I’m a week into my Ulysses reading group. I’ve been going back and forth between the book and a massive Annotated copy which …. “thorough” doesn’t even cover it. Line by line by line. Every reference delineated/explicated/spelunked: every locale, bawdy song, apocalyptic Irish saint, nursery rhyme, slang, 16th century political figure … It’s there. (I find it extremely refreshing that some references remain elusive. The editor admits as much, saying, in so many words, “I realize this is a reference to SOMEthing but I’ll be damned if I know what the hell it is.” Cue James Joyce: “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.” Sometimes the back-and-forth of this reading process is unwieldy in the extreme. I’m in the “Proteus” episode right now, where Stephen wanders on the beach, the first real submersion into the subjectivity of his mind, and … every single line sends me to the Annotated copy. I can’t move forward without it, whether we’re dealing with French/Latin phrases, snippets of Italian, or … my own gnawing sensation that the man is trying to tell me something and it SOUNDS like English but something is lost in translation. This kind of thing is fun for me, and it also makes me feel close to my dad. The fun part about it is all that is happening in the section is a young man takes a walk on the beach before he meets up with his friend. He has time to kill. He walks on the beach. That’s it. We’re not talking earth-shattering plot points here. I am trying to keep up with the group, and I’m pretty much on pace. I only do a little bit a day because there’s only so much of this I can take.
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