How I read Ulysses and lived to tell the tale
Don’t be put off by the book’s reputation; persist with it and you will be rewarded
‘yes I said I will Yes’
And so, with those six simple words, the most famous, frustrating and mythologised novel of the past 100 years comes to an end.
Like many would-be readers, I had always been put off tackling James Joyce’s monumental Ulysses by its reputation.
This is a book that has been deemed by many as impenetrable and unreadable, 933 pages of genre-defying, shape-shifting stream of consciousness and idiosyncratic wordplay.
A book that many count as a badge of honour to say they began reading, but did not complete.
(“I abandoned it at ‘Circe’ [the notorious script for an impossible play].” “I can do better than that! I only got as far as ‘Proteus’.” [the third episode that mostly takes place within the head of Stephen Dedalus])
Over the years, I have contemplated reading Ulysses countless times. It has loomed high on the bookshelves like an Everest, a seemingly unconquerable challenge daring me to try it.
Several times, I have picked it up, read the first page beginning with “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan …”, and then put it down thinking that it didn’t seem that difficult, but life is too short to invest the untold number of hours required to wade through this supposedly unreadable tome. To do so would require supreme reserves of energy, discipline and concentration which I lacked.
So I put it aside again.
But it waited there patiently, like an unclimbed mountain that goaded me whenever I spotted its spine among the other books in the shelves.
And there it remained until January this year.
Somehow, I stumbled upon a podcast produced by the modern day Shakespeare & Company, an ambitious project involving more than 100 readers to record an audio version of the book by instalments, with the grand finale on Bloomsday, June 16.
The podcast began on February 2, which happened to be the centenary of the publication of Ulysses by Sylvia Beach’s small Parisian bookshop, Shakespeare & Company, on the occasion of James Joyce’s 40th birthday in 1922.
Finally I had found both a reason to read Ulysses and a companion to help me navigate my way through this notoriously difficult book.
The world really doesn’t need another essay about Ulysses. Many more words have been written about the book than Joyce ever penned in his lifetime.
Suffice to say that it’s ironic given its fearsome reputation, Joyce intended his book to be read by the common man.
He would be dismayed to see it now regarded as the apotheosis of literary fiction, seemingly beyond the reach of all but the most educated and cultured reader.
But surely Joyce must have been aware of how difficult his book would be. Famously, he told a friend that he intended to “keep the professors busy for centuries”.
And from the outset, he was deliberately iconoclastic and provocative by taking on two of the canons of western literature, Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Hamlet to help form the thematic structure of the book. Without a doubt, his own ambition was to have both his book and himself one day elevated to the same pedestal of greatness occupied by Homer and the Bard.
It’s true that parts of Ulysses are incredibly hard going. Even with the help of a chapter by chapter guide, much of it leaves me mystified and bamboozled. Time and time again, I have had to re-read sections or go back several pages to understand what I am reading. Joyce’s wordplay, his metaphors and allusions, the wide range of assumed knowledge, all add to the frustration.
But stick with it, and you will be rewarded. To describe it as unreadable is lazy and insulting. It is challenging and requires a greater commitment than most books, but through its 933 pages, you will Ulysses to be inventive, frustrating, subversive, romantic, and delightfully obscene. And funny. Very, very funny and full of wonderful Irish dialogue.
Legend says that Joyce wrote the final ‘Penelope’ section of the book almost as an afterthought, originally intending to finish it with ‘Ithaca’, Leopold Bloom’s return to home after his day of traipsing around Dublin.
Whether it’s true or not, ‘Penelope’ — also referred to as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy — is the perfect conclusion.
Perhaps Joyce realised how tough much of Ulysses would be for readers and decided to reward them for persisting with his magnum opus by making the final chapter an unadorned, direct and colloquial monologue from the book’s principal female character, who is never far from the centre of the narrative but always just off stage.
It’s as if he said to himself, I’ve made them suffer enough, I’m going to make that last bit easy for them.
The final episode of the Shakespeare & Company podcast of Ulysses was read by Sally Rooney, probably the most acclaimed young Irish writer working today.
As we arrive at the last page, Molly reflects on the day Bloom proposed to her and her response: “yes I will Yes”.
And here, I believe, lies the ultimate insight that Joyce wanted to leave us all with at the end of his masterpiece …
Our human existence, for all its turmoil, tragedy, farce and disappointment, has meaning for one overwhelming reason: to love and to be loved. That us why we are put on this Earth.
The love between Bloom and Molly has not been extinguished, despite the betrayals and adultery and tragedy that have occurred within it; if they can each rediscover that love, then life will have meaning.
And that applies also to the book’s other main character, Stephen Dedalus, a barely disguised alter-ego for Joyce himself.
Aged 22, Stephen is the very model of the tortured artist, an intellectual giant surrounded by pygmies and an unfulfilled talent who wanders through the book immersed in his own misery, suffering and nightmares. When he leaves Bloom to venture off into the night (or early morning) in the penultimate chapter, there seems no resolution.
But we know from biography that Joyce’s own awakening and the ability to become a great artist came from his first date with Nora Barnacle, the woman who was to be his life long partner, on June 16, 1904, the day in which Ulysses is set.
His relationship with such an uncomplicated free spirit would crack something open within him and unleash the talent that was trapped inside.
Ostensibly a book about two lonely individuals on a great odyssey through Dublin, Ulysses teaches us the most important lesson of all about life: what makes it worthwhile is the companionship of others.
The capital Y in that final “yes” spoken by Molly Bloom is no mistake. Joyce put it there deliberately.
This is a book of great humanity in which the final message is one of hope.
My own journey with Ulysses is coming to an end (I fell behind the podcast during the latter episodes). But having conquered this monumental work of art, I have no doubt that at some stage in the future I will go back to the opening page and start reading it all over again.
