Ever watched Baywatch? Not the one with the Hoff running towards the beach, when may be another dude was drowning right behind him while he’s painstakingly moving in slow motion, but the one with the Rock and Zac Efron that’s released a few years ago and nobody thought was good. And it wasn’t. It was one of them terrible movies most people are likely to forget, but somehow I really enjoyed it, and I would watch it again if I had nothing better to do.
Debates and fistfights follow the discussion of this book. Relationships break over it, maybe wars waged over the discussion of whether this really is the most important novel of the twentieth century. And that is a big claim. What has Ulysses ever done to deserve that badge of honour? Especially when the twentieth century is full of books that has changed the form of the novel itself and captured the century so well, and for the sake of not waging wars I won’t list those novels here.
And for the same sake, I cannot say whether Ulysses is that important. Personally, I don’t think the claim is substantiated. You look at writers such as Woolf, Proust, Kerouac or Burroughs, all who have unique styles of their own and Joyce at least has influenced Kerouac some, even though the weight of his style is more heavily influenced by Proust. Woolf calls it the work of a “queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples”, which I find ironic because in the terms of scale of pushing the boundaries of novel, Woolf comes the closest to Joyce. T.S. Eliot is the most obvious influence in his style and reverence, and you can see a lot of the same techniques used in the Waste Land — self aware and choc-a-bloc with literary references. But the debate of the importance of Ulysses, I think is not relevant and shouldn’t be relevant to the reader.
Finish it if you can, don’t finish it if you can’t. One reviewer stately says that life is too short for reading Ulysses, take it as you will; the hardcore fans would reverse that statement and say that Ulysses is too short for life. Another irony, as Ulysses for its 930 pages only takes place in a single day. The relationship of the opus with the reader is just that — it is personal, and I’m not interested in otherwise. Watch Kubrick, watch Baywatch. But whatever you watch, enjoy the shit out of it. Otherwise the reviewer’s statement is apt — life is too short for Ulysses. So what matters to me then, if I can be honest and question myself is — do I like Ulysses?
For years I have been avoiding this book. I tried it once a decade ago when I was in uni and was taken aback in the very first pages. The first sentence even:
“Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from a stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed”
And what follows is a lot of latin which at that time I had no resources to. And besides, I haven’t read the Odyssey so I knew I was going to be lost. But as any books that I find in the bargain bin, I would pick it up and when a book is done, I’d pick up the next one. But I made some precautions this time: I read up on Ulysses and those who have read on Ulysses and heeded some of their advice. Read Odyssey (check), read up on Irish history at the start of the twentieth century (maybe later), read Hamlet (ok what, check), find Ben Gifford’s annotations (check), use Shmoop to read on the summary and analysis for every chapter, each more stunning than the last.
The latter two advice helped immensely, and I can’t thank Gifford and the team at Shmoop enough. However, I used the annotations sparingly. I think another article is needed on the approaches on reading this frikkin behemoth, because there are sure many. In short, reading Ulysses is preparing oneself for a war of attrition with the book, and yet, the same question remains: do I like it?
Ulysses frustrated me endlessly. It is reading eighteen books in the same binding, plus other external readings so you don’t get lost. Unless you’re a historian, English major genius savant, you would have a difficult time with this book as any normal people. There are words here that are extinct, words made up, Irish slang, different styles within the same page, styles that nobody had ever used in a novel. And you know the punchline, that despite the difficulties, I love Ulysses. This book is nothing like I’ve ever read and I’ve read a few. And I expected to hate it, after really disliking the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
In fact, Ulysses is a sequel to Portrait. We find out what happens to Stephen Dedalus, now in his early twenties and failing as an artist in Paris, washed up early as a tutor to kids who couldn’t care less and an anti-semitic boss who gives him terrible life advice. His money goes quickly and he’s constantly in debt with his peers. But his mother has died, and his relationship with his father is cold. As Ulysses is based on the story of the Odyssey, Dedalus is Telemachus, waiting for a father figure who would be able to guide him in his formative years. This is not his father, who’s a drunk no-good singer who can barely takes care of his multitude.
We don’t see our Ulysses, Leopold Bloom until the fourth chapter, preparing breakfast for his wife. The roles are reversed here. Bloom is a man but feminine in many levels (this deserves an entire discussion by itself), but he knows that she is cheating on him, knows who she cheats with, but loves her just the same. He is ad-canvasser, borderline freelancer and he barely makes any friends. He’s also Jewish by origin and this rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
The rest of the novel loosely follows the chapters of the Odyssey, drawing parallels to the modern Dublin. The sirens are there somewhere acting as barmaids, but they are not the destruction of the sailors, the barmaids are vessels of sentimental times which can lead a people astray to what is happening now. One of my favourite chapters is Cyclops as I find it so relevant, and I see modern examples of Cyclops everywhere — I’m looking at you Trump supporters. The book ends with a monologue of Bloom’s wife Penelope, for many English majors trying to score, I heard that they’d claim to the attractive female English major that they love reading this last chapter of Ulysses.
Ulysses is many things, and I won’t be able to pin down every single one of those things even with all the essays of scholars and sparknotes summaries handy, it is a deeper book than that. There is venom in its intent, that’s for sure, because it is a book to put down other snot-nosed literary connoisseurs. It is a fuck you to the English language, because after all, Joyce is writing in the language of the enemy (Ireland was under the Empire at that time). But it is a joyous book, it is hilarious as much as it is ambitious. Stephen Fry hit the nail right in the head in this YouTube video: this book is a celebration.
Misunderstood? I don’t know. Hated? Yeah, it’s pretty fucking notorious. But really, Joyce is well eaten by the worms in his grave, so he wouldn’t really care if you hate it or love it. Read Harry Potter if you will, or Twilight. There is no shame in finding the book difficult. If you met anyone saying that this was an easy read, that person is a chronic liar and is probably psychotic. But give Ulysses a go, who knows that it might even floor you as it did to me.
