ULYSSES BY JAMES JOYCE - The twelfth section of our Slow Read (Episode 17: Ithaca)

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”

William Faulkner

There is a fierce group of Ulysses readers who will soon be winding up a ‘Slow Read’ that commenced in August 2022. This has been a joyous adventure: many readers have been there from the start; some joined part way along; some left then rejoined as their lives demanded . . . We settled into a lovely rhythm of 3-4 presenters of assigned passages each week and danced through 7-9 pages per week as led by the presenters. Each presenter has their own style – illuminating rabbit warrens that the text directs us into; giving an overall thematic consideration; focusing on favourite or most challenging passages, connecting the passage to a larger arc or enquiry that Joyce engages . . .

What this has allowed all of us to do is to slow down and attend to the richness and complexity of Joyce’s language. We have discovered so much along the way, and our weekly meetings have felt like a romp not just through Ulysses but through much of our collective culture’s knowledge, as sedimented and fractured in the book.

We aim to complete this journey around Easter 2026. What will we do then? Some have voiced interest in rolling back through the Big U again – starting in Autumn 2026. Others suggested an exploration of Joyce’s early works – Stephen Hero for example and his play Exiles. We may start a new round of Finnegans Wake. What might interest you in a reading of Joyce on Tuesday afternoons? 

Toby Brothers

THE CURRENT STUDY:

First published on 2 February 1922 – James Joyce’s 40th birthday – UIysses was immediately controversial, described by one Irish critic as “The most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature”.

The Slow Read is an opportunity to read and relish of one of the greatest novels of all time in the company of others. The ‘Slow’ approach has proved popular within the Salon as we are not driven by completion of the text within a defined timescale, rather we focus on full enjoyment of the material. In a typical session we might discuss – inter alia – the immaculate conception (who does or does not have a navel?), language as a tool of colonialism (and how to subvert it), space between thought and speech, amor matris, cubist paintings, Thoth (Egyptian bird-headed god), changing understandings of Hamlet, Shakespeare’s sex life, the occult, cypher jugglers, Norse mythology, the dialectic within Stephen’s head, the Daedalus-Icarus myth . . . We are all here for the tangents!

Toby Brothers, Salon Director, explains in more detail:

Every time I run a study of Ulysses, there is SO much we do not get to consider: I know we may still not get to everything, but the Slow Read – served in tranches of two-hour sessions – is an opportunity to go deeper and wider in this amazing work than ever before in Salon studies. As long as there is continued interest, I will keep offering this study, even after Molly finally drifts off . . .

I offer many resources for reading around, but the richness of our work comes from contributions and independent research from participants. This study is particularly opportune given the abundance of new resources available thanks to the 2022 Ulysses centenary, including the offerings of the recently published Cambridge Centenary Ulysses, the brainchild of Catherine Flynn. 

The Ulysses Slow Read has become one of my most fascinating encounters with literature. At the start I did not know exactly how it would work out, but with a game group and a text of ENDLESS possibilities, we find so much each week that challenges us and expands our understanding of the book, of ourselves, of our movement through time, of our struggle to be understood . . .

Every week, three or four participants take a deep dive into a section of text (typically 2-3 pages) and each reader’s offering reflects their individual style: some lean on the textual and virtual correspondences, others look closely at what is being revealed in psychological or epistemological terms, others use the knottier passages for reflection and questions, sometimes someone will sing part of it, some emphasise the poetry and beauty of the writing. All members of the group respond to each presentation and come away with enriched context and understanding. 

In conversation with Paul Caviston, one of the lead Joyceans, we discussed how the Ulysses Slow Read Group works best as a ‘Slow Open Group’: a group with a relatively stable core of members that can also adapt to new participants as and when someone leaves. The group size is capped at ten and, as far as possible, we try to balance the numbers of men and women. We are also open to readers who wish to sample the experience by joining for a minimum of three sessions. This option requires prior discussion with Salon Director, Toby Brothers. 

To give an idea of the pace of our reading, our current cycle aims to finish at the end of Summer 2026, that’s four years from when we started. We hope to welcome new members to bridge the ending of one cycle and the beginning of the next. This is our model of open-ended rolling exploration.

The main requirement for joining the group is to have read Ulysses at least once and to have a passion for the text. New participants create new relationships to the book and to each other, with exploration undertaken in a spirit of openness which gives space for each person’s voice to be heard.

Central to the ethos of the group is its capacity to enable conflicting and often polarised views to co-exist. This allows complexity and ambivalence to evolve while resisting the pull towards certainty and fixity of positions – a key aspect of Joycean scholarship that is central to any reading of Ulysses.

Our reading practice, based on ‘Sounding Out’ the text, is open to members using differing theoretical frameworks, and we try to make these frameworks of meaning as overt as possible as we read. We read aloud, paying close attention to text and texture of the work. Listening to each other reading taps into an archaic sense of reverie, allowing emotional intensity to surface. Many people on first reading are overwhelmed by myriad styles and arcane terminologies and debates. This often obscures the emotional heft of Ulysses and readers can get bogged down in ‘decoding’ or ‘thematizing’ or developing overly elaborate ‘metaphysical / psychoanalytic / philosophical’ schemes within which they try to pin down or encapsulate the book.

So, the Slow Read sure ain’t for the faint hearted, but we laugh a lot in our current group and that’s no mean feat!

Published with thanks to Paul Caviston

JOINING DETAILS:

• This is the twelfth section of the ‘Slow Read’ Ulysses study led by Toby Brothers and occasional guest facilitators from within the group. We have reached Episode 17: Ithaca.
• There will be 13 two-hour sessions on Zoom, Tuesdays from 2.30-4.30 pm (UK), starting on 13 January and ending on 7 April 2026.
• If you are interested in joining this study but have not participated in the first eleven sections please email toby@litsalon.co.uk but please also see the message at the top of this page about a possible new study starting in the second half of 2026.
• The total cost for this section with all notes and resources is £390.00, we expect to read an average of 8 pages per week.
• Please have available these editions in preparation for our study:

  • Ulysses, by James Joyce, Annotated Students’ Edition, Penguin Modern Classics 2011, ISBN: 9780141197418. There are many editions of Ulysses — I find this edition is most coherent and the notes and introduction by Declan Kieberd very helpful; as we will constantly be referencing particular passages, having the same edition will be extremely useful.
  • The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, by Harry Blamires, ISBN-10: 0415138582