
James Joyce's "Ulysses": Why you should read this book - pclark
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/06/james-joyces-ulysses?fb_action_ids=521770817577&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_ref=scn%2Ffb_ec%2Fwhy_you_should_read_this_book&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582
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jseliger
_"Ulysses" is perhaps the most written about book ever after the Bible, which
should tell you something. It's definitely a better read. Sláinte!_

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.

~~~
Jun8
"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."

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.

~~~
impendia
> 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.

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.

~~~
bdr
First of all, I think you're confusing correlation and causation 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.

~~~
impendia
I do enjoy some literature. Huck Finn, 1984 and Animal Farm, Brave New World,
Jane Eyre, Lord of the Rings come to mind. Didn't care for the Iliad, but I
enjoyed Plato.

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!

~~~
bdr
Good point. Not all literature depends on a love of language in the way that
Joyce and Nabokov do. That might be the key distinction.

------
diiq
For me, the moment that transformed the book from a chore to a delight was the
moment I realized it was _funny_. I was allowed to laugh, but I was also
allowed to miss jokes, miss references. There are so many, that if one flies
over your head, then next one will fly straight into your open mouth. The Rise
of The New Bloomusalem is _hysterically_ funny.

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.

~~~
FreakLegion
Yes! You only need one reason to read Ulysses: You'll enjoy it, if you let
yourself. _Ulysses_ is hilarious, moving, and thought-provoking, all at the
same time. But if you're afraid of it -- if you're afraid of missing a
reference, of not appreciating the mise-en-scène of turn-of-the-century
Ireland, of somehow not "understanding" the Homeric scaffolding or the rest of
the book – then you won't enjoy it, and maybe literature isn't for you.

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.

~~~
diiq
Well named: fear of your own ignorance is an excellent way to hate literature.

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!"

------
gruseom
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?

~~~
vhf
_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.
:)

~~~
rayiner
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.

~~~
waterlesscloud
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.

------
scarmig
Literature has intrinsic value. Good literature has more intrinsic value than
bad literature. Ulysses is even better than typical good literature.

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.)

------
Tloewald
Having read the article, I downloaded Ulysses, which I have bounced off
before, and tried again. Nope, still not my idea of fun. Tolstoy is not my
idea of fun either, but more fun than this. Of all my friends, the only one
who has read Ulysses (and claims to adore it) cannot articulate its virtues.
He also loves Umberto Ecco -- I suppose for similar reasons.

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.

~~~
jseliger
>I just don't see the point.

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.

~~~
Tloewald
So you're saying that I __do __see the point. Excellent, I can move on.

------
rabbitonrails
I read Ulysses 3 years ago. After initial skepticism, I discovered that it is
truly a great work of literature. One example that impressed me was the
chapter Wandering Rocks, where Joyce implements a virtual Dublin that operates
like a massive, clockwork simulation tracked over one hour -- he follows many
different events and points of view as the characters walk through the city,
experiencing events in accurate time that ripple across their perspectives
(e.g. a clock chiming heard by 10 different people at different times and
intensities according to their distances from the clock, echoes from the walls
of surrounding buildings, and the speed of sound -- all mapped to Joyce's deep
knowledge of Dublin's geography). Ulysses requires a lot of work and time to
understand. I would like to recommend the following to anyone who wants to
read it:

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...](http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Naxos-AudioBooks-Joyce-
James/dp/9626343095) 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...](http://books.google.com/books/about/Lectures_on_Literature.html?id=jP5-XRoUVBgC)
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.

------
Tycho
I enjoyed Ulysses, but only after the first 100 pages. Not sure if this was
because the first 100 was lower quality, or if it just took me that long to
'acclimatise' to what Joyce was doing.

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.

~~~
gruseom
It may well have been a question of acclimatization. That's a great way of
putting it, by the way.

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?

~~~
frozenport
In Faulkner's Sound and The Fury, the first 100 pages are the disjointed
mental images. For example, yelling at a golfcourse will trigger paragraphs of
memories about his sister Caddy. In contrast to Ulysses we are only given
aleatory images for the first 100 pages. I sometimes feel that the work was
compromised with such a modernist artifice.

------
jonnathanson
I find that Ulysses is a completely different book every time I read it.
Perhaps that's because I'm under the influence of whatever analysis, essay, or
bit of commentary I happen to have read about it, or class I happen to be
taking, just before diving in. Or perhaps it's because I've been in a
different life stage, or state of mind, each time. But honestly, if I weren't
a strict unbeliever in the supernatural, I'd swear that Joyce hastily rewrites
the book, from beyond the grave, each time I open it up.

I know of no other book that has this effect on me.

------
vhf
_"Ulysses" is fun—maybe the best book you take to the beach this summer._

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.

------
Mithrandir
While we're on the subject of modernist literature, I would suggest taking a
look at In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. It's quite a bit longer than
Ulysses, at about 1.5 million words, but I find it really fascinating. The
flow of his words, to me, seems almost musical.

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."

~~~
stan_rogers
Just a note: you're more likely to find an English-language version of _À la
recherche du temps perdu_ titled _Remembrance of Things Past_ rather than _In
Search of Lost Time_.

~~~
Mithrandir
Yes, the title "In Search of Lost Time" became popular when D.J. Enright
revised the previous English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence
Kilmartin, which were titled Remembrance of Things Past. ("Remembrance of
Things Past" came from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, "In Search of Lost Time" being
a literal translation of the original French title.) Pretty much all the
English translations are based off of Moncrieff's work.

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.

------
joycer
It is my belief that Ulysses is the one true novel.

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.

------
jackfoxy
It took Joyce seven years to write _Ulysses_ at a page per day. It's not an
easy read. It is a great book. On the other hand Ken Kesey wrote _Sometimes a
Great Notion_ in three months, and to my mind it compares favorably to
_Ulysses_ in many ways. It is also a great, though overlooked, novel.

------
yaks_hairbrush
Here's a take on Ulysses written by a former math professor of mine.

<http://www.dougshaw.com/Reviews/review1.html>

I've not read Ulysses myself, having disliked Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man.

~~~
gruseom
I disliked the Portrait as well. But loved Dubliners.

------
robocat
The book is out of copyright now, so is available on Project Gutenburg in a
variety of file formats.

<http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300>

------
Joeri
I've tried to read it two times already, and never got past page 100 out of
utter boredom. I will try one more time, but some books are not for everyone.

~~~
colmmacc
I grew up in Dublin, and lived in Chapelizod - close to where Joyce did - and
always felt a weak pressure to read Ulysses. It's talked about so much it
almost becomes a nuisance not to have read it.

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.

------
bigthingnext
"Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the
Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and
Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailerand Rinbad the
Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and
Xinbad the Phthailer."

------
lec
A good first read of Ulysses can be done via the librivox version of this
book. At first blush the beginning chapters seem amateurishly read, however
you soon realize that this was done on purpose in keeping with the tone of the
work. Once you are in on the joke, you can see how this haphazard narrative
adds to the experience.

------
josephjrobison
I've been reading it off an on for about a year and a half. I'm halfway
through right now. At times it is extremely captivating and pretty funny, then
the next chapter I'll get completely lost. I'm only using Sparknotes as a
guide, which is probably my first mistake.

------
bdr
Check out joyceimages.com for Ulysses "illustrations". We use images from the
time the book is set in. Some of them are of a specific person or place that's
mentioned, while others just demonstrate the mood of a line.

------
abolibibelot
Nabokov, which incidently is one of the too-impressive great writers mentioned
in the comments, beside writing some of the best novels ever, taught
literature for years in Cornell. I cannot recommend enough his "Lectures on
literature". His take on literature is not post-modern at all (he was not too
fond of surrealism and he loved Joyce for his style and not his devices). In
one of these lectures, the famous "Good readers and good writers"
([http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.htm...](http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.html))
he said that

"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.

------
rabidsnail
> Are we really too busy for one of history's great psychological novels?

Yes.

------
cooop
I'd be interested to hear what novels others think should be read and why...

