James Joyce Reading Group discussion

Since I just started this group, and we don't have members yet, I thought I'd just do some blogging on Joyce.

I first tried to read Ulysses when I was about 20, and I was really angry that I couldn't understand it. I took a few years to do more reading, and to try to get into the world of Joyce's head - in short, I read some biographical material and tried to read what influenced him.

Later, I went back to the books and started with Dubliners and read straight through the rest of the novels. His work has highly influenced my own work as a musician and composer, and after struggling with the late novels, I learned a great deal about form (and other topics) from them. I have since read the books numerous times, and have set the chapters of Ulysses to music in a project I called "Love Songs to the Episodes of James Joyce's Ulysses". This project sought to use the thematic and structural ideas from the novel and apply them to musical composition.

Joyce is an obvious influence on many writers working today. You can see the fruits of his labor in countless works of art, from literature to film and visual art. The structure of the "wandering rocks" episode in Ulysses, for example, has offered the post-modernists a model for the collage novel, an idea pioneered by Joyce, but realized more fully by folks like William Burroughs. You also find this structural device in contemporary cinema.

Indeed, Joyce was a very cinematic writer - the so-called "stream of consciousness" writing in Ulysses, which sought to merely register a more faithful rendition of consciousness, uses techniques like flashbacks, close-ups, and a variety of other techniques that resemble editing and montage in cinema.

Finnegans Wake, deemed un-readable by many, admired by less, and adored by few, gave improvisers (musicians who work in improvised music) like myself a model for building a "world language", where sounds from many cultures could come together in a new and exciting ways. Today, many improvisers travel the world playing with musicians from numerous cultures, and the result is the emergence of a musical language that truly knows no bounds. The language Joyce created in Finnegans Wake is a collection of phonemes from over a dozen different world languages and he uses this language to spin endless puns that (unfortunately) only the multi-lingual can appreciate.

Hi Phillip, nice to see someone has decided to start on the Joyce realm at GoodReads. I've read all...or most of...Ulysses, FW, Portrait, Dubliners, and even Stephen Hero once. I enjoy Joyce for his humor and his trickiness, and I wish more people could just give a try to the works and try him for fun, not to see his stuff as a chore. Looking forward to some fun insights, and I hope more folks show up.

Indeed - it's a shame that so many people are put off Joyce because of his "difficulty". That just made me want to read him all the more (mashochist that I am)...

But as Anthony Burgess said in Re:Joyce, "difficulty is part of Joyce's big joke, all his main ideas are expressed in good, round Dublin terms". And I think that is how you have to enter into the books. Don't expect to understand EVERYTHING when you read them. If you want, go back and read them again and again and read the critical writings and take up the scholarship (if you're inspired). If not, read them once - anyone could get a lot out of them and still not understand everything. I actually think, in this respect, Joyce's writing comes closer to being alive than any other writer. Life is so like that - you don't always understand the implications of all things. It takes time and reflection to understand ourselves in relation to all of the people and events in our lives. Joyce is telling us to pay attention in life - there's a lot you're missing! I can't think of a more important message.

I think I've mentioned this in another post, but one of the main difficulties in Ulysses is getting used to the function and execution of "stream of consciousness". While I've never been really comfortable with that term (there's nothing "streaming" about it, if anything it shows how fragmented and fractured our consciousness is), this is the way that Joyce illustrates the way we think. A character looks at something - a character thinks about that thing. In Joyce, there is no narrator to hold your hand and tell you when the prose moves from observation to meditation. Most readers expect something like the following:

Mr. Bloom saw the young maiden exiting the butcher's shop and gazed longingly at her ample ass. He wished the butcher would hurry so he could follow her down the street and admire her further.

But what you get in Joyce is:

Mr Bloom pointed quickly. To catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the morning. Hurry up, damn it. Make hay while the sun shines. She stood outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the right. He sighed down his nose: they never understand...

*******

So, you have two sentences (the first sentence and the first part of the last sentence) that "narrate" (in the traditional sense) what Bloom is doing. The rest of the sentences tell us what Bloom is thinking...those are his thoughts.

Joyce saw no reason to separate the action from the internal observation. Works for me, but it takes some getting used to.

The other problem I have with the term "stream of consciousness" is that a lot of readers mis-interpret this term, and get the impression that Joyce "just wrote whatever came into his head" - and they confuse this term with the writer's process, not the registration of consciousness in his subjects. The idea that Joyce just wrote whatever came into his head is far from the truth. He labored over Ulysses for 11 years, and spent 19 years working on Finnegans Wake.

The other "difficult" element in Joyce is vocabulary. Scholars have said that Joyce has the largest vocabulary of any writer in English - Shakespeare takes second place! So yeah, it helps to have dictionary nearby. And, he's using the Irish language, and most of us don't have Irish phrasebooks lying about the house.

But all of this is really secondary to the really beautiful writing and ideas that flourish in his books.

And Joyce seems to expect you to understand the language with him...you also have to be quite conversant in the Catholic liturgies, too, to "get" it. :)

Some would say "too smart for his own good."

More like "too smart for our own good"....

But I'm deeply thankful for his efforts, I've learned so much about life and art and narrative structure from him and am eternally grateful.

Hello,
Thank you very much for starting the James Joyce discussion group. I consider Ulysses one of my favorite novels. I remember exactly where I was when I finished it: I was sitting under a tree on the UCLA campus. It was 5:20 PM. I put the book down and said to myself, this is one of the most incredible reading experiences I have ever had.

I am also a great admirer of Dubliners. I teach it and love it. There are passages, paragraphs, lines, which are so flawless and lyrical and beautiful in every sense that I re-read them over and over. The snow in the famous last paragraph of "The Dead": "It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." There is no better, more pure and effective use of repetition and alliteration anywhere in literature.

I especially like "The Sisters", "A Painful Case", "Counterparts", and, of course, "Araby" and "The Dead". I think that the first paragraph of "The Sisters" is a key to all the major themes of the entire collection. A close reading of it is how I introduce the work to my students. But I would love to discuss any of the stories with anyone about anything, even if you just plain love the stories and characters for what they are. Thanks again!

Thanks for joining, and for commmenting Molly!

I'm in the midst of reading Zamyatin's "We" for my Russian Readers Reading group, but as soon as I finish it, I think I'll go back and read a few of these stories again. It's been awhile, and I really enjoy them.

Ulysses also sort of changed my life. Or rather, I changed in order to read it. I think I already posted how when I was young I tried to read it, but coudn't really understand it fully. So I spent years "preparing" for it. I really put a lot of time into that book, and I'm so glad I did. It helped me see other novels and other works of art differently. Most importantly, it made me start to "look closer" at things...and that's an important lesson in life!

Thanks for coming along, Molly...Philip and I were quite lonely here.

Phillip wrote: "Indeed, Joyce was a very cinematic writer - the so-called "stream of consciousness" writing in Ulysses, which sought to merely register a more faithful rendition of consciousness, uses techniques like flashbacks, close-ups, and a variety of other techniques that resemble editing and montage in cinema."

We've largely forgotten that JJ's use of SOC was a means of capturing more accurately and precisely what goes on in one's mind than it was an attempt to deliberately achieve a breakthrough in writing. That understanding is a retrospective misreading, and we tend to make too much of JJ's SOC as a masterful device. In a similar manner we tend to tie ourselves into knots trying to pin down JJ's abstract and slippery definitions of epiphany. I think he merely focused on something we all know though few enough of us dwell on: that the world's reality is always multilayered, that we glide along on a superficial stratum, but sometimes deeper meanings one or two layers deeper happen to seep through to the surface for one reason or another, and that's about all there is to it. The stories of D, for example, are all seemingly superficial with occasional thinning out between the covert layers beneath. He also makes his characters psychologically at war with themselves: he is a master of ambiguity so when the epiphany flashes we're free to conjure up meaning in any way we like: the reader is a vital element in JJ stories, and more so than in stories by many other writers.