Great Books Audio

Ulysses – Episode 4

Episode 4,  Calypso
The narrative shifts abruptly. The time is again 8 a.m., but the action has moved across the city to Eccles Street and to the second protagonist of the book, Leopold Bloom, a part-Jewish advertising canvasser. Bloom lives at No. 7 Eccles Street and is preparing breakfast at the same time as Mulligan in the tower. He walks to a butcher to purchase a pork kidney for his breakfast and returns to finish his cooking. He brings breakfast and the mail to his wife Molly, whose given name is Marion. He reads his own letter from their daughter, Milly. The chapter closes with his plodding to the outhouse and defecating.

Continue reading...

Ulysses – Episode 3

Episode 3, Proteus

In this chapter, characterized by its stream of consciousness narrative style, the action is presented to the reader through the prism of Stephen’s interior monologue. He finds his way to Sandymount Strand and mopes around for some time, mulling various philosophical concepts, his family, his life as a student in Paris, and again, his mother’s death. As Stephen reminisces and ponders, he lies down among some rocks, watches a couple and a dog, writes some poetry ideas, picks his nose, and urinates behind a rock.

Photo of Sandymount Strand by Chris Powersmith

Continue reading...

Ulysses – Episode 2

Episode 2, Nestor

Stephen is teaching a history class on the victories of Pyrrhus of Epirus. The class is visibly bored, unconcerned with the subject and not disciplined. Before seeing the boys out of the classroom for a game of hockey, Stephen tells the students a cryptic and impenetrable riddle about a fox burying his grandmother under a bush, which falls flat. One student, Sargent, stays behind so that Stephen can show him how to do a set of arithmetic exercises. Stephen indulges him, but looks at the aesthetically unappealing Sargent and tries to imagine Sargent’s mother’s love for him. Afterwards, Stephen visits the anti-semitic school headmaster, Mr. Deasy, from whom he collects his pay and a letter to take to a newspaper office for printing. Deasy lectures Stephen on the satisfaction of money earned and the importance of efficient money-management. This scene is the source of some of the novel’s most famous lines, such as Dedalus’s claim that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” and that God is “a shout in the street.” He rejects Deasy’s biased recollection of past events, which he uses to justify his prejudices. At the end of this episode, Deasy makes another incendiary remark against the Jews, stating that Ireland has never extensively persecuted the Jews because they were never let in to the country.

Continue reading...

Ulysses by James Joyce – Episode 1

Ulysses, the novel by James Joyce, chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title parallels and alludes to Odysseus (Latinised into Ulysses), the hero of Homer’s Odyssey (e.g., the correspondences between Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus). Joyce fans worldwide now celebrate June 16 as Bloomsday.

Ulysses totals about 265,000 words from a vocabulary of 30,030 words (including proper names, plurals and various verb tenses), divided into 18 “episodes”. Since publication, the book has attracted controversy and scrutiny, ranging from early obscenity trials to protracted textual “Joyce Wars.” Ulysses’ stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose—full of puns, parodies, and allusions—as well as its rich characterisations and broad humour, made the book a highly regarded novel in the Modernist pantheon. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

This chapter is brought to you by Audible.com. Click here to download a FREE audiobook.

Episode 1, Telemachus It is 8 a.m. on the morning of 16 June 1904 (the day Joyce first formally went out with Nora Barnacle). Buck Mulligan (a callous, verbally aggressive and boisterous medical student) calls Stephen Dedalus (a young writer first encountered in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) up to the roof of the Martello tower, Sandycove, overlooking Dublin bay. Stephen doesn’t respond to Mulligan’s aggressive and intrusive jokes. Stephen is focused on, and initially disdainful toward, Haines (a nondescript, anti-semitic Englishman from Oxford), whom Buck Mulligan invited around. Stephen’s annoyance stems from the intrusion, as he was disturbed the previous night by Haines’s moaning about a nightmare. Mulligan and Dedalus proceed to look out over the sea, and Stephen is reminded of his deceased mother, for whom he is visibly still in mourning. This, and Stephen’s refusal to pray at his mother’s deathbed, remains an issue of some contention between the two. Stephen reveals that he once overheard Buck referring to his mother as “beastly dead.” When faced with this, Buck makes a brief attempt to defend himself, but gives up shortly. He shaves and prepares breakfast, then all three eat. Buck then departs, and sings to himself, unknowingly, the song that Stephen once sang to his dying mother. Later, Haines and Stephen walk down to the water, where Buck and his companions are swimming. We here learn that Buck has an absent friend from Westmeath who has a yet-unnamed girlfriend (later revealed to be Milly Bloom). Stephen declares his intention to depart, and Buck demands the house key and to be lent money. Departing, Stephen declares that he will not return to the tower tonight, citing Buck as a “Usurper.”

Continue reading...