Ulysses

It seems as though the fate of Ulysses is to be a book that is given the highest possible praise by academics and writers but which no one reads.

It is widely considered to be not only the greatest achievement of literary modernism, but the greatest book ever written. It has garnered the highest praise from countless literary lights, from Jorge Luis Borges to Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov's praise (he called it "The greatest book ever written") is especially noteworthy, seeing as he heaped curmudgeonly scorn on almost every other darling of the literati, while Borges, (who should know: he probably read more than has any man who ever lived), opined that Joyce wrote lines, "worthy of Shakespeare." And yet, despite all this, I have not met a single person, in the flesh, who has actually read it.

To begin with, I am simply interested to know if anyone else has actually read it.

I have.

It's not so overwhelming.

I mean, after all, if a dog can finish...

I've tried and gotten about 20 pages in. It wasn't so bad, but it required a commitment that I didn't have at the time.

"A classic is a book that everyone praises, but no one reads." -C.S. Lewis

I think that applies to Ulysses. It's a love-it or hate-it book. I'm in the latter camp, along with Virginia Woolf and quite a few of Joyce's contemporaries. There are sections which are not bad, maybe even brilliant, but much of it is pure crap. It is almost unreadable, and few people who start it actually finish it.

So why do so many critics praise it? Critics are herd animals. Most of them wait to see what the consensus is, then they go along with it. They are afraid that if they say they don't really like it ('the emperor has no clothes') they will be labelled as 'Philistines'.

I read it last fall. While it will never be a favorite of mine, there were parts that I really liked. Overall though, it was a bit too much like doing schoolwork.

I read it by reading it for about half an hour each day - if it was a section I was enjoying I could always read more.

I read it every year or two, and it gets better each time. It's much more approachable than Finnegan's Wake.

I read it in the early sixties,
aloud, to a blind reader. It has crossed my mind that
trying to read it silently is what makes it hard reading for many, and makes them
drop it halfway through -- or is it more often one seventh or one sixteenth of the way through? Cerebral, though he might seem at times, Joyce
was much more concerned with sound than with
thought-processes.
And itʻs one of the few novels that I would conisder re-reading. Havenʻt yet, but it is, unlike most that Iʻve listed,* an actually owned book..

*What Iʻve listed in L T is about
6/7 Wish List.

I gave up about halfway through. Probably chapter 13 or so. I suppose I'll pick it up again at some point, but too many of the chapters felt like the literary equivalent of Where's Waldo? spreads.

I didn't and still don't know what to make of the structural schemas. I didn't peruse them while reading, but I'm curious to hear whether any of you found anything worthwhile in, say, the color of chapter 2 being brown. Was there a lot of brown stuff in chapter 2? Did it improve the chapter?

It's on my TBR pile, and I've also lined up several to read as preparation: Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Homer's duology (nope, haven't reat those yet either). Not sure if the pre-reading will help, but just in case it does ...

I enjoyed Ulysses (mostly) and will someday read it again, in close proximity to a read of The Odyssey & Hamlet. It helped that I didn't take it too seriously, didn't feel the need to "understand" everything and my companion book was more of a "guide to Ulysses for students" than Gilbert's huge overly academic tome.

For the most part, I just went with the flow of words. I was fascinated by the variety of styles and I typically like the "day in the life" stream-of-consciousness. I was kind of amused by "the mess" and the language, to me, was poetic (in the sense of a few words/phrases/sentence fragments are used to evoke images). I also loved the overlay of stories -- the brief encounters with bit players that occur in one narrator's chapter and then that same character reappears a little later, just further down the street in another character's chapter.

>7 rolandperkins: Roland, I find your comment interesting because one strategy I employed to get through the bits I was struggling with was to turn on the "text-to-speech" feature of my Kindle. Even a computer-generated voice was helpful and did bring out some of that aspect.

I've read it, but only as a kind of novice, and I can tell it is one of those bottomless books--of the kind that every time return to it there is more to discover. And it is a funny thing, but I think it is one of those books where every single word shows deliberation. I think that's why I find Ulysses hard to read, but easy to get lost in.

I have read Ulysses twice now, and there's a lot in it, but apart from a few bits, it wasn't much actual fun to read.

Incidentally, both times I read it in the bath. And I now have a theory that you can split the book-reading chunk of humanity into two parts - those who, faced with that, say "You read *what* in the bath?!" and those who say "You read Ulysses *where*?!"

>13 cheesestraws:
What about the ones who ask you "What colour was the water when you got to the last page?"

>13 cheesestraws: - >14 thorold: LOL!!

". . .those who say "You read WHAT in the bath?"
and those who say "You read Ulysses WHERE?" (13)

A parallel literary anecdote is
Hendrik Van Loon's discovery that there are only two responses to his statement, "What I'm working on now is the FALL* of the Dutch Republic." The first response is something like. (1) "Interesting. You must have access to materials that (John Lathrop) Motley didn't have? (This type just assumes that he said RISE of the Dutch Republic. They're familiar with classics of historiography, but are not listening too closely to what Van Loon is saying.
(2) The second type says something like, "Whuddya mean "fall"? It rose; it didn't fall!"
Type (1) he had to patiently
explain that he said "Fall"
not "Rise".
TO Type 2,he had to say,
"Oh yes; it fell. Didn't you know that the Netherlands is now a monarchy ,not a republic?"

*emphasis added

I'm in the group that loves Joyce. I have read and enjoyed Ulysses twice now, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man five times, Dubliners three times. I guess I'm a fangirl! I have never gotten all the way through Finnegan's Wake, though! It's just too abstruse.

After OʻCasey and Synge, in a college class, I felt prepared to take on Joyce in the summer, though not expecting to "finish" ULYSSES. Because, coming from a basically Oral oriented family, where the Bible was in the King James English and the newspaper was in Hawaiian, Read Out Loud, I felt I was ready, thanks to Hearing the Boston Irish speak English. I love the sound of Irish English -- which I Heard, more or less, in the wonderful turns of ironic humour especially; but the hurrying pace of college made that expensive to keep up. The strangest thing is when I returned to home and began to learn the epic long Hawaiian Tumulipo/Kumulipo, I had the hardest time "getting things together." Then one day, years later, I recalled the old Bible and newspaper readings as well as Joyceʻs ear in his pen drawings after Voices: it was an amazing experience and a break-through. However, before. in Tonga, I read a passage of ULYSSES to students -- and could not refrain from laughing, while reading. To my astonishment, the students were poker faced to the end.
So there probably is something like a "culture" barrier, despite historical and biographical introductions that preceded -- and like/unlike experiences such as that little masterpiece by Elizabeth Bowen (pseud.), "Hamlet in Africa," which (related orally) by her elicited rejection from her listeners because no actual Prince would (to them) ever behave so dishonourably. I wondered if Bowen had dramatized Hamletʻs dilemmas instead of merley recounting the plot in outline, she might have got at least a more comprehending audience. But certainly not everything artistic is written for understanding by the ear. But I do believe Joyceʻs language and characters in dialogue are easier "heard" when read than not. Others must have had this experience. Some persons remember whole swatches of poems, like Vergil, from the mnemonics of the Sound which clues the Sense, instead of the reverse?, especially if the words build to emotional tension such as of the nature of Book Six.
Have others had similar experiences? From works formidable by reputation so that one is not inclined to want to recall failing them?

#10 Eliz_M.
Thank you. Your paragraph 2 describes the "mess" (to use your take on some dilemmas) that Stream-of-Consciousness does not avoid, while ambling about exploring the sense of how things Hang Together mainly loosely IN THE COURSE OF ONE DAY, from Aristotleʻs sunrise to sunset to sunrise programmatic "rule." (Joycean technique is to use othersʻ ideas while at the same time poking fun at them -- in this case, for of course, no life can be told in 24 hours; but Ulyssesʻ does and it involves the entire history of man, symbolically, when he builds a parallel course with the Adventures of Ulysses.) Big incidents are implied in small ones, anecdotally. Consider how,if you were to cover a history of man, in his relations to his fellow-men, his environment, circumstances of danger and opportunity, over a 24 hour span. Since the character is a living, breathing subject/object/spirit/thing/thinking/feeling etc., that "history" has to reflect in interactions, including those that society long ago agreed was not worth writing about because they were too personal, etc., and are notevents of history that are memorable -- big moments because collectively agreed upon as Advances for the Society and Individuals (plural, not singular one at a time, not each and every specific one all by himself/herself, but like countable, say from one to infinity, which is theoretically never ending)? And the moments are not recorded publicly but necessary for each and every individual (not collectively, but one by one, countably, theoretically, in flesh and blood terms) to move from one moment to another. Itʻs been a long time since Iʻve seen a copy of ULYSSES, of which there was supposed to be only one "definitive" edition overseen by the Trustees until there was a quarrel over the editing and/or editor (a German ULYSSES scholar by an English scholar), so I donʻt know which edition I read but it was in force in the 1960ʻs I think) . . Well, one of the most surprising moments "happens" (an example of the type forbidden in print, thus leading to Joyceʻs books being banned in Boston etc.), i.e., whatʻs called a "scatalogical?" kind of scene (Joyce loved recording) occurs when Ulysses is sitting in at his kitchen table, as wife is talking, talking, and he is half-listening and half-not. He is uncomfortable. Then slowly, and then suddenly he is aware that he wants to break wind. But he canʻt break the flow of Noraʻs talking and so he concentrates but without a hint of the emergency upon him, upon Noraʻs talking, the flow of it, the life of it; he concentrates as though thinking harder on what sheʻs saying -- in a very special way, so the flow moves like a river in normal force, up going her voice, inflecting, down goes her voice, and he is following, following . . .unhampered, wonderfully, so Ulysses lifts one half of his backside, twisting his leg, ever so carefully, the talk flowing still ... when the wind breaks. Gently. And his compromised leg falls in relief back into position; his backside at full rest. Now, a reader would be justified in saying itʻs a Great Waste of Time reading about, Who Cares about body gasses and fluids and stuff; but, you know, Joyce is reminding us all thatʻs What we are, even when discoursing about our Most Important Ideas and Feelings, of which Noraʻs is a kind of subprime valued specimen, but genuinely delivered, fresh, fulsomely to conclusion. Living isnʻt necessarily Who we are. Take the moment,as one of all lifeʻs moments: its anecdotal service, or leave it. That is the nature of observing oneself honestly closely over a period of 24 hours. Donʻt even TRY to escape; gasses go about with one, like oneʻs buttocks and legs, like oneʻself dealing out talk in earnest or in jest. History too publicly has its important stinking moments, its headaches and diarrheas writ large but passed over because organic? Historians look for the INTELLECT in action. Ah,yes, of course -- of course, to chart the Socio-Politico-Religio course(s); but a bad stomach could stop that, or for that matter, contaminated air. It takes a sense of humour to admit these plainly organic moments as not really humiliating, socially, and to admire the creator of the scenes. The metaphor of a Bad Stomach Day is readily extended to any unexpected, cause-and-effect or perhaps happenstance condition, like accepting Circe then needing relief from her compulsive demands. In the myth, Ulyssesʻ entire crew is killed and he alone escapes -- and they are innocents. There is Cyclops and the Lotus Eaters. The Ulysses sitting in his kitchen listening to his wife is the Ulysses that in the end returns to his wife and gets see (in the end) she truly is a BEAUTIFUL PERSON. She in turn loves him. He is a BEAUTIFUL PERSON. All the shadow plays and ups and downs of history in full fledge says really almost nothing more than that for conclusion, except the flowers in memory of humankind remain forever memorable to the lovers in transit.

*The description of the Ulysses scene is only generally correct. Itʻs the spirit of Joyceʻs honest writing, wild and constrained, filling up the crannies of the inbetween moments etc. that I so admire about his ULYSSES. I am glad that I read it in Boston, because it shows how Boston in time does see the light, even though it was also among the first to ban the book, among most of the privileged English speaking book buying cities of the world.

I've read it three times, which doesn't sound spectacular but I'm someone who hardly ever rereads a book even once - the too many I haven't read take priority. Along with Under Milk Wood it is my favourite fiction book.