Man this book is hard!

[mal4mac]

Ulysses is a great book which is not that hard to understand given a decent IQ...

I think motivation and/or attitude is more important than IQ; you need to have a lot of patience to look up those obscure references to Dublin, Catholicism, Irish politics, etc... Or you need to take the view that understanding everything isn't so important, just let it wash over you, and take in any pretty flotsam that jams up in your brain. (I can't take that approach, and enjoy the experience ... Desolation seems to be able to ... I don't think it's to do with his IQ being greater than mine, though it might be... his OQ is obviously much higher - the Obscurity Quotient is a measure of you ability to withstand living with obscurity.

I don't think you can say Joyce went further into greatness than Dickens, Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Further into obscurity, certainly... maybe a good thing, maybe not... it seems to entertain a lot of people.. so probably a good thing... but it also upsets people like the OP, so they need to know that Joyce is a strange walk into a very strange (possibly great) wilderness... but you don't have to go there to be a lover of literature.

[Desolation]

That's an excellent way of putting it, mal.

Reading Ulysses doesn't make you smarter than anyone (I'm certainly not smarter than anyone here, not by a long shot). That's ridiculous. Everyone has their own personal aesthetic that affects the way they approach and enjoy a work. I like it weird and obscure - Joyce speaks to me, while I find Dickens, or Homer himself, incredibly difficult. A reader doesn't have to enjoy/understand anything, be it Joyce or Flaubert or Shakespeare (though, you probably do have to read Shakespeare), to be a lover of literature anymore than anyone has to enjoy Public Enemy or Mozart to be a music lover. People are different, and nuanced...It's not so simple as saying "If you're smart, you'll enjoy X."

Also, I might have to steal your "OQ" concept.

[Jackson Richardson]

I struggled with it to the end. The difficulty is principally, as I remember, Joyce is trying to convey the way people think and experience reality in their minds. We don't think in grammatical sentence and all sorts of recollections come into our mind.

I'm probably the only person who got all the Gilbert and Sullivan references in Ulysses, and I was amused to spot them.

[mal4mac]

Everyone knows that people do not think in grammatical sentences, and all sort of strange associations are made. But do I need to peruse the confusing, random perambulations of Joyce's mind to realise this? I just need to peruse the random fluctuations of my own mind to see this in action! And I wouldn't want to impose my obscurities on anyone else.

I guess I just like more order in my literature than Joyce's fans. That said, it's certainly a valid exercise to try and capture a stream of consciousness. But, like rugby, it's not an exercise I wish to pursue myself, but fair wind to Joycean fly halfs... each to his own game...

P.S., I do not like Gilbert & Sullivan, yet another reason for me not to read the book!

[mal4mac]

I'm certainly not smarter than anyone here, not by a long shot.

Humility is a nice attribute, but don't take it too far...

Also, I might have to steal your "OQ" concept.

Feel free, who said minor artists borrow, great artists steal?

[AuntShecky]

I wrote a response, including quoted replies, but the cyberpunk gremlins snatched it out from under me! Before it was all gone, I said that the landmark court case lifting the ban on Ulysses on December 6, 1933 can be found in the front of any Vintage edition of that book. Also (shameless plug!) I said once again that cries of obscenity, political incorrectness, and any other seemingly offensive aspect of a book may be a pretext or disguise for reader resentment-- why? Because the work's inherent excellence makes
it difficult-- of "hard,"the very same question the original poster asked. For more on this topic, please refer to this link:

http://www.online-literature.com/for...ng%20Greatness

[Jackson Richardson]

mal6mac - I far rather read Edward Gibbon for his prose style rather than Joyce. I'm not a great fan of Joyce, I was just trying to indicate what he was about.

I "did" Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for A level, and didn't like the character of Stephen Dedelaus at all - he's an insufferable prig and like a number of other lapsed Roman Catholics I've known, has a nasty sense of superiority.

Since Dedelaus is based on Joyce himself, I'm not sympathetic.

I'll say this for Ulysses - it a modernist masterpiece with a very modest bloke - Bloom - at its centre, which makes a nice change from Mrs Dalloway and the like.

[mal4mac]

I'll say this for Ulysses - it a modernist masterpiece with a very modest bloke - Bloom - at its centre, which makes a nice change from Mrs Dalloway and the like.

I'm very attracted by the everyman character of Bloom, which is probably the main reason I tried so hard to read the book. Maybe I'm too much like Bloom? I wish. A famous critic, I forget who, said that Joyce had created a superb main character but one who could never, and would never, attempt to read a book like Ulysses.

[Jackson Richardson]

A famous critic, I forget who, said that Joyce had created a superb main character but one who could never, and would never, attempt to read a book like Ulysses.

That's rather good.

[mona amon]

I'm very attracted by the everyman character of Bloom, which is probably the main reason I tried so hard to read the book. Maybe I'm too much like Bloom? I wish. A famous critic, I forget who, said that Joyce had created a superb main character but one who could never, and would never, attempt to read a book like Ulysses.

Love Bloom! One of my all time favourite characters. I think he'd definitely have tried to read it - doggedly, looking up every other phrase, LOL. He's always trying to understand and analyse stuff in a pseudo-scientific way.

[manuscript]

my mother bought Ulysses for me when i was 20 and i started it several times when i was younger but this year i finally read it. at the start of the year i read a third of it then i put it away and i read the rest of it in september and october while i also read other books that were easier and more enjoyable reading like some austen and wharton and i think some genre fiction. it is definitely the most challenging thing i have ever read and probably the most rewarding. partly because i wanted to show myself that i could do it, and because i was proud of what i achieved, but even more so because of all of the ideas that at times transported me completely. i think it is meaningful what Desolation says about letting it wash over you. i think it is very natural to feel frustrated about not understanding many details but there are reasons why you have to be OK with not understanding those details. the most obvious reason is because Joyce intended for this book to puzzle university staff level readers, but what this also means is that he does not actually intend for readers to understand everything. we have to keep in mind, that he was an extremely intelligent person, and like any very serious literary author he was writing to posterity, and he understood that all of his contemporary references would become less important with time. what you have to think is, what are the basic things that are going on in this, who are the major players and what are they more or less doing or discussing, what does it mean that the narration is in the style of middle english or the imagined fluid voice of a woman, and so on - and if you can do those sorts of things, which are the basic elements of reading any book at all, you will learn some of the most important things that Joyce really wanted to convey. if like Desolation says we really want to understand the details then we can go back 3 or 4 times.

it seems like a good annotated edition is necessary because sometimes it is just very hard to tell what is going on. but do not get the penguin annotated students edition i had, you will regret it, because it is rubbish. shop around and look at reviews, there must be better annotated editions out there. did norton ever do one, because normally i found their editions pretty robust.

i have got to say something that is important to me, a little theory of mine. that the reason i think that Ulysses is really so difficult to read is not because of all the references to little early 20th century cultural details, or because parts of it are in other languages, but because the language in which it is mostly written is just very uncompromising and pure literary english, with no concessions to readability or prescriptive style. reading this is a great opportunity for picking up a few things about our language. that is just a kind of a slightly silly little idea of mine though.

[ennison]

Is there a reason why being "difficult to read" equates in some people's heads with being a "great book"? Hmm. the jury is still out on Joyce as a great writer, very clever yes, dashed odd - definitely. "Finnegan's Wake" is one of those books that life is too short for. That's why it'll always be a text more often spoken of than actually read.

[mal4mac]

it seems like a good annotated edition is necessary because sometimes it is just very hard to tell what is going on. but do not get the penguin annotated students edition i had, you will regret it, because it is rubbish. shop around and look at reviews, there must be better annotated editions out there. did norton ever do one, because normally i found their editions pretty robust.

I agree that Penguin isn't up to much, I don't like the Oxford World Classics Edition either. Those are the only annotated editions I know of. I found they didn't explain some of the most bemusing things, and over-explained in other places. And that's just in the first fifty pages after which I gave up... There are whole books of annotation longer than Ulysses itself, I looked at these using "Google books" and "Amazon look Inside". They suffered from the same problems as the annotated versions. I think Manuscript is right when he says Ulysses was meant to be a puzzle to academics, one they obviously haven't cracked, at least not in a way to help the common reader looking for "full understanding".

[manuscript]

I agree that Penguin isn't up to much, I don't like the Oxford World Classics Edition either. Those are the only annotated editions I know of. I found they didn't explain some of the most bemusing things, and over-explained in other places. And that's just in the first fifty pages after which I gave up... There are whole books of annotation longer than Ulysses itself, I looked at these using "Google books" and "Amazon look Inside". They suffered from the same problems as the annotated versions. I think Manuscript is right when he says Ulysses was meant to be a puzzle to academics, one they obviously haven't cracked, at least not in a way to help the common reader looking for "full understanding".

i agree very much with what you wrote about explanations being excessive or omitted. i began with a great deal of faith in the annotations and became increasingly frustrated and annoyed, it was only in the last few chapters that i gave up on them. it was as though the editor had been driven mad by the text to the point of becoming completely detached from the reality of its relationship to a genuine audience. i am sorry to hear it about oxford world classics as i have been going through a love relationship with those editions, but i guess it was only a matter of time. you know what you are talking about and i will be the first to buy a copy of your edition! :-)

[Anton Hermes]

The novel can, and should, be read cold. Don't approach it like an academic or a scientist, it will ruin all the fun.

Read whatever you like however you like, but part of the fun of reading such an erudite work is being able to engage with it on an intellectual level. It's like reading the score of a musical composition: it's not necessary, but it's certainly a valid approach to appreciation. I didn't have to have a degree or a library of reference works to read Ulysses (I only used Blamires' Bloomsday Book), but knowing the background and getting the context of the allusions really helped me enjoy the work. The same goes for Finnegans Wake, which I greatly enjoyed reading.

the jury is still out on Joyce as a great writer

No it ain't.