John Ryan, Anthony Cronin, Brian O'Nolan, Patrick Kavanagh and Tom Joyce, Sandymount, 1954
Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
I’ll confess I’ve never been a big fan of Joyce. I love Faulkner, Woolf, Kafka, Proust, Eliot—even Pound—but of all the high modernists Joyce has always left me cold. Partly, I think, that’s because of that one statement he made regarding Ulysses: that he had “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” That comment, which I suspect may have even been somewhat off-handed or joking, nonetheless poisoned the well for me. Ulysses was not a thing to read; it was a thing to be studied. It was not a novel; it was a puzzle.
I read Ulysses in an undergraduate seminar about fourteen years ago, didn’t really like it, and went back to reading Faulkner. I haven’t touched it since. That being said, I’ve realized over the past few years that I have a healthy appreciation for Bloomsday itself. One thing I do appreciate about Ulysses (and Dubliners, for that matter), is how rooted in a space and time it is (the very opposite of Kafka), and how clearly the novel creates a topographical map that you can literally follow throughout the day. So this year I decided to do something for Bloomsday. Since a trip to Dublin was out, I thought that perhaps the thing to do was the opposite. Rather than follow the city, I’d follow the book.
And so I organized an all-day Read-a-thon of Ulysses, beginning at 8 a.m. (as does the novel), and going until the early morning hours of the next day. Because you can’t read a 800-page novel aloud in less than a day, the reading had to be silent—so we set up some chairs at Machine Project in LA, invited people to bring their copies down, and to read along with the novel throughout the day. One chapter for each hour, no reading ahead. The goal being to follow Leopold Bloom as closely as possible through the course of the day.
This is about the point where any serious Joycean is shaking her or his head. These are people, after all, who spend their lives’ work on this book (and by this I mean no disrespect—I’ve spent a good many years on Woolf’s Orlando), and it is something, they maintain, that cannot be read in a day. The allusions and symbols are too thick, there’s too many references to Irish history, to Hamlet, etc.—and you have to know at least half a dozen foreign languages, including Gaelic, Hebrew, and Latin. If you don’t know this stuff intrinsically, you need one of those heavy companion books that track all these allusions for you, so you can piece together their meanings. Not to mention the fact that it’s dense—the writing style changes so dramatically, the syntax and the slang gets overwhelming. You have to spend hours working on single paragraphs, puzzling out each word and its context and what’s happening. It is not, in sum, a day’s work.
Well, to hell with that, I thought. In this great piece on Bloomsday by Michele Tepper, she traces its origins to John Ryan and Flann O’Brien, the latter the famous Irish poet who, in Tepper’s words, was “an alcoholic genius who both looked up to Joyce and distrusted his stardom.” Tepper confesses that she “sometimes worry that the hullaballo over Joyce’s greatness makes his work seem even less accessible, more the specialized province of a literati clique, recognizing each other from their stooped shoulders and over-elaborate puns,” and concludes that if “you feel intimidated by the cult of Joyce, it can a useful remedy to remember that from the beginning, the idea of a Bloomsday celebration was shaped by people who saw Joyce as fallible, even mockable, and who were skeptical of his fame.”
Like Tepper, I think one of the pleasures about Bloomsday (unlike Ulysses itself) is that it shouldn’t be taken so seriously. While the novel does merit all this study, these are also the reasons why it’s become so imposing, so monumental that it’s only ever read in classrooms. It may be cited by the Modern Library as the Greatest Novel of the Twentieth Century, but it’s also hated and feared by most readers—even smart readers (myself included). The caricature that Ulysses has become is perhaps best expressed by Jonathan Franzen, who cites the fame of Joyce’s novel as sending a message that “Literature is horribly hard to read. And this message to the aspiring writer: Extreme difficulty is the way to earn respect. This is fucked up. It’s particularly fucked up when the printed word is fighting other media for its very life.”
The last thing I want to be accused of is sympathizing with Franzen. This is where reading Ulysses in a single day gets interesting. For when you realize you’re only going to have an hour to get through the next forty pages, it totally changes your reading experience. You stop worrying about allusions, about Irish history, about what the hell that paragraph means. You miss a lot, and you become okay with that. You let go of a lot of anxiety of comprehension, replaced instead by the anxiety of finishing. But this anxiety, as it turns out, is a lot easier to deal with. After all, the novel is only 800 pages, and you have twenty hours—that’s only 50 pages an hour. With nothing else to do that day, and with some snacks and some company, that’s a reading schedule that any college graduate could manage. Indeed, reading a chapter an hour, you realize that many of Ulysses’ chapters are short: The Telemachus chapter (from which we get “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake”) is only twelve pages, much of which is dialogue.
And so I set out to read Ulysses in a single day, worried less about getting everything and worried instead only about getting through it. Fearing it would be an impenetrable slog, I discovered that much of the book is actually quite readable, and quite pleasurable. I had remembered each chapter being a distinctive, and distinctively difficult, narrative style, each requiring you to basically re-teach yourself how to read—but while this is true of some of the chapters, for the most part the narrative is surprisingly straight-forward. There are some chapters that I’ll confess I understood very little of (particularly Proteus, the Sirens, Cyclops, and the Oxen of the Sun), and retained very little of, but for the most part I did okay. I suppose it helps that I did have some inkling of Irish history—but really, all you need on that front is to google Parnell and know that the English are not beloved—and that I’ve read Hamlet. But I realized that the main bar to reading and enjoying Ulysses was its own self-defeating aura, which I had largely bought into.
Giving up on the burden of having to understand everything, I found that there was much to simply enjoy for its own sake. Passages leapt out to me with striking beauty, particularly in those early chapters, such as this from the Proteus episode:
“Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. Omnis care ad te veneit. He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.”
What does any of that mean? Not sure, to tell the truth—I don’t know Latin, so I can’t translate that line for you. But I love the adjective “ghostcandled,” and the phrase “through storm his eyes.” That’s enough for me; I don’t feel like I have to have a perfect grasp of the meaning of the text in order to enjoy parts of it. My argument is that, like some midnight raider, I as a reader am free to pillage from the text: take a line here, a neologism there, for my enjoyment and my edification, without any fidelity to the whole text. Don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing wrong with knowing or studying the whole text, and I wouldn’t mind having the time and resources to really understand each line of Ulysses (as I’d like to think I do with The Sound and the Fury or To the Lighthouse). I just don’t want that to be the admission price.
So with this kind of naïve reading style, one can make it through the first half of the novel quite easily, and quite pleasurably. Having only to read about forty pages per hour, I found the job more than manageable, and had time, in fact, to reread a few chapters when I finished early. I found that I really dug the Hades episode (those of you who know my background won’t find this surprising). I also found that there were certain chapters that felt like dead weight, particularly the Aeolus chapter. Taking place in the newspaper office, it’s notable, plot-wise, for a missed meeting between Bloom and Stephen Dadelus, and while that’s important for the ongoing development of the narrative, most of the chapter is given over to displaying Joyce’s penchant for rhetorical devices. It felt like a ten page chapter needlessly stretched to forty pages. Again, this is where I may be running afoul of some Joyceans, and where I may part company with them: just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should. And Faulkner’s line about writing, I think, applies here: “In writing, you must kill your darlings.” I’m tempted to say that what keeps Ulysses from being a great novel (for me) is that Joyce didn’t know when to quit, that he kept piling crap in just to show that he could do it, even stuff that wasn’t necessary. But then again, that writing strategy is precisely what I love about Moby Dick—its baggy excess, its sloppy meandering—so maybe I should just shut up about that.
Then I hit the Lestrygonians episode, where Bloom, over lunch, recalls his early relationship with Molly, and how much has changed. There are passages there which are quite beautiful, quite moving, and alone make the novel worth reading. I realized that I think part of the reason I had such hatred for Ulysses in college was personal, and emotional: my girlfriend at the time was seeing another guy, and expected a novel about a guy dealing with his wife’s infidelity would impact me more. The day progresses with lock-step dread towards Molly’s rendez-vous with Blaze Boylan, and yet reading it as in college I felt none of that anxiety. Of course, by the time the affair is consummated, we’re in some of the more difficult to read passages (The Sirens and Cyclops), the ones that are so layered with rhetorical technique and cacophony that one has to read through them, rather than just read them. Those passages didn’t resonate with me then; rereading the book as an adult, I realized that the ones that caught me more where far earlier in the day, at lunchtime.
The other wonderful thing I learned about reading Ulysses in real time is how much the time of day can affect you while your reading. I started at 8 a.m., with Bloom having breakfast and Stephen teaching his morning classes. I read through until lunchtime, getting hungry at about the same time that Bloom did (sneaking out for a quick slice of pizza—since there wasn’t anywhere close I could get anything suitably Irish for lunch). By the time Bloom and Stephen ended up in Nighttown, it was almost midnight, and I was exhausted, so the hallucinatory quality of those pages was amplified by my own lack of lucidity. My wife didn’t have an affair yesterday (so far as I know!), but it was a surreal and amazing moment to come home at 2 a.m. and crawl into bed beside her, already sleeping, having spent the day seeking communion (with a novel, rather than a surrogate son) and finding it, however briefly. To spend a semester, or a year, or a lifetime, reading a book is one kind of journey—to read a book that spans a day during the course of that day is another kind of journey altogether.
Discussing Hamlet, Stephen at one point says, “What is a ghost? One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through a change of manners.” This is what a “classic” like Ulysses (or Moby Dick, or The Odyssey, and on and on) is always on the verge of becoming: a ghost that has become inaccessible, that has ceased to be vital and has become instead sacred. My reading experience is certainly not for everyone, but it was a way for me, as a reader, to re-enter a novel I’d long given up on, a way to make it useful for myself and my current situation. Between the idea that it’s too imposing to be read, and the idea that it’s too sacred not to be exhaustively studied, I want to offer a third alternative: it’s a good, at times great, eminently readable novel.
Happy Bloomsday, everybody.
(Many, many thanks to the 20 or so readers who came out to read with me throughout the day, from those who spent just a few minutes to the woman who read the entire book with me, start to finish, from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m., on her birthday no less! Thanks also to the wonderful people at Machine for making this possible, especially David Eng, who put together such an amazing event. Thanks, too, to the numerous online friends who encouraged, cajoled, retweeted, liked, or otherwise supported this project—and to my lovely wife Nicole for putting up with this nonsense.)
Colin Dickey is the author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius and the co-editor (with Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. His work has appeared in Cabinet, Lapham’s Quarterly, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Tags: Bloomsday, Colin Dickey, David Eng, Dubliners, Ezra Pound, Flann O'Brien, Franz Kafka, Hamlet, James Joyce, John Ryan, Jonathan Franzen, Leopold Bloom, Machine Project, Marcel Proust, Michele Tepper, Moby Dick, Orlando, Stephen Dadelus, T. S. Eliot, Ulysses, Virginia Woolf
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