Joyce’s Ulysses, originally serialized in The Little Review between
March 1918 and December 1920, and then published in its entirety in February
1922. From the start, it was held in almost
religiously high regard, but also as a work of imposing
impenetrability and pretension. Vladimir Nabokov called it “divine”; Ernest
Hemingway called it “goddamn wonderful.” Virginia Woolf called it “illiterate,
underbred”; Aldous Huxley called it “one of the dullest books ever written.”
While literary giants debated its merits for decades, many readers merely
shrunk away entirely, despite the novel’s enduring reputation as one of the
20th century’s defining English-language masterpieces. Its status as an
impenetrable masterwork is self-reinforcing at this point: It is as great as it
is complex, an Everest to be scaled only by those hardy enough to undertake it.
I used to have a habit of leafing through the huge-ass
novel at bookstores, seeing a weird soup of words and non-words commingling,
and wondering what advanced degree of intellectual capacity I’d need to unlock
in order to not just slog through the book but really grok it, get the whole
thing, perhaps casually reference it at future dinner parties. (I would also be
a regular attendee of dinner parties in this genius future.) Standing in one of
those old-timey Barnes & Nobles, I’d flip to the front, see that opening
buckshot of words—“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead”—and
return to the cozier confines of other reading, the sort of books that didn’t
necessitate a separate guidebook to understand. This went on for years until,
for whatever reason, I ended up finally acquiring a copy in my first year out
of college, and decided to give the whole thing a go, at which point I
discovered something truly shocking.
Ulysses is
not that big of a fucking deal. Yes, it is complex; yes, it is great. But you
could totally read it, and you should.
A lot of modernist literature plays aggressively with
the canon of Western literature, reconfiguring religious texts and classical
works with a sacreligious glee. Ulysses is
no different: From its title onward, it chops up Greek mythology, Catholic
guilt, Irish history, and the English language, playing them off of each other
with ever-increasing archness. You may know this already about the book, or by
only skimming its Wikipedia page. So the thinking might be that in order to
read Ulysses,
you’d need to read what Joyce had—you’d need to have some semblance of his
worldliness in order to engage in the 700-page dialog with him. You probably do
not have time to read the entire canon of Western literature, so I can
understand why this would be intimidating.
In reality, you really only need to read two books
before you read Ulysses,
and those are Joyce’s two books before Ulysses. The short story collection Dubliners, if you weren’t
forced to read it in high school, is a series of brief vignettes of
turn-of-the-century malaise; it’s heartbreaking and beautiful, and a great
introduction to the themes of stasis that define his later works. It is also
written in strikingly clear, sturdy language—no Latin required. Follow that up
with his first novel, A Portrait Of
The Artist As A Young Man, published two years later, which
introduces Stephen Dedalus (an important character in Ulysses) as well as Joyce’s
stream-of-consciousness prose style. This galloping, lyrical style can seem
intimidating if you jump in midstream, but in the Portrait it scales from the meandering
thoughts of a child in the earliest chapters to the more densely introspective
preoccupations of an adolescent. It rises in complexity as it goes, letting you
keep up alongside it, and a lot of its innovations are pretty well-worn stuff
over decades of imitation. If you’ve read Dubliners, you can read Portrait.
And if you’ve already read those books, then guess
what? You’re ready for Ulysses,
my friend. You will, of course, want some sort of guide along the way. I used Stuart
Gilbert’s study, which was sort of the first to crack the book’s
code, but there are plenty others out there. All of them will, in one way or
another, break down the book’s structure, which is part of what makes it easier
to read than you’d think. Ulysses is
broken up into 18 chapters, each of which varies wildly from all of the others,
and those chapters themselves comprise three parts. So at any given time,
you’re not tackling Ulysses,
The Greatest And Most Complex Book Ever—you’re reading the colossal drama of
“Cyclops,” or you’re reading the filmic vignettes of “Wandering Rocks,” or
you’re reading “Sirens,” the chapter in which Joyce tries to come up with words
that sound like
music feels,
which is as batshit insane as it sounds. These chapters and sections are
discrete challenges that all have a specific
set of allusions and techniques and motifs, but once you know
them, they’re wildly inventive, fun little challenges to undertake, and then
they’re over. If you were feeling ambitious, you could read a chapter in a
sitting or two. You could even knock out a few chapters over a few weeks, then
take a break and come back; you will not forget what’s going on. The plot
mostly consists of a dude walking around, thinking about things, and
occasionally cranking his hog.
This brings me to my last point, which is that, once
you’re in, the book is filthy, and very funny. Occasionally Joyce’s sexually
charged letters to his wife make the rounds; if you
like those, you will love Ulysses,
which reaches its first of several climaxes during a hallucinatory chapter set
in a brothel. Joyce’s vaunted stylistic extravagance was innovated, in part, to
conjure the density of human thought, and he didn’t shy away from how often
those thoughts drift toward the needs of the flesh. The book is full of piss
and shit, low-brow puns, hunger pangs, and endless horniness; what’s so fun
about the book is watching him describe all of this in some of the most heavenly
sentences ever constructed, and fitting it into the larger tapestry of Western
intellectual culture.
It took me the better part of a year to read it, but I
read at a snail’s pace for some probably undiagnosed reason; a faster reader
could knock the whole thing out in a few months, easy. And then, guess what?
You’re in the fucking club! Having read Ulysses is almost as fun as reading Ulysses, and not just because
you’ll have a dog-eared and underlined copy as proof of your intellectual
magnificence. I still flip through the book longingly today, just as I did
before I had read it, revisiting spaces and ideas and jokes and confluences of
words that don’t exist elsewhere in fiction. When you’ve engaged that deeply
with a book, your affection for it and its characters is enduring: You want to
revisit old affable Leopold, or proto-sadboy Stephen, or Molly, who looms large
over the novel and (spoiler?) speaks at last in the book’s oceanic final
chapter. The book, which attempts against all odds to pack the fullness of
Western literature and Irish history and human emotion into a single man’s
meandering day in Dublin, is an overwhelming affirmation of the possibilities
of life, which is part of what makes Molly’s final “yes” such a perfect ending.
It may take you a year to read it, but in the end it kicks you in the ass, out
in the world, demanding you live fully and chase beauty wherever it rears its
unlikely head.
Ulysses, in
other words, is a justification of the effort it takes to read Ulysses. Hence the overwhelming
cult around it. Go wandering into its labyrinth and you come out changed by the
effort. But—and this is my point—you will find your way out, and you’ll be
changed, in some measure, by the experience, too.
