This last fall, a close friend of mine set up a reading group with his grad school friends where we tackled Ulysses by James Joyce. Having never read any Joyce (I’d only heard of the book referenced as one of those obnoxious tomes that nobody actually read), I had no idea how difficult the book would be. We were able to sustain the group for a few months but eventually lost steam. Having barely made through about half the book at that point I figured if I didn’t finish it now I never would.
Fortunately there are some fantastic resources online that helped me make sense of Joyce’s cryptic writing. In particular, Patrick Hastings has an excellent guide, including a short introduction on the first page to what the novel is about, which I heartily recommend you read first. The full text is also freely available here, with annotations.
Attempting any sort of half-baked exegesis is well beyond my skills at this point, so I’m forced to rely more on the experience of reading the novel itself. And there’s no better word I can think of than psychedelic. Joyce puts you inside the subconscious of his characters in a way that’s both sublime and occasionally disgusting.
At least 60% of the novel is well over my head, but in between pages and pages on frustrating, dense, occasionally incomprehensible text are some of the most beautiful bits of prose I’ve ever read. And while I’ll be presenting some of these passages out of context, the struggle of digging through the text and being surprised by one of these passages is worth it. Anyway, here’s the 18 episodes, presented from my least favorite to favorite, with one of the passages I liked (and all episodes had something excellent).
18. Circe
Some interesting passages, but it’s too damn long (as long as several other episodes combined) and difficult to follow.
Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it's up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got me? It's a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It's the whole pie with jam in. It's just the cutest snappiest line out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator.
17. Eumaeus
An exhausting chapter, intentionally, so as to give the reader a sense of the exhaustion that Bloom (the novel’s main character) is feeling. Still, a slog to get through.
the eloquent fact remained that the sea was there in all its glory and in the natural course of things somebody or other had to sail on it and fly in the face of providence
16. Cyclops
The repeated interruptions of the story with random Irish mythology is cool, but I would have had no idea what happened in the chapter without a guide.
In the dark land they bide, the vengeful knights of the razor. Their deadly coil they grasp: yea, and therein they lead to Erebus whatsoever wight hath done a deed of blood for I will on nowise suffer it even so saith the Lord.
15. Penelope
I’d probably enjoy this chapter more if it had any punctuation or paragraph breaks. As it is, it’s an 80 page run-on sentence. It’s also the chapter that got the book banned in the US for years, though it’s tame compared to anything you’d see on Twitter these days.
I wonder did he know me in the box I could see his face he couldnt see mine of course hed never turn or let on still his eyes were red when his father died theyre lost for a woman of course must be terrible when a man cries let alone them
14. Oxen of the Sun
Written in a dozen or so styles of English, starting with Old English and getting progressively more modern.
Twilight phantoms are they, yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They fade, sad phantoms: all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is no more. And on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion, the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come trooping to the sunken sea, Lacus Mortis. Ominous revengeful zodiacal host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned, the giantantlered, snouter and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning multitude, murderers of the sun.
13. Wandering Rocks
A series of random vignettes of life in Dublin.
Beingless beings. Stop! Throb always without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I. Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me you who can.
12. Telemachus
The first episode, and written in a relatively straightforward way, as if Joyce doesn’t want to scare the reader away too soon. If only I’d known what lay ahead!
Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.
11. Lestrygonians
Joyce has way more fun than any should describing all the disgusting ways people eat (though this passage is not that):
Quaffing nectar at mess with gods golden dishes, all ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar imagine it drinking electricity: gods' food. Lovely forms of woman sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine.
10. Lotus Eaters
A short episode, describes Bloom’s thoughts while running some errands.
Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.
9. Aeolus
One of the first episodes that breaks with normal storytelling, as the passages are randomly broken by newspaper headlines.
We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality? Lord Jesus? Lord Salisbury? A sofa in a westend club. But the Greek!
8. Calypso
It’s the fourth chapter but the first to feature the main character, Leopold Bloom.
Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket he turned into Eccles street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his veins, chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak.
7. Scylla and Charybdis
A bunch of Irish lit nerds argue about Shakespeare’s love life. What’s not to like?
As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.
6. Nestor
The second episode, with some interesting asides.
Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.
5. Nausicaa
Written in an overwrought, melodramatic style, and told from the perspective that Bloom imagines in another character (and mildly obscene!).
The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.
4. Sirens
Joyce outdoes himself describing various kinds of music.
Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine.
3. Hades
Bloom attends a funeral, with intense passages about death and mourning.
Well, it is a long rest. Feel no more. It's the moment you feel. Must be damned unpleasant. Can't believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven't yet. Then darkened deathchamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you like to see a priest? Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his lower eyelid. Watching is his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the floor since he's doomed. Devil in that picture of sinner's death showing him a woman. Dying to embrace her in his shirt. Last act of Lucia. Shall I nevermore behold thee? Bam! He expires. Gone at last. People talk about you a bit: forget you. Don't forget to pray for him. Remember him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then they follow: dropping into a hole, one after the other.
2. Proteus
This was the chapter where I realized I really liked this book. No single passage does it justice, really fantastic writing throughout.
You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls do you not think? Flutier. Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.
1. Ithica
The second to last episode, and the one which wraps up Bloom’s story. Written like a catechism, in a question/response style.
What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.