyce Quarterly (PR6019.O9 Z637), which has been publishing some of the best Joyce scholarship for around 40 years.

There are etexts of Ulysses available from Bibliomania and Tim Szeliga's Finnegans Web. Samuel Schiminovitch has a marked up and annotated online edition of the text which is of great interest.

Laura M. Crook has a partly annotated text of Ulysses, with sound files for the Sirens episode.

And then there's Ulysses for Dummies...
 

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