Struggling with Ulysses (RANT)

By pink_turtle76

I started Ulysses by James Joyce about a week ago, and this is probably my 4th or 5th try at it. Every time before, I got stuck pretty much right away in the Buck Mulligan/Stephen Dedalus opening. Just to maybe not sound like a total hack here, I’ve read other stuff people like to call hard without too much trouble. I got a lot out of Pynchon, Infinite Jest, The Brothers Karamazov, stuff like that. Right now I’m about halfway into Circe, the brothel/play chapter. There are parts I’ve genuinely liked. Like in Cyclops, when Joyce goes on forever about how epic The Citizen is, then flips into this line: So anyhow Terry brought the three pints Joe was standing and begob the sight nearly left my eyes when I saw him land out a quid. That almost killed me. He does have great jokes, little everyday details, and I get that the stream of consciousness thing influenced a ton of writers after him. Robert Anton Wilson was one of my favorites too, and he leaned on Joyce a lot in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. But I’ve also been trying to figure out why Joyce did all this. That quote where he said he stuffed it with so many puzzles that professors would be arguing over it forever doesn’t exactly make me feel better about it. Most people reading a novel are not trying to win some weird intelligence contest against the author by decoding every little enigma and maze and mystery they can find. And I don’t really see how turning the whole thing into a public brain-off helps much either. Like, I’m on Circe now, but the chapter before it is Oxen of the Sun. From what I read on Wikipedia, that whole chapter tracks the history of English prose from Latin up to around 1904 Irish street slang. Since it’s set in a maternity ward and then a pub, I guess you can read that as the language developing alongside the fetus, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and all that. And the chapter is something like 20,388 words long. Sure, that’s clever. Would I have figured out exactly what Joyce was doing with the language if I hadn’t looked it up? No way. I’d have noticed it changing, but I don’t think I would’ve immediately tied it to the whole history of English, especially since he doesn’t seem to actually use Old or Middle English spellings, at least not that I noticed, just the grammar and word order. So how much of this stuff is supposed to matter? The word count, for example. If you take 20,388 and divide it by 9 months of pregnancy, that’s 2265.333 words a month. Divide that by 30 days, and you get 75.5111 words a day. Divide that by 24 hours and it’s 3.14629. Hey, that’s pretty close to pi. Does that mean anything? Maybe. Definitely maybe. Or maybe the paragraph lengths matter? Do the word counts in each paragraph say something about how long each stretch of English history lasted? Or maybe they match the number of surviving works from that period? I guess what I’m saying is I’m not sure how much of this is actually useful or actually deep. There are lots of cool bits, but has it really changed how I see the human condition or anything like that? Not really, so far. Have I learned something profound? Nope. Have I met any characters who felt real? A few, I guess. But if Joyce suddenly killed one of them off, I don’t think I’d care all that much. I’m just not emotionally attached to anybody in this book, and a lot of that is because of all Joyce’s intellectual trickery. Anyway, I do want to get to Molly’s big ending monologue, but at this point I’m also kind of ready to be done with the whole thing.