For over three months now, I’ve been reading Ulysses by James Joyce.
I gave it four out of five stars. It could use a good editor. It’s a fascinating book, but there’s just too much of it.
The first three or four chapters start off well enough. But then Joyce starts getting a little oblique. There’s lots of stream of consciousness going on, but sometimes you can’t tell whom it’s coming from. And sometimes you can’t tell if it’s stream of consiousness, or the actual narrator. Some people claim that there’s a Narrator, but also an Arranger. I wouldn’t know about that. Part of it is written as a play. Part of it as catchism. The last chapter has no punctuation. And yet some people really love this book.
I didn’t read it by myself. I had help. A lot of people really love this book. They write their own books about it. Which is great because without them I would have had no idea whatsoever was going on. It’s supposed to be a difficult book, and it succeeds grandly.
Overall, The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses by Patrick Hastings was the best help. It started as a website and grew from there. Each chapter of Ulysses is dissected, translated into sub-genius English, and explained as need be. It’s a little on the scholarly side, but not painfully so.
What got me started with this was hearing ambassador Daniel Mulhall talk about his book, Ulysses: a Reader’s Odyssey on the radio. It sounded like a swell book. He’s been reading Joyce’s book for years, and has put his own feelings and ideas about it into his own book. There was one particular chapter of his that is much better at explaining Joyce’s chapter than Hastings’ is.
Half-way through Ulysses, I bought a copy of Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford because I thought that I was still missing out on too much. As it turns out, I wasn’t missing out on too much that mattered. Gifford’s notes are really impressive, and often quite interesting, but they are not so very much essential.
The brothel chapter was definitely not my favorite. I almost gave up reading the book at that point. I decided I would just skip over the part that was bothering me, and continue on. By then I’d already passed through all the troubling bits, though, so I ended up skipping not a single word.
You end up knowing more about Leopold than you know about anyone else in the world, probably even more than you know about yourself. Which is a pretty good trick. But some of the things that I know about old Poldy, I’d prefer not to know.
One of the characters in the book is a younger version of the author. And he’s a genius idiot. So Joyce was pretty self-aware. He knew what he was doing as he put the book together, and I’m sure that he got exactly what he wanted. People are going to talk and think about this book as long as folks can read English, I would guess. But I didn’t enjoy the book.
Of course, you don’t have to enjoy something in order to appreciate it. You get the stream of consciousness of four characters in the book: Leopold, his wife Molly, Joyce’s younger self Stephen, and Gerty who’s just a girl at the beach. You get to know each of their humanity. It’s pretty impressive. Kind of depressing too.
I fear that I’ll think about parts of this book for the rest of my life. Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s just that many of the thoughts will be sad. For instance, one of my permanent memories from reading Dubliners 40 years ago (!) is of the old woman whose nose and chin touch at the tips when she smiles. My heart breaks just a little more each time that I recall it.
Long ago, I tried to read Finnegan’s Wake. If you read it aloud with your best Leinster accent, you can almost see through the homophones and puns and actually understand what’s going on. But my voice gives out before very long. I bet I didn’t ever get past sixty pages. All for the best, I wager.
