As an alternative title, “How to read Ulysses if you’re an idiot like me.”
Okay, maybe I’m not an idiot (jury’s out), but I never quite felt that I could handle Ulysses somehow. Maybe I felt that I wasn’t patient enough, maybe that I wasn’t masochistic enough; I think I tried to read Dubliners at one point and couldn’t get on with it, and that may have been where my reluctance began. It’s strange, because I’ve always loved The Waste Land, which I’m learning is considered by many to be something of a companion piece to Ulysses, and published in the same year. I think perhaps there’s something about poetry which, in my mind, lends itself to obfuscation; I can give myself permission not to understand a poem on the first read, but with a novel, I want to follow it. There’s also, of course, the length issue. Reading The Waste Land is simply less of a commitment.
It’s possibly ironic that learning Irish is what has changed my mind about reading Ulysses, since Joyce seemed rather derisive of the Gaelic Revival and its sasanach champions, if his characterisation of Haines (based on Richard Samuel Chenevix Trench, an old acquaintance of Joyce’s) is anything to go by. Still, it was through my latest Irish course that I realised that it’s the centenary year of Ulysses‘s publication, and that it was going to be Bloomsday in about six weeks. Well, I thought, there’s probably never going to be a better opportunity to have a bash at the thing. I’ll try to knock it out by Bloomsday.
I think there were a couple of other factors in my decision: I mentioned that I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey lately, and it’s revitalised my interest in The Odyssey (I’ve been meaning to read Emily Wilson’s translation for an embarrassingly long time). Then, when I was researching verse novels, I came across Omeros by Derek Walcott. In an ideal world, I’d like to read all three this year, though I don’t make any promises.
I work at a university library, so I had my pick of versions of Ulysses at my fingertips. Initially, I took out the Oxford World Classics edition of the 1922 text, but I soon realised my mistake. Despite being a doorstop, the print was tiny, and all the annotations were endnotes. In a text as dense with allusions and references as Ulysses, constantly flipping to the back of the unwieldy book was going to get annoying very quickly, if trying to read the minuscule letters didn’t give me a migraine. I wondered if an ebook version might be a better shout, but none of the affordable editions seemed much cop. In the course of my search, I stumbled across something totally unexpected: the entire text of Ulysses is up on genius.com, the lyrics website, complete with user-submitted annotations. These vary massively in quality, but many are very helpful, and have the advantage of being inline, so you don’t have to navigate away from the text or open up a million new tabs (this is where The Joyce Project is at a disadvantage). I quickly found that this was going to be the best way for me to read the book.
That said, I still felt like I needed some additional help. I took another trip to the Joyce section of the library shelves and got a new stack of books. After careful consideration, I whittled my selection down to three: The Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires, Ulysses Unbound by Terence Killeen and Allusions in Ulysses by Weldon Thornton. All three are helpfully divided by chapter. So my routine now goes like this: I read a chapter of Ulysses on genius.com, wading through the many spurious or gratuitous annotations and appreciating the actually helpful ones. Then, I read the corresponding chapter in each of the three supplementary books. This way, I get a precis of the events of the chapter, in case I get lost and, for example, think that Stephen has gone to his Aunt Sara’s when in fact he has only imagined the visit, and I also get a catalogue of all the many references. These, at least in the first three chapters, tend to fall into four main categories: Irish history and culture (this is a huge category), medieval theology, English literature, and classical antiquity. Much of it is definitely outside my wheelhouse. The three books each have their advantages and disadvantages: Thornton’s is extremely thorough, but the references are somewhat decontextualised, and without checking them against one of the editions he’s using it’s easy to lose track of where they go and how they fit together. Conversely, Blamires is a good overview, but more concerned with narrative than allusions. I think Killeen strikes a good balance between the two. Still, for the moment at least I prefer to use all three, as I like to fill in my knowledge as much as I can. Killeen and Blamires often have slight differences in their interpretations or where they place emphasis, and it’s interesting to compare the points of view.
I’ve also discovered a couple of deep-dive Ulysses podcasts. One is ‘Re: Joyce’, in which Frank Delaney painstakingly goes through the text in fragments anywhere from a paragraph to a single line. It started in 2010, and was obviously intended to go on for many years; sadly, it was abruptly cut short in 2017 due to Delaney’s death. Still, there are hours and hours of it—nearly 400 episodes between five minutes and a quarter of an hour long, and I’ve only listened to about thirty-five so far (we’re still on chapter one). It’s another great supplement to my slow reading method. The other is ‘Blooms and Barnacles’, which I haven’t had a chance to listen to yet, but which I think will provide yet another valuable perspective. It’s nice to feel part of a community of Joyceans who are as detail-oriented as I’ve chosen to be.
People I’ve spoken to about this method of reading Ulysses seem to think I’m mad. My colleague asked me, “do you think someone could just read it without doing all that?”. Of course they could! Presumably, most people do. I’m not sure how I feel about that, however. I can only assume that either they’re missing a huge amount of meaning, or they are just much, much better informed than I am on the four categories mentioned above (and I’m not bad on English literature, what with having a degree in it—not that that’s anything to write home about, but it’s not nothing). I have to wonder, who is this hypothetical reader who doesn’t need the stabilisers on? I tend to assume that they’ve had a relatively privileged education. I know you can study classics in some state schools, but these tend to be the ones in higher-income catchment areas; generally I think that’s the kind of thing you’re more likely to have access to in either private schools or, if you’re the right generation (my dad’s), as part of the old grammar school system. Here you’re also likely to get a lot of English literature and, most likely, some theology. But does the average British private or grammar school give you a good understanding of Irish dialect and politics in the 19th and early 20th centuries? That seems doubtful. Of course, it’s possible to be an autodidact in any one of these areas, or all four (though access to good academic texts isn’t necessarily straightforward if you’re not an enrolled student or academic), but I think it would take a fairly lucky confluence of circumstances to choose those four subjects independently of an existing interest in Joyce. So who is the “typical” reader of Ulysses? Is it someone who already has access to all of Stephen Dedalus’s often esoteric knowledge? Is it someone who is happy to go with the flow, not worrying about the details? Or is it someone like me, who is using Ulysses as a jumping-off point for a deeper education? I don’t know that there’s a right way to read Ulysses, but I think mine is the only way I’m realistically going to get through it.
With all this said, I’ve finally made it past the opening three chapters and met Leopold Bloom, the novel’s true protagonist, at last. Dedalus’s self-conscious erudition falls away at this point, replaced by a livelier and more embodied narration. It makes me wonder whether the hard-going, alienating affect of Dedalus’s chapters is deliberate: where Dedalus is tied to Paris and the past, mind occupied by history and religious rifts of the middle ages (for all he’s trying to free himself from the bonds of the church), Bloom is preoccupied with the Dublin of the present and the future. Antiquity refreshingly gives way to modernism, and “un coche ensablé”** finally comes unstuck. Maybe the slog of the first few chapters is precisely Joyce’s intent. Or maybe not! It’s probably far too early for me to tell. I will say that another novel which is an initial slog, Middlemarch, became one of my all-time favourites after I got over the hump—though in that case the hump is only a few pages, not three incredibly dense chapters. Still, I’m hopeful that my plan to finish Ulysses before Bloomsday is on track.
Have you read it? Did you use any readers’ guides, or did you just jump in? Do you think going in blind ultimately makes for a better reading experience? And are you going to be dressing up for Bloomsday?
*From Chapter 3, ‘Proteus’.
**As above. This phrase, meaning a coach stuck in the sand, is attributed by Dedalus to Louis Veuillot, in reference to the prose of Theophile Gautier. However, Thornton says he’s unable to locate it, so it may be apocryphal or invented.
Panicky in the UK 