Hacker Cinema
Ulysses
Ulisse
1954 · Film · 100 min
Directed by Mario Camerini
A retelling of Homer's The Odyssey, focusing on Ulysses's ten-year journey home to Ithaca following the Trojan War, where he faces various mythical challenges while his wife Penelope fends off suitors.
2 negative2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
Great article. Note to self: check out May Sinclair.
After wanting to read Ulysses my whole life and failing several times, I finally took an Extension course at Stanford in it, led by a teacher who'd been teaching it for 50 years. All the students were motivated, and I had several critical commentaries available to me. You could hardly ask for a better environment. (If it's not obvious, I'm not the type to dismiss the classics as irrelevant works of dead white men.)
I was mildly positive for most of the book, but I found the last two episodes (we don't call them "chapters") just plain unreadable. In the end, I hate to say it, I think Ulysses is past its sell-by date. Stream of consciousness has been done; multiple viewpoints have been done; sex, excretion, female desire, and other "forbidden" topics have all been done. Those were revolutionary in their time, but now? Meh.
The teacher often said about Joyce, "He can do whatever he wants with the English language!" And I say, "Who cares?"
Joyce himself said that it was just a really funny book. As Virginia Woolf said about it:
A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.
Many things (like alcohol) can be addictive and damage relationships. Who objectifies others should be a personal choice, censorship should not be performed for the purpose of protecting people from thinking in a certain way. Plenty of other information can damage minds too, can't it? Who's to decide which porn is more or less damaging, unless you support a blanket ban on all pornography? Come to think of it, even non-pornographic fiction can damage minds; films involving drug use, James Joyce's Ulysses.
Your question is a common one. Literary critics often joke about how critics in general rate James Joyce's "Ulysses" as a top novel, yet "no one has actually read it." The same goes (to a lesser extent) in cinema for "2001: A Space Odyssey."
If you'd said "Ulysses is funny" I wouldn't have questioned that. :) It's certainly not a parody of the Odyssey, despite the partially ironic title and the echoes in the episode structure.