Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive—and distinctive it appears to be in man; any deliberate tendency to pursue the hard and painful as such and for their own sakes might well strike one as purely abnormal. Nevertheless, in moderate degrees it is natural and even usual to human nature to court the arduous. It is only the extreme manifestations of the tendency that can be regarded as a paradox.

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:

Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce’s writings, and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac I am. Moreover, I always detested regional literature full of quaint old-timers and imitated pronunciation. Finnegans Wake’s facade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement.

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:

We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most ‘intellectual’ piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves, we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right – not an obligation – to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification. […] And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualification and revelations…resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.

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.

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).

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.

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.