18 Nameless Episodes of ‘Ulysses’: A New Key

One of the many unconventional features of Joyce’s entirely unconventional Ulysses is the lack of chapter numbers or titles. Aside from three Book divisions clearly marked with I, II, and III, Joyce’s pages do not give the reader any way of naming a particular episode. A title schema drawn from Homer’s Odyssey has long stood in for this deficiency, at least for those who have studied Ulysses. But these names do not appear in the novel itself and are, therefore, useless Greek to the average reader encountering the novel for the first time.

Wouldn’t discussion of Ulysses between all manner of readers be enhanced if everyone used a simpler, more intuitive naming scheme for the episodes, rather than one that requires specialized knowledge and memorization? The book has 18 episodes that can be detected on the printed page by page breaks and capitalization. Why not just refer to the episodes by number?

Does “Lotus Eaters” come early in the novel? Is it before or after “Wandering Rocks”? As an untutored Joyce reader, I have no idea. But I am pretty sure that “Ulysses 5” comes before “Ulysses 10” and that neither opens or closes the book.

Here is a proposed new naming convention for the 18 episodes of Ulysses. The new episode name is followed by the Homeric title and the first few words of the episode.

[ Book I – The Telemachiad – episodes 1-3 ]

1 – Telemachus – “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan”

2 – Nestor – “You, Cochrane”

3 – Proteus – “Ineluctable modality of the visible”

[ Book II – The Odyssey – episodes 4-15 ]

4 – Calypso – “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate”

5 – Lotus Eaters – “By lorries along Sir John Rogerson’s”

6 – Hades – “Martin Cunningham, first”

7 – Aeolus – “IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN”

8 – Lestrygonians – “Pineapple rock. Lemon platt, butter scotch”

9 – Scylla and Charybdis – “Urbane, to comfort them”

10 – Wandering Rocks – “The Superior, the Very Reverend”

11 – Sirens – “Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons”

12 – Cyclops – “I was just passing the time of day”

13 – Nausicaa – “The summer evening had begun to fold”

14 – Oxen of the Sun – “Deshil Holles Eamus”

15 – Circe – “The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown”

[ Book III – The Nostos – episodes 16-18 ]

16 – Eumaeus – “Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed”

17 – Ithaca – “What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen”

18 – Penelope – “Yes because he never did a thing like that before”

Bloomsday 2012: To/From Dublin with Love

Bloomsday, 16 June 2012.  James Joyce’s Ulysses has been in print for 90 years. It is now copyright-free in Europe. What better time for a global celebration of Ulysses that uses the sprawling social multimedia universe to bring Bloomsday from Dublin to the world and from the world to Dublin? Can new media be used to dive deeper into The Heart of the Joycean Juggernaut than ever before?

Sure it can, but how? Let’s hear your ideas. Post comments here and/or @2lysses,  and let’s get this collective show on the road!

 

Support “Ulysses” Adaptation in Dublin Next Month

Here’s your chance to help bring James Joyce’s Ulysses back to Dublin (where it belongs!).  Well, at least the latest stage adaptation of the great novel, which celebrates its freedom from copyright beginning this Sunday, January 1, 2012.

“Gibraltar” by Patrick Fitzgerald opens on New Years Day for a two week run at the New Theatre, Temple Bar, in the heart of Joyce’s Dublin. The play has been performed in New York and Philadelphia, but this marks its European debut. If all goes well, the show will return with a local cast around Bloomsday 2012.

But “Gibraltar” needs your help to be a success. Contribute to the Dublin production online via IndieGoGo. The deadline is January 20.

For tickets, visit http://www.thenewtheatre.com.

 

First-Time ‘Ulysses’ Readers to #OccupyUlysses

Earlier this week a Ulysses-watchful friend tipped me off to a growing Twitter thread having to do with something called #occupyulysses. I wondered: How can you stage a mass demonstration inside a novel? A few quick Tweets later and the mystery was at least semi-solved.

It appears that one or more followers of The Atlantic’s #1book140 book club, which selects and reads 1book over the course of a month, were miffed that their suggestion of James Joyce’s Ulysses was rebuffed. Undeterred, one (or more) of the Joyceans declared a splinter faction to attack the novel. Hence #occupyulysses or #ou140, for short. It seems that a three-month duration has been decided as the target reading time — wise given the Herculean challenge that is Ulysses.

This blog has rallied to support the nascent effort and will offer all manner of online support & encouragement. We hope all you Ulysses veterans out there will support these Ulysses virgins with comments posted here.

We hope to post weekly progress reports here (if received from the collective #Occupyulyssians). Feel free to send updates to sc11ysses@yahoo.com.

Onward, Brave Ulysses Readers!

 

Bloomsday on Twitter 2011: Call for Recallers

Were you one of the few thousand who followed the @11ysses Twittering of James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloomsday this year? Did our relentless day-long stream of tweets on June 16 leave an impression that you’d like to talk about?

We have been approached by an online publication in London to reflect back on this “Ulysses Meets Twitter” experiment for their January 2012 issue commemorating Ulysses. I’d like to assemble a group of 4 or 5 people to discuss their reactions to experiencing Ulysses in this odd way.  The discussion will be conducted via email (or maybe Twitter) and then edited for publication.

If you are interested in being a part of this discussion, please post a Comment to this blog post. Tell us a little about yourself and your Bloomsday experience with @11ysses, and include your Twitter name.

Let us hear from you by Saturday, October 22!

 

How “Ulysses” Met Twitter: Part the Last

Yes, yes, yes, I said Yes. This is the last (5th) installment of The Twittering of Ulysses (by James Joyce). An experiment conducted on Bloomsday, 16 June 2011.

 

How “Ulysses” Met Twitter 2011: Part 4

Attached here for your reading enjoyment is the 4th installment in our 5-part Twitterfication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, an act of social media committed on June 16, 2011, rendered herewith in glorious PDF.

In this episode, newsboys shout, time’s livid final flame leaps in, bats ding, and Bloom stands guard.

Previous installments are blogged below.

@11ysses Considered: “Our Home on Eccles Street”

 By Caetano Waldrigues Galindo, one of the @11ysses Bloomsday 2011 contributors.

In Dublin, in the James Joyce Centre, they have a door.

It’s the door to a house. A house that no longer exists, and that, in a very important way, has never existed. It’s the door to number 7, Eccles Street, taken from where it stood when the house was demolished.

That may be why the house no longer stands.

But as a matter of fact it may be said it is still there, because the reason so many of us have stood before it, photographed it and, even, written about it (QED), is the fact that we are not there to see the house, or the door, as in reality they may have existed. We are there to see, to touch, a little piece of the life of Leopold Bloom, who obviously never once touched that doorknob, who never held a candle that shone through its “semitransparent semicircular glass fanlight.”

We are there, by that door, to see if it opens for us (avid readers, intimate friends of Mr. Bloom’s) the ‘real’ reality of a made up world, where that fellow may still live.

*

For all of its importance as avant-garde, groundbreaking literature, I am sure (and the older I get, the surer I become) that what keeps us reading Ulysses is its sheer weight as a novel, a weight that can even be adequately measured by standards that were created for the classic novel. Amazing characters, solid psychological work, wisdom (as Harold “no-relation” Bloom would have it), beauty.

Love.

The opposite of hate, as our new “apostle to the gentiles” said at Barney Kiernan’s. That same man who in the beach, at dusk, summarized Dedalus’s concerns about the man and the world by thinking “longest way round is the shortest way home”, because he knew, as all of us know (and as Ulysses has been teaching us for almost a century), that we walk through ourselves always meeting ourselves.

Wisdom.

That’s why I read Ulysses. That’s why I’ve spent the last nine years translating it. To meet me. To learn about love and about the world. To try to touch the reality of the invented lives of Dedalus and the Blooms.

*

And this, now, is all to say that the whole experience of ‘tweading’ Ulysses has been, for me, a huge boon, a wonderful lesson about the relevance of the novel to so many persons, all over the world. And, at the same time, has made me (readers and translators tend to feel quite alone) feel I’m part of a group.

A group that, this time, was the group of the great Stephen Cole (a round of applause, please). But a group that, fundamentally, exists only as the group of Joyce’s sons, as the group of Leopold Bloom’s brothers.

We all live right behind that door.

And in this, the rarest occasion in which we’ve all shouted together, we’ve known the house is still inhabited.

Caetano Waldrigues Galindo teaches linguistics and translation theory in the Federal University of Paraná (Brazil). He has translated authors such as David Foster Wallace, Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Stoppard, Ali Smith and James Agee. His version of Ulysses will be published in March 2012.

How “Ulysses” Met Twitter 2011: Part 3

We hope you have enjoyed the previous installments of this Bloomsday experiment, rendered in glorious PDF. Here is Part the Third (of Five). Things get out of hand (hand in pocket?) in this installment, as Women take center stage: on the beach, in hospital, and in the fevered dream of Nighttown.

What bit is your favorite of this Twitter rendering of James Joyce’s Ulysses?

 

How “Ulysses” Met Twitter 2011: Part 2

For your continuing reading enjoyment, we present here the second part of our serialized re-telling of the Bloomsday 2011 Twitter experiment, once again downloadable in glorious PDF for your convenience and portability.

In this installment things begin by looking U.P., but conclude on the very different notes of Force, Hatred, and History for our persecuted hero Mr. Bloom.