Ulysses schmulysses
While the wifeling spent Sunday in New York picking out a wedding gown, I settled down to the grim task of inching painfully through Ulysses. Frankly, I am baffled why this book tops the Modern Library's Editors' choice for top 100 fiction. It's truely a tomb. Here are my impressions 200 pages in.
Admittedly, I've read only as much commentary as I think essential to follow the narrative, so perhaps I shouldn't complain that it's difficult. Yes, difficult to read, and even more difficult to understand. Still, Joyce succeeds in using stream of consciousness to illustrate the protagonists' inner lives. Apart from the sense of intimacy it engenders, at times I was swept up in a sense of time unfolding.
However using a similar style for the narrative scaffolding is unforgiveable. It allows Joyce to punctuate the text with half-baked and glibly poetic ideas. It feels like standup comedy for literature professors. Indeed Joyce claims he intended that Ulysses read like a puzzle so as to guarantee him exposure in the pages of learned journals for centuries to come.
His obscurantism is therefore in part deliberate. However, Ulysses is notoriously full of errors, and at least two major overhauls of the text have been prepared since its initial publication. But I suspect that its also difficult because some of the ideas are simply sloppy.
Example - Bloom keeps in his pocket a brochure from 'Agendath Netaim'. Surely it should be 'Agudath Netaim'? What's the reader supposed to think? That Bloom, the half-jew is being hoodwinked by a phoney Zionist organization? That its a pathetic pun on the 'agenda' of the tree-planters association? Or that its just a mistake Joyce made in the first draft and left in the text through lack of better knowledge, or for better bamboozling the reader?
Perhaps as I read on, enlightenment will dawn. Perhaps I'll read a commentary that reveals a cunning insight into irish-jewish identity politics. But for now, I feel that the emperor is half-naked and trying to get the rest of us to undress.
Admittedly, I've read only as much commentary as I think essential to follow the narrative, so perhaps I shouldn't complain that it's difficult. Yes, difficult to read, and even more difficult to understand. Still, Joyce succeeds in using stream of consciousness to illustrate the protagonists' inner lives. Apart from the sense of intimacy it engenders, at times I was swept up in a sense of time unfolding.
However using a similar style for the narrative scaffolding is unforgiveable. It allows Joyce to punctuate the text with half-baked and glibly poetic ideas. It feels like standup comedy for literature professors. Indeed Joyce claims he intended that Ulysses read like a puzzle so as to guarantee him exposure in the pages of learned journals for centuries to come.
His obscurantism is therefore in part deliberate. However, Ulysses is notoriously full of errors, and at least two major overhauls of the text have been prepared since its initial publication. But I suspect that its also difficult because some of the ideas are simply sloppy.
Example - Bloom keeps in his pocket a brochure from 'Agendath Netaim'. Surely it should be 'Agudath Netaim'? What's the reader supposed to think? That Bloom, the half-jew is being hoodwinked by a phoney Zionist organization? That its a pathetic pun on the 'agenda' of the tree-planters association? Or that its just a mistake Joyce made in the first draft and left in the text through lack of better knowledge, or for better bamboozling the reader?
Perhaps as I read on, enlightenment will dawn. Perhaps I'll read a commentary that reveals a cunning insight into irish-jewish identity politics. But for now, I feel that the emperor is half-naked and trying to get the rest of us to undress.
- sheikh X at 7:29 AM
5 Comments:
well well, i'm still only 100 pages in (that's 2 years back, and haven't returned). i think when i do find the wherewithal to read a book of such length it'll be proust instead. good points, though. i'd like to compile a list of the most overrated works of literature. when i do get around to ulysses i suspect it might top the list. any other suggestions?
25 pages a day. That's my stragegy.
I think almost everything is over-rated ;-( But I wouldn't trust my opinion, left to my own devices I'd probably stick with Detective fiction!
On the flipside, a great, almost forgotten author is Israel Zangwill. Do you know his little book, The King of Schnorrers? It's out of print, but pretty easy to find (the Strand usually has copies). Disregard the Amazon review - where Candide is mean-spirited, Zangwill's satire is tender.
I am in Geneva and yesterday I went to the Martin Bodmer foundation`s Museum of the Book where they had a first edition copy of Ulysses on display. I have only read the first sentence of the book as its a cool first sentence.
i'm posting an email from adam. apparently registering for comments is proving an insurmountable challenge.
your ridiculous blog host won't let me post a rejoinder to your ignorant screed about Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses unless I am a blogger
how do you expect to have quality people give constructive comments on your blog if you prohibit anonymous /nonblogger posts?
i was too sick the other evening on the telephone to suggest that maybe you are just not smart enough to understand joyce...
hi ilan -
the bodner museum you described sounds pretty astounding. these canny book-collectors... the original manuscript for ulysses is in a similar (though much smaller) museum in philadelphia. a pair of jewish collectors, the rosenbach's, acquired it for a few thousand dollars back in the 1920s. new american money acquiring european cultural heritage...
happy travels...harry
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