ULYSSES

I’m e rathke, the author of a number of books. Learn more about what you signed up for here. Go here to manage your email notifications.

MYSELF

Famed for its difficulty, for its obscenity trial—which changed the publishing industry—for the many self-aggrandizing things Joyce said about his work, Ulysses is a mountain standing off in the distance that most fear approaching lest they tumble back on down to the ground and admit that they didn’t like it or found it too confusing and opaque, that it bruised their tailbone.

And I understand that.

I do.

Even though I’d read it before, when I picked it up this spring after reading A Portrait of the Artist, I bounced right off it. And I knew what to expect! Had read (and liked it!) before.

But I tried again in the autumn and this time fell into it. Not the way I did when I was 20, when I first raced through the novel, but in a new way.

Interestingly, to me, my reaction to A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses flipped from the original ones I had fifteen years ago. At first read, I thought A Portrait of the Artist was just all right and Ulysses was the real book.

Now, I think I’m inclined to disagree and say A Portrait of the Artist is the real book and Ulysses is a grand yet collapsing cathedral.

Ulysses is a difficult book. More difficult and uninviting than I remembered and even reading all of Joyce in preparation for it doesn’t properly prepare you to deal with the pyrotechnics of his prose here. It can, at times, be difficult to even follow what’s happening.

Some books teach you how to read them, with the initial difficulty spike becoming more normal. You fall into the style and start swimming with the current rather than against.

Not so with Ulysses! For the simple reason that each chapter forces you to learn a new way to read.

The trick is to be okay with the confusion and confounding nature of the text. To understand you’re going to get lost and that you just need to let the language flow through you, wash over you.

There’s a lot of fun to be had in this novel but it is also, at times, tedious on purpose and perplexing to a degree that feels malicious, like Joyce wants you to bow before what he’s done. It’s a bit obnoxious, honestly. If you’re not paying extremely close attention, you may miss key plot details or even what’s happening in the scene you’re reading.

It’s less fun and less funny than I remembered it and while there are big rewards, I’d compare it to a theme park, in a way.

If you’re not willing to stand in line for most of the day to ride a rollercoaster for five minutes, you may as well stay home.

You cannot talk about Ulysses without talking about prose and style, but I’m going to try to make you understand what I think is the most important aspect of the novel and how and why it changed literature. And I’m going to do it mostly without discussing prose.

And so I want to talk about exactly one chapter in the novel, which, I think, is the most important chapter of the novel, which makes it one of the most significant and important chapters in English literature and the 20th Century.

ALL OF US

Before Joyce, most literature had these characteristics:

• Important people

• Doing important things

Both were not a requirement, but usually they were both present. Even when the protagonist was not, initially, an important person, the climax would reveal that they were a prince or princess all along or maybe their actions led them to join the nobility in some way, shape, or form.

Joyce brought fiction to us. Regular people doing regular things.

But what’s most significant, I think, is that he took the Epic to us. Ulysses is famously structured and modeled after The Odyssey, one of the most important Epics in western literature. Perhaps, simply, the most important. Wily Odysseus. Cursed Odysseus. Who spent twenty years away from home, who made an enemy of Poseidon, who fooled gods, who watched those gods kill all his friends and companions. The man who finally returned to Ithaca and murdered a house full of suitors to claim his home once more.

Joyce brings this all important, foundational story to us. And, more interestingly, he makes no great claim for us. No demand to be special or original or even interesting.

In fact, he allows us to be boring idiots wandering what was an unremarkable town full of unremarkable people.

We follow Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they wander Dublin in 1904, when Dublin was still under English rule and kept in abject poverty by that ruling class across the Irish Sea.

So let’s talk about Nausicaa.