{"id":126501,"date":"2018-06-14T09:00:44","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T13:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=126501"},"modified":"2023-09-19T11:51:18","modified_gmt":"2023-09-19T15:51:18","slug":"are-we-all-joyceans-here-then","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/14\/are-we-all-joyceans-here-then\/","title":{"rendered":"Are We All Joyceans Here, Then?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Detail from the Penguin Modern Classics cover of Ulysses<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cAre we all Joyceans here, then?\u201d the young professor asked, poking his head into the classroom doorway.<\/p>\n

We looked back at him uncertainly. Yes, we were all here for the Ulysses<\/em> seminar that met at six thirty P.M.<\/small> on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But to call us \u201cJoyceans\u201d seemed like a stretch. Today\u2014Thursday, January 29, 2015\u2014was only the first day. And besides, this was City College.<\/p>\n

No article about City College is complete without the obligatory phrase \u201cthe Harvard of the proletariat,\u201d which was supposedly both our school\u2019s nickname and its reputation in the mid twentieth\u00a0century. By 2015, however, no one could deny that our beautiful Harlem campus was in decline. Governor Cuomo had recently slashed the budget for the entire CUNY<\/small> system, with City College bearing the brunt of the cuts, and the disastrousness of this decision is difficult to convey without resorting to sodomitic imagery. That year, classrooms were so overcrowded that latecomers had to sit on the floor. One of my professors entered his office on the first day to find that his entire desk had been stolen. The humanities building still used old-fashioned blackboards, but the budget didn\u2019t provide for chalk, so professors hoarded and traded it like prison cigarettes. Most bathroom stalls didn\u2019t lock, and for several weeks, the entire campus collectively ran out of toilet paper\u2014I\u2019ll never forget the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2015 and the generosity it inspired in my fellow students, who shared their own toilet paper from home and never stooped to charging for it.<\/p>\n

It was in this context that the English department decided to offer its first-ever Ulysses<\/em> seminar, though they offered it as you might offer someone a home-cooked meal that you\u2019re secretly pretty sure contains broken glass. \u201cNB: This is a highly demanding course with a heavy reading load<\/em><\/strong>,\u201d the course catalogue warned in bold italics, \u201cmore like a graduate seminar than a 400-level college class.<\/em><\/strong>\u201d I don\u2019t think it actually said \u201cDON\u2019T TAKE THIS CLASS<\/em><\/strong>,\u201d but that was the obvious implication. I have since learned that our idealistic young professor was met with departmental resistance when he suggested a Ulysses<\/em> seminar, and I now suspect that the department was half hoping no one would register for it at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the department hadn\u2019t counted on the sheer belligerence of City College students. I took one look at that warning and immediately decided, thanks to the same knee-jerk rebelliousness that had led me to avoid college until the age of twenty-seven, that I had<\/em> to take this class. I wasn\u2019t the only one: there were thirty students in the Ulysses<\/em> seminar. (This is what passes for a small discussion class at City College.)<\/p>\n

Were we all Joyceans here, then? Taking our silence as a yes, our professor stepped into the crowded classroom.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy read Ulysses<\/em>?\u201d he began. \u201cWell, not a lot of people have read it, even among those who study literature for a living. It\u2019s quite long and extremely difficult. To have read Ulysses<\/em> imparts a certain cachet. It will open doors for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

We gazed upon him in awe. Not so much because of his words\u2014City College students are long inured to all forms of door-opening rhetoric\u2014but because he uttered them in an English accent<\/em>. According to our school website, City College students hail from more than a hundred fifty nations, but England, as far as I could ever tell, is not one of them. An English accent was a true novelty around these parts. And let\u2019s be real here: America has such unresolved daddy issues about England, it\u2019s embarrassing to behold. You could feel the air change in our windowless little classroom with the sudden collective snap to attention, the straightening of spines, the performative scribbling of notes, the solemn vow in every heart: I will be his favorite.<\/p>\n

Once we actually began to read Ulysses<\/em>, a novel that is largely about the need to break free of the British empire and everything it stands for, the irony of all this was not lost on us. \u201cHistory is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,\u201d Stephen Dedalus says in the second chapter\u2014the second episode<\/em>, as we learned to call them\u2014and we were chastened to realize that we were still happily dreaming away. But by then it was too late. You cannot traverse Ulysses<\/em> without an experienced guide, and if we met ours with a level of mind-body-soul eros that is rarely experienced outside of the mother-infant bond and hardcore BDSM scenes \u2026 well, you weren\u2019t there. This was a matter of survival.<\/p>\n

Our professor had not been kidding about the length and the difficulty: it took hours to read a single episode, and we had to read an entire episode in advance of every class, which essentially meant that we were reading Ulysses<\/em> every moment of our lives that we weren\u2019t in class discussing it. We couldn\u2019t skim it or CliffsNotes it because our professor opened each class with a fiendishly tricky little quiz that you could pass only if you\u2019d done your own close reading. What does Bloom read on the toilet? (A newspaper called Titbits<\/em>, and he wipes his ass with it too.) What does Bloom order for lunch? (A gorgonzola-and-mustard sandwich and a glass of burgundy because he wants something vegetarian and the culinary landscape of Dublin in 1904 is bleak beyond belief.) What does Bloom do during the final lines of \u201cSirens\u201d? (He farts.) Never knowing what would appear on the next quiz, we studied the text with a maniacal attention to crammable detail: Number 7 Eccles Street. Storm petrels. Banbury cakes. Garryowen the dog. Bella the whoremistress. Metempsychosis. Pflaap. Sometimes, as a surprise, our professor would divide us into teams and host a game of Ulysses<\/em> Jeopardy<\/em>, with a Toblerone bar as the prize for the winning team, and we all hurled ourselves over our desks screaming, \u201cWhere is Dlugacz! Who is Mina Purefoy! What is a sexologist!\u201d in mad pursuit of chocolate and professorial approval.<\/p>\n

As a commuter school, City College is not designed to foster intimate friendships among its students, most of whom have jobs and families and homes in the outer boroughs. But gradually, through Jeopardy<\/em> games and shared notes and heated debates on the bangability of Stephen Dedalus, we in the Ulysses<\/em> seminar got to know each other. There was the star student who wept with rage whenever she lost at Jeopardy<\/em>; she\u2019d been in college for ten years and still hadn\u2019t declared a major. There was the guy who liked to show up to class drunk and the one in recovery who always sat near him. There was the young single mother who sometimes showed up to class with her toddler daughter, a remarkably well-behaved child whom we affectionately dubbed \u201cthe littlest Joycean.\u201d There were sex workers and social activists and this one girl who went by the nickname \u201cDragon Killer\u201d\u2014and there was me, initially embarrassed to be a twenty-eight-year-old college student but quickly coming to understand that no one ends up at City College without a backstory to rival Ulysses<\/em> itself.<\/p>\n

Week after week, we trudged up six flights of broken escalators (I have never once witnessed City College\u2019s escalators in motion) to the windowless little room on the sixth floor. We wrote our midterm papers and tormented our automatic spellcheckers with words like bullockbefriending<\/em>, strongmembered<\/em>, elbowdeep<\/em>, and Mrkrgnao<\/em>.\u00a0Winter turned to spring; the windowless classroom went from uncomfortably cold to unbearably hot. One sweltering day, we asked our professor if we could have class outside instead; he agreed, and we discussed the \u201cIthaca\u201d episode on the graveled roof of the building, shouting over the wind as it fluttered our books and shuffled our notes and the sun set violently pink over the Hudson. What a wreck the campus was; how happy we all were. Every evening, after class, I speed walked downhill toward the 137th\u00a0Street 1 train, wired and vibrating with a distinct kind of joy that I\u2019d never felt before and have never felt since. It was the joy of knowing\u2014knowing with bone-deep certainty\u2014that everything I\u2019d ever heard about college was a lie, that the Ivy League was a scam, that nothing at Harvard could ever hold a candle to what was happening here in the Ulysses<\/em> seminar at the crumbling City College of New York.<\/p>\n

On the final day of class, our professor took us out to a local pizza restaurant and awarded each of us a Ulysses c<\/em>ompletion certificate. \u201cCongratulations!\u201d it read. \u201cYou have hereby completed a thorough and noteworthy reading of Ulysses<\/em> by James Joyce. This certificate entitles you to bragging rights as well as the ability to lead discussions, stimulating or otherwise, on this great novel.\u201d We hugged; some of us cried. And then, just like that, it was all over. We had read Ulysses<\/em>. For the rest of our lives, we would be people who had read Ulysses<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As a person who has read Ulysses<\/em> (and who takes full advantage of said bragging rights), I am occasionally asked, \u201cFrankie, should I<\/em> read Ulysses<\/em>?\u201d I don\u2019t know how to answer the question. First of all, Ulysses<\/em> is not really a novel that one reads<\/em>. It sounds pompous to say that it\u2019s a novel that one experiences<\/em>; I will say instead that it\u2019s a novel to be wrestled with as the biblical Jacob wrestled with that mysterious angel, except that wrestling match took up only one night of Jacob\u2019s life whereas Ulysses<\/em> will take you multiple months at the very least, and I cannot in good conscience endorse that as a productive use of your precious free time.<\/p>\n

But I can tell you this: we in the Ulysses <\/em>seminar are still in touch. Some of us have become very dear friends. Recently, I ran into one of my classmates in a Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side; though we\u2019d never talked much to each other, we recognized each other instantly and embraced like long-lost sisters. An astonishing number of us have gone on to study literature in graduate school\u2014including that hypercompetitive woman who took a decade to declare a major. Others have become psychologists, teachers, novelists; still, every year on Bloomsday, we remember with pride that we\u2019re all Joyceans here.<\/p>\n

As for me, I still display my certificate on my refrigerator\u2014and I just found out that my final paper for the seminar, \u201cUnspeakable \u2018Circe\u2019: Sexual Perversion and the Lacanian Detour in Ulysses<\/em>,\u201d is forthcoming in James Joyce Quarterly<\/em>. I\u2019m not a career academic, so when I received this news, the first thing I did was laugh. The second thing I did was email my former professor\u2014perhaps now<\/em> I\u2019d be his favorite! And the third thing I did was send the journal my contributor bio, which says simply, \u201cShe received her undergraduate degree from the City College of New York.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

James Frankie Thomas is the author of \u201cThe Showrunner,\u201d which received special mention in the <\/em>2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in <\/em>The Toast, The Hairpin, and\u00a0<\/em>Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop. He received his undergraduate degree from the City College of New York.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  \u201cAre we all Joyceans here, then?\u201d the young professor asked, poking his head into the classroom doorway. We looked back at him uncertainly. Yes, we were all here for the Ulysses seminar that met at six thirty P.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But to call us \u201cJoyceans\u201d seemed like a stretch. Today\u2014Thursday, January 29, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2410,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[2672,34383,947,34382,946],"class_list":["post-126501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-bloomsday","tag-city-college-of-new-york","tag-james-joyce","tag-joyceans","tag-ulysses"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAre We All Joyceans Here, Then?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We had read \u2018Ulysses.\u2019 For the rest of our lives, we would be people who had read \u2018Ulysses.\u2019\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/14\/are-we-all-joyceans-here-then\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Are We All Joyceans Here, Then? by James Frankie Thomas\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 14, 2018 \u2013   \u201cAre we all Joyceans here, then?\u201d the young professor asked, poking his head into the classroom doorway. 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