Preparing to teach Ulysses

Bloomsday embarks on something that has long been a twinkle in the eye, but just took a while to take form - a Beginner's course on Ulysses. It's that paradox, the novel that is deeply admired, but for many it's forbidding, intimidating and not user-friendly. We hope to challenge those mindsets.

Speaking as one who taught it to all levels of students for over 30 years, I do understand the difficulties. Indeed as a university teacher of Joyce, one of my assessment gambits was to ask students to log their reading impasses and to analyse how they overcame them. It was always fascinating and different for each student, and as a side benefit, plagiarism-proof.

Reading is a strange and wonderful occupation, and it always fascinates me that we who are readers can enter so many parallel universes through books. And usually, never be confused about where we are or why we are there.  A splendid feature of brain functioning that it allows this perverse multi-verse of experience to operate at all, and more so, when the parallel universes proliferate, as they do with committed readers.

There is no doubt that Joyce creates difficulties in the first three chapters of Ulysses: Stephen knows far too much, and do I really care about his intellectual (mainly ecclesiastical) baggage in Ch.1-3? As a reader it will take me a while to decide I do, and for the most human of reasons. If I don't know grief, guilt and regret, and I probably do have some experience of these disabling human conditions, then Stephen is a good guide to the
territory (and much else besides). And like him or not, I have at some stage to reckon with the unlikely scenarios that Bloom (whom I find easy to relate to, despite his obvious shortcomings) can find a way of passing hours pleasantly and productively (well, maybe not, in the end) with him, and that Molly can think of him, smelly and unkempt as he is, as a potential lover.

Preparing the materials for next Sunday's course, I'm struck too by the fact that the difficulties may be challenging and real, but also, and not contradictorily, that Joyce is engaged in a process of teaching one how to read the great baggy monster that is Ulysses. We'll spend some time familiarising ourselves with not only the big structural issues, the architecture, of the novel but also its varieties of inner speech. Our focus will be the easier chapters, the Bloom and Molly chapters. Hopefully, students will want to return for a more advanced course. Ulysses as a reading universe is rich, deep, multi-facetted. As anyone who has been around Bloomsday in Melbourne knows, one never stops learning. Let's hope we can adequately share the joy.

Very gratifying to have booked out on 19 Feb, and I'm pleased to think there are in the ranks of people coming some who have spent half a lifetime or more reading the novel. So, I hope we can expect some good craic about it.  Because of the quick and warm response, we're doing a second course on 4 March - same place, same timetable. Curriculum and Booking details on website.