There is not an abstract idea that you can hold in your mind but words, poetic language that you can embody, so the story comes alive in the language itself.
READ and LISTEN simultaneously to Joyce’s ULYSSES. When you loose your way click on the U.C. “Ulysses Challenge” button and get an explanation of what is occurring in that particular section.
Samuel Beckett said Joyce was not to be read ‘it is to be looked at and listened to’ and we have begun this process with two episodes.
In Scylla and Charybdis we join a drunken Stephen Dedalus in the National Library in Kildare Street at 2.00 p.m. where he flits through a kaleidoscope of philology and theology to stupefy all present. Managing to fly like a Lapwing he leads his listeners astray as he upholds his thesis about Shakespeare. It is indeed a roller coaster ride not on the high seas but here in the library and allows one to experience the interface between a brilliant mind and the creative imagination.
Wandering Rocks takes us through the streets of Dublin at 3.00 p.m. a labyrinth, in which wander all the characters in “Ulysses”. It is full of little vignettes of activity. It absorbs us into the rhythm of this summer’s day and allows us to knit together the multiple characters that cross paths and feature throughout the book. It acts therefore as an excellent scaffold to grasp the many personalities, to give them names and to make connections as they occur in other sections of the book.
Throughout the selected texts click on the Ulysses Challenge button to read the relevant commentary.