James Joyce's "Ulysses": Why you should read this book
economist.com
economist.com
The writer is also missing something important: it's virtually impossible for a normal person, or even an abnormal person, to read Ulysses without a guide to the book that describes its allusions and what's going on. If you're trying to read Ulysses without the superstructure of a guidebook or guidebooks, or a class, you're almost certainly going to fail, because very little of it, taken as a free-standing narrative, makes any sense. This is doubly true for those without an in-depth understanding of Irish history and religious practices / cultures.
I read Ulysses in a grad seminar, one or two episodes per week. Without that guidance, I don't think I would've finished. Or could have, in any meaningful sense of the word.
Ulysses seems like it was written to be written about, or to be treated like a puzzle, more than to be read like a novel. Some people obviously enjoy this sort of thing. I don't think I'm one.
Once I arrived in China I cracked open the book for the first time, and the nightmare began. I searched in vain for any English-language bookstore I could find in the hopes of replacing Ulysses with something more... comprehensible. Writing that report was more painful than wisdom teeth extraction.
In one sense this puzzle aspect is definitely true, e.g. Joyce even said famously: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."
On the other hand if you rule such works out, wouldn't you also get rid of many important and enjoyable works. Much of Borges, Eliot's The Waste Land, DFW's novels and essays, Pynchon, Homer are some of the ones that immediately came to mind.
My approach to these books is completely orthogonal to that described in the OP: Try reading it with no guidebooks, etc. If you don't like it, fine, set it aside. But if you can slug through at least the first part. Then, bring out the guides.
But is Homer enjoyable? I don't dispute that it is important, or that it is enjoyable to some.
But my memory of the Iliad from my freshman course on Western civ was that it was a cross between allusions which I didn't have the interest or patience to track down, and a long list of warriors, with eight lines about their family history each, who then promptly get killed by Achilles.
Since then I've tried to read similar (maybe?) works of literature, with the same result. I tried to read Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I'm sorry to say I couldn't get the point.
It seems that the sort of people who enjoy Homer are, to a first approximation, the same sort of people as those who enjoy Joyce, or any other literary work where it is difficult to figure out what the author means.
In short, I remain curious about how one might appreciate such a work, but I don't really buy your argument here.
"It seems that the sort of people who enjoy Homer are, to a first approximation, the same sort of people as those who enjoy Joyce, or any other literary work where it is difficult to figure out what the author means."
For example, Nabokov is much more accessible than Joyce, but the same people who like Ulysses are likely to enjoy Lolita.
Second, I would ask whether you enjoy any literature. Some people like words more than others. What do you like to read? Do you read poetry? Not everyone has to. People who study music tend to like more "inaccessible" music like Bach or Mahler or whatever, and I presume you don't think it's because they're being pretentious. I listen to more mainstream music. But words, I get and love.
I haven't read the Iliad, but I loved The Odyssey. I read it for the first time two years ago (age: 26, translation: Fagles). It's full of sex and violence and dramatic tension. Expecting a dusty classic, I was surprised by how engaging it was.
But you mention enjoying words. Now that I think of it, I don't typically enjoy words. I enjoy the ideas that words convey, so I happily read a ton of books, but when the writing is not straightforward I quickly lose interest.
And I do theoretical math and try to persuade calculus students that it's a fantastic subject, so I certainly can't accuse anyone of being pretentious when they enjoy something I don't!
Similar with Marquez's novel, he tried to emulate oral histories of old folks. So I'm afraid you didn't have a chance to come to these works in your own terms but had to treat them as parts of the canon.
I don't recall sensing any elitist veneer. Rather, as I recall there were multiple male characters named Jose Arcadio Buendia and I could never keep them straight. Moreover, there seemed to be virtually no sense of cause and effect, it felt like a bunch of shit just happened to the characters and they never got to make decisions. Their personalities would change, seemingly at random, and I kept getting confused.
I'm sure there is some significant literary reason for all of this, but I lost track of the characters and the plot, got frustrated, and gave up.
My loss, presumably.
Undoubtedly knowing about Irish history, Irish literature, Catholicism, etc. helps one to follow what is going on. Yet I think it repays the effort of reading. I have read it through twice, once when younger than Stephen Dedalus, once when older than Leopold Bloom, and found that that my perceptions of the book had changed considerably, though I enjoyed it both times.
Should "you" read Ulysses? Don't know: who are "you"?
I could never have made it through, if it were merely an intellectual exercise. It's a slapstick, pun-filled, over-the-top festival. There are songs, and dances, and plays, and fights, and sex (maybe), and proofs by algebra that Hamlet was Shakespeare's grandfather, or vice versa... IT'S FUNNY.
(Oh wait, it's HN).
What I mean, in long form:
Postmodernist works (e.g. Catch 22) are often hilarious. The hallmarks of postmodernism (references, subverting memes, subverting conventions, subverting everything, breaking the fourth wall) are the kind of thing you see more in British comedy than "serious" literature.
Postmodernist writers either miss the jokes completely, or kill them with overanalysis. I am postulating that either the academics we call "postmodernist" don't actually get the jokes, or are very wryly re-telling them with a straight face, then secretly laughing at the people who don't realise it's all a joke (which I consider mean-spirited).
By that measure, all writers writing today are, technically, postmodern; but even among those writers who are writing difficult, academic, contemporary literature, there are stuffy pompous ones and funny snarky ones and everything in between.
It's hard to think of it, because we don't consider the books we like as literature. Vonnegut, certainly by Timequake, is deeply postmodern. Murakami undoubtedly is, and is often very funny; Jasper Fforde tickles; hell, a very strong case could be made for Douglas Adams as a leading Postmodern humourist.
A line from The Second Bakery Attack1: "Why my wife owned a shotgun, I had no idea. Or ski masks. Neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't explain and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt."
Murakami makes me laugh a lot.
By that measure, isn't absolutely everyone, living or dead, a postmodern artist?
It is the lack of such a definition that makes postmodernism.
If someone painted like Jan van Eyck today, it would be postmodern --- both because of the year, and because of the current culture of art. Same painting, different classification. (There's a hilarious story by Borges with almost exactly this premise: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote")
Please understand refraining from saying whether this freedom is good or bad. I mean only to name a distinction between western art up through modernism -- art which met specific expectations according to period and place --- and western art post-modernism, which defies any uniform expectation.
I know kids in their early teens who've loved Ulysses because they don't have these fears, don't see reading as something they can fail at. They can't fail at it because literature isn't reducible to being "understood," therefore not reducible to being "misunderstood." You wouldn't talk about music in terms of its understandability[1], at least not entirely, and you shouldn't approach literature that way either.
All that said, if you want another reason to read Ulysses, do it because it will force you to read and think about writing and language and people in a different way, and that different way is a tool you really ought to have in your toolbox. Which is to say, reading Ulysses can also be worthwhile in the same way that learning a functional programming language is.
1. And for anyone who hasn't really studied music, you'd be amazed by the number of references you're missing there, too. You just don't notice and don't care because those references aren't essential, which is true of Ulysses as well.
No one can 'get' it all. There's too much, and besides, half of it might not be there anyway.
Devour lit with popcorn. Odysseus is a superhero; Knect a nerd; Bloom a clown. And I'm a creepy teddy bear, saying "Reading is Fun!"
[Silly bit deleted here.]
But I think the problem is deeper really. If you have to make an argument about why the humanities have value beyond pure entertainment (which is really what "why you should read Ulysses" boils down to), you've already lost the war, so why bother fighting the battle?
I go back and forth on this. Sometimes I think that our civilization has taken a major wrong turn in believing only in the technical and eschewing the great shared traditions. Other times I remember that the percentage of humanity who cared about this stuff was always very small.
But let's hear from people who've read Ulysses. For those of us who haven't: why should we?
I won't argue further, but it's neither my vision of most people here, nor the vision I have of most vocal people here. And I really hope I'm not mistaken. :)
So there's some of us out there, even in the engineering schools.
Yep, most people are too busy surviving.
It would make a good iPad app actually.
Btw, I think you'll find there's lots of people on Hacker News quite willing to entertain a discussion about something like Ulysses. It's a diverse community.
The closest he comes to saying why Ulysses is worth reading is that it is a "great psychological novel" and that just begs the question.
By the way, I recognize the phenomenon as a former grad student in (Russian) literature: when you're immersed in something, it can be hard to articulate its value to outsiders. You keep pointing to things that you take for granted, but others don't.
Unfortunately, copyright issues and the Joyce estate killed the project.
Please. There is a difference between criticizing what passes for art these days[1] and believing that arts don't have value.
[1] E.g. going around switching prices on items in a grocery store, or acting mentally disturbed in public in order to get committed to a mental institution (both of those where graduation projects at Konstfack in Stockholm).
In my experience a big part of "the classics" seem to be using them as some kind of gamer achievement to prove your erudition. An argument can be made for them leading to a wider world view or exposure to thought provoking/timeless concepts, but I don't think enough people truly read them at that depth/for that reason. I like to read and have a reasonably broad library, but I find it tiresome to discuss literature with a lot of people as I don't have a formal education in the space and most people that want to chat about it snicker if you say you first encountered Boethius in A Confederacy of Dunces or that you prefer Candide to The Metamorphosis or you like One, No One and One Hundred Thousand over, say, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Perhaps I was peculiarly ready to read the book because of my Catholic intellectual family, and an education that included reading Edith Hamilton and a reasonable translation of the Odyssey. When I was nine, I learned to love challenging language and imagining alien culture as I devoured the complete Sherlock Holmes. I'm sure Ulysses contains many allusions I missed entirely, but perhaps not too much. I read much more slowly than some smart folks I know, but part of that is hearing the sound of the words in my head while I imagine what perceptions and beliefs the speaker is responding to (which will never be exactly the reality in which they are fictitiously or actually embeded).
That's all the justification it needs. If you disagree with the first premise, you shouldn't read it. Being well-read and cultured is dying as a signifier of cultural superiority or as a topic of social conversation, so those utilitarian purposes really don't hold. But if you appreciate the intrinsic value of writing, then Ulysses is one book worth reading.
Why over other books? It's a very textured, complicated book: figuring it out is great if you enjoy puzzles, and it's deep enough to survive multiple readings. (Just read it once, and it was great, but it's definitely not a quick beach read.)
I just don't see the point. I love how when writer who knows a huge amount of obscure crap and wraps contorted references to it into an unreadable mess is considered some kind of genius of erudition if the obscure crap involves, say, dead languages, religion and literature, but if it were dungeons and dragons and Harry potter it would be considered at best pop culture pastiche and at worst pathetic.
That's in part because Joyce had synthesized the previous couple hundred years of literary history and the movements within literature, and he very consciously wanted to do something very different from what had been done before (he also wasn't interested much in what readers of conventional novels would think). If you don't have a lot of context regarding, say, literature from Paradise Lost and Shakespeare to 1921, you're going to find the point very hard to see. If you do, then the novel can be sublime.
Joyce was writing during the time we now call Modernism, and the Modernists really broke the link between popular and critical success / pleasure, and we've been living with the results, as a culture, ever since.
If you're curious about these issues, Peter Gay's Modernism is a decent place to start.
1. Give yourself about 6 months.
2. Do not read the text at first go. Instead, listen to the excellent audio recording. http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Naxos-AudioBooks-Joyce-James/d... James Joyce was a lyricist and singer and incorporated many auditory elements into his wordplay. Many voices interact in this work, forming a weave that can be baffling on the page but which acquires a certain harmony read aloud. I would even suggest that much in the way rap musicians take utter (often ridiculous) liberty with the English language, creating works incomprehensible on page but that can be understood in the context of song, Joyce experimented with language-as-lyric. Joyce was known for waking up his wife by laughing out loud as he was writing this work -- he found the wordplay ridiculous and hilarious -- so don't approach it with the severity of a religious text.
3. Do not worry if you get lost or zone out. Just keep going and review or re-read later. If you try to understand everything you will never finish and become discouraged.
4. While you are listening to Ulysses, read Vladimir Nabokov's Harvard lectures on Ulysses. http://books.google.com/books/about/Lectures_on_Literature.h... This is a wonderful chapter-by-chapter companion that will make sense of the chaos.
5. If you want a warm up, read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
What I recall not liking was having no idea what was going on. In a given scene I wouldn't be sure where the characters were, how many were there... even who the characters were. Somewhat like looking at one of those Picasso paintings where you recognise a few fragments of familiar objects but the overall picture is just confusion.
I'm tempted to re-read it to see if those things make sense now. Maybe back then I wasn't able to keep track of the abstractness.
I find this is often the case with any great work that is remote from where one is, whether in time or culturally or aesthetically. One must be willing to put in an initial good faith investment to "fund" the effort of reading it, with the expectation of profit later. Usually it begins to pay off before too long. Sometimes it never does.
Here's an interesting question. Among books that one has truly appreciated (i.e. excluding total writeoffs), which took the longest time before you broke even?
I know of no other book that has this effect on me.
Well, Ulysses is indeed a great read, but certainly not one I'd take to the beach. It's far from an easy read, I would not advise anyone to read it in a place where distraction is so easy.
And Ulysses is fun iff you enjoy litterature, just as Godard's movies are fun iff you enjoy experimental movies. I do enjoy both, but I would not say "it's fun" to anybody. Just like saying "debugging embedded assembly is fun". Could be fun for you, but not so fun for the majority of people.
However, I'd like to also point out that you shouldn't read ISoLT or Ulysses or any other book for that matter, just for the sake of saying that you were able to read it. I think that you lose the depth, the meaning of the words when you read to "show off". You "read" the book, the words flowed into your brain, but did you really understand what the author said?
Unfortunately, I think modernist literature is often susceptible to "half readers", where people start the book, but never finish it. Modernist style can seem pretty alien to some people (Background, as jseliger pointed out, is also important to understanding the "meaning".) As Wikipedia puts it:
>"For the first-time reader, modernist writing can seem frustrating to understand because of the use of a fragmented style and a lack of conciseness. Furthermore the plot, characters and themes of the text are not always presented in a linear way. The goal of modernist literature is also not particularly focused on catering to one particular audience in a formal way. In addition modernist literature often forcefully opposes, or gives an alternative opinion, on a social concept."
There's also a new re-translation being done by Penguin; only the first four are out, the rest are supposed to be out in 2018(?). I think the delay is due to some of the volumes being under copyright still.
From my experience in neighborhood book club, I have found that almost anything, modernist, literature, or not, is susceptible to "half readers".
All other novels are attempts to achieve what Joyce accomplished. A sort of Platonic Ideal.
My reasoning is the evidence, meaning the reason it is the one true novel is because I believe a novel is: the act of attempting to fully represent an individual's experience; If you disagree with my definition of novelisation, that's fine, but it is how I classify novels, and in so much Joyce achieves the nearest perfection of this through the novels seeming opaque or random nature.
One's experience is a cloud of infinite affects and effects that one could attempt to catalogue, but would fail miserably. Here is exactly what Joyce achieved. Through Ulysses' failures it achieves perfection. Like Dali's belief that all things are latent with hidden meanings, or how if you hate Warhol because you think his work is crap then you should recognise that you actually love his work because his message was to show you that all mass manufacture is simply the production of crap.
It is more than What?, it is Why?.
Finnegan's Wake is an even a better example of this belief in practice, but it throws out the rules which unjustly garners it ire. Ulysses plays by the rules, that is grammar`dictionary`genre, and that is why I believe it is held in higher regard.
tl;dr : if you think Ulysses is difficult to read and incomprehensible, you are reading it correctly. Read it without guides, they dismantle the work's truth.
http://www.dougshaw.com/Reviews/review1.html
I've not read Ulysses myself, having disliked Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Like you, I could never get past a few chapters ... but it all clicked for me when I read the final chapter first. The final chapter is very readable, very fun, and very risque ... and to me it was a surprising read, it's not what I expected at all from an Edwardian Dubliner.
Having read the final chapter, I was much more motivated to read the rest ... I wanted to read more of what this writer was up to.
"There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three — storyteller, teacher, enchanter"
(Nabokov himself strongly leans to the latter...)
I will quote the end of this short lecture, as an answer (a very Nabokovian answer) to that nagging and essentially unimportant question: what makes a great novel?
"It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass."
Yes, Ulysses is a precise work, full of riddles and references. Having an annotated edition may give you good grades, or give you insights on the making of the novel, but the device used are not that important - what makes it exhilarating is the joy of the language, the way it sings uniquely, and the way this song builds or subsums the world.
That's my take on what Nabokov meant when he said a great writer is an enchanter. Nabokov's "Ada or Ardor" is an enchantment, as a whole and fractally, down to each single sentence, to each single word. Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu" is an enchantment, a very long river of neverending sentences. Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" is the work of a mean and sarcastic enchanter who uses rythm as a weapon. Just as reading Joyce makes you speak in his special brand of English (or if you venture into Finnegans Wake, his special brand of Gibberish), reading Proust, Flaubert or Nabokov (or Céline or Pynchon) infects you with what they've made of their language to suit the needs of their work.
Yes.