Ulysses is NOT hard

[00:00:00]I want to talk about James Joyce's Ulysses, which is often characterized as very difficult novel. And there's a certain obsession with difficult fiction on the internet right now. Like I think it comes from the idea that literary prestige really comes not from a work of literature saying something new or in a new way, but just how well it hides what it's trying to say under layers upon layers of stylistic narrative overgrowth. And uh there is a certain cultural cachet of having uh long novels.

[00:00:32]Uh having read long novels and having them on the shelf and really why not? Uh in an age of short-form content, it's really nice to see that long difficult novels are making a comeback. And it really is good for your health to read a long novel, a great novel of literature.

[00:00:47]It really does change you. And I do remember the first time I read a truly long book, I I have this rush of confidence at the completion of it. And it's like this repeated assurance that uh you can do this and like this is actually really enjoyable. And it's really easy to do.

[00:01:03]Like I really think I can do this. That's the feeling it gives you. Well, I feel as though James Joyce's Ulysses is definitely one of those novels and we'll be reading this novel on Verse community in August and September of this year on Verse, which anyone with a membership can attend or view. All the recordings will be up um after each meeting. We're going to break this book up into two months' worth of reading. We're going to meet uh uh once a week to discuss what we've read and I'll be providing some uh pre-reading assignments to kind of guide you through the work at the start of each week, what to look for in certain chapters, what to think about while you're reading, and this is going to guide our discussion.

[00:01:44]But I'd like to consider the reputation of Ulysses as unreadable and to break down this difficulty to show how it's actually structured and more playful than it is obscure. Uh and this is really a good entry point into long novels. I think James Joyce's Ulysses is going to be a really great first long novel to read. So, I'll be teaching it for first-time readers of Joyce, but second or third-time readers, of course, are welcome. Um early readers of Ulysses complained that the book was just simply incomprehensible and unreadable. T.S. Eliot recognized it immediately as a work of genius, Pound as well, uh and many of the other novelists, but it just so happens that when a work of genius is introduced, many readers don't understand it. This novel was published first in 1922 by Sylvia Beach's famous uh Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Co., and readers have been daunted and baffled by this work ever since. Um one early reviewer condemned it as unreadable, unquotable, and unreviewable.

[00:02:51]And uh the book fell under scrutiny when it was condemned as obscene. So, during it went to trial, so during an obscenity trial, the director of public prosecution admitted that he had no idea what this book was about. Um Joseph Collins, who was a New York Times reviewer in 1922, said that the book was bewildering. This book frustrated Virginia Woolf, who called the novel illiterate. So, I think I think these readers, many of them really great readers, many astute readers, um actually were reading the the novel a bit incorrectly. So, I want to convince you of a theory I have. The theory is that this novel is by no means the most difficult novel. In fact, it's very easy to read from a certain perspective. Now, the novel is bewildering to those who approach the novel as they might any other novel that they've been reading, especially contemporary novels or the novels of the 19th century. Um no doubt, if you're used to reading the Victorian novels of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, then Joyce's Ulysses is going to seem very very strange and bewildering.

[00:03:56]In the novels of the Victorian period, it's often important to Well, it is really important to follow the thread of narration carefully, remain sensitive to the subtleties of character, plot, and description. And while all of this is important for Ulysses, they aren't essential to the first reading, and I'm putting the emphasis here on the first reading. There are three main reasons why critics and readers have been daunted by Ulysses.

[00:04:20]And I want to talk about those. The first one is its maximalism.

[00:04:24]Many academics and non-academic readers will say that the book's sprawling length and its outright maximalism is one of the main reasons why the book is difficult to complete. And the sprawl is not decorative sprawl. That's the first thing. Every page is densely packed with allusions and what might be called Easter eggs. It's this very intricate web. I mean, Joyce reportedly said that I've put so many puzzles and enigmas that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.

[00:04:56]And that's the only way of ensuring one's immortality. And he did load every page with puzzles and enigmas and and allusions. And it's easy to suspect this book of mad ravings of a fevered brain until you actually begin to start reading it and studying it and close reading some of the passages. But to read every passage, every page of Ulysses as carefully as one might a poem of John Donne would be maddening in itself. You just You can't do it. Uh you can't do it quickly at least. And no one is going to understand it all.

[00:05:30]So, Oliver Burkeman has this really great advice in his Meditations for Mortals. Uh Burkeman uh says this. He says, "The first is to treat your to-be-read list as a river, not a bucket." And this goes for reading. He says, "That is to say, think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up and that it's your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you from which you get to pick a few choice items here or there without feeling guilty for letting the others go by. And he's talking about a to-be-read list, but it actually works with Joyce's prose. If you just let the prose wash past you, you just keep going through the book, things will catch your attention. You're going to understand you're going to breeze past some things, you're going to let some things flow by, but some things are going to catch your attention. And it's there where you really need to focus. So, remember in any kind of reading you do to follow your interests and your response to literature is always a reflection of of yourself, so it's a way of self-discovery.

[00:06:31]So, when you're reading Ulysses, allow that prose to just flow past you. Know that you're going to read it more than once, so read it the first time with the intention of going back and reading it a second. Even if you don't wind up doing that. Try to to read it steadily from the beginning to the end without stopping um often to look up words or or or things like that uh or look up allusions. Let the flow of the words roll past you and and when you find something interesting or your interest is piqued, slow down, stop a moment and look. If something catches your attention or awakens your curiosity, take a moment to study that passage in detail, but don't feel obligated to study every single passage with the same amount of of intensity. There are some lovely passages in this book. I particularly love the descriptions. There's this one description of Mr. Dedalus's pipe smoke rising and he says flowering in the air, uh which is such an apt description of of that. You you will be delighted often, I think, um and especially if you remember that this is for fun. The second reason why this book is very difficult or is called difficult is because of the allusions.

[00:07:43]People will often talk about the allusions and you will likely miss a lot of allusions. I certainly do when reading this book, although I find more and more each time I read it. From the very first chapter, he will reference obscure plays of Oscar Wilde, Irish politics, a painting of Lord Byron, theological treatises, medieval texts that you'll you'd only read for linguistic weirdness. Uh there are several examples here. He And the novel itself has like something like 10 languages that make an appearance. And not just phrases so common that we treat them as spicy English, but uh often entire verses of poetry, not to mention that even if you know the language, you might still often miss what Joyce is trying to say.

[00:08:29]Uh for he sometimes quotes things the way he heard them in a language he didn't know. And so there's all of that working into the text uh and its allusions. So don't feel like you have to catch them all, but take take any similarly-sized Shakespeare play or poem by John Milton or Alexander Pope and you will find that those plays or poems are as densely allusive as Joyce's Ulysses.

[00:08:56]Most readers capable of passing the modern uh language barrier will find Shakespeare uh quite easily enjoyable. And it's likely you missed some of Shakespeare's nods to Montaigne in The Tempest and it's likely you missed that he uh was riffing off of contemporary gossip in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

[00:09:17]There are classical allusions, mistranslations from Latin, and yet for some reason when tackling an author that doesn't have a label of difficulty attached to them, people are able to shrug off this fact and enjoy the text and what they can get from it, which is a lot. It's a lot of enjoyment.

[00:09:33]And it must also be said that Joyce didn't mean to be as difficult in his allusions as the contemporary reader makes him out to be. If you look at most of the referenced works and authors in Ulysses, you'll find that it's all the kind of stuff that every everyman, every person would have would have known. An educated reader at this time would have understood a lot of the references to Shakespeare, Homer, the Bible, Dante, the Catholic Church. Uh so, people complain about quotations in foreign languages sometimes, and yet uh who among the said educated readers would not recon- recognize passages from Wagner?

[00:10:09]Even those with languages that were quickly falling out of the education system, Latin and Greek, um more often than not, you'll find Joyce quoting them. In the case Latin, religious hymns or are are are quotations from the liturgy.

[00:10:24]What separates us in the 21st century, the most educated generation of history and of humanity, from Joyce's original reader is that we are educated to be usually specialists.

[00:10:36]We don't We don't learn Latin and Greek anymore. At least most of us don't. We consider ourselves educated having only dug deep into certain spheres of human inquiry, uh those only relevant to us because they confirm the breadwinning chimera of the back of our vertical minds, really. So, Ulysses requires somewhat of a generalist, somewhat of an open mind uh when reading it. Last thing I'll say about allusions, and this comes from something Christopher Ricks suggested in in one of his works. He said that that a good allusion will reward the reader, but they do not require the reader's recognition.

[00:11:12]That means that the beauty of the text works whether you get the allusion, the inside joke, or not. But if you do get it, it's usually a special moment.

[00:11:22]And the good thing is, if you join us on Vurste for this study, you'll be able to hear all the things that other people are noticing in their reading that you didn't notice. And that's really one of the great things about discussion-based literature or reading and book clubs.

[00:11:35]There's the social experience of reading, which is always new and exciting for me. When students share their own insights and share what they noticed uh and what other students, and often myself, didn't notice. And so you get this really a wide view and comprehensive experience of the text this way. Now, the third reason why this novel is often called difficult is because uh people are really insistent upon finding the message. They're message hunters.

[00:12:05]Uh so open-mindedness is really the most important quality you can have when approaching Ulysses. You're not there to squeeze water out of a rock. The ability to suspend your need for clarity and just plow through the pages will help you. The book is often only hard because you assume that the author could have only meant one thing and now you're stuck figuring out what that thing is and you're trying to analyze it that way. Instead of just going with your gut.

[00:12:30]Uh I I believe this kind of reading, going with your gut with Ulysses, believe it or not, uh your gut is probably right.

[00:12:37]Uh Leopold Bloom has a particular [clears throat] palate for guts, so maybe this is actually a really appropriate metaphor. Uh but the main thing is to remember that novels are supposed to be fun. I mean, they're basically like if you were to read a if you were to read Middlemarch in two days, it's basically like you binge-watching Netflix because back then novels were considered like the way we consider Netflix now or our shows that you can just watch and watch and that are serialized. It's very similar to the popular reading culture of the Victorian period and out of which this whole tradition that Ulysses emerges. It's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be entertainment. It's not supposed to be a chore. And there's no There's no exam at the end of this course. There's no exam at the end of the book. Uh it's a it's the experience that matters. And whatever you miss in Ulysses, the thematic and emotional unity of the work will compensate for will be compensated in your second reading or your third reading. And no matter how bad you misunderstand some of Leopold Bloom's hungry musings, you will not miss that he is a man of grotesque imagination.

[00:13:46]And he's always really obsessed with cuckoldry.

[00:13:49]And you'll leave the book enamored of some of its characters. And that's one of the beautiful things about it. And I think really important, probably most importantly, you're going to you're going to enjoy it.

[00:14:02]Uh it's very irreverent.

[00:14:04]Uh so, you know, content warning there about every bodily fluid is mentioned at some point in this text. And sometimes in disgusting ways.

[00:14:12]Um but that's part of that's part of the experience of Ulysses. And at the end of it, you're going to you're going to experience confidence as a reader.

[00:14:20]You're going to have that book on your shelf. You say, "I read that." And it'll be a it'll be a sort of accomplishment.

[00:14:25]And you'll go back and you'll read it again. And you'll pick it up. And you'll maybe go to this chapter or that chapter or or study your notes that you took while you were studying it. So, I do hope you'll join us on Vulture and I hope this actually made the book less daunting whether or not you're going to join us.

[00:14:39]And hopefully you'll read it on your own.

[00:14:41]So, everyone, thanks for watching on YouTube. And until next time.