I have tried to read some of the classics of English literature. In particular I attempted the works of James Joyce, including his most famous work Ulysses. I gave up early on in that book, deciding that what I was likely to get out of it was not worth the effort that I needed to put into it. It also made me wonder what purpose was served by the author burying the message under so many layers of metaphor, code, obscure allusions, and word play that it required years of study by professors of literature to explain it. This high level of difficulty has led to the suspicion that some of the people who claim to have read and enjoyed it have not really done so but are merely being pretentious.
Brianna Rennix loves the book but is well aware of all its problems and she writes an entertaining essay on the topic. She says that among politicians who have declared their fondness for the book are Pete Buttigieg, whom she describes as a “Liberal darling and overgrown Student Council President” and a Rhodes Scholar resume-padder, as well as the “rumpled, jumper-wearing leftist Jeremy Corbyn” who both claim that the book should be understandable by regular people if approached the proper way.
She says that part of the book’s reputation for pretentiousness and deliberate obscurity was caused by the way that Joyce himself talked about the book.
Even after the publication of Ulysses cemented Joyce’s public reputation as a literary giant, he often talked about the book as if it were a kind of long con. “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” Joyce told one reader, “and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.” To another, he declared: “The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.”
So: Ulysses isn’t meaningless, but its own author seems to acknowledge that it is, at least partly, a book designed to frustrate easy comprehension. So what about this other claim that Ulysses fans often make, that it’s really just a Normal Book anyone could read if they tried? This, I think, is also overstating the case a bit. Ulysses is an incredibly dense and bizarre book: Even the more “realist” opening chapters aren’t especially straightforward, as the characters’ minds jump fluidly from one topic to the next, sometimes lighting on fragments of memory whose full context won’t be revealed until later, sometimes on an obscure literary reference, sometimes on a popular ad jingle or long-gone Dublin landmark that no one outside turn-of-the-century Ireland could possibly be expected to recognize. This isn’t to say that you need some specific educational pedigree to understand Ulysses. Plenty of teenagers and adults without a college education have deeply loved the novel, and I’ve certainly met Ivy League types who didn’t understand or like it nearly as well as they pretended. But it’s really not for everyone. For some people, the amount of excruciating mental labor they have to put in to follow the story vastly outweighs any pleasure they might get from Joyce’s prose. I think about how furious I used to get at people who told me I would “enjoy” calculus once I understood it, when even the simplest calculus problem made me feel as if a small, angry rodent were shredding my brain-tissues from the inside. I imagine the experience of trying to read Ulysses feels this way to many people.
It is not that I am not willing to expend considerable effort in trying to understand something. But that is because those things are intrinsically difficult, not made deliberately and artificially so.
Rennix ends by giving some practical suggestions to how to read the book. She almost tempted me to take another go at it but I probably won’t. There are just too many other things that are of higher priority for me at this stage of my life.
I love Ulysses. There’s a trick to reading it however – at least, to reading it for the first time. It’s stream of consciousness, and you should read it as stream of consciousness: just let the words, associations, and images flow, without attempting to understand the references, meanings, and allusions. Just immerse yourself in the experience, and see that day in Dublin through the eyes of the characters in it, inhabit their skins, smell the burned edge of the kidney Leopold Bloom is frying up for breakfast, taste the word diaphane-adiaphane in your mind, feel the wet sand of the beach under your feet.
There’s nothing deliberate or artificial about it, it’s as close as it’s possible to get to being several completely different people living in a different time and different place. What you’re mistaking for artifice and abstruseness is unvarnished, unfiltered, unexplained experience: it only seems abstruse because you’re resisting it instead of accepting it, even if you don’t fully understand it.
Later on, you can re-read it in a “scholarly” way, if you want to. But from where I’m standing that’s really not the point.
Every June 16th (albeit this year might be an exception for obvious reasons), on “Bloomsday”, Ulysses-inspired† people recreate Leopold Bloom’s trip around Dublin. It ranges from walking tours (individual or in groups, with or without a guide) to elaborate fancy-period-dress horse-drawn carriage spectaculars. I always got a bit of a giggle watching it when I lived in Dublin (coincidentally, near to at least two of the sites mentioned in the book, and hence beset on Bloomsday), albeit I’ve never even tried to read the book.
† I say “-inspired” rather than, say, “fan” or “(obsessed) reader”, as I’ve never had any idea what percentage of the Bloomsdayers have actually read or are otherwise competent about the book and its subject-matter. That is, I wouldn’t be too surprised if some of the Bloomsdayers are “in it” mostly for the fun — and it does look like a bit of fun — rather than as a celebration of the book or authour.
Try some of his other work. Dubliners is a well-known short story collection. I’ve only read the last story; “The Dead”. Quite moving, and the John Huston film of the story is very watchable.
I haven’t read Ulysses, but I have read Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, which has been compared to Joyce’s more “difficult” books. My first attempt failed, but when I approached it without any preconceptions about what a novel “should” be, I sailed through fairly easily.
I read Ulysses after having read Homer’s Odyssey a number of times and learned that it was, well, an homage (or pastiche if you want to be unkind) of Homer’s work. I didn’t find it all that difficult at the time. I would probably have a more difficult time now, after so many years have passed.
When I was doing research for a LARP set in Paris in the 1920’s, I ran across Ulysses again. The LARP used historical characters, and one of the characters I settled on was Sylvia Beach, who ran a bookstore called Shakespeare and Company and was a pivotal figure in early 20th century literature, promoting writers like Hemingway, Wilder, and James Joyce. In fact, Ulysses was originally published as a serial (in the American periodical, The Little Review, thanks Google). But when I researched her character I found it was largely Sylvia Beach who, at Joyce’s concern that it would never be published as a complete novel, edited Ulysses prior to being the first publisher of the complete novel. And when I say edited it, I really mean editing it, not just concatenating the passages from the serial together. Sylvia Beach worked closely with Joyce to remove redundancies, ensure the plot moved along, ensured the meanings that Joyce put in made sense, requiring re-writes and updates, and generally worked as the editor.
For performing that task, on that novel, and being largely uncredited and unrecognized, Sylvia Beach has always been a hero to me.
I tried to read it once due to the various encomia, but found it slow, boring, turgid and pointless. Mostly boring. Didn’t get far, obviously.
That noted, it’s in the public domain, so anyone can easily experience its, ahem, “literary merit”.
brikoleur:
What? The very things it’s supposed to exemplify is an abundance of references, meanings, and allusions — the which are pointless if they are not understood.
Besides, I can no more read a text without attempting to understand it than I can eat food without attempting to taste it. Don’t see how it’s possible, even in principle, to do so: the very process of reading is that of assigning meaning to sequences of symbols!
Rob:
Already did. Fucking “Finnegans Wake”. Guess how far I got…
(Literary onanism is not my thing)
flex:
That describes co-authorship.
Such heroism!
@brikoleur No. 1…
That’s true, you’re absolutely correct.
I’m a firm believer that no book should be read for the first time with any intent other than to enjoy the writer’s work. Analysis can come later, if at all.
@John Morales No.8
I have known my share of people who ruin a good meal by attempting to identify every ingredient in a dish before them.
I’m not sure if this is really anything meaningful, but I’ve heard of comparisons to Homestuck
I didn’t find it that difficult. The problem is that it is self-conscious (in that Joyce is writing the book the show off his cleverness). Before tackling Joyce again, I suggest you read some works by Richard Ellmann; his Ulysses On The Liffey I found valuable in helping to interpret the text.