It’s official –– I’m one of the few, the proud, the slightly masochistic: I have read Ulysses.
And, actually, it was pretty good.
Since this is going to be a fairly long review, I’ve decided to write up in a kind of FAQ question-and-answer style, as if we were having a conversation with one another. This way, you can dip in and out as your interest dictates. I hope this document provides some guidance and a little encouragement towards a book that is too often left unread.
Ulysses: A User’s Guide
What is Ulysses?
Ulysses is a book written by Irish author James Joyce, first published in its entirety in 1922, on Joyce’s 40th birthday. In its early days it gained notoriety for being banned in the United States on obscenity charges. But this ban was reversed in 1933 after a decision, known as United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, declared the book free from obscenity. It remained banned in the UK until 1936, and apparently became openly available in Ireland only in the 1960s.
Rightly or wrongly, today the book enjoys a kind of cult status as one of the most difficult novels ever written, with many considering it an achievement just to have gotten through the whole thing. It is famously experimental, with each episode written in a different literary style. The last episode, which captures Molly Bloom’s internal monologue in the form of a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy, is particularly beloved.
Ulysses was preceded by Joyce’s collection of short stories, Dubliners, and by his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which chronicles author avatar Stephen Dedalus’ childhood years. It was succeeded by Finnegan’s Wake, which is by reputation even more difficult to read than Ulysses (and indeed considered by many to be unreadable). All of Joyce’s works take place in Dublin, with many of the same characters making appearances in each work.
What is Ulysses about?
Set in Dublin on the single day of June 16th, 1904 (the day Joyce first met his future wife), Ulysses is a loose retelling of The Odyssey in modern garb. Stephen Dedalus––
Wait, what’s The Odyssey about again? Do I need to have read it to read Ulysses?
The Odyssey is one of two ancient Greek epic poems by Homer, and it chronicles the trials of the hero Odysseus (Ulysses, in Roman myth) in his wanderings after the Trojan War. Odysseus spends ten years at war in Troy and it takes him another ten years to sail back to his kingdom of Ithaca. He has a number of adventures before finally losing his entire crew and winding up a captive of Calypso, a beautiful nymph who tempts him with an offer of immortality. Odysseus, however, resists the bait (though not her bed) and continues trying to find a way home. While Odysseus is gone, his wife, Penelope, faithfully waits for his return, and refuses to marry any of the many suitors who come to court her. These suitors — 108 of them by Homer’s count — eventually take up residence in Odysseus’s palace, eating up his food and making a mockery of the rites of hospitality sacred to the Greeks. Things come to a head when, after nearly 20 years with no king, Odysseus’s son Telemachus, who was a baby when Odysseus left for war, finally nears maturity. Telemachus struggles to take his place as head of the household among the jeering suitors, and Penelope’s maneuvers to stall their wooing seem to be meeting with less and less patience. With time running out before the family loses their patrimony entirely, Telemachus takes up his own journey to search for his father, though compared to Odysseus’s arduous and wide-ranging travels his excursions are rather tame. Odysseus washes up on Ithaca’s shores just in time, and father and son join together in tag-team fashion to defeat the suitors and regain the palace. Odysseus is finally reunited with Penelope, and we leave them at rest in their marriage bed, faithful to one another until the end. (Well, except for all those nymphs.)
While it’s best if you’ve happened to have already read it, I wouldn’t say it’s necessary to have The Odyssey under your belt before reading Ulysses. If you’ve got annotations to help you with the specifics of each episode, it’s surprising how little you really need beyond the basic gist of the story. This is largely because, while Ulysses is loosely based on its namesake, it takes its source material more as inspiration than blueprint. Joyce doesn’t, for instance, work through the episodes in the order in which they are presented in Homer. The characters, too, have a tendency to shift in their correspondences to their mythological counterparts — Molly Bloom, for instance, begins the book as Calypso but ends it as Penelope. Being familiar with The Odyssey gave me one or two moments of insight (e.g. none of my annotations seemed to comment on how the Blooms’ bed is jangly and wobbly because it’s in direct contrast to Penelope and Odysseus’s bed, which is literally rooted to the ground and unmovable, since it’s made from a tree growing in the center of their home), but generally I didn’t have any special understanding beyond that which someone might have simply by reading an episode summary before each corresponding chapter of Ulysses.
Other than the general outline of the poem, however, there is one important thing to know with regard to The Odyssey. Each episode of Ulysses, though unnamed in the text, has an unofficial Homeric name based on the way Joyce referred to it in his private correspondence. So, episode one is generally referred to as “Telemachus,” episode two is “Nestor,” episode three is “Proteus,” and so on, even as your edition probably won’t have these chapter titles written anywhere.
Okay, back to the plot synopsis. And give me the whole story please, beginning to end.
So, Ulysses is meant to be a modern retelling of The Odyssey in early 20th-century Dublin. As in Homer, the story opens not with the hero, but with several episodes dedicated to the Telemachus character, Stephen Dedalus, who was the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel. Stephen is in his early 20s now, and has recently returned home from Paris, the city to which he’d exiled himself in the previous book in the hopes of beginning his writing career. The homecoming was not a happy one: he was recalled back to Dublin at the news that his mother was dying. The vision of her on her deathbed still haunts him nearly a year later, and he is wracked by guilt for his fastidious refusal to fulfill her dying wish: that he kneel down and pray at her bedside.
Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting…Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love’s bitter mystery.
Held back at the very moment of his liberation, and tormented by memories that imprison him in a kind of stasis, the once promising Stephen is stalled. Determined not to yoke his talent to any master — either to duty, or religion, or even to Ireland itself — he can’t decide what to do with himself or his career despite opportunities offered by several potential “fathers” over the course of the story. “The bird that can sing and won’t sing,” as Florry the prostitute describes him. After breakfast Stephen leaves his lodgings and decides that he cannot return again. Following a brief interlude teaching at the boys’ school where he works, he spends the rest of the day without a direction or a home, wandering.
It is only in the fourth episode, “Calypso,” that we finally meet our Odysseus, who is here an unassuming advertising canvasser preparing his breakfast.
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine…
Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
—Mkgnao!
—O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.
The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.
Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.
—Milk for the pussens, he said.
—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
Quite apart from the cerebral Stephen, Bloom is in touch with the sensual world around him and, at nearly twice Stephen’s age, seems happily surrounded by the appurtenances of comfortable middle age. But Bloom soon is set to wandering as well. His wife, Molly, has instructed him to stay away from the house for the day, so that at 4:30 she can consummate her affair with her concert manager, Blazes Boylan. Bloom politely says he’ll go see a show. So in parallel to Stephen, after breakfast Bloom leaves his home, and like Odysseus he spends the rest of the book trying to find a way back.
While Bloom ambles around the city, encountering a number of people and situations all of which have at least a nominal analogue in an episode of The Odyssey — from sirens transfigured into barmaids to the winds of Aeolus upsetting papers at the newspaper office — he continually thinks of Molly: her quirks and funny views and sayings, and especially all the memories he still has from the different chapters of their lives.
Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.
Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun’s heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion’s head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you’ll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.
Me. And me now.
Stuck, the flies buzzed.
We come to learn, slowly, that the Blooms have not consummated their marriage since the death of their son, Rudy, ten years earlier. Having died at only eleven days old, both Blooms continue to mourn the loss, though silently and without any direct acknowledgement.
I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was. She twentythree. When we left Lombard street west something changed. Could never like it again after Rudy. Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?
A number of parallels in thought and circumstance, from the way Stephen and Bloom are both affected by the same rain cloud to the interior truth that they are both similarly lost, lead us to expect that Stephen and Bloom must at some point meet. Bloom and Stephen come tantalizingly close to speaking several times, even passing by each other on at least two occasions, but they never quite make each other’s acquaintance until late in the night (much after the dreaded hour of 4:00). Filled with an intuitive paternal affection, Bloom follows Stephen to Nighttown, the local red-light district, in hopes of saving him from the life of debauchery he seems increasingly to be sinking into. It’s here that both Bloom and Stephen face their metaphorical demons, which are made manifest in the circus-like, hallucinogenic atmosphere of the brothel. The two confront their memories, regrets, and inmost obsessions in physical form as a phantasmagoric parade of nearly every character who has thus far been referred to even in passing makes an appearance. Finally, Stephen, in a sudden fit, stands and breaks the chandelier hanging above him. Bloom awakes from his daydream and helps Stephen escape with his good name and (some) money still intact.
Bloom takes Stephen for a bite to eat at a cab-shelter before deciding to invite him home, “as on the night he misguidedly brought home a dog (breed unknown) with a lame paw (not that the cases were either identical or the reverse though he had hurt his hand too…” Bloom finally returns to his home on Eccles Street with Stephen in tow, and after the chaos of the brothel the two enjoy a quiet cup of cocoa together. Bloom offers to allow Stephen to spend the night, where “at least he would be in safe hands and as warm as a toast on a trivet,” but Stephen demurs, leaving shortly thereafter.
Bloom takes a brief accounting of his very long day, shucks off his clothes, and lays next to Molly in bed. She has been waiting for him all evening. He relates to her all about his day (with judicious expurgations). Having finally made his way home — that is, to Molly — he kisses the “plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump,” and promptly falls asleep. Wherein Molly has her first introduction, and commences her famous unpunctuated soliloquy.
So ends the story. But a bare bones summary of the plot overlooks almost everything interesting about the book. For one, Bloom’s episodic adventures traipsing across Dublin, which I didn’t even try to summarize, comprise the largest part of the story. It would be impossible, too, to try to discuss in short form the many recurring themes of the novel, from Irish nationalism, to anti-semitism, to Roman Catholicism, to money, beauty, aging, and death. Perhaps most importantly, every episode is written in a wholly different style. Some episodes imitate the writings of different time periods (often to comic effect), or reproduce the sound of music through words, or limit their vocabulary to some subset of English. Joyce even includes a chapter of writing mistakes, wherein he intentionally adopts a tired and ugly style. Some of these experiments are more successful than others, but compared to the naked plot they are much more central to the spirit of the work.
Ultimately, the book seems to be an attempt at exploring the whole of a single human being — the public, the private, and the unwitnessed. Though we get the complete picture only with Bloom, we also see a number of characters from different vantage points, including right inside their still-percolating thoughts. This is where Joyce demonstrates his mastery not just of language, but of writing — he is capable of making an egotistical 22-year-old artiste, a humble 38-year-old ad-man, and an earthy 33-year-old adulteress all entirely separate, entirely authentic, and entirely real. It’s true that Ulysses is most famous for its countless learned allusions and language games — and indeed they are seemingly innumerable — but I think the real heart of the book, and where Joyce’s genius truly lies, is in how precisely he understands the ways of thought and how perfectly he can model them. His prose is perhaps the most successful attempt at capturing the ineffability of thought that has ever been attempted. His characters, who experience real and searing emotions — loneliness, uncertainty, love, longing — elevate the book above the procession of boast and pretension that characterizes so many self-consciously avant-garde works.
And did I mention the book is funny? I love that an advertisement for “Plumtree’s potted meat” is, to Bloom’s great consternation, placed right under the obituary section. I love how Bloom’s name is misprinted in the paper as “L. Boom.” I love Bloom’s musings on animals: “Dogs at each other behind. Good evening. Evening. How do you sniff? Hm. Hm. Very well, thank you.” The entire book is surprisingly light-hearted and even optimistic, with the overall effect that it seems to embody a unique kind of playful erudition. Puzzling out the allusions and literary tricks becomes a kind of game that you play with Joyce — one that is both charmingly amusing and rewarding.
And yes, the book is also unflinchingly explicit, even crude depending on your tendency to clutch at your pearls, but in making room for nearly every human bodily function — from menstruation to defecation to eructation to seminal emission — right alongside all its deepest emotion — the aching moments of despair and the breathless flashes of delight — Joyce is also faithful to the actual experience of living. He is never malicious, but always human and humane — even humanist. He is the rare author who is willing to meet us where we actually are. And it is characteristically Joycean that, after a long hard look at our unvarnished selves, he finds in our meager frames that which is most beautiful.
He foresaw his pale body reclined in it [the bath] at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.
I mean, have you ever read a more beautiful description of a flaccid penis?
Do I need to have read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners first?
I didn’t read either one of these works before jumping into Ulysses, but I ended up wishing I had. With the aid of annotations I don’t think my reading was too impoverished by skipping Dubliners, but without Portrait Stephen remains to me a somewhat mysterious and aloof figure. Though he winds up being a minor character next to Bloom, I would have benefitted from knowing more about him beyond the dribs and drabs I gathered from scattered notes.
My conclusion: you can get away with skipping both books if you really just want to get right down to Ulysses, but I’d recommend giving at least Portrait a go first if you’ve got the time. Of course, having read both (along with The Odyssey) would be best.
Should I skip parts?
In the interests of making the book more accessible, I’ve noticed a trend online advising readers to skip portions of the book, particularly the first three episodes (the so-called Telemachy, which deals mostly with Stephen — an admittedly priggish character a lot of readers seem to dislike).
I’d advise against skipping parts. I don’t say this only because I’m a purist, but because one of Joyce’s literary techniques is to opaquely introduce memories or themes that will be revisited later. Skipping portions means you miss those introductions, and later parts of the text will have less meaning for you.
Take, for instance, this excerpt from Stephen’s thoughts early in the book:
Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.
A perfect distillation of adolescent longing. But it also poses the question: “what is that word known to all men?” It is the question hanging in the air when we see Stephen again at the library in the ninth episode, “Scylla and Charybdis,” and finally, near the very end of the book at the brothel in “Circe,” when Stephen confronts the specter of his mother at last, it comes directly to the fore once again:
STEPHEN: (Eagerly) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.
Without the scaffolding of the first three books, you wouldn’t know that this isn’t just a throwaway question, but something Stephen has been dwelling upon all day, something to do with his feelings of isolation — something which he is desperate to answer. You wouldn’t know, either, why Stephen refuses to wash his hands when he goes to Bloom’s house (as is shown early on, he is hydrophobic, probably because water is associated with baptism, but also because it is termed the “great sweet mother”). Indeed, you wouldn’t even really know why Stephen is talking to his mother in the first place.
The context is even more important with more difficult passages. Joyce builds up the story’s symbolic language with layers of recurring images and memories, which at first tend to bubble up in confusing jumbles without any real explanation. It’s only with repeated exposure to those images and memories that we can slowly put the pieces together and figure out some meaning and motivation for the earlier occurrences after the fact. You would not only miss out on this build-up were you to skip certain parts, but without the shared language which Joyce has painstakingly built up over the course of the book, you might possibly wind up confused later in the few portions of the book that are relatively clear. Though the book is superficially episodic, I think of it more like a set of interlocking pieces — it would be very difficult to read any one section in isolation.
Knowing that there are portions of the book early on that you couldn’t possibly understand right away should encourage you; you’re not missing out on anything if you don’t quite get what you’re reading at first — you’re simply encountering the book exactly as it was designed to be read. Things will become clearer with time. And after all, if you skipped ahead every time the going got tough, there’d hardly be any book left to read!
Some people say a first reading should be done without any notes at all. Do I really need annotations?
I’ve observed a lot of resistance to reading annotations on a first go-around with Ulysses. If you already have a strong opinion one way or the other on this, go with your gut. However, I think skipping annotations in the hopes of making the book more approachable for yourself is liable to backfire. Ulysses is a challenging text, and it is all too easy to get bored, confused, and discouraged without guidance. While notes can be cumbersome at first (see below), I also personally can’t imagine having gotten much at all out of my first encounter with Ulysses without at least some annotations at hand.
Just as Joyce builds up a self-referential language of symbol and memory through repeating motifs, he also builds up meaning through repeated allusions to the real world — famous Irish nationalists, say, or important liturgical practices. None of us is an early-twentieth century Dubliner, so you’ll be missing out on a lot without a guide. I’m a firm believer that everything in Joyce is motivated, and annotations help to elucidate those motivations, so that you can get a better and deeper reading on the text.
In any case, making use of annotations doesn’t mean you’re committing yourself to following their every proclamation as holy writ. I disagreed with mine all the time, and I think one of their functions is to provide you with a line-by-line interlocutor as you read, which helps to stimulate and clarify your own positions on the text. When you find yourself itching to discuss some contentious passage or chapter and come to realize that it’s almost impossible to locate anyone else who’s actually read this book, you’ll be happy to have your annotations to talk to.
Which annotations should I read then? And which edition of the text? — I’ve heard there are a lot of them.
When it comes to which edition you read, you can’t really go wrong — or right. The first edition from 1922 was rushed and is infamously riddled with errors. Since then, there have been plenty of editions meant to correct the original text, but there are three which are of most significance:
The first is the 1934 edition, which was published after the ban was lifted in the United States. This became the standard for a number of years. It was eventually cleaned up and labeled the “Corrected and Reset” edition in 1961, and it is still the version used by Modern Library and Vintage.
The second is the 1939 edition, which is the last one Joyce personally edited.
The last significant edition, now known as the “Gabler” edition, was published in 1986. It was an attempt at producing a definitive edition of the text, and was much ballyhooed when it was first released both for its scholarly bona fides and its convenient line numbering. It was soon accused by some, however, of actually adding in more errors than the first edition had. The resulting brouhaha, which played out in the 90s, has often been referred to as the “Joyce Wars,” and while the Gabler edition is still the one generally used by scholars (seemingly largely because of those handy line numbers) ultimately its reputation has been somewhat tarnished.
All of that just to say: don’t worry about which edition you read too much. The virtue of the 1934/1961 edition is that you can get it in a number of nice formats for comfortable reading. The Gabler edition is infamously ugly and falls apart easily, but it’s great if you want to read some secondary literature with easy reference back to your text.
I will say that the only meaningful difference I could discern between any of the editions is that in Gabler you get an answer to Stephen’s question about “that word known to all men” — which you can Google if you want to know. I prefer the text without the answer.
Personally, I wanted the convenience of having hyperlinked annotations (more on that below), so I read a kind of composite edition produced by the Joyce Project, which has the added virtue of being completely free. It can be downloaded here.
And annotations?
As you might imagine, with regard to annotations, there are far too many choices to even list! But there are only two that every Ulysses reader really needs to know about:
James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study by Stuart Gilbert
This is the original Ulysses commentary, written before the book had even been legalized. Gilbert wrote it with direct input from Joyce, and he is the source from which we get the Homeric names for each episode (along with a scene, hour, organ, color, symbol, art, and technic for each episode — also provided by Joyce). Gilbert wrote with the particular aim of getting the book un-banned by proving that it was indeed art and not pornography. As Ulysses was still illegal and difficult for many to obtain at the time of Gilbert’s writing, he includes many long quotations from the book in supplement to his commentary.
I used this book sporadically as I read. The schema is somewhat interesting, knowing as we do that it comes directly from Joyce, though I didn’t find it terribly enlightening. Overall I felt that most of what Gilbert has to say has already been folded into other commentaries, and the parts that haven’t suffer from his political project, which can make his analysis come off as somewhat sycophantic. Still, he’s good for a little extra insight into how each episode was originally received, or, rather, how perhaps Joyce hoped each episode might be received.
Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Don Gifford
If there were such a thing as a Ulysses encyclopedia, this would be it. It is the most exhaustive and detailed of any of the commentaries on the market, and is probably best as an occasional reference rather than a cover-to-cover read. The best part of Gifford, I think, is that he consciously tries to keep away from too much subjectivity, and from what I’ve read, he is fairly successful at avoiding authorial hobbyhorses.
I had two abortive attempts at reading Ulysses before I finally read it this year. I gave up both times not because I didn’t like the book, but because I overloaded myself with annotations. Being meticulous about reading every note in Gifford (both times!) was the main culprit. This time around I finally learned my lesson, and with a heavy heart I had to ban myself from reading anything from this beautiful children’s-workbook-sized doorstopper (R.I.P.).
So what exactly was your reading set-up?
After two failed attempts, I realized I was letting the perfect get in the way of the good. I decided I needed to reduce as much as possible the friction between the text and the notes, which for me meant somehow getting on-page annotations so I didn’t have to keep switching between large and unwieldy books every time a word or a phrase or a sentence confused me (which was constantly).
So I went the unorthodox route of reading an e-book, specifically the free version available from the Joyce project, a labor of love by a retired literature professor many years in the making. The e-book has in-text numbered notes with hyperlinks, which pop up on my e-reader as a little window directly on the page. While the notes in this version aren’t as exhaustive as Gifford’s, they are still plentiful, and they provided what was for me a good middle-ground between being left in the dark with too little guidance, and overwhelmed with far too much.
I know some book purists dislike e-readers, but I think reading this way not only saved my neck from craning back and forth, but also saved me from the unexpected burden of my nagging perfectionism. One of the most difficult things I found about having a separate book of annotations is that the notes (naturally) aren’t marked in the original text. So even when I was reading without any particular question in mind, I was always wondering — “could there be a note here?” It was surprisingly distracting and I was often flipping back and forth more than even Gifford requires. With the e-book, I knew whether or not my annotations had something to say, and that made it easier to just relax and read.
Not to mention: it was pretty great to just highlight any word I didn’t know and instantly get a definition. Access to instant translations was a boon too. In a book like Ulysses, this amounts to a major convenience.
The only real drawback to reading on an e-reader for me was the difficulty in paging back and forth, which I ended up wanting to do much more than I generally do with fiction.
The only other resource I used was Harry Blamires’ The New Bloomsday Book, which provides a simple detailed summary of each chapter. This was helpful when I was having trouble deciphering what was actually going on. It’s extremely clear and no-nonsense, and it was quite helpful with the more difficult episodes.
All of this sounds like a lot of work. If this book’s so difficult to read, should I even bother trying?
It’s true, it can all get overwhelming before you’ve even opened the book. To sum up, here’s my simple, no hassle recommendation for getting started reading as quickly as possible:
1) Obtain a copy of the book. Both of these editions have their own annotations:
Hardcopy: Alma Books, 1939 edition
E-Book: Joyce Project, composite edition
2) Obtain a copy of The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires and read the episode summaries if you need extra help with the plot.
That’s it!
Thanks, but that didn’t address how difficult everyone keeps saying the actual reading of the book is.
It is true that I’ve had to be very selective with the quotations I’ve made use of so far. Finding quotes that require no annotation and can stand outside of their context is challenging with a book like this one, and I admit that in my attempt to make this review easy to read I’ve been perhaps a little misleading. Fairly often when reading Ulysses, you’ll be hit with walls of text like this:
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, though through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
But don’t despair! I also think the difficulty of the book is generally overstated, and the reading isn’t nearly as hard-going as I feel I was led to believe by the popular conversation. There are a few reasons for this:
1) Joyce doesn’t simply plunge the reader into his most obscure and difficult prose from page one. Instead, in the first episode or two he gives the reader time to adjust to his style.
The book begins in a more-or-less naturalistic pose, and before anything gets too difficult the reader has a chance to get a grasp on some of the themes and images that will recur again and again in the story later on. This gives the reader a bit of background and insight into what’s going on so that the more difficult passages that come later are easier to understand.
Look, for instance, at this conversation in “Telemachus” between Stephen’s roommate, Malachi “Buck” Mulligan, and Stephen (whom Mulligan calls “Kinch”) as Stephen looks at himself in Buck’s shaving mirror.
—Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard!
Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.
—I pinched it out of the skivvy’s room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.
Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen’s peering eyes.
—The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you!
Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:
—It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.
Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them.
—It’s not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly. God knows you have more spirit than any of them.
The themes of Irish nationalism and of Stephen’s search for his identity are both here, and in fairly conventional, approachable garb.
2) A difficult episode is generally followed by an easier one, and no one style is sustained for long.
Perhaps because I knew Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy comes last, when I first started reading Ulysses, I assumed that the prose would just keep getting more and more difficult with each succeeding episode. So I was immediately worried when I got to the (in)famous “ineluctable modality of the visible” passage I’ve quoted above. These are the opening lines of the third episode, “Proteus” — the episode I believe is most responsible for people’s putting the book down and never picking it up again. But Proteus is just about the most difficult episode in the entire book, and the episode that comes directly after it returns to a naturalistic style once again. So if you do happen to give Ulysses a go, don’t give up here!
Joyce seems to make a concerted effort to make sure difficult episodes are always followed by easier ones, so you can count on a good (and in my opinion, enjoyable) amount of variation in textual style and difficulty as you read along. One of the pleasures of reading the book was the sheer variety Joyce offers up. Like a buffet, you can take a little nibble here, a big bite there, and if there’s anything you don’t like, well, no worries — there’s always something different to look forward to just a few pages away. In general the difficulty of the book waxes and wanes in cycles, so the prose never feels like it gets bogged down in impenetrability. Each episode is a taste, an experiment, and never too much of a sustained commitment. Proteus wound up being one of my favorite episodes, too, so it’s always good to remain patient and just keep an open mind.
3) Joyce is never just making up pleasant-sounding nonsense to seem artistic. You can always suss out a meaning.
Much has been made of Joyce’s claim that in writing Ulysses he “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” And after reading the excerpt from Proteus above, you may be tempted to think that at least some of it has no real meaning beyond some vague evocation of profundity. Maybe you’re thinking: Is this entire book just going to be an extended version of nonsense-verse like “Jabberwocky?” Are we in “I Am the Walrus” territory?
That was my fear, anyway. Whenever you read something experimental, there’s always the chance that you’re going to get the kind of author who writes specifically to confound their readers. The kind whose writing is ultimately little more than words thrown together like tossed salad. Early on as I was reading, though, I realized I could trust Joyce. The text is difficult, yes, and sometimes hard to understand, but it’s never just Joyce having a fun time at your expense. It is always possible to suss out what he’s trying to say, and there’s usually a good reason why he’s written it out the way he has.
The paragraph I’ve quoted from Proteus, for example, is what Stephen Dedalus is thinking as he walks along the beach, considering how the outside world continues to exist even if he closes his eyes. Every bit of that paragraph makes sense when you puzzle it out long enough (with ample aid of annotations, yes); none of it is throwaway gibberish.
And once you’ve grasped the meaning, the text completely changes. It becomes a remarkably accurate representation of what it is to think. We don’t explain things to ourselves clearly and in complete sentences because the meaning of what we’re thinking is already understood, so in order to get the effect of eavesdropping on someone else’s thoughts at first the prose is obscure. But once we’ve “gotten in,” it’s rewarding to see just how close Joyce gets to representing what otherwise seems nearly impossible to represent in words: the inner voice. Over and over again I was amazed by Joyce’s ability to get down on paper what felt very much like spontaneous private thought, with all its half-ideas and inconsistencies and random associations, and I think it was only possible by writing in exactly the form he chose.
Other episodes have different targets. As I discussed above, some illustrate the style of a different time period or aim to reproduce the sound of music through words. So, yes, the book is packed with the “enigmas and puzzles” that Joyce describes, but they are in fact puzzles — things meant to be grappled with — and not mere non-sequiturs.
4) You’ll need to rely on the annotations less and less as you go along
At first I was spending much more time reading the annotations than the actual book. It seemed like practically every word was accompanied by some extended commentary I needed to read, and every sentence led down its own rabbit hole. I actually ended up learning quite a few odds and ends from the annotations (did you know John Ruskin was never able to consummate his marriage because he was disgusted by his wife’s pubic hair?). But it got tiring too — sometimes I felt like reading, but I was just too tired to keep bouncing back and forth between the book and its annotations.
Eventually, though, you get acclimated to Joyce’s world. You start seeing the same events and people alluded to over and over again, and you get the clarity of context without needing to interrupt yourself to look it up anymore. You also get a better handle on Joyce’s eccentric style. Eventually I stopped needing to check every footnote, and the reading process got much smoother and easier. For at least half of the book, I wasn’t terribly troubled by the number of annotations I was reading.
5) Ultimately, it’s just a novel.
So is Ulysses a tough read? Yes — it’s certainly difficult and definitely a project to get through. But I think it has such a mystique built up around it that people sometimes forget it’s also ultimately just a story, and in many ways one that’s not all that different from others we’ve all encountered before.
You don’t need to understand every single reference. You don’t even need to understand every single sentence. No one is going to test you on whether or not your interpretation of it is the best or most original or most correct (in fact, you’ll probably have a hard time even finding anyone else to discuss it with). Reading is a personal experience, and, ultimately, your relationship with the book is entirely your own to decide. Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good.
All right, so maybe it’s not a total nightmare to read. Any parting thoughts?
I’ve so far steered clear as much as possible from my personal theories about the book, mostly because I have many and this guide is already long enough. But I’m dying to share just this one: just as the adulterous Molly is a kind of inversion of the chaste Penelope, I believe that Stephen is an inversion of Telemachus. He is the son who is in need of escaping the father — all fathers, even Bloom. Instead, Bloom is the father in need of the son, the Odysseus who needs his Telemachus, rather than the other way around.
I haven’t read the book yet, so do you have any more general parting thoughts that might have more meaning for me?
In reading this book, I was simply blown away by Joyce’s range. He has written passages that I believe no other person could — because of his erudition, his fine ear for words, and also his unique sensibility, which teeters just between the coarse openness of the modern world we know and the repressed, yet more subtle attitude of the past that is now lost to us. I got the impression that Joyce is an author who can accomplish anything he wants to linguistically, and that Ulysses is the result of his doing all of it at once.
He’s fresh, modern, and in a sense revolutionarily middle class; there is not a whiff of the stuffiness of the Victorians or even of the snobbishness of other contemporary modernist writers like Woolf or Eliot. Joyce is entirely his own, and uninhibited in a way I haven’t seen before. Modern, unorthodox, but honest and surprisingly free of pretense, 100 years later he is very much still a radical.
And, I admit, even as a 21st-century cynic, some of that prose still made me blush.
So you’re saying I should read it.
You should read it!
Like, right now?
Well, not now, whenever you’ve got the time.
Will you talk about it with me after I finish?
Of course. I’ll keep the kettle on.
I've a volume which includes both Dubliners and Artist. It's my water closet book, and I'm about ten Dubliners along. When I'm done, probably about October, I was planning to call it good with Joyce, but now, thanks to your review, I'm starting to hope I'll live long enough to enjoy Ulysses. You have such a wonderful, flowing expository style, that I'm jealous of your ability. You should plunge into a big writing project! I’m sure there’s a great story’s seed that just wants (years of) water in the soil of your soul.