In Jasper Fforde’s charming alternate history The Eyre Affair, England in the 1980s is a place where hardcore literature fans change their name to John Milton, roving gangs of surrealists rumble with French impressionists, and “Baconians” go door-to-door like Jehovah Witnesses’ to convince people that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays. For the English in Fforde’s world, art and literature attain the type of popularity comparable to American’s fascination with sports and celebrity.
After finishing the book I wondered why our world couldn’t be more like that. I wondered, “Wouldn’t we be better off if we took literature that seriously?” Then comes Bloomsday to confirm that the answer to my question is a resounding, “No.”
Today marks the 105th anniversary of Bloomsday, a commemoration of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses. For at least the past fifty years, fans of the notoriously difficult novel have gathered around the world in order to drink, dress up and celebrate their status as the literary equivalent of Trekkies.
Who are these people? And why is such a monstrously bad book still praised so highly? Perhaps it can be attributed to the career inferiority complexes of English majors. They may no make as much money as their friends who got their MBAs, they reason, but at least they can claim to have read The Greatest Novel Ever Written.
Even fans of the book, though, will admit that it is almost completely unreadable without outside help. When you have to read a book length companion guide in order to grasp the story, though, something has gone terribly askew. The only other comparable literary work that requires such scholarly aids for understanding is the Bible. But at least that was inspired by God. What was Joyce’s excuse for such pretentiousness?
Ulysses isn’t The Greatest Novel Ever Written because it fails to do what even most third rate works are capable of doing: communicating its meaning. Joyce was too busy trying to cram the detritus of his erudition into the work to bother making a connection with the reader. He may have succeeded in making suckers of those who are impressed by technique. But for most readers—those of us who believe art should produce some type of emotional effect—his effort is a miserable failure. Ultimately, Ulysses is to literature what The Birth of a Nation is to film; a impressively horrible work that may (possibly) be admired but cannot (surely) be enjoyed.
No doubt, fans of Joyce will say that I’m wrong. They will say that I am failing to put in the effort required to grasp the beauty of the novel. They will argue that I am discounting the remarkable use of language and linguistic technique. They will say that I am missing the point. These people will say many things. These people are usually English professors. They don’t know any better.
As Virginia Woolfe once said, “[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” Too true. Which makes it ever odder that academics esteem such a sophomoric novel, filled with insiderish attempts at humor. “The Irish,” noted The Weekly Standard contributor Stephen Schwartz on the 100th anniversary, “are inordinately fond of jokes and puns, especially if they are esoteric and thus known only to a few.” By this standard, Joyce’s book, which contains more obscure references than Dennis Miller’s cranium, can be classified as the greatest joke every played on English literature. “The paradox is that the book is a giant fart joke,” says Diana Wynne, producer of the documentary Joyce to the World. “There’s this huge vocabulary and complex technique, references to English literature and all kinds of obscure learning. But at the story level there’s a lot of low humor, base jokes, and a celebration of ordinary people.”
Ulysses, in other words, is the highbrow literary equivalent of an Adam Sandler movie.
June 16th, 2009 | 6:57 pm
“The only other comparable literary work that requires such scholarly aids for understanding is the Bible.”
This is an odd thing to say. Most of the Bible can be understood fairly easily on a surface level, without any scholarly aids. Granted, scholarly aids can and should be used to deepen our understanding (and even to correct misunderstandings) but that’s an entirely separate matter.
June 16th, 2009 | 8:52 pm
Thank you.
I’ve been waiting for some brave, two-fisted blogger with hair on his keyboard to say all those things about Ulysses which, if I said them, would make me look like I just didn’t get it.
It is literature about literature. It is writing about writing. It is an idea that has crawled into it’s own belly button in order to contemplate itself the better. But then, when you start out on page one with a parody of the Mass–or of Matins, or some other mainstay of Catholic worship (I refuse to check my dog eared college copy)–what else can you expect?
The only paper that ever fetched an “A+” in my entire undergraduate career was a paper I wrote on Ulysses. To your main point, note the use of the term, “undergraduate”.
June 16th, 2009 | 9:02 pm
So, what do you think of Dos Passos’ “Manhattan Transfer”?
June 16th, 2009 | 10:23 pm
SF Author John C. Wright wrote about this book the other day in a critique “Humbug, or “If You Don’t Understand It, It Must Be Art”.”
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/250536.html
June 17th, 2009 | 1:14 am
I have a love/hate relationship with Ulysses.
On the one hand, I share your disdain for the incoherence of the book (topped only by Finnegan’s Wake) and the disingenuousness of the literary snobs who acclaim it. When it was voted the greatest book in the English language several years back, I remember getting into an argument with a couple of well-read friends in which I noted (tongue in cheek) that it couldn’t be the greatest book in the English language when probably only 100 people could genuinely claim to have read it all the way through.
Yet, for some reason – probably related to my love for the city of Dublin, I do have some affection for Ulysses. Can’t really explain it, but the book made a little more sense to me after I visited Dublin.
June 17th, 2009 | 2:44 am
[...] many ways, I share Joe’s antipathy to James Joyce’s Ulysses. But I must confess to having something of a love-hate relationship with Joyce’s novel, [...]
June 17th, 2009 | 7:30 am
I’m a bit torn about this book as well. I somehow have managed to trudge through it three times, the latter two times with the aid of Cliff’s Notes. Even with the Cliff’s Notes it was difficult to follow what was going on. So I would agree that anything that incomprehensible does not deserve the accolade of greatest English novel of the previous or any century.
On the other hand, I have read it three times. There’s something about it that draws me in, and quite frankly I can’t explain it. There is something beautiful about the language, and I appreciate the varied styles that Joyce uses.
June 17th, 2009 | 12:18 pm
I second JBJ in saying…”Thank you!” I have always held a caustic view of Joyce (and yes, Finnegan’s Wake was far worse), while at the same time feeling uneasy that I “just didn’t get it.” It is, then, good to read others expressing the same views, while making me laugh more than once in the process.
June 17th, 2009 | 2:36 pm
Ultimately, Ulysses is to literature what The Birth of a Nation is to film; a impressively horrible work that may (possibly) be admired but cannot (surely) be enjoyed.
Um … please clarify if you have some other basis for that comparison other than what you say here about ULYSSES.
You rag on the Joyce novel for being pretentious, incoherent, snobbish tedium that can’t be bothered to make a point or connect with an audience — a perfectly fair criticism. But one that is so completely and absolutely [words escape me] if applied of BIRTH OF A NATION that it can’t even be dignified as “wrong.” Griffith, for all his innovativeness technically, was a Victorian melodramatist at heart and a master of Kitsch, about as far from a literary modernist as one can get. BIRTH is as obvious as a punch in the nose (or a noose around the neck). It definitely has its problems: obviously, the racism makes it an uncomfortable watch for anyone today.
But more pertinently here, BIRTH was so influential that everything unique about it at the time has been so assimilated into what-we-now-consider-ordinary film-making that its power is diminished some. There was a time when movies didn’t cross-cut to build suspense or track the camera for dramatic effect or use closeups to steer audience identification, etc. In other words, subsequent films have stolen (or maybe “normalized”) BIRTH’s thunder and made us blind to why it is important and great. But ULYSSES is the very opposite problem — yeah, it was innovative, but only because nobody else could write or wanted to write in the way Joyce did. Comparing BIRTH to ULYSSES is not a serious critical claim (unless from an a-priori dismissal of all silent films as “too hard to understand,” I suppose).
June 17th, 2009 | 2:58 pm
Oh … and it is surely relevant to any claim that THE BIRTH OF A NATION (like ULYSSES) is not enjoyable that it was the work of a popular artist, working in a popular medium and it was the biggest box-office hit ever at the time (factoring in inflation and making allowance for sloppy/shady record-keeping in the pre-studio-era, it’s still among the biggest). Works that are not enjoyable do not become popular smashes, as Griffith learned with his next big 3-hour-plus epic, INTOLERANCE.
June 17th, 2009 | 3:18 pm
I am in awe that you read it the three times, Paul. I’ve started it three times, but never finished it. Though I suppose I wasn’t all that motivated in the first place.
June 18th, 2009 | 11:29 am
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes:
Let me suggest that one difference between Ulysses and, say, Finnegans Wake, may be that the latter is readable primarily by those literary masochists who deliberately “pursue the hard and painful as such,” for its own sake. Exceptions abound in both cases, of course. But the testimony of countless readers—and no, Joe, not just insecure English professors and majors, but insecure persons of all majors, professions, ages, races, and genders enjoy Ulysses—suggests otherwise: it is entirely possible to accept Ulysses as an invitation to “court the arduous,” and as a result of that courting to obtain true enjoyment. While some literary smuggards may indeed rub their “erudition” in the faces of others, their snobbery says nothing significant about the quality of the work itself. People can be snobbish about anything, highbrow or lowbrow, so long as it lets them securely inhabit that inner ring of which C. S. Lewis spoke. People have a way of latching onto the smallest ornament or bauble if they find that by virtue of it they can wield exclusionary power over others; that says a lot about people but very little about the thing itself. Furthermore, I suspect that those who behave really snobbishly about a book may not really enjoy it themselves; perhaps they are snobs because they feel as though they should enjoy something but do not. After all, gratitude is the dominant note of the truest forms of literary pleasure, and the grateful reader wants to share his or her joy with others, not rub in their eyes. Those who lord their tastes over others do not love a work for its own sake, but for their own sake, and thus they do not fully love the work (or themselves, for that matter).
If pompous readers (and non-readers!) really wanted to lord something unreadable over the rest of us, they would push and preen over Finnegans Wake, that crackerjack humdinger of obscurity in comparison with which Ulysses reads like, well, a crackerjack box. But Finnegans Wake rarely appears on the top lists and rants against it are comparatively rare. Many who like Ulysses dislike or otherwise cannot appreciate Finnegans Wake. Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, loved the former book but derided the latter as a “petrified superpun” and “one of the greatest failures in literature” (a “monstrously bad book,” he might even have said). Furthermore, Nabokov said in an interview:
But Nabokov was not excommunicated by critics, partly because he was Nabokov but just as likely because far fewer critics love or even read Finnegans Wake than Ulysses. The fact that even today, every so often people a passionate rant like Joe’s geysers forth against UUlysses suggests to me that the book has a certain level of readability which Finnegans Wake may lack. People respond to it viscerally; it divides people. I’m not saying that anyone has to love either book. But I do think it is possible to see that others may enjoy Ulysses for reasons having nothing to do with material insecurity or elitism or having been “suckered.”
Joe writes: “But for most readers—those of us who believe art should produce some type of emotional effect—his effort is a miserable failure.”
Leaving aside the question of what art should or should not do, this statement is questionable. Consider Nabokov himself: his chief criterion for what he sought in fiction was “aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” And he treasured Ulysses and consistently taught it in his classes.
According to Joe, “Ulysses isn’t The Greatest Novel Ever Written because it fails to do what even most third rate works are capable of doing: communicating its meaning.”
Let’s call the sort of art that is reluctant to communicate its ostensible meaning “difficult” art. Recall what the poet Geoffrey Hill once said about difficult art:
So there are different reasons why a writer might resist explicitly communicating her meaning. Perhaps she seeks to tyrannize the reader by simplifying and thwarting his opportunities for intelligent response. That sort of artist is the kind that falls in love with her own voice. But might not a writer also be difficult for precisely the opposite motive, because she seeks to honor the reader’s intelligence, and even to honor the difficult mystery of the real?
I think Ulysses is not an insult.
June 22nd, 2009 | 8:40 am
[...] William Faulkner. People respond to The Sound and the Fury, I believe, in much the same way that they respond to James Joyce’s Ulysses. I hated S&F in college. Now, having reread it last week, I can’t say that it will ever [...]
July 1st, 2009 | 3:48 pm
[...] about literary taste lately. A few weeks ago, one of the bloggers at First Things let out a cri de coeur over the awfulness of James Joyce’s novel Ulyssses. I must confess to never having read [...]
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