Ulysses [Brossura]

Ulysses is the most astonishingly difficult work of fiction that I have ever read. It is also one of the most astonishingly beautiful books I have ever read. Certainly, reading this novel is not for the uninitiated or the faint of heart. But it's also not for those who believe they can understand everything in this book.
Certainly a ton has been written on this site about the plot so I'll skip that and just give my suggestions about how to go about reading this behemoth. Find a website that gives you a chapter by chapter summary (wikipedia is not particularly good because the analysis is simply too short). Read the summary of every chapter before you read the chapter and once again after you finish reading the chapter. Also, keep a dictionary handy. James Joyce has the largest vocabulary of any writer I have ever read. I found that this method was sufficient for me to be able to understand a great portion of the book. If I had tried to use an annotated guide, I feel like I would have spent too much time looking at every reference and ultimately given up on the book out of sheer boredom. Literature is meant to be enjoyed and appreciated, so unless you are planning on teaching the book to others, read the book without an annotated guide.
For those that are willing to abandon all hope of complete understanding and enter Ulysses, I think the experience is actually quite rewarding. The writing is top-notch, the humor incredibly funny, and the drama incredibly moving. James Joyce said more with this book than I believe has even been said about the human condition in any other book (his only rival being William Shakespeare). It is a work of absolute genius, the kind of book that even the best writers can merely kowtow to in reverence. Its triumph will probably never be equalled and for that reason, it is worth the challenge.

Having read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and also Dubliners, I decided last summer to tackle his novel Ulysses, to which several literary associations have deemed the greatest twentieth century novel. Today's sophisticated younger reader may ponder the accolades professors and scholars have showered upon a novel that rambles for well over 700 pages, but there are significant reasons that I would like to briefly elucidate.

First, as many have pointed out this is a book of language, and specifically one that attempts to import all of English lexicon in order to examine where its vocabulary leads us and where we ultimately run up against road blocks. This monumental task had never been accomplished in the English language since the likes of Shakespeare and Chaucer.

Second, this is a novel of experimentation. A 19th century staple, the novel was overdue for an update that would capture the complexities and anxieties of the 20th century. For too long, the novel reflected a mathematical plot line divided evenly into clear physical events, which, frankly, failed to detail the organics of human thought and development. Ulysses does the unthinkable: Our thoughts and actions cannot be explained away by chronology;there is a real-time universal presence to them, as some would later read in Faulkner's works.

Third, there is an authentic examination of the individual. Reading his biography and Ireland's history, Joyce repeatedly hammers home the colossal battle between individuality and social conformity. In Ulysses, outside forces such as the Catholic church, parents, ignorance, politics, and peers attempt to squelch the voice of the individual by attempting to dictate what happiness and contentment are. It is through allusions to the mythological story of the Odyssey that our most heroic feat today is learning how our voice can Bloom in a world that too often expects us to conform.

Fourth, it is an honest, realistic story about life in general. Whether we want to admit it, much of life is spent within ourselves, as Joyce unearths through the three characters' streams of consciousness. We do talk to ourselves; our thoughts are random, not linear; we scrutinize ourselves hoping to make connections among scraps of thoughts that only we and God have access to. No novelist up to this point had created what amounted to a confessional that was unafraid of society's taboos and mores. Where else could a young modern reader, for example, read about a character's sexual acts in unadorned detail?

Finally, contrary to what critics have stated--i.e. several novelists of Joyce's age called the work a mess--there is a compelling story. At the time of its publication, virulent anti-semitism consumed not only colonized Ireland but the rest of the world. So enters our modern day Ulysses, Bloom, a baptized Jew who exhibits the attributes of Christ but is condemned by his society for alleged ancestral sins. And then there is poor Stephen, whose triumphant announcement to the world that he is an artist contrasts sharply with his doldrum existence, refusing to pray for his dying mother, rejecting his largely absent father, and holding a teaching position that is less than inspiring.

There's Molly, a singer by trade who is blazed into sleeping with a talent agent so that she can further her career and can also help provide for Bloom when money is tight. Molly and Bloom may be jovial in name, but underneath is the tragic loss of their infant son who managed to live only eleven days. To me, this is an unflinching look at real life. And yet, epiphanies still happen, and new friendships such as what Stephen and Bloom display provide us with what really matters most: love and acceptance. Bloom is the father who unconditionally accepts Stephen, and Stephen is the son Bloom has dreamed of since Stephen clearly needs guidance.

Many readers have pointed out that the traditional literary community has hailed Ulysses as the seminal novel of the twentieth century, and, therefore, today's reader must adhere to its proclamation. If Joyce were alive, I think he would be appalled simply because freedom of expression was his guiding principle. Joyce's main point is that the path toward freedom is not merely a straight line or even a winding one; rather, it is a confluence of thoughts, feelings, and relationships that eventually crystallize into an overarching personal epiphany. Ulysses certainly is a challenge, but then again so is life. Each day is worth a seven hundred page book--Joyce's merit is that he actually proved it.

What to make of Ulysses, that towering work of modernism that has been seen as both the hallmark of the age, and an impediment to later generations of writers trying to get out from beneath Joyce's long shadow?

Ultimately, the worth of the novel can't be questioned, even if you do not `like' the book. Perhaps no novel in the 20th century exerted (and continues to exert) so great an influence over the written arts. Lots of ink has been spilled about the novel. On this, my third reading of it after twenty years, I have this to say:

Part of the challenge and thrill of the novel is Joyce's chameleon like ability to thrown on literary guises, while at the same time being intractably, even stubbornly, Joyce. He had few illusions about his genius, and wrote a work from that lofty standpoint. Although loaded with humor, dirty jokes, and common place incidents, Ulysses is an intellectual's novel, meant not to be read but re-read. It is nearly Talmudic in its dimensions. Dig deeper into a passage and you find multiple layers of meaning.

Part of the challenge (and frustration for some) of this novel is its incredible restlessness. The first third of the novel features Joyce's famous stream of consciousness technique. Characters are minds in bodies, thinking a stream of thought, occasionally interrupted by some external datum.

Here Joyce creates a kind of hyper-naturalism. It is as if he wishes to show readers that the naturalism of the preceding generations was nothing more than a fictive mask. Here is the closest we can get to the workings of the human mind in its social and psychological settings. He bends language get this. He coins new words. He leaves words dangling off and thoughts unfinished. In other words, he tries to reproduce how our halting minds actually think their thoughts.

Once Joyce has accomplished this, he appears to repudiate it. We then get a variety of chapters written from certain literary standpoints (often mockingly so). It is as if Joyce is saying: this is literature too, a series of guises that we throw on and off at will. This is the lens through which people see the world. They are more than encapsulated minds. They also structure their worlds.

So, Ulysses keeps the reader off kilter, and with a sense of sheer delight on the part of Joyce. We start over and over again, chewing on the same material and spiritual conditions of one day in Dublin over a hundred years ago.

In the process much that is profound happens surrounded by a spectacle of mundane happenings. In other words, just another day.