Help me love James Joyce

Cafe Society
1

I am terrified of James Joyce. All I know about him is:

  • he’s reputed to be one of the best authors ever
  • his books are reputed to be incredibly difficult to understand
  • he’s Irish
  • there’s a great pub named for him that I spent every Monday night of my first two years of university drinking in

I read The Dubliners in high school and successfully bluffed my way through the fact that I didn’t understand it at all. Must have been because everyone else in the class (and quite possibly the teacher) was in the same position. Also I’m not really a short story fan …

So I’m going to get a James Joyce book out of the library, and I’m going to read the damn thing if it kills me. Well, maybe not. I’ll read it until I get bored of it, but I’d like to try to avoid that eventuality, which is what this thread is for.

I find that the enthusiasm of others is often enough to get me to like things, or at least to maintain my interest for long enough to learn to like it. John Irving, for instance, always makes me want to pick up a Dickens book, and my friend Rob made me love electronic music.

I put it to the room, then: which one should I get? Please accompany your recommendation with (a) a brief synopsis, (b) an explanation of why it’s great, and © any helpful or encouraging words that will inspire me to finish it, or to get past page twelve.

(Note that I will bookmark this thread and (hopefully) revisit it as I read the book, in order to share my impressions and ask for opinions and clarifications.)

2

Ulysses is the one most likely to appear on “Great Books” lists, but it can be pretty overwhelming. I’d recommend the A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to start. It’s to Ulysses what The Hobbit is to The Lord of the Rings – kind of: a shorter, simpler prelude to a masterpiece. It’s also semi-autobiographical, as the title implies, so it can give you a little insight into Joyce, as he saw himself.

3

Ulysses is the one most likely to appear on “Great Books” lists, but it can be pretty overwhelming. I’d recommend the A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to start. It’s to Ulysses what The Hobbit is to The Lord of the Rings – kind of: a shorter, simpler prelude to a masterpiece. It’s also semi-autobiographical, as the title implies, so it can give you a little insight into Joyce, as he saw himself.

4

Cowgirl, go read Dubliners again. It’s a great introduction to Joyce, and it might be his best work too. Now, it’s been a while since I read it, but as I remember, it was supposed to be a glimpse into every social strata of Dublin in those times. That’s about all you need to know about it to enjoy it as a piece of fiction that stands alone.

I read it when I was about 24 or so, and even then [not trying to be condescending] I was able to appreciate some of the sheer beauty of Joyce’s use of the English language. On top of that, some of the stories are just so beautifully crafted that they can take your breath away. If you read them in order, take it slow, and don’t panic, I think you’ll like Joyce by the time you read the final paragraph of “The Dead.”

Most of Joyce’s other stuff needs–no demands–a class discussion led by a real literary scholar to appreciate the bulk of what is going on. Not so Dubliners.

5

Read Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellman. His letters to his common law wife Nora are very, very interesting.

warning adult content

My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or to fling you down under me on that soft belly of yours and f*ck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shame of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair.

6

thanks for the tips ! TWDuke, I like your analogy: I loved The Hobbit but couldn’t get through Lord of the Rings. I will also have another go at Dubliners, I find high school was able to make the best books into crap. It’s true, I probably didn’t appreciate the gift of language that authors like this have, as a teenager. And these days I am in a language-appreciating mood.

(I’m reading Lolita right now, I was struck by the line

.

Lovely !)

7

Cowgirl,

Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist are the best places to start. Remember to read carefully. Joyce played much with words.

One of my favorites, one that I enjoyed teaching, was Araby. A lovely short story about the desires of our youth; and our search for that outside of our ordinary life. Try to put it in perspective. Going to a fair is not much in this day. But then, before TV and the like, this was an event. Especially in Catholic Ireland. And the fair was Araby. . .it has this tone of the distant deserts.

So we see lots of prejudices. The boy can’t leave until the “Irish Sot” returns home. He wants his penny’s worth of pleasure. The pleasure if foreign and forbidden. But by the time he gets there, all of the booths have closed and the carnival freaks are already retired.

Look at how he describes his feelings at the end of this story. Is this how you would expect him to feel? So why has Joyce chosen this particular emotion?

8

A good way to get into Joyce is to re-read Dubliners, especially the last story, “The Dead.” Read it slowly, allowing the gorgeous final paragraph to melt into your psyche. Then read Portrait and then Ulysses.

9

Do as others have suggested and go back to Dubliners. It’s not smart to jump directly into Ulysses. In fact, I love Ulysses but think that jumping into it is sheer madness.

Just take time with the stories. If they seem funny, laugh.

I’m not a big fan of guide books, etc…so I’m sure I miss plenty. But when you’re reading it for recreation, there’s no point in ruining it for yourself by ‘unmaking’ the story.

(Okay, there are little bits you sometimes need to look up. Like why it’s so awful that there’s a dish of clay in the fortune telling game)

AL

10

“Help me love James Joyce.”

That’s hard to help with. Know him and love him. I think that, for most readers, Dubliners really is a good place to start. The individual sketches are satisfying on their own, but taken together they are something more. You’ll see different shades each time you reread it.

It’s tempting to try to present you with an itemized list of things that seem significant to me, but really we’re talking about vivisection here. Joyce’s writing is brilliant because it’s all about what’s under the surface of things, and there are layers and layers contributing to the whole effect, and not in a clumsy way. He doesn’t clumsily say “Mr. Duffy felt x, because y,” pinning him down to a bit of pasteboard. He presents you with the surface of things, and artfully arranges for you to feel them as keenly as his characters do. He has a seemingly endless bag of tricks for managing it.

At the first look, it appears as though Joyce started out writing strictly realistic prose that was merely prettier and more affecting than most writers are capable of, and gradually became much more cerebral and “tricksy.” Really, he just became less concerned with concealing the art and artifice of his methods as he grew older, and, with hindsight, it’s clear that his entire body of work contains a sort of “back channel” that resonates with you at a level below the intellect. Well, damn if I’m not sounding like a vivisectionist.

Let’s leave it at: Joyce is subtle and beautiful. His prose works the way good poetry works. It’s a participatory experience, he’s not just using words to describe a narrow fixed perspective.

I think that, for most people, clay is a pretty unambiguous symbol, Mrs. Liffey. Nothing lasts foriver, and it’s lethe to forget that the midden wedge of the stream’s your muddy old triagonal delta.

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?

:wink:

11

Hello, Penman- the Post here.
Ah, but there’s the fact that the children have put the dish there without permission- polite society did not play the game that way. You got the Bible if you were going to be a spinster forever, as, if I remember correctly, she gets in the “replay”. It’s the fact that nasty little plate has crept up upon the party. It’s not so much what it means, I suppose, but what its presence means.

I’m still suffering from some Joyce burnout, actually. It’s essay season here, and I’ve done two on women- one Yeats and Joyce and the other Paul Muldoon.
AL

12

I saw James Joyce on a bus in San Francisco once. Which was really wierd, because he’d been dead for, like, fifty years. But I had a copy of The Dubliners in my backpack that had a photo of him on the cover, so I dug it out and copared on the spot. He was a dead-ringer. Right down to the steel-rimmed glasses and eye-patch.

Freaky.

13

Silly of me to think you meant something so obvious as the meaning of the “portents.” Sorry!

Definitely, it sometimes takes a little digging to get things that would be obvious to anyone familiar with contemporary Irish society. Thankfully Joyce wrote for the world and for posterity, so those bits tend to be underlined fairly clearly. (I remember having to look up the second verse of the song from The Bohemian Girl that Maria sang, to see exactly why she made the “mistake” of repeating the first verse in its stead, although it was easy enough to guess what was up in a general sort of way.)

That story is as precise and concise as a Swiss watch-- what is it, all of four pages? A perfect distillation of a lifetime of tiny stings, thoughtless rebukes, unintended insults, and well-meaning condescension. Maria is so stoic and seems to take her practical invisibility as natural. Joyce is so oblique about the feelings that an “insignifcant” encounter with a kind man stirred up in her, and the guilt that she feels when she realizes it took her mind off the all-important plum cake for a that crucial moment. (How selfish of her!)

For me, Joe is the big enigma of Clay. I can’t quite tell if he’s the only one who has some empathy for Maria, or if he’s just a maudlin drunk.

And that’s nothing Miller– I once saw James Joyce get into a drunken brawl with Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Charles Bukowski, but the rosy-fingered dawn approached, and they called a truce and retired to the long shadows before there was any clear winner. True story.

14

Well, now that I’ve seen the excerpt from the letter above, I just know that I’ll never think of him the same again, without the image of James “Mack-Daddy” Joyce gettin’ his freak on.:eek:

15

I second (or tenth) the idea of reading the books in the order inwhich they were written: Dubliners then Portrait then Ulysses.

I must strongly but respectfully disagree with Annalivia on the guides. I find them invaluable, especially for Ulysses, but also for the earlier works. I find that after going through the novels with the guides one can later enjoy them as novels rather than as brain stretching intellectual exercises. I’m guessing from your posts Annalivia that you are in an academic environment where you can get help from profs and other students. For someone in my situation, reading the book on my own, (which I am guessing is also Cowgirls situation), the guides provide a much needed substitute for that kind of academic interaction.

St. Martins press puts out an illustrated and annotated version of Dubliners. (at least they used to.)

I’ve seen annotations for Portrait but do not own one.

For Ulysses I recommend Don Gifford’s Ulysses annotated. I read each episode of Ulysses with this book open on one side and the actual novel open on the other. After this exercise I am now able to read Ulysses without any more effort than, say, a work by Dickens or Hemingway.

Also Stuart Gilbert was a contemporary and friend of Joyce’s. He wrote a book, more or less under Joyce’s supervision, called James Joyce’s Ulysses. This book lays out all the symbolic baggage that Joyce used, including all the allusions to The Odyssey. The book should be taken with two big grains of salt. First it gives the impression that Ulysses is nothing more than a game played with symbols, while it is much more than that. Also Gilbert was way more into the occult than Joyce. While Joyce was interested in the Occult–especially Theosophy–he was not a true believer. Gilbert was, and overstates the influence of the occult on Joyce.

Frank Budgen was a sailor and artist who befriended Joyce and to whom Joyce probably revealed more than he did to any other person. His book James Joyce and the making of Ulysses presents a much more human interpretation of Ulysses, centering more on the character of Bloom rather than the higher Games. It is a useful corrective to Gilbert and (IMHO) the best book on Ulysses around, providing almost as penetrating, sympathetic and sad view of human nature as the original book itself.

Also, if you know anyone from Dublin, listen closely to their accent, both the traditional Dublin accent and the softer “posh” accent of more well to do Dubliners. Reading Ulysses in this tone makes it surprisingly more accessable.

If you work through Ulysses you will be rewarded with one of the most beautiful works of art ever made. But its slow going at times. It took me a whole summer, where I was working only part time. Without the guides, particularly Gifford, I don’t know if I would have succeeded at all.

16

Heh…as a postgrad, I tend not to get too much help with anything. Usually, I get a dirty look and “you should know that”.

Actually, as the only Joyce fan in this crop of MLitts, I’ve watched some of the people in my lectures self-destruct in the guides. I entered the room early one day and was accosted by another student who asked me if I’d finished the assigned reading (we had a two weeks to read two chapters of Ulysses ). I said that I had, and she looked horrified. She’d gotten so bogged down reading the notes for everything and anything that she hadn’t even gotten the story out of it. Just a bunch of historical references.

So, perhaps I shall mend my ways and say use guide books, but with caution.

AL

17

Hardcore Joyceophile here. I concur with the consensus: Joyce really, really must be read in chronological order: his theories of writing evolved over time, and reading them out of order will most likely leave you extremely confused.

Also, don’t be afraid of secondary sources. I used to have everything Joyce ever wrote–maybe 9 inches worth of shelf space–and about 15 feet of Joyceana. The first secondary thing I read, which got me hooked into the whole universe for an obsessed 12 years or so, was “Re: Joyce” by Anthony Burgess. (I was on a Burgess kick at the time, but after Burgess referred me on to Joyce, I never really went back to Burgess, whom I think of, now, as like a poor man’s Joyce.

Ellman’s “Joyce” redefined the literary biography and is a bit dry, but endlessly fascinating. “My Brother’s Keeper” is an interesting book by Joyce’s brother, whose name escapes at the moment.

Check out the lit. crit. section of your bookstore or library, and read a little about Joyce to prepare you for the real thing. I bet I’ve read 10 pages of Joyceana for every page of Joyce I’ve read.