Ulysses Lecture I - Telemachus (Patreon)

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."

Ulysses is a beautiful book. It’s profound, poetic, allusive, and humorous. But it’s also a novel filled with ghosts.

My aim with this series is to guide you through and spark a lifelong love affair with James Joyce’s masterpiece.

Today’s talk is on the first episode of Ulysses: Telemachus. 

In the Penguin Modern Classics edition, this takes us from pages 1-45.

Timestamps:

• 0:00 introduction to Ulysses
• 3:30 who is Telemachus?
• 5:00 why Homer’s Odyssey?
• 8:00 the pain of returning home
• 9:30 the beginning of Ulysses
• 11:00 Homer’s sophisticated narratives
• 11:30 seeking one’s father & male maturation
• 13:00 Telemachus, Hamlet & Stephen Dedalus
• 14:00 Ezra Pound & T. S. Eliot on mythic structure
• 16:20 trying to awake from the nightmare of history
• 17:20 what happens in the first episode?
• 17:57 Joyce’s picture of Dublin
• 18:45 the Martello tower
• 19:00 “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan…”
• 20:00 artists as antennae of the human race
• 21:30 the death of Stephen's mother
• 22:00 pain, grief, guilt & remorse of conscience
• 24:00 Joyce’s Flaubertian prose
• 25:00 unlocking memories with Marcel Proust
• 25:50 how secret meanings unfold
• 28:00 analysing the first paragraph of Ulysses
• 30:00 the vision of Stephen’s mother
• 31:30 dealing with guilt during grief
• 34:10 what does ‘Agenbite of Inwit’ mean?
• 34:30 Hamlet, Macbeth & conscience
• 36:30 Stephen’s stream-of-consciousness
• 37:00 a “living” assignment for you
• 38:00 what are our thoughts made out of?
• 39:50 allusions and the theme of rebirth
• 41:20 Haines, Irish Gaelic & Elsinore
• 43:00 reincarnation in Joyce’s Ulysses
• 44:00 Stephen’s ‘Hamlet’ theory
• 45:00 the mystic Joyce’s love of numbers
• 45:40 Walt Whitman’s contradictions
• 48:00 Oscar Wilde’s influence on Joyce
• 49:00 rage of Caliban & cracked looking-glass
• 53:45 Ireland as “silk of the kine” & old woman
• 56:58 names & the meaning of Stephen Dedalus
• 57:30 the biographical element in modern literature
• 58:20 the Daedalus and Icarus myth
• 59:10 the son striving to be atoned with the father
• 1:00:00 bird symbolism in Ulysses
• 1:03:00 the omphalos & naval of the world
• 1:04:50 biological vs spiritual parents
• 1:08:00 being the father of oneself
• 1:11:00 the relationship between the characters
• 1:12:00 enacting the crucifixion afresh in our soul
• 1:13:20 atonement, death & rebirth
• 1:15:00 the epic journey of souls
• 1:16:45 preparing for the next section
• 1:19:20 some questions for you

Questions to Consider:

1) What do you make of Ulysses so far? 

2) When was the last time you felt the need to ‘return home’?

3) Have you caught yourself thinking? What did you notice about your stream of thought?

Bonus: Please let us know which parts of this first episode were most resonant for you.

Happy reading, everybody!