Why ulysses is a great novel

If he could only recognize some little commonplace which had slipped in where it was not expected. But no! The pitiless and uninterrupted stream rolls by, and its velocity or precipitation grows in the last forty pages till it sweeps away even the marks of punctuation. It thus gives cruelest expressions to that emptiness which is both breath taking and stifling, which is under such tension, or is so filled to bursting, as to grow unbearable.

This thoroughly hopeless emptiness is the dominant note of the whole book. It not only begins and ends in nothingness, but it consists of nothing but nothingness.

It is all infernally nugatory. The seven hundred and thirty-five pages that contain nothing by no means consist of blank paper but are closely printed. You read and read and read and you pretend to understand what you read.

Occasionally you drop through ann air pocket into another sentence, but when once the proper degree of resignation has been reached you accustom yourself to anything.

So I, too, read to page one hundred and thirty-five with despair in my heart, falling asleep twice on the way. FOR: To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.

AGAINST: I have read pages [of Ulysses ] so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first 2 or 3 chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this is on par with War and Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating.

When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. FOR: [F]or all its appalling longueurs, Ulysses is a work of high genius. Ulysses has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy. Since I have read it, the texture of other novelists seems intolerably loose and careless; when I come suddenly unawares upon a page that I have written myself I quake like a guilty thing surprised.

The only question now is whether Joyce will ever write a tragic masterpiece to set beside this comic one. Someone recently sent me a copy of Ulysses.

I was told I must read it, but how can one plow through such stuff? I read a little here and there, but, oh my God! How bored I got! Probably Joyce thinks that because he prints all the dirty little words he is a great novelist.

You know, of course, he got his ideas from Dujardin? Ulysses is hopeless, it is absurd to imagine that any good end can be served by trying to record every single thought and sensation of any human being. Joyce made everything possible; he opened all the doors and windows. Also, I have a very strong theory that he was actually a woman. Then you look at Ulysses and say, well, he was a girl, that was his secret. And the style of the novel is, in fact, many different styles: in abandoning the omniscient narrator, the novel is often read as the true beginning of modernist literature.

So, Joyce's Ulysses is still a very hard read. How hard may be seen by contrasting it with the second "best" novel on the Modern Library list: The Great Gatsby. This novel is surely on everyone's list of top five favorite novels: it is short one-quarter the length of Ulysses ; it is accessible; it has an engaging narrator; it tells a powerful story from start to finish; it is written in beautiful, lyrical and penetrating prose; and, although it has many complex sub-texts, it sounds a single powerful theme—the failure of a materialistic American dream.

Gatsby , too, bears reading and rereading to uncover the layers of complexity, but a first reading—or a reading after long absence—is a powerful, moving narrative experience in a way far different than Ulysses. Still, I urge that people read the first Ulysses I rediscovered, the deeply humanistic novel which is bursting with the enormous variety of life. I do have to say that my re-introduction to the novel was aided by 24 recorded lectures—simply entitled "Joyce's Ulysses"—delivered by James A.

Heffernan focuses primarily on the character and psychology of Stephen, Bloom and Molly but the lectures provide a guide through the chapters of the book and relate them to the Homeric myth and put them in context of other recurrent themes e.

Irish Nationalism. Perhaps that reading of the "first" Ulysses will provide a stimulus to explore the almost infinite dimensions of the second, literary one. Both Gatsby and Ulysses have famous endings. Both endings are not without deep ironies. But, the final sentences of Gatsby are about the futility of our dreams.

The end of Ulysses is about the affirmation of our humanity. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. At this point, Stephen accidentally smashes the gaslight.

The stage directions describe the apocalypse:. Outside the brothel, Stephen becomes involved in a fight with two soldiers. And Bloom is there to rescue him. This is the climactic point of the entire novel.

For, if Stephen had been a son in search of a father, Bloom is a father in search of a son. At the end of the chapter, as Stephen lies in a heap on the ground, Bloom has a vision of his own dead son, not an infant as he had been when he died, but eleven years old, as he would have been had he lived, the woollen handkerchief that his mother had placed in his pocket before his funeral now miraculously resurrected into a living lamb.

It is as moving and as tender and as wondrous a moment as I have encountered in literature. After this, there remain three further chapters, mirroring the three opening chapters in which we had been introduced to Stephen. Here, Stephen has found his spiritual father in the unlikely figure of Bloom. Of course, in a traditionally narrated novel, the significance of this meeting would barely register: after all, nothing much exactly happens as such.

A middle-aged man sees the son of a friend very drunk, and determines to keep an eye on him; follows him into a brothel and sees to him when he gets involved in a fight; takes him back to his own home, and helps him freshen up; and then they part. However, in this novel, in which the tiniest and most trivial of details can assume immense meaning and significance, even something so ordinary as this becomes extraordinary: the ordinary decency and gentleness of Bloom is transfigured into the most extraordinary thing in the world.

The deflation of the heroic may be funny, but it is the inflation of the everyday that seems to me to be at the heart of the matter. For all its myriad complexities, this novel is about the everyday, the ordinary: it embraces all that ordinary life has to offer, never turns its back on anything for being to trivial or too low or too sordid; and it exalts what it finds. The final chapter is given over to Molly Bloom. She has been at fringes of the novel till now, but in the final exultant pages — once Bloom, his epic journey finished, is asleep — she comes fully into the spotlight on her own.

It is magnificent. Of course, while the writing may be unpunctuated, the reading cannot be: we need to pause for breath. And so, we are forced to create our own stops and pauses, provide our own punctuation. And, as we do so, this rushing torrent takes on shapes of sorts, and Molly becomes the unlikeliest model for Penelope, perhaps even more unlikely a model than Bloom had been for Ulysses.

But Penelope she is. We travel with her on a voyage through her past — her marriage to Bloom, the death of her child, her lovers — and, by the time we come to that exultant ending, Bloom, despite being a cuckolded husband, is triumphant: like Odysseus, he has vanquished his suitors.

At the very end, Molly thinks back to the time when Bloom had proposed to her, and she had said Yes. Twentieth century literature, on the whole, is pretty angst-ridden, but this is jubilant. There is nothing in all literature quite as joyously affirmative as this.

In a recent post , I tried to make the point that we must allow for literature not to be entertaining. But Ulysses is a work which, despite its formidable reputation, entertains : it is sheer fun, even when it is at its most serious, and it is a great irony that this of all books is associated with stuffiness and literary snobbery.

It is an amalgam of everything: a single ordinary day in which ordinary people go about their ordinary business is raised to a level where it becomes a depiction of the whole of mankind, through the whole of eternity. But there is nothing self-consciously lofty or elevated in any of this: it is all rooted in the ordinary, the everyday.

The achievement is extraordinary. All prose fiction since has been under the shadows of these twin peaks of literary achievement. It is all too easy merely to stand in awe before such achievements, but a better response would, I think, be to familiarise oneself with them. One may not understand everything at first reading — or even, perhaps, at the umpteenth reading — but let us not let such minor details get in the way: after a while, the difficulties, far from irritating, merely add to its unending fascination.

If ever there was a work to be lived with, this is it. My knowledge of the novel is, however, very superficial. Much appreciated, Himadri. I did enjoy reading your article. I have never read through all of Ulysses, but have dipped into it at times. There are many more passages that make me laugh.

Posted by argumentativeoldgit on August 2, at pm. And my apologies for taking so long to reply: i have been away for a few days. Thank you both for your kind words, but I must admit I do feel like a bit of a fraud: I certainly do not claim any expert knowledge — merely enthusiasm. And, as Michael says, full of laughs.

Back when I was a student — in fact even when I was still at school — Anthony Burgess used to write regularly in the Observer, and he had an enthhusiasm for Joyce that was quite infectious.

Temporarily, that is … I am still determined to have a few more attempts at it. I do enjoy bits of it when I dip into it, and some day, I really must dake a deep breath and dive in. Posted by Kinna on August 7, at am. I attempted it a couple of times and failed to get past the first 10 pages. It is customary in several cities throughout the English-speaking world to read the novel aloud in public annually, from beginning to end, on on June 16, aka Bloomsday.

However, this year a novel twist to this twisted novel occurred via Twitter. Or not! Posted by argumentativeoldgit on August 10, at pm. Thanks for the links, John. Posted by Miguel on February 24, at pm. Perhaps I need to re-read it. Posted by argumentativeoldgit on June 16, at pm. Hello Miguel, and thank you very much for that. Posted by Max Cairnduff on February 4, at am. That reference would then, as you discuss, have made no sense to me at all.

I do think though that one can worry too much about references. They often assume not only a certain level of education, but a certain type of education. As a result much that the author might have expected to resonate with their peers may be opaque to a modern reader. A good example is with Eliot. He assumes a certain level of classical education which I suspect few of his readers now have. It can make him more obscure than I think he would actually have been to many of his contemporaries.

Indeed it might be a shame if one did, what would then be left for a rereading? Posted by argumentativeoldgit on February 5, at pm. And, generally, spend a bit of time there catching up! Do you know that there are articles, and even books, showing people how to pretend to have read classics? Because in fact there are. Posted by Max Cairnduff on February 4, at pm. Hence they are tempted to fake it.

I was recently at Blackwells Bookshop in Oxford, and, as ever when I set foort in that place, I felt grossly inadequate: all those learned books on all sorts of subjects — biochemistry to macro-economics, pre-Socratic philosophy to linguistics, Medieval history to naval architecture … you name it, I am ignorant about it.

Why should I? Whom would I impress? What is most galling is that there must be many people who get put off making the effort required for demanding books because they do not get the message that this effort will be rewarded. There really is no incentive around for anyone to engage seriouslywith serious literature. Posted by argumentativeoldgit on May 10, at pm. Hello, and thank you for that, I think with Ulysses, people just get put off by the difficulty, but once you accustom yourself to that, it is such unmitigated fun!

I really should have a proper go at Finnegans Wake now. Not immediately — but some time in the not too distant future. It would be worth the effort, I reckon. Posted by Lisa Hill on January 14, at am.

The first time I read it, I missed most of the playfulness, and I was still rather earnest when I read it the second time. And yes, FW is next. I was going to read it last year but I had an annus horribilis and although I listened to it on audio twice, I never really got started with the print version.

But now I have a beautiful Folio edition of it, so is the year I venture forth! Posted by argumentativeoldgit on January 20, at am. Yes, I agree: just as one cannot run a marathon without, at the very least, being in training, so one cannot come straight to an author such as, say, Joyce or Proust without any literary experience, and hope to take in their works. I think that with any work of substance, we cannot take everything in: even on the umpteenth reading, it is difficult, and on the first reading it is, I think, impossible.

It is no different from obscurity that would result form frequent allusions to The Simpsons and Seinfeld. Homer and Dante are themselves not more difficult than The Simpsons to understand. The so-called stream of consciousness is troublesome text to be sure, but you can achieve a similar effect with any unnatural writing. Posted by argumentativeoldgit on March 10, at pm. The references in Ulysses are to everyday matters as well as to Homer, Dante, etc. But, artifice though it undoubtedly is all art is artificial , I think it is executed with such skill in this novel that it conveys very vividly the workings of human minds.

Oh, but, really. You know perfectly well what is natural prose. You are writing it. A road from A to B is natural. One with needless bridges and tunnels is an artifice. By a deletion Joyce creates, from what is clear in the mind, an artificial obscurity. Posted by argumentativeoldgit on March 11, at am. Since no writing occurs in nature, all writing is necessarily artificial. The kind of prose I am writing is more commonly used , yes: I think we can agree on that.

The primary purpose of as road is indeed to get us from Point A to Point B, with, usually, as little fuss as possible. But sometimes, we may want to build a road that will allow a traveller the most scenic views; and in this case, it may well be justified to build a few more bridges and tunnels than are absolutely necessary. We certainly do not think in grammatically well-constructed sentences. Sometimes, we may not think in words at all: for if we did, why do we so often need to make an effort to put our thoughts into words?

What Joyce does in Ulysses is to give an impression in words of the way we think, of the way thoughts occur to us. Now, did Stephen actually think a fully formed sentence at that point? Or was it, rather, instantaneous — a thought, an impression, that occurred in a flash, that flit by in a split second? You say:. And two further points on this matter:. The reader does not get an impression of working at something; the reader actually is working at something;.

I certainly did. I frankly get bored with prose that demands no work from me: I tend to find such prose bland and boring. I think I went to some pains in my essay above to demonstrate that this novel is not merely a random collection of odds and ends, but, rather, is designed to give an impression of randomness.

Stephen thinking of Chrysostomos is far from random: it helps characterise the kind of person Stephen is. Neither Leopold Bloom, nor Molly Bloom, nor Blazes Boylan, nor Martin Cunningham, nor any of the other characters in the novel would have thought of Chrysostomos at this point. Stephen does, because this is the kind of world his mind inhabits. And it amounts to a lot of things. It amounts to characterisation.

It amounts to imagery liturgical imagery is particularly important in this opening chapter. It amounts to a subtle rhythm in the prose. It amounts to the thematic development religion and theology are important themes in this novel.

You had written in your earlier post:. Can we not at least allow that some of us may actually enjoy working at it, and, indeed, welcome the opportunity to do so? I frankly find rather insulting the suggestion that those of us who think this book to be great only do so to justify the work we put into it. Could it not be that we appreciate what we ended up getting out of it?

There is much in Joyce that is legitimate. The prose is a wild success sometimes. Even the arcane stuff is OK if it goes strictly to characterization. Posted by argumentativeoldgit on March 12, at pm. Quite the opposite — I feel privileged to read and re-read so wonderful a book.

These arcane elements can serve characterisation, and they can serve a great many other ends also. Sometimes, they may be there for their own sake — ends in themselves rather than means to some other end. But it is out of such trivial acts that our everyday lives are constructed. In other words, this book is admired not so much because it depicts the trivial, but because it transforms the trivial into something magnificent.

This is a stupendous achievement. But I am frankly not sure if this is what you meant. There are also many other reasons to admire Ulysses : it is, after all, a profound and multi-faceted work, and all I am presenting is my own, personal perspective.

By trivia I meant things people might have to look up. I did not mean to say that this book violated some established rules for novels. So in sum I said or implied that Ulysses proceeded in part from bad motives.

Which part? So there. Nor do I think that expression is self-explanatory. Not in the direction of some rules of novel writing, but in the direction of an author with a little learning eager to show off. Only saying where I was headed and where not. Posted by argumentativeoldgit on March 13, at pm. Before I address your points, may I first say that of course I really want to know what you meant.

I do feel that debate and discussion are important, but that, on the internet, it all too often descends into cheap point-scoring, name-calling etc.

I have tried to explain in an earlier post what I think debate and argument should ideally be like, and why I think they are important. I also tried to explain in that post why it is important to scrutinise the words we use, and what specifically we mean by these words: it is not out of bloody-mindedness, or out of a desire to be awkward, but because clarity of our argument depends on the clarity of our words, and, quite often, the very nature of what we are arguing relies on the precision of our expression.

With that out of the way, let us move on. Ulysses does, as you say, refer to a great many things — to history, to literature, to philosophy, theology, etc. I personally do not think these things are trivial I wrote a post some time back explaining why. On the contrary, it seems to me important to have a wide range of general knowledge. But the question we need to address is why the book is so full of so many references. To whom should he want to show off?

And to what purpose? If he wanted merely to show off, would he not have made it more easily understood, so as to reach a wider audience? In this novel, Joyce set out to depict the way our minds work, the way we think, the way thoughts enter our minds.

Now, our minds are full of all sorts of bits and pieces of knowledge we have picked up — sometimes systematically, sometimes otherwise. These are things that are resident in our minds. So naturally, when our minds are at work, these various bits of knowledge we carry around in our minds will inevitably come into play. And Stephen is a very intellectual chap: his mind is full of Thomas Aquinas, of Aristotle and Dante and Shakespeare, and so on.

So it is hardly surprising that these things play a major part in his thinking process. Other characters are not quite so intellectual. As I said in my essay above, the majestic structure of Ulysses is often built on less-than-majestic material. And Molly is far more down-to-earth than either: there is nothing very erudite about her stream-of-consciousness. The knowledge that we carry about us in our minds inevitably form a large part of our thoughts.

The various references serve other purposes also, I think. So the philosophy of Aristotle, the music of Mozart, the dramas of Shakespeare, all have their part here; and so, for that matter, do smutty schoolboy jokes, cheap music hall songs, newspaper headlines.

All elements, high ad low, are present. This is actually a very tightly constructed novel. In other words, the various references — which I. And Ulysses is not a bad novel. If this is what you mean, then I am once again a bit puzzled.

There are many reasons why people love books, but I must confess I have never heard of anyone loving a book because it makes a lot of references to other things. I know several people who love Ulysses : no-one I know loves this book because it makes a lot of references. Do you have any evidence that this is why the book is loved? Can you point me to some article or essay in which the writer claims to like Ulysses because of all the references it makes?

In short, do you have any evidence to support your allegation? The people whom I know who love Ulysses love it because of its linguistic exuberance, its wit and humour, its profound humanity, its vast thematic scope, and so on.

Ulysses reads like Jeopardy the American game show , but are there any signs of understanding? Does Joyce seem to you to understand theology? Anybody can go Thalatta, Thalatta! I never said I liked them. Establish first the otherwise poor quality of the book. Let me see if I can follow this.