I recently came across a list online of the top ten most "difficult literary works" and Joyce was naturally on the list. Of the novels listed I had read, I couldn't agree that Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby Dick, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged or Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago are difficult. What the last four share is that they're very long, and some readers may find some parts a slog, but they're easily understandable. Joyce's Ulysses is a very different case. It's genuinely difficult. Not unreadable random gibberish as some claim, but difficult. A friend of mine in literary academia recommended I prepare myself. So I dutifully read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and reread as she suggested Joyce's two primary inspirations, Homer's Odyssey and Shakespeare's Hamlet. I also read relevant portions of four books on reading Joyce, though soon after starting I jettisoned all but Henry Blamires' The New Bloomsday Book. I've never worked harder to understand a book--and that includes college level physics, integral calculus and property law texts.
The book focuses on three Dubliners on a June day in 1904: Stephen Daedalus, the hero of Portrait, begins the story; Leopold Bloom, an adman and Jewish resident of a very Catholic country, is central, and his wife Molly anchors the end. The 18 chapters, each covering about an hour, are loosely based upon different episodes in Homer's Odyssey, with Leopold as Odysseus, Stephen as his son Telemachus and Molly as the (un)faithful Penelope. Joyce's chapters are unnumbered and untitled, but early on Joyce leaked a "schema," a chart with the corresponding Homeric episodes, place, hour--even color, bodily organ, art, literary technique and symbol featured. And critics and readers have understandably latched on to the schema like a life-preserver, because you need all the help you can get.
What irritated me most about Ulysses was that Joyce seemed to do everything he could to thwart ease of reading. Joyce eschews quotation marks, which he considered an "eyesore." The problem though is that although he uses a dash to indicate the beginning of dialogue, there's no equivalent of an end-quote. It's often hard to keep track of who is speaking. Worse in a book consisting of so much interior monologue, there's not much to delineate the boundaries between dialogue, exposition, description and thought. Joyce also seemingly had issues with our friend the hyphen and often runs together these weird word mash-ups and combinations--one of the most egregious was "contrasmagnificandjewbangtantiality." Molly's 46-page soliloquy at the end, although there are some subtle breaks that lead to it being described as being separated into 8 sentences, reads basically as one long run-on sentence devoid of commas or even apostrophes. There's a lot of slang, cant, and obscure allusions to things Catholic and Irish and a lot of words, lines, even paragraphs of foreign languages left untranslated.
It was hard to stomach a book with more misogyny than any text I've read since Milton's Paradise Lost--and not just in comments by Stephen and Leopold. There's the chaos of Molly's thoughts in her soliloquy compared to that of the men, her inversion from the Homeric epitome of fidelity to a promiscuous adulteress and from the clever "matchless queen of cunning" in the Odyssey to a woman of "deficient mental development." There was a plethora of disturbing demonic imagery of the female and women in the “Circe” episode. Some examples: “The crone makes back for her lair.” The “bawd” hisses and Stephen wards her off with Latin, causing her to spit a “jet of venom.” The virgin Birdie “with a squeak... flaps her bat shawl.” Another woman is described with “wolfeye shining” and descriptions of women’s hands as paws, nails as talons, feet as hoofs. The “feminist” is described as speaking “masculinely.” Leopold says: “Always open sesame. The cloven sex.” Lots of demonic imagery surrounds the nightmare descriptions of Stephen’s dead mother who appears in a vision. That’s just a selective sample of quotes from one chapter.
I often also found myself repelled by the Rabelaisian touches. Nothing is left out; there are detailed descriptions of flatulence, defecation, urination, masturbation, nose-picking... A microcosm of my experience with Ulysses can be found in my reactions to the first three chapters. The first one, dubbed Telemachus: This isn't so bad. You just have to go slow. And hey, maybe this will be fun. Mulligan is hilarious. Second chapter, Nestor: Stephen's gentleness with his student, his rejection of the antisemitism of his employer is rather endearing. I can muddle through this. Third chapter, Proteus: WTF?? and ewwwww. The "ewwwww," my first but not my last of the book, was evoked by one of the last sentences of the chapter: He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully. For the rest let look who will. For some understanding of the WTF?? reaction, let me share with you the opening paragraph:
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
Mind you, it gets a lot more impenetrable as the chapter goes along, with Joyce using untranslated chunks of Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Swedish, Russian and German. And "Proteus" is an easy read compared to the "Oxen of the Sun" episode nearing the book's end or the closing "Penelope" with that soliloquy of Molly's. James Joyce's Ulysses is known for perfecting the "stream-of-consciousness" technique of which the above paragraph opening "Proteus" could be seen as an illustration, although some claim it's merely "interior monologue" and would only cite a few parts, such as Molly's soliloquy, as true stream-of-consciousness. One of the few effective uses of stream-of-conciousness I've read was actually in Portrait. I had to admit Joyce used it effectively to suggest the just forming mind of an infant and young boy. One of the strongest arguments I've read in favor of Ulysses was actually in the (very readable) young adult novel, I Capture the Castle. The argument made there is that we would be poorer without the technique in the writer's toolbox, and we should be grateful to those innovators who push the envelope. Someone had to be the first artist to use metaphor. And I have heard the argument that stream-of-consciousness is particularly suited to conveying an unhinged or semi-conscious mind.
The problem though is Joyce doesn't use it so selectively in Ulysses. Think of those books that overuse metaphor. A little use of stream-of-consciousness for a particular effect goes a long way, and some of it in Ulysses, such as in the quote above, is rather poetic. But a lot of it makes for a slog of a read that made Tolstoy's War and Peace look like a children's primer and became increasingly mind-numbing. By the time I got a couple of chapters into the Leopold Bloom section, I was struggling to keep myself from skimming, and less than a hundred pages into the book, I gave up my attempt to make sense of everything I was reading.
I can see that it took genius to write this book--as it did for Schoenberg and Webern to compose works using the twelve-tone technique. Yet I find those musical works painful to listen to and turn away gratefully to Bach and Mozart and Mahler. Similarly, no, I didn't find reading the 783 often inscrutable pages worth the effort in and of itself, beyond the historical significance. I understand why a friend of mine, an admirer of Lewis Carroll, could fall in love with the exuberant world-play in the novel and why my friend in academia might be fascinated with the wealth of literary allusions. I admit there are parts that are funny and passages that are beautiful, and that I found some of the Shakespeare discussion in "Scylla and Charybdis" fascinating, because I'm weird that way. The line from it, about how mistakes "are the portals of discovery," may be my favorite in the entire novel. For some reason, the "Ithaca" episode often made me crack up--maybe because of my hysterical giddiness I was reaching the end.
But those momentary pleasures don't make up for the tedium and the ugliness nor are they enough to ever lure me back. I prefer the works that quietly seduce on first read, which stand alone and where the complexities are found on reread, not one that must be read multiple times together with scholarly exegesis just to crack the first layer. I prefer the authors who know how to use the one telling detail, rather than who throw a word salad at the reader. I admire writers whose genius is used to make the difficult and complex clear, who use simplicity to illuminate the profound, who make their story flow like a river, rather than obfuscate the mundane, damming up the flow of reading with such thorny prose a reader must keep circling back trying to wrest the meaning. I love inventiveness in structure and style, but put in service of storytelling, not as an end in itself. And I far prefer those books that treat women as if they have minds and bodies worthy of respect.
I don't regret reading the book. I don't regret the knowledge I gained of the touchstone of modernist literature. It made sense of things I've seen in what I now know to be Joyce's imitators. In that regard I can't recommend reading Ulysses highly enough if you care about literature and writing. But if I'm to go by the GoodReads rating system where one star means I "didn't like it," then that's definitely the rating this novel merits from me. Even if admitting to hating this book and deploring the influence it has had on modern literature means I'm to be dismissed as silly, lazy, unenlightened, an ignoramus, a philistine and without taste. And hey, I don't want to skew the recommendation algorithm by rating it higher! Although, for what's it's worth, I loved Joyce's Dubliners and liked Portrait. I won't be reading Finnegan's Wake, which I'm told makes Ulysses seem lucid in comparison.
