Review: Ulysses

Ulysses by James Joyce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So this novel is rather wildly inaccessible for a first time read-through. I know it draws a lot of attention for turning up on a bunch of "best of the 20th century" novel lists like the Modern Library one, but it's not something anyone should feel obligated to read to be honest, considering how much work it takes to get to a point of understanding it. But if you're open to exploring a fairly unique reading experience, then it ends up being a pretty worthwhile one in the long run, especially on multiple re-readings because there's so much more to be gleaned than is possible on an initial reading... although I feel like I've been saying this a lot for other books already, haha. Just don't expect to understand everything the first time around, because you won't.

Being a mostly stream-of-consciousness work, there isn't much of an interesting plot persay; it's practically ~780 pages covering an average day in the life of an Irish-Jewish man (is that a proper-proper adjective?). Rather, this is a book that's worth reading more for its experimentation with narrative techniques and linguistic wordplay, and the ways in which Joyce uses those to enrich an ordinary everyman's day with a sense of both bewilderment and grandeur. It makes you realize how incredibly complex our lives are even in the most basic of details, and how often we tend to just glance over them without realizing it. Some parts of the book are actually really moving once you get into it- one of the most affecting takes on the struggle for human connection and (surprisingly) surrogate fatherhood that I've read, ever, maybe.

Given how difficult it is to read for the first time, a few tips that come to mind when reading:

1. Read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first. It precedes this work in time and gives a lot of insight into the backstory of Stephen Dedalus and his mental state, for which this novel functions almost as a sequel to. It's also shorter and technically more accessible, as it introduces you to some of the writing techniques that are expanded on in this book. If you can get past the stream of consciousness in that work, then this one won't feel quite so bad.

2. Other topics that help provide insight into the story: the general characters and structure of the Odyssey, Shakespeare's life and his major works, Irish national history at the turn of the 20th century, some of the major stories from the Bible, and the basic tenets of Catholicism... to name a few. But it's not really likely that most people reading this book would have all of that covered beforehand anyway; I would see these more as knowledge that would enhance subsequent readings.

3. Each of the chapters in the book functions as a largely standalone episode and relies on a different kind of writing style, ranging anywhere from the usual Joycean stream of consciousness, to a theater script with stage directions, to a Catholic-styled question and answer catechism, to a chaotic punctuation-and-paragraph-less thought blob that feels as though Joyce just vomited the novel onto its pages. In other words, they each read very differently. The difficulty fluctuates a lot, so one section of the book isn't generally representative of the rest of it. The beginning three Stephen-centric chapters in particular, while setting up for the rest of the novel, are a bit misleading as they differ a lot in tone from Bloom's chapters that take up the majority of the book.

4. I found it helpful to read a guidebook concurrently to get an overall feel of what was happening when I was having trouble with the writing style, and it actually made the process of re-reading individual passages a lot better as well, as you start to recognize a lot of details that you wouldn't notice on a first reading anyway. The Annotated book is also helpful for explaining the encyclopedic amount of allusions and external references, but isn't really necessary for a first go-over unless you like to interrupt your reading often.

5. Pay attention to objects and memories and sayings that occur more than once. Sometimes the details of a scene or memory won't be explained until several chapters after it's been introduced (you might not even have noticed it until that point), which ends up revealing that first appearance of it in a rather different light. It's really like trying to experience the memories/thoughts of another person without having any background knowledge of their past- it's not like you have to explain the context behind your own thoughts to yourself whenever you think them, right?

6. Don't take everything that's said or done at face value, because the line between what's happening in the external world and what's happening in people's minds is generally blurred to the point that the perspective will often switch between character thoughts and external narration mid-sentence. Not every conversation is actually being said, nor are people's impressions of what they see at any given moment necessarily accurate.

7. Just don't take the book that seriously to begin with. While there are overarching reasons for the narrative and word choices and references made, a lot of other stuff is just there because James Joyce is one of the biggest trolls in all of literature. (But that also makes for half of the fun with this book.)