" Are we all Joyceans here, then?” 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 “Joyceans” seemed like a
stretch. Today—Thursday, January 29, 2015—was only the first day. And
besides, this was City College.
No article about City College is complete without the obligatory
phrase “the Harvard of the proletariat,” which was supposedly both our
school’s nickname and its reputation in the mid twentieth century. 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
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’t provide for chalk, so professors hoarded and traded it
like prison cigarettes. Most bathroom stalls didn’t lock, and for
several weeks, the entire campus collectively ran out of toilet
paper—I’ll 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.
It was in this context that the English department decided to offer its first-ever Ulysses
seminar, though they offered it as you might offer someone a
home-cooked meal that you’re secretly pretty sure contains broken glass.
“NB: This is a highly demanding course with a heavy reading load,” the course catalogue warned in bold italics, “more like a graduate seminar than a 400-level college class.” I don’t think it actually said “DON’T TAKE THIS CLASS,”
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 seminar, and I now suspect that the department was half hoping no one would register for it at all.
But the department hadn’t 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 to take this class. I wasn’t the only one: there were thirty students in the Ulysses seminar. (This is what passes for a small discussion class at City College.)
Were we all Joyceans here, then? Taking our silence as a yes, our professor stepped into the crowded classroom.
“Why read Ulysses?” he began. “Well, not a lot of people
have read it, even among those who study literature for a living. It’s
quite long and extremely difficult. To have read Ulysses imparts a certain cachet. It will open doors for you.”
We gazed upon him in awe. Not so much because of his words—City
College students are long inured to all forms of door-opening
rhetoric—but because he uttered them in an English accent.
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’s be real here: America has such unresolved daddy issues
about England, it’s 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.
Once we actually began to read Ulysses, 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.
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” Stephen
Dedalus says in the second chapter—the second episode, as we
learned to call them—and we were chastened to realize that we were still
happily dreaming away. But by then it was too late. You cannot traverse
Ulysses 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 … well, you weren’t there.
This was a matter of survival.
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 every moment of our lives that we
weren’t in class discussing it. We couldn’t skim it or CliffsNotes it
because our professor opened each class with a fiendishly tricky little
quiz that you could pass only if you’d done your own close reading. What
does Bloom read on the toilet? (A newspaper called Titbits,
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
“Sirens”? (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 Jeopardy,
with a Toblerone bar as the prize for the winning team, and we all
hurled ourselves over our desks screaming, “Where is Dlugacz! Who is
Mina Purefoy! What is a sexologist!” in mad pursuit of chocolate and
professorial approval.
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 games and shared notes and heated debates on the bangability of Stephen Dedalus, we in the Ulysses seminar got to know each other. There was the star student who wept with rage whenever she lost at Jeopardy;
she’d been in college for ten years and still hadn’t 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 “the littlest Joycean.”
There were sex workers and social activists and this one girl who went
by the nickname “Dragon Killer”—and 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 itself.
Week after week, we trudged up six flights of broken escalators (I
have never once witnessed City College’s 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, strongmembered, elbowdeep, and Mrkrgnao. Winter
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
“Ithaca” 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 Street 1 train, wired and vibrating with a distinct kind of
joy that I’d never felt before and have never felt since. It was the joy
of knowing—knowing with bone-deep certainty—that everything I’d 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 seminar at the crumbling City College of New York.
On the final day of class, our professor took us out to a local pizza restaurant and awarded each of us a Ulysses completion certificate. “Congratulations!” it read. “You have hereby completed a thorough and noteworthy reading of Ulysses
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.” We hugged; some of us cried. And then, just like
that, it was all over. We had read Ulysses. For the rest of our lives, we would be people who had read Ulysses.
As a person who has read Ulysses (and who takes full advantage of said bragging rights), I am occasionally asked, “Frankie, should I read Ulysses?” I don’t know how to answer the question. First of all, Ulysses is not really a novel that one reads. It sounds pompous to say that it’s a novel that one experiences;
I will say instead that it’s 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’s life whereas Ulysses
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.
But I can tell you this: we in the Ulysses 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’d 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—including 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’re all
Joyceans here.
As for me, I still display my certificate on my refrigerator—and I
just found out that my final paper for the seminar, “Unspeakable
‘Circe’: Sexual Perversion and the Lacanian Detour in Ulysses,” is forthcoming in James Joyce Quarterly.
I’m 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—perhaps now I’d be his favorite! And the third thing I
did was send the journal my contributor bio, which says simply, “She
received her undergraduate degree from the City College of New York.”
Frankie Thomas is the author of “The Showrunner,” which received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her writing has also appeared in The Toast, The Hairpin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
She is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She
received her undergraduate degree from the City College of New York.
