So, Ulysses

I first started reading Ulysses as a senior in college, though I didn't make it all the way through; I restarted and finished in 1993, then read it again in the winter of '94–'95. In the years following I picked it up and re-read certain episodes on their own, in addition to reading Ellmann's biography of Joyce. It was something that fascinated me and it was something I admired; it felt good to revisit it and reconnect with where I had been before.

This time through I felt like I saw so much more in the book, and yet at the same time I felt like I saw its weaknesses too; that Joyce was a genius and one of the greatest writers of his time is beyond question, and yet with great genius can come great excesses. There is a feeling of a novel being crushed under its own weight; Joyce continued adding to it practically up until the moment of printing, and we are left with a book which is so thick with tropes and cross-references that a first-time reader will often have no hope of knowing what is going on. There is also an overwhelming feeling of self-absorption and solipsism, not only in the author's alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, but in the author himself; "I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me." In addition, the artifice at times becomes artificiality, and the stylistic ideas that Joyce imposes distract and derail us and seem to only serve to draw attention to themselves.

Most of all, Ulysses is often a cruel book; the secondary characters are pushed onto the stage and then undercut like effigies, the pompous, the pathetic, the drunken, the deranged, the self-deceiving, the hopeless, the corrupt, the empty, the falling and lost. Bloom himself is ridiculed and abased in the eyes of others, despite all his good qualities, sometimes ridiculed and abased by the book itself. Is the novel a positive thing, taking the minutiae of the everyman and elevating it to something timeless and universal, or is it negative, taking the timeless and universal and dragging it down into the jakes? The answer, I suppose, is both.

This book, so inward drawn, so obsessive of one place and moment, so obsessive of itself, there is something sad about it—not pathetic, for it is also a grand construction, something huge, a work of magnificence, but in a lot of ways it is the opposite of the Odyssey, for the Odyssey has been carried forward through time, it still has meaning and life, we can still read it and feel all of humanity through it, whereas Ulysses is always turning away, looking backwards, inwards, receding, becoming more and more distant with every moment that we move farther away from June 16, 1904.