Ulysses

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Summary: pedantism
Review: ULYSSES is so boring and ridiculous in its pedantism!

Rating:
Summary: To capture the evergoing present
Review: Joyce describes the ways that Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus follow, from dawn 'til night, on June 16, 1904. What's special about this day? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Bloom fixes breakfast, goes to the bathroom, does business, attends his friend Paddy Dignam's funeral, goes back to work, strolls on the beach, gets drunk with some friends, follows the party at a brothel, gets Dedalus out of a problem, and then invites him home for more drinks. Then he goes to sleep. Dedalus wakes up in Buck Mulligan's place (a tower), goes to teach at a school, wanders around the beach after visiting some relatives, goes to the library, in the evening he goes to a bar with some friends, and finally he meets Bloom at the brothel.

This immeasurable book is a desperate attempt at capturing the present, which is constantly escaping: the present on the inside and the outside of people. It is an absolute witness of what the characters see, hear, fell, smell, and speak to themselves. It is looking for utter simultaneousness, trying to be an absolut record of everything that goes thorugh the bodies and minds of the main characters. Meanings? Symbols? Interpretations? Infinite. This book leaves, among many others, the sensation that it has passed and left us blank; that we didn't retain anything, that we hold nothing of it: exactly the same sensation that the present leaves on us.

Every chapter parallels a chapter from Homer's "Odyssey", and each is written in a different style. As a literary work of art, it is incomparable: it uses language, symbols, syntaxis, pronouns, time, everything, in a unique way, in order to depict for us what happens to a person in a normal day.

A separate mention is deserved by the final chapter, the monologue of Molly Bloom. 50 pages without a period, a true masterpiece of stream-of-consciousness. A most faithful portrait of what goes through a woman's mind half awaken, half asleep, a summary of her life and her relationship with Leopold. It is necessary to read this passage in one single effort.

When reading "Ulysses", it is useful to keep in mind Marcel Proust's work. Proust seeks to recover the past long gone, while Joyce seeks to capture the present before it becomes past. This is an overwhelming book, irritating and, above all, admirable. It reaches unsuspected levels of creativity, experimentation and literary depth.

Some people don't like it: that's their prerrogative. But to say this is a phony or bad book, is to acknowledge one's laziness as reader. They're losing a tour-de-force in literature. Be sure you don't suffer the same fate.

Rating:
Summary: a capsule of all life's experiences
Review: Let me first start off by saying I love the book. Its language is of the likes I have never before seen. And, let me also say, that while people who hate this book will try to totally disparage it and, in my opinion, try to burn it, if they had the chance, you, the prospective reader of this book, should cast aside all preconceived notions, whether yours or others', about this book. Just as well: throw my comments about the book away, and decide for yourself (because that is just what I said). But keep the idea of deciding for yourself, and disregard all the ploys that people will try to get you to not read this book, and go read this book, you just might enjoy it.

Besides, how do other people know what you will like? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Rating:
Summary: Over Rated Sensationalism
Review: It was later said when Joyce was dead and buried that he had confessed to a close friend that "Uylsses" was a complete fabricated joke that he used to get revenge at the world with. He was drunk most of the time he had put pen to paper and he threw so much of the text out that its suprising that most people hold this pretentious amateurish work as the greatest novel of the last one hundred years. The prose is vague, uninspiring and chatoic, there is no plot line what-so-ever, it's just a meandering stream of undelicate and unsophisticated garble from a minor artist.

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Summary: Acting Roles & Creating Stories
Review: The reader of Ulysses is forced to continually reassert his perspective and understanding of point of view when reading the text. The narrative frequently shifts in perspective between Stephen, Bloom, the citizens of Dublin and a faceless narrator operating on levels internal and external. Language is used directly in speech and substantiation, as well as symbolically in mental thought and acquires transcendental meaning in grammatical and spelling reconfiguration.

Stephen's typological character is self-defined in Telemachus as that of a servant. As he explains to Haines, "I am the servant of two masters... the imperial British state... and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church." Whether this servitude is literal or self-inflicted, we do not know. We know from Mulligan's remonstrations of Stephen's actions at his dying mother's bedside that Stephen has struggled with the Catholic faith. We know from Haines' knowledge of Gaelic over the milkwoman's that there is a level of intellectual and political dominance in place. We also know this from Haines' self admission, "We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame." This is exactly a point where a reading of Ulysses accompanied by a fair knowledge of the political relationship of England to Ireland and an understanding of the rise of Nationalism during the time in which the novel was placed could add a good deal of understanding to the depths of the characters relations. This will continue to be the case throughout the novel as there are countless allusions to the history of the church and Ireland. There are frequent references by Stephen of historical heroes such as Pyrrhhus, Moses and Parnell who were frustrated while trying to lead a certain people out of bondage. The purpose of these references culminates in the important discussion between Stephen and Bloom toward the end of Ithica about Moses Maimonides and the chanting of the 113th psalm which celebrates the escape of the children of Israel from Egypt. These historic and theological references are important counterpoints to Stephen who in Telemachus declares himself not to be a hero. Though the narrative of the first few chapters can be followed fairly consistently without historic knowledge of this kind, in the later chapters the narrative will cease to make much sense when references are cited and counterpoised to create specific intellectual and sociological meanings in the lives of the characters. Once a fact or idea is raised it will surely resurface at a later time in the thoughts of a character and will be mulled over ad infinitum. It is the discourse of the narrative that gives the best illumination into the classification of characters.

Not only does Joyce span the forms of narrative from dialogue to subconscious hallucination, but also he twists the structure of language and words themselves to reassign meaning to language tools whose original purpose was to have a definitive meaning. Consider the final functional unit of the novel. Molly begins her soliloquy with the internal declaration, "Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed." The entire soliloquy could be labeled as the indicial knowledge which feeds into the question: will Molly bring Bloom's breakfast to their bed in the morning? However, in the course of this long final narrative the question is eclipsed by the question: will Molly continue to be unfaithful to Bloom? Directly after this is established, it is tempting to speculate about the meaning of the narrative rather than cling to the rules of understanding its structure. Before this point in the narrative we have only had a very short encounter with Molly. The most we have gathered about her character is that of an object of desire. This image is both reinforced and destroyed by her final soliloquy. The answer concerning the original question of breakfast appears to be in the positive as Molly has expressed disappointment in her lover and a remembered passion of her vow to Bloom. This speculation gives a more refined meaning to the narrative as a whole implying a cyclical nature to Dublin life. Molly will bring Bloom his breakfast and he will leave on another journey throughout Dublin leaving her to remain in the bedchamber as an image in the lascivious imagination of the world. This seems to be the consensus of overall criticism of Ulysses. But, as it seems the day of Ulysses was the first day Molly had an affair, this suggests daily life isn't as static as it might first appear and people have the propensity to break from their assigned roles. This is especially true as with Stephen, whose role was to find a father figure or a "home" in the novel, but Stephen leaves him/it when the discovery is made. Creating final and definitive answers to Ulysses meaning is impossible and we should remain aware of this in conjunction with our methods of reading.

Rating:
Summary: James Joyce Said It Best !
Review: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."

James Joyce

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Summary: Failed Literary Experiment
Review: Isn't it about time that people were honest about this book? It is a work of its time rather than anything of lasting interest.

We all know the background, at the turn of the century the art world was a kaleidoscope of new ideas and trends. In art there was Cézanne, Seurat, and Picasso. In music Scriabin was experimenting with the melding of music and light.

Artists were experimenting with form rather than looking at content. Sometimes these experiments worked other times they led to a dead end and were forgotten.

Ulysses is an experimental novel, one that uses the form of stream of consciousness. The form is at the expense of its readability and clarity. What happened with Joyce's experiment, it limped through Finegan's Wake which is so impenetrable it barely rates as a puzzle and died. Ulysses as an experimental art form is a dead end, and with good reason.

The sorts of things that made and make literature great are the sorts of things that Joyce rejects with his experiments in form. Literature is related to the content rather than the empty vessel of form.

This of course is not to say that Joyce was without talent. It is just a shame to see that his talent was wasted as he became immersed with the fashions of the time.

Rating:
Summary: Overblown nonsense
Review: Isn't about time someone stood up and spoke out about this book? Sure James Joyce was a writer of some talent as shown by his early short stories and his Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. But this book?

When he wrote it Joyce was in the hands of the European artistic progressives. They had rejected the notion of contest in favor of form. That is hypnotized by that arch braggart Wagner they accepted the delusion that art must continually progress and change form. When he wrote art generally was subject to continual change in style. Picassos went through his various periods, French Art struggled through Impressionism, Cubism and so on.

James Joyce moving in those circles felt that he had to reject the form and grammar of his predecessors. That is he had to reject the way of writing which made Dickens, Eliot, Austin and Conrad the giants of literature that they were. What in fact is wrong with the use of grammar and the English Language. It has given us masterpieces such as Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth.

With Ulysses you can see a novel peeking out from behind the obscure language. Joyce's talent was such that even he could not write something absolutely bad but what a tragedy that such a dud ideology could destroy the work of so potentially gifted a writer.

You know its true.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book, now given context
Review: Almost everything that can be said about one of the world's greatest works, has been, but there is a good reason to buy this edition as oposed to the dozens of others. That is that one of the most interesting comentaries on Ulysses was the court descision by Judge John M. Woolesy allowing its importaition to the US. A landmark case for free speech, it is included with a foreward and other usefull information, producing an excellent edition of an excellent novel.

Rating:
Summary: Ulysses
Review: Simply put, this is the ultimate novel. While it may appear dry in the get-go, you are quickly addicted. Ulysses has tons of fascinating psycho-babble with plenty of believable storyline aspects and character developments to back it up. This one of the rare few books that you must own.