r/jamesjoyce

I just got back into the book (read through Lestrygonians before taking a long break) and happened upon this question. I was nerding out to my girlfriend about the historical impact of Ulysses, particularly how it serves to de-stigmatize women's enjoyment of sex. Although I haven't gotten to the point in the book yet, I mentioned how Penelope features sexual fantasies from a woman's perspective.

And then she asked me how he wrote it. I was stumped. Turned to Google but didn't find anything. Is it known if Joyce corresponded with any women while writing Penelope? Did he ask any women about their experiences? I'd love to know if there's anything documented!

Can we infer from an absence?

"After the Race" 's aboutness is race, nations, colonialism and how to manage success in the world of the other.

" "After the Race" is of course a story about a race, about a sporting competition; it is also a story about races, about the competition between races ( in the popular usage at the time of "race" as frequently synonymous with both ethnicity and nation). [ Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire].

Jimmy Doyle's dad came good ('he had made his money as a butcher') and has inserted his son into the other race ( 'He had sent his son to England to be educated' , ' Then he had been sent for a term to Cambridge to see a little life').

Jimmy was enthralled by the company of the day ( ‘Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money’). 

Jimmy is elated at the excitement of being in the car and being seen to be in the car. The acknowledgemment of the significance of breaking into this clique is shared by Mr and Mrs Doyle ( ‘In Jimmy’s house this dinner had been pronounced an occasion. A certain pride mingled with his parents’ trepidation..') 

Even as he is losing at cards he’s getting a kick from being in the group (‘ What excitement ! Jimmy was excited too; he would lose, of course’).

Cheng sheds light on exactly how naive Jimmy has been :

“ In turn , Ségoiun and his friends are present in large part to exploit Mr Doyle’s financial resources” ,

“ so also there is a hint here that the card game has been rigged to relieve Jimmy of his money." [Vincent Cheng Joyce, Race, and Empire].

In other words the wiley continentals have set up a sting on the parochial son of a butcher. We fleece him at cards, we get his money to invest in the motor business and we don't have to pay him back!

Cheng places this outcome into a colonianial setting 

“ The grimmest irony of this “terrible game” lies in this: that not only is Jimmy Doyle fleeced by the sharp play of continental cardsharps (the colonizer once again exploiting the colonized native), but that Jimmy is happy and grateful for the experience, enjoying the excitement and the privilege of their company,  and - at the moment of his greatest loss and exploitation- himself raising the “cheer of the gratefully oppressed.” “

Joyce is saying to Mr Doyle- what did you think would happen,a butcher’s son, really?

Margot Norris [Suspicious Readings of Dubliners]  refers to G Leonard’s interpretation of Jimmy’s behaviour

“ Joyce sets the story at a liminal moment when the young Frenchman’s fortune hangs in the balance of a fictional transaction whose tender is purely symbolic. He will manipulate the metaphysical desire of Jimmy Doyle, his thirst for prestige and recognition, for social status, that Garry Leonard formulated in Hegelian terms as “ Jimmy Dolye’s slavish dependence on the Other to authenticate the myth of himself” “.

This places Jimmy into one half of the master slave consciousness of Hegel. Jimmy can only express Jimmy in terms of the continentals- 

“ In both cases he is striving to hear what it is the Other wants from him so that he can conduct himself according to its desire” [ Reading Dubliners again: A Lacanian perspective, Garry Leonard]. 

So how do we interpret Ségouin’s lack of relationship with Jimmy?

He does very little in the day- drops Jimmy and Villona off in town, calls for a cheer when international tensions threaten the possible hustle and opens a window!

Ségouin is never defined in terms of other.

Peter Striniger sums up the Master Slave relationship -

“ Each person, then, needs the other to establish his own awareness of himself” [Hegel, A Very Short Introduction] and reinforces that it is master and slave who are defined by other-

“At first it seems that the master has everything. He sets the slave to work in the material world, and sits back to enjoy both the subservience of the slave and the fruits of the slave’s labours. But consider now the master's needs for acknowledgement. He has the acknowledgement of the slave, to be sure but in the eyes of the master the slave is merely a thing, not an independent consciousness at all”.

Joyce has given us a blank Ségouin. He is not defined by others but we can infer his motivations by what happens to others. The hiatus which his character is, considering Jimmy’s immersion in others, indicates there is no consideration of Jimmy other than to take him for all he is worth. Ségouin is conniving, devious, successful and planned the whole thing.

Does anyone have any pictures of the sort of outfits that women would have been wearing in this time period? I just finished reading Nausicaa and have been curious, in the context of Bloom’s perversions, what kind of garments these women would have been walking around in.

It was serialized in Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap's Little Review, and they were literally persecuted for it, as most of you know. I'm reading yet another recount of how what we now know as High Modernism got up on its legs: A Danger To The Minds Of Young Girls: Margaret Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature, by Adam Morgan (2025).

Two lesbians who loved avant, new ideas, anarchism, free love, women's rights, Anderson and Heap. Of course they were persecuted left and right. NB to those who haven't thought about it: lesbians were crucial to the rise of Modernism: Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Bryher, HD (bisexual?), Anderson, Heap, Gertrude Stein and Toklas, Natalie Burney.

You, the current reader of this on Reddit, possibly: *This was probably written by a lesbian, self-serving, tryna claim credit....*Naw man: I'm a straight dude.

One of the few remaining subscribers writes to the Little Review in 1920:

"Can you tell me when James Joyce's Ulysses will appear in book form? Do you think the public will ever be ready for such a book?"

Jane Heap wrote 'em back:

"Ulysses will probably appear in book form in America if there is a publisher for it who will have sense enough to avoid the public."

It would take 13 years from then.

Ulysses and Finnegans Wake together ?

Currently reading Ulysses throughout the day and FW at night; read somewhere that they both compliment each other as a duology

I am reading Ulysses while listening to the book as read by Donal Donnelly (Recorded Books). I have read the book before, but this is a different experience. The narrator has a lovely Irish accent, and listening makes it so I don't skip the tricky parts.

I know I should read The Dead last (which I will), but what about the rest?

I just ordered it and would like to know what to expect.

Hi Folks,

I'm a software engineer and Joyce fan. 

Last year I struggled through Ulysses and created an annotated edition to help me get through the text. 

For now I've just posted Chapter 9, one of the densest if not the densest chapters in the book. 

Questions/requests/ideas/etc more than welcome.  

https://ulysses.gigan.io/index.html