I promised that I would post today, and I will. I also promised that I would post a huge review/critique of Ulysses. Well, I’m not going to do that. I’m at work, and I actually have to show some effort today, even if my computer won’t. What I am going to do is start the critique. I’m going to give my impression of the book itself, and I’m going to try citing Sean Joyce from a New Yorker article about how he handles the Joyce estate. So bear with me.

Okay, here we go:
I finished Ulysses on September 11, 2006. When I started reading it back in February, I promised that I would read at least five pages a day, every day, until I was finished. My copy, published by Vintage, is 783 pages long. So I would be done in roughly 157 days. That’s about five months and one week. Well, I cut back to five days a week, though I did manage to stick to reading at least five pages a day. Hey, some days I did 10. I always read in multiples of five, until I got to the last section where Molly takes over the narration, where I read a sentence a day for eight days. More on this later.

Bear in mind, also, that I read most of Ulysses while coming home from work. I work in lower Manhattan. I live in Queens. I take the E-train to and from work most days. It is on the E-train where I read Ulysses. So this is the critique of a casual reader. I’m not some scholar, hidden away in a quiet library, or some nook, poring over each and every word or sentence, parsing meaning out of the text like some brainiac. I’m just some yahoo on the subway, usually around 5 or 6 p.m., with my head stuffed in a book.

To begin:
Ulysses follows a day in the life of Leopold Bloom. That day is June 16, 1904, to be specific. A lot happens to Bloom and his friends, but nothing more than you’d expect from a regular day. Over the course of what I figure is 24 hours, Bloom wakes up, takes a shit, eats breakfast, goes to a funeral, hangs out with his friends, reads a letter from a lover of his, hangs out with more friends, flirts with and masturbates to a young woman he meets at the beach, takes Stephen Dedalus (whom we all should know from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) to a whore house, then to a coffee shop, then home. And that’s it. Nothing much out of the ordinary happens, per se, but then, it’s just a day in the life.

Or, that’s basically it.

Now, you’d figure it’s just a day in the life, so it ought to be easy to read. Well, this is Ulysses, and Ulysses has a reputation for being a hard read, a reputation only partly earned. It would be more accurate to say that there are sections of Ulysses that are hard to read, and there are sections that simply fly by, most notably one of the latter parts of the book which is written like a play. Easiest five pages-a-day I read. But then there are sections that are simply blocks of text.

But this isn’t any harder than, say, Crime and Punishment, or The Inferno, and it’s certainly easier than Don Quixote. If you’ve made it through any of those – or any novel by Tolstoy, or Faulkner, or any of those guys – then you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting through anything by Joyce. Except maybe Finnegan’s Wake, but I haven’t read that yet, so I can’t really comment.

I haven’t read all of Don Quixote either, but you get the point.
In a New Yorker article, Sean Joyce, James’ grandson, is said to have found his grandfather’s work “not only readable, but appealingly human.”
“As I got older, I realized Joyce is not the difficult writer they say he is,” Sean is quoted as saying in the article. “When [scholars] say, ‘We’ve done so much for him,’ I think, What about the thousands, not to say millions, of readers they scared off? All this crap they write—that’s good old American slang!”

And he’s right for the most part. These characters are appealingly human, because they think about things we all think about, feel things we all feel, and so on. What’s amazing – or what should at least be acknowledged – is that no one really attempted this kind of thing before. If I’m wrong, and someone other than Joyce did this in a novel, let me know.

This kind of thing is taken for granted now. Stream of consciousness is common, if not a staple, in today’s literature. Honesty about what people really think, about what people really do – hell, who doesn’t write about that? Depictions of some guy sitting on the toilet, taking a shit and wiping with newspaper? Well, okay, not so often.

One area where some readers might be put off would be in Joyce’s vocabulary. I have to admit, it’s rather daunting. I read somewhere – and I’ll try to find out where... okay, I probably won’t – that Joyce used 40,000 different words to compose his novel. I think that’s above the average range for most people’s vocabularies, but if you’re willing to use one of the larger dictionaries out there, you can get through it. Hell, I made it through without, just took the words in context, deconstructed them with what little Latin I remember, and I did all right.

But I think more than vocabulary, simple construction is the most daunting part of Ulysses. What I mean is how Joyce put those sentences together to tell the story. There are literally pages where it’s one big block of text. The text itself isn’t difficult in and of itself, but the appearance of so much text – no matter what that text actually says - can be daunting.

I’ll also be the first to admit here that I had to sometimes re-read what I’d just gone over. There are radical shifts in tone, character POV, and in one or two cases, shifts in the sexuality of the pronouns in use. At least, I’m pretty sure. See, there’s a scene in a whore house where Bloom goes from “he” to “she,” and someone... how to put this delicately? Hmm. I don’t think there’s a way, but I’ll try. Someone gets elbow deep into his/her nether regions.

Delicate enough?

Right. Let’s move on.

The final roadblocks to making Ulysses an “easy” read would be the symbols and metaphors. I didn’t get half of what Joyce threw out there. I didn’t get references to officials and important people of his day. I probably didn’t get all the religious references. Hell, there were times when I didn’t get normal sentences, but as I said, I was reading it on the E-train in Manhattan, so what are you going to do, right?

Right, I’m done for now. I’ll write more later, because I have more to write. Was the Modern Library right in claiming that Ulysses was the best book of the 20th Century? Did I actually like it? Does it really matter? All this, and more, next time.