Why You Should Read: James Joyce’s Ulysses

A Turbulent Run Down Stream of Consciousness or: Yeah... We're Covering It.

Merry [belated] Bloomsday: the holiday most often abandoned within minutes of starting!  Go out for an extended morning walk, indulge in the sights and sounds of the town, and enjoy your kidney breakfa—wait…hold up…the title alone triggers sirens to blare, so let’s do some clean-up: James Joyce’s Ulysses is notorious for its difficulty, with its pages of experimental prose, allusions to the most esoteric literature, and most notably, stream-of-conscience writing style, so much so that its reputation as “unreadable” and “high-brow” has come to overshadow all other elements the work has to offer.  While, yes, Ulysses can be difficult and arcane, the collective view on Ulysses is rather unfair and not actually of Ulysses itself, but instead what people believe Ulysses is—a caricature of the actual novel where some of its most memorable, but not its only, traits come to be exaggerated to the point where they are not only the defining traits of the work, but the only traits of that work in the minds of others.  When people talk about Ulysses, it’s rarely the novel itself, but their idea of it.  (Chances are, that person hasn’t even read it all the way through!)  Basically, Ulysses’ reputation as impenetrable and high-minded is not exactly accurate and misses the finer points of the work, to the point where its reputation is an entirely separate entity from the text itself: Ulysses is boisterous, vulgar, silly, and largely accessible, not some holy codex written in languages reserved for the cultural elite.  (If you want to talk about impenetrable nonsense, try Finnegans Wake—it’s basically what people think Ulysses is.)

Pictured: A Major Sex Symbol Being Read By Marilyn Monroe

So far, this have been largely defensive and before we get into why Ulysses is worth reading, there is still that massive hurdle of reputation to get over, so here we are: “How Not to Read James Joyce’s Ulysses”.  We’ll get through this quick … 

• Don’t Fret Over Every Line:  You won’t understand every single reference, and that’s okay.  The vast majority of it doesn’t matter.
•  Ignore Allusions: Allusions to the Odyssey and other works are inconsequential to most readers.
• Don’t Give Up Within the First Three Chapters:  The main character, the shining star of the book, is not introduced until the fourth chapter, or Book II, roughly fifty pages in.  With his introduction, the narration really picks up and the stream-of-consciousness becomes less reliant on obscure (and at times, insufferable) intellectual references which are dominant in the first three chapters.  At Book II, the text actually becomes consistently fun.  (Ulysses…fun?!  Incredible, isn’t it?)

...and most important...

• Be Cognizant of Narratorial Changes:  Joyce employs stream-of-consciousness often, but not always, which will mean the narration will weave between third-person narration and a character’s inner monologue.  These transitions are never overtly labeled, often happening within the same paragraph with no textual indication of change.  The reader must look for tonal changes, or the easiest indication, first-person pronouns that are not part of dialogue.  The divide between character’s internal and external worlds is not always clear-cut.

This stream-of-conscience technique is the book’s greatest strength, though it is also the biggest hurdle for unsuspecting readers.  Unlike knowledge of the story beats in the Odyssey or the geographic layout of Dublin, being able to decipher what is internal and what is external is crucial to understanding, and enjoying, Ulysses.  For example, here is the first instance of a narratorial swap, which may go unnoticed by unsuspecting readers:

—Look at yourself, [Mulligan] said, you dreadful bard!
Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.

Catch it?  It should become apparent with “As he and other see me.”  No indication of a change, and this is one of the easiest ones to spot, it is an introduction after all, with its frequent use of the first-person pronoun “me”.  Okay, the disclaimer is over, here is why you should read Ulysses:

Sigh... That disclaimer was longer than Ulysses itself...

In its simplest form, Ulysses is the story of Leopold Bloom as he spends his day, a Thursday, June 16^th, 1904, which is not a remarkable day—just another day in Bloom’s life.  At least that is Ulysses from a story approach, what it is actually about is transporting yourself into the life of another human being, one Mr. Leopold Bloom, for a single day, with no details spared, in all its mundane glory.  Nothing grand happens in Ulysses, and it is all the better for that, and nothing too dull is cut out.  Nearly 800 hundred pages of someone else’s day, with every action, every thought that goes through Mr. Bloom’s head, revealed and cataloged.  (The reader also peaks into the minds of Stephan Dedalus, an arrogant intellectual from A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, who through seeing his inner-workings, the reader begins to sympathize with, and Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife.)  Ulysses is an intimate look into the human condition, with all its glory and down-falls.  The brilliance of Ulysses is seeing life from another’s point of view, without all the glorious edits cutting out the “boring” parts seen in every other work of fiction, or even non-fiction.  All the random, meaningless thoughts a person has throughout the day don’t make it into other works, and for good reason, but Ulysses is a celebration of those elements.  Just about every character in any medium, this could even be expanded further into other people who aren’t you, are more than human because you, the reader or observer, never sees them at their worst and at their most boring the same way you see yourself.  People can put on a “Best of” reel for others, withholding all that isn’t to be shared.  You are with yourself twenty-four/seven, so all those thoughts you’d rather not share, all those sly little actions you’d never admit too, are hidden from everyone but yourself.  Ulysses is one of the few books that embraces those secrets aspects of human life.  The reader is with Bloom, inside his head, when he is at his highest points for that Thursday we spend with him…and the reader is also with Bloom as he sits on the toilet reading the morning paper.  The latter is not enjoyable to read, it is an aspect of being human that we’d prefer to overlook, but one that we can never escape, and for that reason, Ulysses is one of the most accurate portrayals of being human. 

James Joyce’s Ulysses is the transplant of the human mind, in all its grand, dull, sometimes gross, and scattered fashion, onto paper: its greatest power is its ability to do so accurately, allowing the reader to leave their own and venture into another, at least for a day, to prove that, no, the reader isn’t alone in that silly quirk, isn’t weird to have that reoccurring thought, and ultimately that we’re all flawed animals…that we’re all human.