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notficJames Joyce's novel Ulysses is widely considered, by those who have read it, to be the great novel of the 20th century. It's widely considered, by those who haven't read it, to be an abstruse and impossible to read novel. It's widely considered, by those who have read it, a novel of great joy and humor. It's widely considered, by those who haven't read it, the kind of novel that nobody has actually read. I have strong opinions about this divide.
Ulysses is about, if it's about any one thing, 1904 Dublin and its inhabitants. Its particular focus is on two men and one woman: young poet Stephen Dedalus, middle class ad salesman Leopold Bloom and Leopold's opera singer wife Molly Bloom.
I wanted to throw up some notes on why it has a lot to offer to a transformative fannish community.
1)Slashy Subtext. Stephen/Buck subtext drives the Scylla and Charybdis chapter pretty thoroughly. It's almost too obvious to call it subtext. On the other hand, the Stephen/Bloom subtext of the later chapters (especially Ithaca, but also Circe) requires more analysis to see.
Buck Mulligan is a medical student who shares a home with Stephen and in the novel's famous opening scene, he walks up to Stephen in an open dressing gown, hiding nothing.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
It um... moves on from there to a comic parody of a black mass. Nobody's going to deny that Ulysses is a very strange book. :P
Stephen and Buck are on the outs, ostensibly about a British houseguest named Haines who kept them from sleeping the night before, but really about deeper relationship issues. Buck is poor but on a path to respectability. Stephen is poor and drifting further away from reality. Stephen thinks Buck doesn't respect him. Buck thinks Stephen doesn't like him. (Both are probably right, to an extent. Ulysses is not a sitcom, where misunderstanding drives the conflict, only to be cleared up in the third act. There are fundamental issues at stake and they're not easily resolvable)
They bounce off each other extraordinarily well. Buck is funny in a crude and nasty way. Stephen's funny in a subtle and clever way.
"History, said Stephen, is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake."
"–My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn’t it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?"
By Hellenic we see another hint at their relationship, Greek standing in for homosexual throughout the book, though it also holds meaning as a literary and theological referent. Mulligan describes Bloom as "Greeker than the greeks," and while none of Bloom's extensive internal monologuing gives us much evidence of this, the paternal tone his relationship with Stephen takes could easily (and has easily) been construed as sexual in nature. Going into this novel with slash goggles offers plenty to seize upon.
2)Crackfic potential.
150 pages of the novel, the fearsome Circe section, is a long string of crackfic AUs that throw the characters into a variety of surreal situations.
Bloom is reimagined as a politician, a farmer, a prisoner, a submissive, and has various ghostly visitations. After Circe, it's hard to think of a situation you can't throw Bloom into. Astronaut AU? Why not? Schoolboy AU? Been there, done that. Thought SGA was the king of strange AUs? Think again.
And Stephen's hallucinatory experiences are, if anything, even more dreamlike and odd.
Circe is traditionally where it goes off the rails for many readers of Ulysses. They've been going through the book, struggling with some parts, enjoying others, and then they get to Circe and get lost in the frantic hallucinations. But I think fandom is so used to strange AUs that there are people who might think that's the place where it finally gets good. I know that when I'm a couple beers in, I start coming around to that opinion.
3)Meta. Fandom loves self-aware storytelling. The Wincest writer who invaded the show stirred up Supernatural fandom for months. Well, this is Ulysses we're talking about. It's intertextual, metatextual, supertextual, subtextual, sextextual, you name it, we've got it, step right up! Never has there been a book so aware that it was a book as Ulysses. Never has there been a book as aware of its readers.
Hell, there's a man in a mackintosh who wanders through the pages of the book, a total enigma to the reader, and many critics think it's Joyce himself, keeping an eye on the proceedings.
4)Secondary and Tertiary canon galore! The chapter titles I've been using, Circe and Ithaca and Proteus and the like... those aren't canon. Those are fanon titles that gained so much currency that contemporary printings of the book often use them. There is so much fanon about this book it's ridiculous. Several friends of Joyce published their memories of conversations with Joyce about the book and these comments, though unofficial, often ludicrous and totally contradictory, form a crucial part of the discussion of the book. There are fanzines all over the place, with my favorite being Joyce Quarterly. Fanzines sound so much more sophisticated when you call them academic journals, don't they?
And then there's tertiary canon, too, spinoffs and homages from a huge number of later writers. Samuel Delany borrows from and riffs on Ulysses in Dhalgren. Foster Wallace rips off scenes, files off the serial numbers, and then throws in sly winks to let you know what he's doing in Infinite Jest. There isn't a post-modern writer around who hasn't written either Ulysses pastiche or Ulysses fanfic in some form. Molly's concluding monologue has been turned into three different songs by different musicians.
There's a liberating democracy in the fandom that comes from nobody having any clue what's going on. Anybody can propose a theory and discover they've had a thought that nobody's had before. There's a shared struggle in the fandom, on the one hand, to tame canon and make sense out of it and on the other hand, to subvert it as forcefully as possible.
So that's a perspective on Ulysses. There are many perspectives on Ulysses, many hundreds of ways to successfully read the book. But this is one way, and the reason I wanted to share it is because I wanted to gauge interest in a transformative fandom reading of Ulysses. The only fanwork I've written is a Malachi Mulligan double dactyl, but I think it'd be fun to read the book while swapping back and forth commentfics and cracky theories with the kind of people who do that even while watching far less rich source materials. Ulysses is the kind of book that is improved in the sharing and in the building of communities around it. If you'd be interested in a community for that sort of reading/rereading of Ulysses, let me know.
Ulysses is about, if it's about any one thing, 1904 Dublin and its inhabitants. Its particular focus is on two men and one woman: young poet Stephen Dedalus, middle class ad salesman Leopold Bloom and Leopold's opera singer wife Molly Bloom.
I wanted to throw up some notes on why it has a lot to offer to a transformative fannish community.
1)Slashy Subtext. Stephen/Buck subtext drives the Scylla and Charybdis chapter pretty thoroughly. It's almost too obvious to call it subtext. On the other hand, the Stephen/Bloom subtext of the later chapters (especially Ithaca, but also Circe) requires more analysis to see.
Buck Mulligan is a medical student who shares a home with Stephen and in the novel's famous opening scene, he walks up to Stephen in an open dressing gown, hiding nothing.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
It um... moves on from there to a comic parody of a black mass. Nobody's going to deny that Ulysses is a very strange book. :P
Stephen and Buck are on the outs, ostensibly about a British houseguest named Haines who kept them from sleeping the night before, but really about deeper relationship issues. Buck is poor but on a path to respectability. Stephen is poor and drifting further away from reality. Stephen thinks Buck doesn't respect him. Buck thinks Stephen doesn't like him. (Both are probably right, to an extent. Ulysses is not a sitcom, where misunderstanding drives the conflict, only to be cleared up in the third act. There are fundamental issues at stake and they're not easily resolvable)
They bounce off each other extraordinarily well. Buck is funny in a crude and nasty way. Stephen's funny in a subtle and clever way.
"History, said Stephen, is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake."
"–My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn’t it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?"
By Hellenic we see another hint at their relationship, Greek standing in for homosexual throughout the book, though it also holds meaning as a literary and theological referent. Mulligan describes Bloom as "Greeker than the greeks," and while none of Bloom's extensive internal monologuing gives us much evidence of this, the paternal tone his relationship with Stephen takes could easily (and has easily) been construed as sexual in nature. Going into this novel with slash goggles offers plenty to seize upon.
2)Crackfic potential.
150 pages of the novel, the fearsome Circe section, is a long string of crackfic AUs that throw the characters into a variety of surreal situations.
Bloom is reimagined as a politician, a farmer, a prisoner, a submissive, and has various ghostly visitations. After Circe, it's hard to think of a situation you can't throw Bloom into. Astronaut AU? Why not? Schoolboy AU? Been there, done that. Thought SGA was the king of strange AUs? Think again.
And Stephen's hallucinatory experiences are, if anything, even more dreamlike and odd.
Circe is traditionally where it goes off the rails for many readers of Ulysses. They've been going through the book, struggling with some parts, enjoying others, and then they get to Circe and get lost in the frantic hallucinations. But I think fandom is so used to strange AUs that there are people who might think that's the place where it finally gets good. I know that when I'm a couple beers in, I start coming around to that opinion.
3)Meta. Fandom loves self-aware storytelling. The Wincest writer who invaded the show stirred up Supernatural fandom for months. Well, this is Ulysses we're talking about. It's intertextual, metatextual, supertextual, subtextual, sextextual, you name it, we've got it, step right up! Never has there been a book so aware that it was a book as Ulysses. Never has there been a book as aware of its readers.
Hell, there's a man in a mackintosh who wanders through the pages of the book, a total enigma to the reader, and many critics think it's Joyce himself, keeping an eye on the proceedings.
4)Secondary and Tertiary canon galore! The chapter titles I've been using, Circe and Ithaca and Proteus and the like... those aren't canon. Those are fanon titles that gained so much currency that contemporary printings of the book often use them. There is so much fanon about this book it's ridiculous. Several friends of Joyce published their memories of conversations with Joyce about the book and these comments, though unofficial, often ludicrous and totally contradictory, form a crucial part of the discussion of the book. There are fanzines all over the place, with my favorite being Joyce Quarterly. Fanzines sound so much more sophisticated when you call them academic journals, don't they?
And then there's tertiary canon, too, spinoffs and homages from a huge number of later writers. Samuel Delany borrows from and riffs on Ulysses in Dhalgren. Foster Wallace rips off scenes, files off the serial numbers, and then throws in sly winks to let you know what he's doing in Infinite Jest. There isn't a post-modern writer around who hasn't written either Ulysses pastiche or Ulysses fanfic in some form. Molly's concluding monologue has been turned into three different songs by different musicians.
There's a liberating democracy in the fandom that comes from nobody having any clue what's going on. Anybody can propose a theory and discover they've had a thought that nobody's had before. There's a shared struggle in the fandom, on the one hand, to tame canon and make sense out of it and on the other hand, to subvert it as forcefully as possible.
So that's a perspective on Ulysses. There are many perspectives on Ulysses, many hundreds of ways to successfully read the book. But this is one way, and the reason I wanted to share it is because I wanted to gauge interest in a transformative fandom reading of Ulysses. The only fanwork I've written is a Malachi Mulligan double dactyl, but I think it'd be fun to read the book while swapping back and forth commentfics and cracky theories with the kind of people who do that even while watching far less rich source materials. Ulysses is the kind of book that is improved in the sharing and in the building of communities around it. If you'd be interested in a community for that sort of reading/rereading of Ulysses, let me know.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 05:08 pm (UTC)I think all your re-write ideas sound like a lot more fun.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 07:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 07:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 07:04 pm (UTC)Being public domain, it'd be easy to setup an online reading/discussion group, with chapter/section quoting at will. And of course, some aspiring fanficcer could write Ulysses & The Goblin Hordes or whatever the next wave of classic/monster mashups is doomed to be.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 07:23 pm (UTC)I've been joking about Finnegans Wake and Slake Moths for a while. However, I think Ulysses has enough ghostly creatures without adding any more. At a certain point they're going to get to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock & Mermaids" and realize that the Modernists weren't afraid of writing fantasy.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 07:34 pm (UTC)... You wrote Ulysses & the Goblin Hordes?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 07:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-13 07:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-14 06:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-06 07:14 pm (UTC)*makes note on library list*
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-06 07:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-06 07:37 pm (UTC)