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Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

Does he actually give any reason why one should read Ulysses? I didn't see any.

[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?

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Keep in mind you're posting this to a site where most people, or at least the most vocal people, don't think the arts and letters have much value and think that pure technocracy would be a fine thing.

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. :)

You know, you're right. I'm too sensitive on this point. Also, I see I did that annoying thing where someone makes an untrue generalization about HN and inadvertently (or advertently, as the case may be) changes the subject. I'm going to edit that out.

I'm not sure of the precise representation on HN, but I would say that statement is consistent with the modal line of thought in my engineering school.

At my engineering school, I took a whole quarter long class on Joyce, the vast bulk of which was focused on Ulysses. We did a chapter a week as I recall, with the last week focused on the first page of Finnegan's wake. Well, the first couple paragraphs, really.

So there's some of us out there, even in the engineering schools.

His reasons were that 1. it's like Shakespeare in its engagement of both the high brow and low brow of human psychology, 2. it's good for the digital age where we can hyperlink text and bring things like annotations and intertextuality to the forefront (previously the mainstay of literature departments where people had the time to study such things)

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.

But those aren't reasons. The first is a non sequitur on top of an appeal to authority: Shakespeare did X, Joyce does X, Shakespeare is good so Joyce must be good. The second is beside the point; a book that isn't worth reading isn't more worth reading on an iPad! (Reminds me of Chesterton's quip: if a job is worth doing it's worth doing badly.)

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.

Well I think it's implicit that one of the things he thinks makes Shakespeare great is this engagement of 'poetry and patter' and he thinks Joyce also does this. It's not really an appeal to authority to say 'if you like Shakespeare, you'll this...'; and also implicit that the book is widely understood to be good, just difficult/inaccessible (but the digital age can solve that problem. Like, if ever there was a good time to read Ulysses, it's now).

Someone was working on a hypermedia version of Ulysses a couple years back.

Unfortunately, copyright issues and the Joyce estate killed the project.

I haven't (read Ulysses) so hopefully I am not hijacking the conversation, but your comment on why, beyond pure entertainment prompted me. I rarely get the chance to trot out one of my favorite Twain quotes, but now is the time: The classics are the books which everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read.

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.

Other times I remember that the percentage of humanity who cared about this stuff was always very small.

Yep, most people are too busy surviving.

The idea Ulysses reinforced in me is that anything, from shaving in the morning to looking for a place to relieve oneself, if perceived properly, is beautiful, or funny, or tragic. It becomes significant to the extent we consider it. Or, humorously: https://xkcd.com/915/

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).

> Keep in mind you're posting this to a site where most people, or at least the most vocal people, don't think the arts and letters have much value and think that pure technocracy is a fine thing.

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).

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