in the course of an engaging discussion on htmlgiant last week about, as far as i can tell at least, literary ambition, i found myself admitting, i think for the first time in (quasi) public, that i never cared for the work of james joyce, with specific reference to ulysses. well, now that i’m out let me flame.
this will not be an analysis of ulysses but of my attitude toward it.
first, i’ll start with my attitude toward the book as though it is a singular literary object that could possibly exist in a vacuum. you know, like einstein and the speed of light.
the problem is, this is almost impossible for me to do, since the first time i read the book was for a first-year seminar in college titled “the intertextuality of the epic” in which we read every western epic and a couple non-western ones and discussed the relation of these epics to each other with ulysses last. this, by the way, is a move in the direction of the way joyce intended it to be read or why else would he have called it ulysses (more on this below). also, i tend to read all books in relation to each other, which is why, for example, i have no problem finding bleak house kafkaesque. but much of the aforementioned conversation around ulysses implied it was sui generis, so here’s my best thumbnail of ulysses as an island:
there are many, many good sentences in many different styles, all clearly written with great care on (on the surface) topics that i care about very little, or in the case of stephen dedalus’s obsessions, that i care about, but not in the whiny, self-important, and humorless way that he does. on the cosmic scale, very little happens in the book, because it takes place over the course of one day and follows people of very little historical note (and i’m well aware this is part of the point, but are you?).
so a thumbnail, yes, but enough to get my point — that taken out of context, ulysses doesn’t amount to much — across. and it wasn’t what joyce meant by it. if you try to read it that way, the title has to become and obstacle.
so let me get on to my real take on the book:
don't forget about tennyson. or do. what do i care.
the title, as i don’t have to explain to anyone who has read this far, is a latinization of homer’s greek epic, the odyssey. the odyssey is in many ways the complete opposite of ulysses. where the latter focuses on the ordinary, the former focuses on the extraordinary — an extraordinary man doing extraordinary things with the aid of the gods on a (i know this concept is anachronistic) world-historical scale.
i don’t read much literary criticism (all of my formal education focused on primary texts) so i don’t have any authority to refer to here, but the title ulysses screams for context. with the death of god and the rise of humanism and individualism, the modernist project was to find or create new gods on a more human scale, so joyce takes an extraordinary epic and endeavors to make an ordinary epic.
i have no problem with this idea. in fact i like this idea. but really the idea itself goes back at least as far as the turn of the seventeenth century and don quixote. in other words, this was the project of the novel all along. cervantes just didn’t provide us with a shitload of meta-commentary about it. in other words, seen from this perspective, joyce was more of an end than a beginning. it was like he blew up our spot. which i’m also cool with.
but the meta-commentary is the problem. see, the parallels joyce attempts to make between his epic and its namesake are so idiosyncratic as to not actually exist. call this novel stephen and leopold and their friends spend a day in dublin and leave no notes behind and no one will ever find those parallels.
basically it’s like joyce says to you “i’m thinking of a number between one and infinity” and then you flail and guess and hedge until he says, “yes, that was the number i was thinking of” if you ever get it right and he ever admits it.
what it ends up doing is paving the way for the professionalization and academicization of reading. i admire the gall of a man whose mission is to write a novel that it takes a career to understand and which forces all other books to point in its direction (a new bible, to go along with my parallel about modernism above), but i just don’t care much for the book.