Supplementary Reading
Post date: Apr 27, 2013 3:47:32 PM
Just picked up this book at The Strand Bookstore in NYC for a few bucks, everybody should check it out:
To check out on Amazon: Click here.
Although I have only read the introduction so far (because I'm kinda busy reading the real deal and I promised myself I wouldn't consult secondary materials this first time through...), but this looks like a great introduction/supplement to a close reading of the classic.
His basic premise is, and I quote from the dusk jacket for clarity: "Ulysses is not an esoteric work for the scholarly few but indisputably a work rooted in the lives of ordinary citizens, offering a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life in the modern world".
The subtitle alone entices me to read more of Ulysses, "the art of everyday life in Joyce's masterpiece".
I have failed many times to read this novel because I often get bogged down in trying to understand, trying to uncover esoteric references, when this is not at all the true beauty of the book. Joyce, through the interior and bodily observations of chiefly Leopold Bloom, was attempting to quantify the impossibly unquantifiable human mind and body experience, in all its extraordinarily beautiful mundaneness. As I read the book, I find myself observing the world slightly different, noticing banal details that would have escaped my conscious mind earlier, making the everyday moments of life beautiful. Existential clarity, it seems to Joyce, comes through the conscious recognition and awareness of our surroundings, our minds, our bodies, and the people in our lives. Profound stuff.
Another helpful observation that Ulysses and Us does for my own reading of the book is the classification of the various chapters into human actions, chartering the activities of June 16, 1904 into chapter headings labeled as gerunds.
For those who do not have the book and do not aim to read it, I will provide the chapter titles because I really think they will aid in your reading of Ulysses and help you focus on how the novel focuses on the mundane human actions in our everyday lives
(much more helpful, I believe than Stuart Gilbert's 1930 classification, (otherwise known as the "Gorman-Gilbert schema) of each chapter into Homeric parallels with connections to different body parts...but perhaps we could debate this later, what do you say Dr. Baldwin?):
Walking
Learning
Thinking
Walking
Praying
Dying
Reporting
Eating
Reading
Wandering
Singing
Drinking
Ogling
Birthing
Dreaming
Parenting
Teaching
Loving