Ulysses by James Joyce: A Critical Review
It’s long. It’s not as long as, say, Moby Dick, but that comparison brings me to a useful analogy: It’s well-known that John Bonham of Led Zeppelin fame would break into a drum solo during the live playing of the group’s song “Moby Dick” that would last upwards of thirty minutes or more. What’s less well-known (and yet I have it on good authority from a friend of mine who attended a Led Zep concert on more than one occasion during the band’s heyday) is that the only people at the concert enjoying Bonham’s solo were Bonham himself, and that portion of the audience that was stoned out of its collective mind.
The analogy is this: think of Bonham as James Joyce writing Ulysses. Think of the stoned audience as the literati.
(By the way, I had a rather illiterate uncle who once remarked, during a rare family discussion about books, that for the longest time, he thought Moby Dick was a venereal disease. Now I can’t think of Melville’s classic without thinking of that uncle.)
I’ve managed to avoid reading Ulysses my whole life but eventually took the plunge. I’m not sure why exactly. I suppose, because I write for a living, that I thought I should read the book generally regarded as the greatest book of the twentieth century, if not the greatest book of all time. And let me start by saying this: Ulysses is amazing. It’s pure genius. It’s an astonishing, staggering, remarkable work.
It’s also ridiculous.
Look, I can appreciate the influence of this book on modernism. I’m a Hemingway disciple, for crying out loud. I make a pilgrimage annually to his house in Key West. I know what Hemingway thought of Joyce – what all the modernists thought of him. Joyce showed there are other ways to write. He broke the rules. Literature changed forever after Ulysses (and the preceding A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the subsequent Finnegans Wake). There is the literature before Joyce, and then there is the literature after Joyce. So stipulated.
But the manner of the book…the way in which it is structured…
Okay, let’s start with the good. There are essentially three main characters (four if you count the backdrop city of Dublin, which many people do): Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom (Leopold’s wife). The beauty of the story is that these are everyday people, nobody more so than Bloom who is perhaps literature’s all-time greatest Everyman. Joyce, in other words, chose to write a book with Everyman as the hero. Bloom’s journey through a single day – June 16th, 1904 (June 16th is now celebrated worldwide, especially in Dublin, as “Bloomsday”) – is roughly correlated with the journey of Ulysses in the Odyssey. In truth, there is more of Shakespeare in Ulysses than Homer. Regardless, this concept of elevating the Everyman to Hero (or protagonist, strictly speaking) is a staple now of modernism. (Attaching myth, incidentally, to the everyday, is really what myth is all about. It’s no accident that Joseph Campbell loved Joyce.)
Ordinary people living an ordinary day. The reader can relate. In this respect, the book is fine (and obviously significant in its capacity to influence, to this day). The problem is in the telling. It’s not the prose, in and of itself. Joyce showed that he was a master of prose. It is, rather, in the style or, significantly, styles. I read the book with a pen in hand, marking comments in the margins, as I am wont to do. (Don’t give me this crap about the sanctity of books. When I read a book, I underline, I highlight, I dog-ear pages. That’s what books are meant for.) My copy of Ulysses (the Gabler edition) is 644 pages. Over 150 times, roughly once every fourth page, I wrote the words “self-indulgent” in the margins, finally just abbreviating halfway through with “S.I.”.
Joyce could only have been entertaining himself. The book is told, at various turns, by the aforementioned protagonists (and others), and almost entirely in stream-of-consciousness, a little of which goes a long way. Molly’s parts (comprising the last section of the book) are told with no punctuation and few paragraphs a long run-on sentence that drags on for thirty-seven pages and essentially reflects her interior monologue of a thousand ideas and thoughts that are going through her head and i suppose we have to hear everything by reading that joyce fellow’s experimental style and i wonder if anybody ever really reads everything molly has to say or maybe they skim like i did because after a while this kind of writing becomes arduous even tortuous to read no matter how clever joyce must have thought that it was i think i’ll have fish tonight.
Stephen’s parts are almost undecipherable.
At one point in the book, a complete stranger to the story – a new character not seen before or after – narrates an entire section.
There is another whole section that is written like a play. Probably more surreal than the other sections (probably), the parts go to Bloom and Stephen (and others), but also to inanimate objects (a clock, a fan, a door handle).
Are there other sections?
Yes, there’s a complete section where the narrative is told through questions and answers.
Why would Joyce do it what way?
Nobody really knows.
Was it effective?
Not for me it wasn’t. Like most of the devices used in the book, it took away from the story, rather than adding to it.
There are also sections written in completely different styles, written essentially as impressions (mockeries?) of eighteenth and nineteenth century Romantic writers. The impressions are impressive, but who was Joyce trying to impress and why? In my copy, this section is now pretty heavily marked with “S.I.”
As is the section where Stephen is having a discussion on Shakespeare. It’s a discussion of some depth and it clearly shows Joyce’s knowledge of the subject. But why is it in the book? Yes, there are Shakespearian symbols relevant to the characters (Hamlet keeps turning up symbolically), but this particular discussion’s purpose (it goes on for pages) seems clear enough: It is Joyce showing us what Joyce knows.
Now, I can’t help but think as I summarize Joyce’s devices here (I am dangerously close to using the word gimmicks), that the book sounds like something of a hoot. A fun book to read! It’s not. It’s not fun. It’s not fun at all. Go to your library, pick up a copy, choose a few random pages and start reading. You’ll see what I mean.
But notwithstanding my margin scribblings, is it really fair to call the manner in which Joyce relates the story of Bloom, et al., self-indulgent? That is to say, did Joyce care more about himself than his reader? It would seem so. The book is extraordinarily bewildering. It cannot be penetrated without an accompanying study guide (I made use of The New Bloomsday Book: a Guide Through Ulysses, and I make no apologies). But one needn’t take my word for it. Let’s hear from the author himself: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.” How self-indulgent can you get?
Meanwhile, the professors are doing just what Joyce had hoped for. Sitting stoned in the audience while Joyce plays on and on and on and on and on…
It’s an important book, Ulysses. An invaluable piece of the Western cannon. It should be admired as that. Yes, it is ridiculous. But it should be respected. It should even be revered. It need not, however, be read – a sentiment I share with none other than Joyce’s wife Nora. “Why don’t you write books people can read?” she famously inquired of her husband. Good question, Mrs. Joyce.