In many ways, I share Joe’s antipathy toward James Joyce’s Ulysses. But I must confess to having something of a love-hate relationship with Joyce’s novel, which relates in tedious detail a day in the life of the city of Dublin and its environs.
On the one hand, like Joe, I find this incoherent book (which Joyce topped in utter unreadability with Finnegan’s Wake), as well as the literary snobs who acclaim it, to be insufferably self-indulgent. And its incoherence also makes the novel completely inaccessible to the vast majority of even moderate-to-well-educated readers. A decade ago, when Ulysses was listed as the best English language novel of the 20th century, I remember getting into an argument with a couple of well-read friends in which I noted (tongue in cheek) that it couldn’t possibly be the greatest English language novel of the 20th century when probably only 100 people could genuinely claim to have read it all the way through.
And yet, for some reason—probably related to my love for the city of Dublin, I do have some affection for Ulysses and even list it among my favorite books. I can’t really explain it and won’t try. Suffice it to say that the book did make more sense and began to hold some sentimental value to me after I visited Dublin a couple of times with my cousin who spent a year studying Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College and who dragged me along to retrace the steps of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom.
So, my love/hate relationship with Ulysses can probably best be summed up as follows: While the novel does have some sentimental value as a memento of my adventures in Dublin, that doesn’t make it any less of a tedious bore.
June 17th, 2009 | 10:54 am
“while the novel does have some sentimental value as a memento of my adventures in Dublin, that doesn’t make it any less of a tedious bore.”
I wish I could say the same thing regarding my time in Boston and reading The Bostonians.
June 17th, 2009 | 12:58 pm
Incoherent? Please. Ulysses is really not that difficult a read (long, but not difficult. And compared to Finnegans Wake, it’s prose is downright simple). It’s also happens to be one of the funniest books ever written.
I’m always amazed at otherwise intelligent, well-read people who seem to wear it as a badge of honor not to have gotten through Ulysses or similar books. It’s fine not to like or want to finish the book, but to claim that it’s intrinsically incoherent and unreadable, or that probably only 100 people have ever actually read it all, seems like lame bid for populist credibility by disavowing any high-brow literary aspirations and claiming something isn’t worthwhile if it’s not accessible to the masses. Most great art isn’t accesible to the masses. If it’s easy readability and lack of artistic depth that you want, stick with Grisham, King and their ilk, all the cheap flim-flam heavily promoted to the masses in the front lobbies of the bookstores.
June 17th, 2009 | 1:21 pm
I don’t read Grisham or King. I mostly stick to the classics.
Besides, I thought it rather obvious from my comments that I have, indeed, read the book and, in fact, have made the usual rounds of Ulysses sites in Dublin. In addition, I made quite clear that my noting that only 100 people had read the book from beginning to end was a tongue-in-cheek poke at the overall inaccessibility of the novel to even well-educated readers of English (assuming you want to call the stream-of-consciousness gobbledy-gook that Joyce employs “English”).
My love/hate opinion of Ulysses is no more a lame bid for populist street creds than those who acclaim the novel’s alleged “brilliance” are engaged in a lame bid to prove their literary snob creds.
Oh, wait.
;-)
June 17th, 2009 | 3:20 pm
I’m perfectly willing to put work into reading something — I think I can say that with a certain degree of pride having read a fair number of classical works in the original Greek or Latin — but on the several occasions that I started Ulysses, I never really seemed worth going farther.
June 17th, 2009 | 3:46 pm
Most great art isn’t accesible to the masses.
Really? That point only seems even arguably true about the great art of the 20th century, maybe part of the 19th century, and the occasional one-off from earlier (something like TRISTRAM SHANDY, say). But as a general rule, it’s pretty self-evidently false.
It is undoubtedly the case that a well-educated person will get more out of a great work of art than a poorly-educated one. It’s probably the case that a poorly-educated person might not get WHY the Mona Lisa is great. But the Mona Lisa is perfectly accessible to anybody with two good eyes. And it is sometimes even the case, though less often than some apologists for bad work will have you think, that specific great works aren’t appreciated right away (THE BARBER OF SEVILLE) or in their time at all (Dickinson’s poems). None of these things make difficulty or inaccessibility a feature of great art, per se.
I can speak with great confidence only about film (which is basically a 20th-century art form, so it doesn’t speak to the temporal point I made above). And while I’ll put my love for Dreyer, Bergman, Ozu, Tsai and Tarkovsky up against anyone’s, I would still maintain that SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, SOME LIKE IT HOT and CASABLANCA are all way more profound than almost all would-be high-art frou-frou, despite their unabashedly popular form and their being terrific entertainments.
June 17th, 2009 | 7:11 pm
Error alert: the title is Finnegans Wake (emphasizing plurality), not Finnegan’s Wake (showing possession).
Sorry, gents.
June 17th, 2009 | 8:21 pm
I am afraid that I too am among those otherwise well-educated who could not finish this book. It was torture. I will say that in college, I was able to write a paper on chapter 3 and get an A.
June 18th, 2009 | 10:58 am
“the literary snobs who acclaim it”
Well, I grant that some who acclaim it may be “snobs,” but would you in turn acknowledge that some who acclaim it are not? The Nabokov scholar Alfred Appel wrote a book, The Art of Celebration, in which he places Ulysses alongside Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, and Fred Astaire as “the life-affirming, celebratory works of the twentieth century.” Hardly the work of a snob. And Ulysses is well-loved by many ordinary Dubliners.
June 18th, 2009 | 12:56 pm
Tickletext,
Yes, I will acknowledge that it’s not just “literary snobs” who feel affection for Ulysses.
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