Ulysses

This book, James Joyce's seminal masterwork of obscurely innovative writing, has a literary reputation preceding it like almost no other book. It's notorious for being just downright difficult to read, and so having been informed as such by my A-Level English Language teacher (who as this blog goes on it will become obvious had a huge influence on my reading habits) I found it in a second-hand bookshop and started reading it out of sheer determination. That was two years ago (I read many books simultaneously and the longer harder ones get finished very slowly as a consequence), but having barely read anything in January due to exams I decided to tackle the remaining-unread 300ish pages in another burst of effort and so finished it just in time for the next term to recommence tomorrow. The book's general gist[s] is[are]:

• Leopold Bloom, a jewish advertisement editor, goes about the events of his day on 16th June 1904, encountering and interacting with many friends and acquaintances, primarily his wife, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, the son of an old friend. Within the book's twenty-four hour span these three characters go about their varyingly mundane days in Dublin, doing things from attending funerals to regretting affairs to surprisedly discovering a forgotten potato in one's pocket. BUT IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE BECAUSE
• It's also a parody/homage of Homer's Odyssey* (hence the title), with each succession of events vaguely mirroring a chapter of the Greek epic, albeit in necessarily less dramatic scope; for example, where Odysseus and his crew are captured and attacked by the Cyclops, Bloom and his friends are accosted by a drunk nationalist who throws a biscuit-tin at our not-eponymous-hero. BUT IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE EITHER BECAUSE
• Joyce was a pioneer of prose, experimenting with writing techniques throughout the book which I will not embarrass my lack of literature-jargon by failing to explain; and so the language with which the story unfolds is almost endlessly diversely immersively unpredictably obtusely brilliantly creative. The prose dips and flickers almost without warning between dialogues, descriptions, perceptions, memories, thoughts, current occurrences and odd half-metaphorical fantasies. The three main characters' heads are entered to a remarkably personal extent, with their streams of consciousness often played out in grand strings of idiosyncratic wordage. Chapters even vary between the genre and form of their written style - one interspersed with sensationalist newspaper headlines describing updating situations, one composed entirely from questions and answers of varying length, one written as a script replete with amusing stage directions, one written as a single fifty-page-long sentence without any punctuation at all. This is what people are talking about when complaining of how hard to read it is BECAUSE IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE.

   So the book, despite a fairly simple story and a fairly comprehensible set of mythic parallels, becomes nigh on impenetrable because of how it is written. Of course it helps not at all that on top of this the text is also littered with references to contemporary Irish culture, often in minute detail of politics or communities, plus spattered untranslated phrases in Latin, Italian, Irish and a handful of other languages, plus many a word that is simply either misspelt or made up. Much of these latter difficulties could be avoided with an annotated version (which I didn't have) but that adds on a good 240 pages of reading and probably doesn't add 240-pages-worth of enjoyment, so allow yourself to not understand certain things. I think in short it's fair to say that there was a pretty large proportion of the book that was lost on me, and could probably be lost on anyone except those highly-skilled in literary deconstruction and with a lot of spare time for analysis.

   Don't let that put you off in the slightest. This is renowned as one of the most difficult books but it is also absolutely superb: the rewards are so much greater for the increased mental strain of reading it. If they weren't, the first person to have read it would have considered it meaningless gibberish and tossed it aside and it wouldn't be the monstrously famous 20th-century novel that it is. Reading it is often like wading through glue, yes, but only because you're collecting pots of gold scattered about the surface of the glue-pond (please pardon that ridiculous sentence). The sheer liquid delight of the writing style's inventiveness as the words seem to play with themselves, the life-affirming splendour of some of the descriptions of feelings and people, the irrepressible grin or chortle as some benign or opaque phrase turns its own meaning into something entirely different - once you get the knack of not being put off by the text, you can stumble through it and see its fleeting beauty. This post is naturally meandering somewhat because there is so much to potentially say about this book and yet I wouldn't know where to start, so apologies. I'm just trying to outline how great it was to read.

   On the back of my edition, there's a quote by Samuel Beckett about the novel: "His words are not the polite contortions of twentieth century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way onto the page, and glow and blaze and flame and disappear". I cannot put it better; reading the book makes you feel as though you are reading minds, and of course this is hard to comprehend, to retain, to dissect; but it is full of insights and snippets of pure originality and excellence. Molly and Stephen and especially Leopold Bloom do not feel like characters in a novel - they feel like real existing humans with minds and bodies and communities; like we're allowed to peer into their innermost lives through James Joyce's meticulously** crafted prose-tinted glasses.

   It is a cliché to say so but this is a work of genius (it wouldn't be a cliché if people hadn't thought it were true frequently enough to make it one). There aren't many books I would wholeheartedly recommend that anyone who enjoys reading should attempt before they die, but this is certainly among them.

* I did start off trying to read Ulysses and the Odyssey in parallel, chapter to chapter, but of course the one was an epic journey with monsters and adventures in plain prose and the other was a day in Dublin with acquaintances and errands in the unplainest prose I've ever encountered - and for some reason I got bored of the first one and finished the second one first.

** the book had a thoroughly arduous journey from inception to proper publication, due to various factors including: Joyce's povety-stricken conditions; his developing eye-disease; inept copytypists; disinterested publishers; government censorship; and World War One. The pains of a genius' labours are great to birth such a great work as this. Fortunately the original text survives to today in a variety of affordable readable mass-market paperbacks.