Gave up on Ulysses

I'm also struggling with Ulysses. I'm avoiding study guides for the moment, because I want to at least try to understand it for myself. I got through Telemachus and Nestor not too badly, although I had to Google several words and phrases. Proteus is much harder. Since I'm reading it online here, I'm copying any particularly difficult paragraphs into notepad, looking up everything I don't understand, and "translating" the paragraph until I can read it in a way that makes some kind of sense to me.

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Originally Posted by Smooth Operator

You should really read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first, but in my opinion, unless you are a specialist, you need a study guide to truly enjoy Ulysses. .

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That's simply not true. I think the most important thing to enjoy Ulysses is to understand that you don't need to know what every sentence means, and most importantly that you have an understanding of what was going on in Ireland at the time. Being Irish, I had a very good knowledge of the background story so that helped a lot.

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Originally Posted by Bloomsday

That's simply not true. I think the most important thing to enjoy Ulysses is to understand that you don't need to know what every sentence means, and most importantly that you have an understanding of what was going on in Ireland at the time. Being Irish, I had a very good knowledge of the background story so that helped a lot.

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I think you're both right. As with any complicated novel, if you're going to stick at it, there has to be something to hold your interest, something you can relate to. For you, that's your knowledge of Ireland. I don't know the first thing about Ireland, but I'm still getting something out of this book. The thing that's holding me is the cleverness of it and the way Joyce shows his vast knowledge of literature, art, music, religion, everything really. But to appreciate that I need to look stuff up. I tried to do that myself at first, but I have to admit I've resorted to a study guide now.

My advice would be to just read it. Read it for the words, don't worry about deeper meanings, or the connections with Homer, or with Irish history, or anything else. Just read it as a book. It is a fine enough piece of work to stand alone.

My suggestion, is, that if you don't like it, don't read it. As for that list - it isn't a particularly good one - highly limited, and typically American - but one is better off reading other works before Ulysses. Ulysses is what one turns to when they have sapped the 19th century's works to their fullest, and needs something that tears up the standard structure. It's more of a liberation than anything else - the progression toward a style that enables both the past and the individual artist to function together. He tested it out in his earlier works, but Ulysses essentially works to recraft everything, and push the limits of what is possible. Finnegans Wake goes even further, though loses something, and is less interesting in plot and content most people find (and incomprehensible, though it is great fun to cut up).

If Ulysses isn't working, my advice is to come back to it, or to not read it. There is no real "trick" to the text, and one generally needs to know everything about its structure to understand what it is saying (that includes understanding the very, very thick layers of interext). It's a lot of work, and really only something people who are bored with standard narrative would feel interested in as a hobby, rather than as an attempt to educate themselves, or to brag to people who for the most part don't care.

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Originally Posted by Mutatis-Mutandi

Do you think Joyce wrote this with the main goal of screwing with lit professors' minds? Because, it seems that way to me. He even said something like, "this book has enough puzzles in it to keep scholars busy for centuries." He couldn't have had the goal of creating it for entertainment purposes, or even "art for the sake of art," as it must have been a helluva job to write. My theory is this at least partly the case, and it seems kind of sadistic, don't you think? I also read a quote about Finnegan's Wake from Joyce that was something like, "It took me a lifetime to write it, it should take you a lifetime to read it." Ego, anyone?

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I'm pretty sure the "busy for centuries" quote was in reference to Finnegans Wake actually, which one can imagine Joyce writing to put complaints of difficulty in Ulysses violently to rest. But cheeky accusations aside, no - I wouldn't think he simply wrote either of these to screw with professors. "Screwing" is a kind of clumsy word for it. He likes density and difficulty, and he likes laying various jokes on and for the reader, but all the effort he put into them wasn't in the service of empty frustration and mockery. Even during Ulysses, Joyce's eyesight was on the wane, and in a particularly painful and tedious kind of way, surgery after surgery after surgery - as he well knew, his writing aggravated the problem. And that's not even mentioning all the time and energy, itself, that he expended in its composition. It wasn't a trivial thing to him. Absolutely the man had an ego, but artists with big egos aren't anything to write home about. You should also bear in mind, though, that the quotations you give, and that people frequently cite when discussing these books, were partly stated tongue-in-cheek. Like the books themselves, there's as much self-deprecation as there is seriousness in them.

But in the end, it's not like they're for everyone, and there's no such thing as a book for everyone anyway. By dint of difficulty, Joyce's late work cuts down readers even further, but what can one say outside of que sirrah? Some books are difficult, some easy; some popular, some not. It's nice to have a plurality of literature out there, to have the choice in the matter whether to take it easy or go in for the long and labored haul. There's plenty of substantive reading from either route. Even better, since there's so much stuff out there, so much and so many kinds of great literature, too much even for any one person to read, there's no point in getting hung up on the consumption of each and every one of them. You just can't get into Ulysses? Ah well, on to something else. This doesn't have to mean that not caring for it makes you a lesser person, or it a lesser book, or your failure to read it a terrifying loss. It just did't pan out for you. Maybe it might someday, maybe not. Maybe you might find more to like in Joyce's comparatively simpler stuff, Dubliners or Portrait. Just do what readers do and give it a go. Not working? Move on.

I managed may way through Ulysses over several years, mainly reading it on the holidays, and typically reading other stuff in between. I'd go through a chapter, say, and then read bits from the Bloomsday Book and/or ReJoyce to pick up stuff I might've missed. I took a somewhat similar course with the Wake recently, but in a much quicker time-frame. Well aware of the difficulties and discouraged by the tedium of starting out with an archaelogical reading style, I decided to tear through it on the first go, damn it all to hell, and put the anxieties of an initial reading to rest. Of course, I like modernism and I'm like Joyce pretty well too, so there you go. It varies for everyone.