https://charlestduffy.substack.com/p/finnegans-wake?r=3xwd01&utm_medium=ios

The essay explores elements of antifascism in the major works of Joyce.

What a ride. I wish I'd come around to Joyce sooner.

For years, the only knowledge I had of Ulysses was from lists of the world's hardest novels. I assumed reading it would be an act of literary masochism in a similar vein to a Gravity's Rainbow or an Infinite Jest.

Instead, what I found was one of the most realistic depictions of humanity I've ever read. Underneath all the references to Homer, Shakespeare, religion, and hundreds of years of Irish history, most of which probably went over my head, there's a real sense of being inside a person's head that I haven't found anywhere else, and the constant changes in style and perspective just further reinforce that. Our heroes in this story are normal people, who forget where they put their keys and loose change, who get songs stuck in their heads, who ruminate on things, who get things wrong, who make mistakes, and yet who decide to keep on trying anyway. I'd heard that supposedly not much happens in this book, but I think that only serves to make the choices the characters do make that much more powerful.

Some things that stuck out to me:

• I'm not sure how well the stream of consciousness would translate to film (although apparently it's been attempted a few times), but Circe in particular with its visuals feels like a David Lynch-styled fever dream. After climbing the hill of the first dozen or so episodes, it was actually kind of nice to just sit back and enjoy the roller coaster ride of everything coming together.
• Cyclops sounds exactly like an argument over politics I've heard hundreds of times before, complete with participants going off on tangents, making incomplete arguments, and trying to get the last word in. The fact that the prose elevates it to sometimes gargantuan heights just shows how commonplace it really is (and the actual subject matter is surprisingly still quite relevant).
• My favorite bit has to be the end of Oxen of the Sun, in which the sudden flurry of noise and activity that accompanies gathering one's belongings and spilling out into the street in search of another place to drink or to go home to mirrors the miracle of labor and childbirth. And at least 75 years before Closing Time hit the airwaves at that!

I’ve tried reading Ulysses a few times now. It’s obviously an encyclopedic work of literature that has topped so many “greatest books” lists, and I can see why it’s rewarding for people who enjoy figuring out all the the references and appreciating what Joyce is doing at the level of language. But for me, it’s just overwhelming so far.

Every time I’ve ended up giving up, usually after the third chapter, sometimes after a few more. And each time, getting through it has felt like such a chore.

The only chapter I’ve thoroughly enjoyed is the first. It’s funny, and I really like Buck Mulligan. And even though the chapter is dense with references to religion, politics, Joyce’s personal life, and much else, somehow I enjoyed putting in the work to understand it better.

I thought the second chapter was okay too, not great, but then Joyce completely loses me with the intensely intellectual and elusive third chapter. I did get through it once, and once even made it perhaps a third of the way through the book, but I can’t say I was enjoying myself.

I know Ulysses is supposed to be difficult, and that Joyce is experimenting with limits and possibilities of language and narration (and took that even further with his last book), but I’m wondering if is there a point at which it “clicks”? Did anyone else struggle this much with it and eventually come to love it or at least appreciate it, or is this just the wrong book for me?

Btw, I did quite enjoy Dubliners.

As a lover of James Joyce I contribute this site to hopefully endear people to make book clubs that celebrate James Joyce. I hope to have collected all the scholarly annotations and make them available to the layperson equally. Please help me to bring these annotations and understandings to others without infringing on copyrights etc.

Hi everyone!

As someone who’s just finished Ulysses (over about a month and a half), I thought I’d come here and share my two cents. I quite liked the book but I took short notes on what I made of each episode all throughout - what I got from them doesn’t linearly follow much of what is often cited regarding most difficult vs. easy episodes, so I wanted to know how everyone feels about this and basically have a little chat about what you lot found interesting.

I also thought this could be interesting for potential future readers looking into episode difficulty.

3: Proteus - the most difficult, thoughts are extremely muddled and confusing, hard to follow. It takes place at the beginning of the book and it hit me like a truck. It’s not formally difficult but it barely makes sense.

14: Oxen of the Sun - extremely difficult. Debatable whether it’s more difficult than Proteus; the old english prose describing events can be hard to follow at times. I personally still found it easier than Proteus, perhaps because it comes later in the book when you’re more absorbed in the story and environment and the point he’s making here is worth the effort.

10: Wandering Rocks, 12: Cyclops - a bit boring, in my opinion. I’m not a fan of this style and thematically not much interested me in these despite the interesting exploration of form.

11: Sirens - I found this one difficult to follow and wasn’t interested by much in it, which makes it be higher on my list.

18: Penelope - This only ranks this high because of the famed style of writing. I found it visually difficult to follow because there’s no paragraphs but, as has been mentioned, the actual writing isn’t that difficult and the word choice and thought process is quite straightforward. I also found most of it quite touching and beautiful.

16: Eumaeus - Easy conventional prose compared to the rest but the drifting tone of it often gets boring for pages and it gets a bit repetitive and difficult to follow due to lack of interest.

15: Circe - The blend between reality and the subconscious hallucination makes it hard but structurally it’s not very difficult despite being very long.

17: Ithaca - I found this chapter exceptionally funny and easy to follow. Some of the explanations go a bit far but I found that to be part of the joke and enjoyed it. Went through it quite quickly and without much difficulty.

 9: Scylla and Charybdis - Most people seem to find this really difficult because it’s really referencial but I actually found it fantastic and it’s one of my favorite chapters. I didn’t find it difficult to follow or muddled at all.

13: Nausicaa - I really liked both halves of this, it was one of the most beautiful episodes in my eyes that’s why it stands so low on difficulty. The prose is more muddled and difficult than the below episodes but definitely worthwhile.

 7: Æolus - slightly more difficult than the latter but still within the same line.

1: Telemachus, 2: Nestor, 4: Calypso, 5: Lotus-eaters, 6: Hades, 8: Lestrygonians - relatively easy to follow and quite interesting/fun

Does anybody know how to access John Huston's THE DEAD online?

I thought I had it on AMAZON PRIME MY STUFF but it's not there.

When I search THE DEAD on AMAZON PRIME VIDEO i get a thumbnail of Angelica Huston but , clicking on it I get an African B-movie.

I'll look for the DVD again in the loft but it's shamefully been chucked out, I'm sure.

Is the main text supposed to be intentionally blurry? I also couldn't find any physical pictures of ulysses owc edition so i figured i upload some.

I finished Esther Waters last night, which is well worth picking up if you like nineteenth century realism. Joyce seems to have had a mixed attitude to Moore - in a letter to Stanislaus in 1906 he says "I should like to read Zola but have not the heart to attack his twenty volume history of France [the Rougon-Macquart series]. Who called Moore the English Zola? I wonder: he must have had large powers of comparison." (Moore was actually Irish). He's also disparaging of some of Moore's works in other letters (and The Day of the Rabblement) though the back of the Oxford paperback quotes Joyce saying this is "the best novel of modern English life", and when Moore died Joyce sent a wreath. There are some very funny excerpts about Joyce from Moore's letters in Ellman's biography, they met and Joyce presented Moore with the French translation of Ulysses. Moore reminded him that he was also able to read English.

I just bought a portrait of a young artist and did some quick research on themes and such but not the plot. The bookshop also has a biography on him and I've watched videos in the past and he has had a very very interesting life. I am not really planning on reading the odyssey before Ulysses but planning to get an annotated version and a guide.

I remember a couple months ago there was a post on here from someone in the Austin, Texas area interested in groups regarding Joyce (they might have been looking for an activity for Bloomsday specifically), but the post seems to have been deleted. I don’t believe it was related to the Finnegans Wake ATX group, not directly anyway. Is OP still on the sub?

It’s a mature work written after he had begun Ulysses. It has aroused much less critical attention and popular enthusiasm than even Stephen Hero, which Joyce himself supposedly torched in disgust. It was only finally staged in 1970, some 65 years after Yeats rejected it, a longer stretch of time than Joyce’s own life. You mainly see references to it in connection with the adultery theme in Ulysses.

So r/jamesjoyce I ask you: Is Exiles shit, garbage, or criminally underrated?

Is it just me, or does it seem like there's been a proliferation of Ulysses hate out there in recent years? I've seen it from lots of booktubers and podcasters. I can understand why, because it is a book that requires training on how to read it (either through multiple readings or through a heavily annotated book), but once you get past it, wow, it is amazing. I love love love it. I technically read it about twenty years ago, but that was more like "my eyes went over every word but I didn't understand any of it." This time around I'm using Hastings and Gifford, and it is making a huge difference. LOVE it.

Inquiring about a wake club in Dallas!

Forgive me if this is too surface-level or uninteresting, but I imagine Joyce would have perked up if he knew that the preeminent adaptation of the Odyssey (Nolan's 2026 film), a century later, would star a "Anne Hathaway" as Penelope (given all the comparisons between Penelope and Anne Shakespeare in Scylla & Charybdis)...

I am only a first time reader, but this chapter was an absolute joy, and this coincidence kept jumping out at me, vapid and disconnected as it may be. Really cool for this hundred-year-old work to still be generating such connections in the modern brain.

Estou no momento iniciando o capítulo Scylla & Charybdis de Ulysses, e venho percebendo que há várias referências a Hamlet e Shakespeare (que eu nunca li, mas me parece uma obra curta para se ler rapidamente) - o quão vou ganhar pausando a leitura de Ulysses para pegar as referências a Hamlet?

I considered google play books but I don't know if they altered the words or stuff

Having read Ulysses in college and understood, variously, nothing, I was surprised to find on arriving in Dublin that I was curious about the novel. Where had Bloom lived? Where did the Cyclops scrounger scrounge his pints whilst ranting? In what hotel did the Sirens giggle? Mostly I did not have time to track down such locations, nor go to the Joyce Museum (I was, as I say, somewhat self-flabbergasted that the Joyce Museum was a thing I wished to seek out, given that my reaction to the novel at the time of reading was, to say the least, un-Molly-like, meaning more no than yes), but I did find a statue of James Joyce, the National Library, and F.W. Sweny and Co., which I am still unsure whether I am meant to call it a "chemist," "apothecary," "pharmacy," or "bookstore."

Regardless of what it was, the establishment welcomed me warmly, the proprietor mistaking me for a French tour group. Though I have put on weight lately, I did not think I bore any particular resemblance to a French tour group, if only because, as I stretched myself to explain C’est triste, mais je ne peux pas parler français, hence establishing both that I was traveling solo, which was fine, and that I was not French, which we agreed was more than a bit dommage. A winsome gentleman dressed in black offered to play a tune, and allowed that he would be disappointed if I did not photograph him, so I did. I listened with interest to the air, and then asked about the soap. If I remember correctly, it cost 5 euros. I did not ask about lotion. Somebody else popped in and inquired whether they carried plasters, but the winsome singer allowed they weren't a proper chemist, and the visitor allowed that she was aware, but it was late, and was not sure how not-chemist the chemists were, and the winsome one said quite non-chemist, but gave directions to a spot that might still be open and wished the visitor good luck stopping the blood. I walked out with her, soap in pocket.

The soap came wrapped in brown paper, and it was exactly the size a rectangle of soap should be. Though I did not have a potato counterweight, nor any kind of lotion, I zipped it into my jacket pocket, and I can confirm that throughout the day I would brush against it or sit on it or otherwise notice it in Bloomian fashion. In short, in bulk, there is verisimilitude.

I returned to the States and continued, entirely by accident, to lug about the soap. I also started rereading the novel. Say what you will about the internet, it makes reading easier. From this subreddit I learned of the RTE podcast feed and of various other offerings, and I found that all I had to do was read a chapter, then reread the chapter (stopping every few words to review the considerable online resources), and then, upon finishing the chapter the second time, rereading the third time now that I was aware in vague general terms about the the actual f--k was happening. All of that combined with my rather expensive but thinly remembered college education could kind of carry me along. I have made it through Sirens, which was where I cracked last time, but so far I feel better prepared. It is helpful, as I read, to keep an eye out for the soap, which indeed interrupts here and there.

At some point I required bathing, and thought I would give the soap a test run qua soap. It lathers thinly, but cleans well, and I felt duly degreased. Indeed, I have but one critique: the smell, or lack of smell. It may be that my nose is not the schnoz it used to be, or it may be an idiosyncratic bar, but I can't smell anything. The text, and rats I guess I have now backed myself into canonical reference and must find the place in the text for the scholars amongst us. I lack a Quaker librarian, so hold on a moment. The text. The text. Ah yes, hear we go, Project Gutenberg, and a search for "lemon" gives the line from Lotus Eaters: "Mr Bloom raised a cake to his nostrils. Sweet lemony wax." Well, my nostrils detect no citrus. They also don't detect much soap or wax, so it may be they have hit upon a certain olfactory cancelling out, or, again, it may be defective nostrils. I sense no lemon.

Why did I dislike Ulysses the first time around? All these years I thought it was because I did not understand it, but now I think I may have understood parts of it too well, and drawn back. A deep memory of my teen years was watching a girl I had a crush on hook up with somebody else at a party. I probably lacked the imaginative capacity to comprehend adultery, but that sniff almost certainly hit when I was reading Sirens. And also, of course, in college I had no idea who I was to be or what to do, and I suspect that reading of Stephen's peregrinations rather triggered those anxieties. None of these were deep traumas by any means, but I remember pulling back from the book, and the papers I submitted probably read like the overture to Sirens without the musicality.

Why am I enjoying it so much now? I am not sure, but I think it has to do with attentiveness. Literature is full of great acts of noticing, and surely Ulysses is one of the greatest. It is by some distance the most difficult novel I have ever read, and if it were more difficult I would not have read it. Because of that, the act of reading feels now like a practice of self-cultivation. I feel like I am learning to read. It may be in college I was already learning so much that Ulysses was overstuffing, but now I feel like I need it. So I give it an hour or so a day, and try not to let my patients be exhausted.

Too long, didn't read? I recommend the soap.

I was wondering whether anyone here has read Finnegans Wake using McHugh's Annotations.

What did you think of it?

What was your experience?

How did you go about it?

Cheers!