Dovegreyreader & Team Ulysses

Lynne Hatwell, aka dovegreyreader -  a Devonshire based bookaholic, sock-knitting quilter and community nurse in her spare time, set out to discover whether it was possible for an ordinary reading person to conquer the mighty Ulysses by James Joyce.

Fortunately, this wasn’t a challenge she was to face alone. Many people who followed dovegreyreader’s blog felt the same and wanted to climb that mountain with her.

And so began ‘Team Ulysses’ – a year-long, online reading group project that began on Bloomsday 2009 and ended one year on. Along the way they would look to Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us for guidance. In it Kiberd shows that Ulysses, far from being the epitome of elitism, was always intended as a book for the common people.

Click here to read a selection of the monthly Team Ulysses meetings over at dovegreyreader’s blog.

Team Ulysses

Lynne Hatwell writes …

Ulysses and Us

Reflecting on the Ulysses year that was and the shared read of a book many of us may have considered impossible, unattainable and slightly out of our league, I’m thinking what a smart idea it was to put that iconic picture of Marilyn Monroe on the front cover of Declan Kibberd’s book Ulysses and Us.

I mean if Marilyn can read Ulysses whilst twirling around a play park on a roundabout then there has to be some hope for me. and apparently it was no pose.

Marilyn really did read the book, and now that I have too I love this picture even more because it’s obvious she’s reading the final chapter Penelope, one of my favourites.

If further permission were needed Declan Kibberd’s opening chapter confirmed that this egalitarian reading of Ulysses was allowed, and so I wrote a post for dovegreyreader on Bloomsday 2009 fired with enthusiasm.

“Because conquering is what I feel is involved with a book which has achieved a nigh on mythical status of impossibility in my mind, really it’s only a book to be studied at university surely?

It’s not really meant for me and thee is it, in fact why bother when anyone I know who has studied it has declared it impenetrable, meaningless, and life-sapping?

I’ve read about various Ulyssesian conquering ruses like reading the chapters in a special order but certainly not the order in which they are published. A sort of head up to base camp and then back down to the foothills, back up to Camp III , back to Camp I style summit approach.

Having prevailed on his father to attend a Trinity College symposium on Joyce back in 1982, all was going well in that Declan had managed to get his reluctant Dublin-residing father in the door, only to overhear other delegates discussing whether to book in for the session on “The Consciousness of Stephen” at which Declan Senior was very quickly back out of the door.

Declan Junior goes on the debate quite how Ulysses was ‘wrenched out of the hands of the common reader’ and I immediately felt like one of those common reader kindred spirits, ‘A book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them.’

Well that’s true, this one’s been too scared to even open it.

But, as Declan Kiberd proceeded to explain quite how common culture replaced by specialist elites led to a particular vein of thought, I began to feel that rising sense of indignation, ‘No longer was the prevailing idea that anyone bright enough could read and understand Hamlet or Ulysses, but that anyone sufficiently clever could aspire to become one of the paid specialists who did such things.’

By now I’m feeling in that ‘how very dare they’ mood that descended the day I first read John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses and so by the time Declan declared, ‘It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people,’ I was shouting loud from the balcony that I don’t have, to the hordes that weren’t gathered beneath, ‘Yes, Declan, yes, let us go forth and do this great thing.’

I calmed down a bit but I’ve almost convinced myself it’s a go-er because Declan says ‘The need now is for readers who will challenge the bloodless, technocratic explication of texts: amateur readers who will come up with what may appear to be naive, even innocent interpretations. Today’s students have been prevented by a knowing sophisticated criticism from seeking such wisdom in modern literature.’

Well I think roped up and with Declan leading the climb I can smell success of sorts, I can do ‘naive and innocent’ along with the best of them and I’m tempted by the privileging of Ulysses as ‘wisdom literature’ over Joyce as the ’supreme technician.”

So having publicly declared my summit attempt on dovegreyreader the idea slowly shaped up in comments, and before we knew it there was a team of us around the world, roped together by a book and climbing this mountain. We’d gather on dovegreyreader on the 16th of each month, having read about 65 pages and we’d be finished on Bloomsday 2010, job done, book read, tick it off the List of Impossibilities.

Except of course it all became much more than a procedure, a process with an end, because I could never have anticipated how much I would actually enjoy the reading. Yes of course there were some sticky ‘Oxen in the Sun ‘ moments, occasional months when I’d put off the reading and the 16th was looming, but we were all in it together and the camaraderie saw us through.

I posted a monthly ‘State of the Summit attempt’ style post with my personal, highly subjective and often mystified observations, others added their thoughts in comments whilst a group of stalwart onlookers cheered us on from the sidelines and never failed to post an encouraging message, or be there with virtual soup in a thermos as we moved from one base camp to the next, and further up this mountain that we had all deemed impossible.

Bloomsday 2010 and there we were planting our flag, and looking back a few weeks on I’m left with not only a sense of real achievement at completing, but safe in the knowledge that I’ve read a book I know will now become part of my reading armoury.  A book to turn to as a reliable friend, one to dip into when I want to recapture the multitude of different moods it creates, or when I want to read something out loud (because I’ve read a great deal of it out loud) or when I just want to recall the camaraderie of the shared read and the way the internet and Declan Kibberd’s wonderful book helped us to achieve that … who’d have thought it.

– Lynne Hatwell, aka dovegreyreader

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