Also Into You: A Ulysses Book Report

(When I was slightly younger, I read books.

Then I did a humanities degree, and all reading stopped together. Now I'm in Act III of the smash hit So You Had the Nerve to Be Born After About 1980, which sees you trying to save up from whatever work you can get from within the no-experience-begets-no-experience millennial catch-22 to move out of your childhood home.

This has, though, meant I've had access to all of the books again, including my sister's. She read Joyce and Faulkner as a teenager where I went for Woolf and Manley Hopkins (and various Non-English Euro-ish Canon things irrelevant here), so I've been working through them because why not.

Well, I finished Ulysses last month and have been going on about it to people who've politely expressed interest ever since, and I thought to myself that when I wanted to get my paragraph-length thoughts about stuff off my chest there was a time I'd use this blog.

In some ways, explaining my thoughts about reading Ulysses and how I'd suggest working up to could work as a nice form of putting my money where my mouth has been before – I don't think much of my thoughts about things have changed an awful lot in five years (dear Lord) beyond slightly less optimism about things getting better without a really stonking amount of work from us.

So I sat down and wrote what follows earlier today, and halfway through realised that tomorrow is Bloomsday. Or today, when you're reading this, because who on earth would miss a coincidence so hilarious and fitting!

I'd like to imply I might do more things around here, but I don't like to make promises (even obliquely) that I don't know I can keep. I hope you've all been well, anyway.)


How Should I Read Ulysses? [link]

Well, there's a couple of points leading up to that that I think it's worth addressing.

First, "Why should I read Ulysses?" My only answer here is "Because you want to", which to be fair is the same answer I'd give to pretty much anything phrased like that. I don't really think glumly trudging through anything just because you feel obliged to is really worth it, but especially given Joyce's writing (as far as I can tell) is so thoroughly built on humour, an approach devoid of joy and levity is especially unhelpful.

If you don't particularly want to, I encourage you not to read Ulysses. I'm sure Joyce wouldn't be offended. The "you" I've got in mind here is people who think they might like to read it but aren't sure if they'd be able to do it or if they wouldn't understand it or otherwise feel a bit daunted by it.

In addressing the second component of the question "How should I read Ulysses?", which is the assumption that there's a hard and fast answer to that question, I'd like, if you don't mind, to take a detour to Paris like Stephen does between Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the beginning of Ulysses.


Always Having Paris [link]

There are many reasons why you might go to Paris. Maybe you like French and French culture. Maybe you want to see the Mona Lisa, Rodin's sculptures, and Van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône in the flesh. Maybe you want to go for a romantic stroll along the Seine with your lover after dark and look at the Eiffel Tower lit up against the night sky, or pay your respects at Notre-Dame, or lurk around the Catacombs. Maybe you're visiting someone, or you're curious to see what all the fuss is about.

There are easily as many reasons why you might not want to go to Paris, such as the expense, the (other) tourists, the food, Parisians, the stolen artefacts, the way everyone goes on about it, or just because your time and energy is limited and you'd prefer to go somewhere less standard if not outright cliché'd.

These are are all good reasons, and I've thought most of them at one point or another. If you do decide to go (and this will be more or less of an undertaking depending on where you're coming from), your experience will be yours alone. You could spend a weekend going round museums, or four months at Nation and a flat in Clichy (which technically isn't Paris, but is still on the Métro) noodling on an overpriced acoustic guitar and avoiding your course reading, or live for thirty years in a little house at Rue Saint-Maur teaching singing and piano and writing books, or anything in between.

I wouldn't say any of those are the wrong way to be in Paris. You can spend as much time and energy there as you like, but you'll only ever see a part of it, and perhaps really understand less than that. It's the same with anywhere, but that doesn't make your stay pointless. For one thing, you could always go back, possibly after consulting a guide.


Two Jokes Walk into a Bar... [link]

If you were of such a mind, you could say that there are two kinds of humour: jokes that build to a punchline, and the kind of funny story that will make you laugh or smile but as much because of how it's told as from the individual laughter breaks. (Ulysses, I'm happy to reassure you, has both.)

In a similar way, I would say that the type of writing that Joyce (and to a degree Woolf, Faulkner, Flaubert, Proust and Chekhov and many other very "stylistic" writers that we may as well lump together as modernists, though it's far from a new thing) produce is more like the funny story than the punchline-based joke in terms of what it does and what it's about.

In this sense something like Les Misérables or Pride and Prejudice or War and Peace or the Iliad (staying in the "books you're supposed to have read" (ugh) pile) are in the punchline category - they have a plot, and finding out what happens at the end when things get wrapped up is a key part of the appeal and the design of the story. I mention "canon" books I like (and War and Peace) to stress that I don't see this as a bad thing at all, just a difference in approach.

You could fairly easily describe the plot of the second group of books I mention in a sentence or two (possibly rather long sentences for some of them) and feel like you'd got a sense of what they're about. That's not all there is to them, of course - I'm willing to bet you know the plot of Pride and Prejudice even only because it's in the DNA of every romcom ever, but people still read it. But the fact remains they've got that kind of punchline.

I think the thing that really tells you you're in "funny story" territory is that when pressed, you end up saying it's really about nothing, or everything, or people, or the world, or the experience of being alive. You've probably heard that Ulysses follows a day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he goes around Dublin on one day in 1904 (exactly 115 years ago today, in fact) and echoes the plot of the Odyssey, but that's just a pocket map of the Paris Métro. You could go deeper and deeper in reading about Ulysses and Joyce, cover your bedside table with Lonely Planet guides and fill a bookmarks folder with travel blog tabs and restaurant recommendations, but (in that infuriatingly smug old saying) that'll never be the same as doing it instead of reading about it, just as recounting your favourite sketch or standup routine is an unforgivable sin, especially in a world with YouTube.


Origin of the World [link]

I think the deal with a lot of "difficult" writers (the ones who aren't just being wilfully obscure for the sake of it, that is) is that it helps to be tuned into where they're coming from, which often starts from the same place everyone else does. Chekhov started off writing little gag-a-day-newspaper-comic-style stories, and you can follow how his tone gradually develops until he gets to the people-on-a-stage-not-saying-anything zone that his plays (more or less) take place in. Similarly, my advice to anyone interested in getting into jazz (only when explicitly asked, I hasten to add, in the same way that I keep my equally amateur opinions on reading James Joyce firmly to myself unless prompted, honest) is to start early on with the Louis Armstrong (or even Scott Joplin ragtime) stuff and go from there. I say this not just because it's simpler (or more direct), but because it's exactly where all of our favourite things and people in bebop and onwards like John Coltrane and Miles Davis (progressing through such as Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt) grew up and sprang from.

In case you're worrying, I'm not now going to say you've got to read the Odyssey before you read Ulysses! (I think a lot of what I've said about not being intimidated out of reading Ulysses can apply to reading the Odyssey if you fancy it, and it's definitely in the punchline category - Emily Wilson's recent translation looks pretty great from the line-by-line readings on Twitter this lapsed Classicist has seen.)

As it happens, Joyce started with a short story collection called Dubliners that very much ties into his later work: various characters from it pop up on Bloom's travels, and he himself originated as a chapter in the collection that rather grew in the telling. I would recommend starting there like I did, though with the assurance that Ulysses has a lot more humour compared to the occasionally rather bleak goings-on.

I don't want to burden you with a checklist of landmarks to colour your impressions going in (I still don't read the introductions until afterwards), but Joyce's meticulous plotting and structuring is definitely there if you know where to look. I just read it straight through cold with no idea and was bowled over anyway.

Next he did his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which introduces his semi-avatar Stephen Dedalus, a bookish but likeable young lad from a precarious household whose warring desires might be his undoing. He's also the other main character of Ulysses: its plot directly follows on from the end of the Portrait.

We start right from Stephen being a toddler and go from there, so you see first-hand the kind of eye-wateringly classics- and church-based education that they were on the receiving end of. Again, there's less humour than Ulysses, and far more explicit references to The Canon because that's what Stephen is immersed in.

Which brings me to the final part of the question "How should I read Ulysses?".


What If I Don't Get the References? [link]

To me what makes a work really great is that it's solid: it feels like a real, living thing. By this I more or less mean that it has depth, but I would hesitate to use that phrasing because of its contamination by canon-fetishism.

Perhaps the simplest two dimensions a work can expand over are what it says (here, the plot) and how it says it (the writing style). The next we could add is kind of self-awareness that I'm similarly unhappy calling irony because of its appropriation by edgelord dickheads.

By self-awareness I mean the work is aware of other works in the area and what a work like itself would normally be expected to do as a result. The next step of this (which I would argue is what Joyce really gets into with Ulysses) is grabbing hold of (traditionally, i.e. expectedly) unrelated works and genres. To resort to cartoonishly broad strokes, we go from such as the Impressionists' deliberate stylistic effects (subverting the expectation for what was now "photorealistic" portraiture) to Duchamp's urinal Fountain.

In humour contexts, this next step is sarcasm or deadpan, the classic marker of adult-level humour. This isn't to say it totally avoids or rejects direct, child-level humour (a fear of perceived sincerity is a defining feature of that later stage of being a child), but has the layered, multidimensional recognition that it is entirely possible, and necessary even, to joke and be serious at the same time.

It is, if you like, a growth beyond binaries, and I think this is where it appeals to my deconstructive/post-colonial, social justice-y little heart.


Queasy Undergraduate Pimple Scratching [link]

It's an accusation that's levelled at modernism and the various 20th century critical "post-"s that they use their elaborate references, vocabulary and structure effectively just to show off and/or pass off trivial and unoriginal observations as Deep Thorts. I would agree that this area does allow bad-faith and just bad writers (okay, okay, writers whose writing I feel doesn't do the kind of things that I think the format enables or indeed requires to justify the strictures of its structures and its demanding demands on its readers), and though you can be a hack in any field, it's rare to leave your dupes so out of pocket.

I would argue that Joyce is respected (appeal to authority alert) because he doesn't do this. It's true that for Ulysses he foregrounds his references to a much greater extent than previously (to the point that they're a focus of the novel just as much as the plot, as is a key modernist hallmark) - there are some famous places where the narrative dizzyingly tries on the styles of various writers, periods and famous works one after the other, mining them for humour and emotional weight equally.

I would argue that if you get the specific reference then that's a bonus, but you haven't had the punchline whistle over your head if you don't know all the books, languages and places that Joyce (or rather, the universe of his novel) does. Mr Bloom doesn't know that he's retracing a warped version of the Odyssey, but Joyce doesn't make him suffer for it - given how the scene changes aren't explicitly marked and how reluctant he was to cough up his very precise blueprint for the book, I don't think he means us to either. (Though he waves us a hint in the title!)


The Cracked Lookingglass of a Servant [link]

So what are the stylistic acrobatics for, then? Well, I'm just a non-Irish underemployed humanities grad stopping by on my way out of a neighbouring field, so you should really ask someone who's better informed about it than me, but here's the feeling I came away with:

I was talking about extended self-awareness, the kind that moves from "I know an X should do this, but this X is doing this" (which you may recognise as the basis of all humour) to "actually, what do you mean by an X in the first place? Does this count as an X? Why?" Along with the style games (and other tweaking of gender/class), there's a pervasive theme of what Irishness is and what Ireland's place in the world is - at one point (early on in the book, in the exchange from which the famous quote about history being a nightmare from which Stephen is trying to awake is taken (I'd argue) slightly out of context) there's a reflection on the problem of an Irish person expressing themself in English, one of the lit essay-friendly soundbites Joyce jokily mentioned deliberately festooning his text with. In that context, you might get a feeling of wondering whether the inauthentic nature (in this sense) of Irish English is like the various literary pastiches (up to and including the Odyssey frame) - or on the contrary, an assertion that if even bogged down by the various frames his novel can tell a compelling story, then perhaps Ireland's cultural position bogged down - to put it far too mildly - by the British can also be withstood and grown past. The deeply, almost manically specific Dublin setting, characters and dialogue can serve as a mirror for the whole world, just as that other pillar of modernism, the stream of consciousness, affirms that the internal thoughts and rhythms of a single person can mirror the whole of human experience.


The Bazaar Fireworks [link]

But to return to my initial theme, I think the reason for the novel's fireworks is just as much because it amuses Joyce to do it like that - no-one's making him, after all. I fully accept that given I have some biographical similarities to Joyce (alas severely limited) in terms of educational background, as I've mentioned in my previous meanderings on the theme I'm less susceptible to being fazed by Difficult Canon Things - I mean having finished Ulysses I'm leisurely picking my way through Finnegans Wake, for heaven's sake. (Take the more out-there bits of Ulysses and just... keep going. I'm having fun.) But though on one level everything in Ulysses is effectively presented as a joke, it isn't at our expense, just as it isn't at Bloom's. I felt like I had permission to wander along the riverbank and admire the view without knowing the names of all the bridges from memory, and I don't see why you shouldn't too.

Once I felt tuned into his humour, I found Ulysses extraordinarily moving and beautiful, and very funny with it. It would be understandable if Joyce was just angry with his position and his country's and took his revenge for the pillage and destruction of his people and cultural inheritance by using the British's own words and works against them, but he refuses to take that kind of easy way out. Instead, through humour and kindness, as reflected in Bloom (mostly - we're still human, and that should be shown kindness too), he makes the far more powerful and demanding statement that he will take all of it, embrace and reflect with love the whole dazzling expanse of humanity and the world in all of its equally beautiful guises and voices just as the Starry Night Over the Rhône dazzles with its declaration that after all the darkness, what matters most is light. We come home from the myths and monsters and misdeeds (including our own) that we refuse to serve, and in the end what counts is the affirmation that's become a cliché but who cares because yes we say yes we will Yes.

(Happy Bloomsday, and bon voyage if you decide to pack your bags and set out!)

On Reading Ambitiously

(As our maiden post, here's some thoughts on why I support tackling Big Things.)

I should say initially that I have no intention of using this title as an excuse to serve up my own fairly small list of Ambitious Things That I've Made It All the Way Through on a bed of Sniping at People Who Don’t Treat Reading as an Extreme Sport. If I end up slipping up and it comes across that way, please don't hesitate to catch your waiter's eye and send this back to the kitchen.

What I do mean to do is to make a case for moving consistently into deeper and more distant waters than those that you are used to. I've used "reading" as my main axis, but I take in my sights any medium with enough breadth to offer the choice.

(I should probably also mention that one of the things that has informed my view of this has been studying foreign languages and the debate/terror surrounding reading set texts "in the original". My view is that making the effort to do so is like seeing a painting in real life as opposed to in a textbook. Incidentally, if you’re not a native English speaker then not all of this will apply to you as is, though I think there are parallels.)

Don't Fear Them, Reader [link]

I think one of the best things about my education (fairly atypical in many respects) was that I was exposed to difficult things on a fairly frequent basis. I had a more-or-less unbroken succession of English teachers who threw The Classics (as distasteful as the canonisation drive is) at us, and indeed Classics teachers who did the same. I don't mean to imply that as an eleven-year-old I instantly got and appreciated the whole of Grey's Elegy, but that I was made aware of the existence of More Difficult Works, and shown that, while it would be impossible that I understand everything going on at first blush (even after puzzling over particular passages and looking up words and allusions, this being just before the Internet got serious), there was still value in attempting to grapple with something big, and the effort involved made what I did glean all the more valuable.

In short, I think that it taught me not to fear works. For me, this was an incredibly liberating feeling: once you have attained your literary maturity (more thoughts on which later), you essentially have the freedom of the whole of human civilization at your disposal. You are free to go up to any great Canon writer in the street, introduce yourself, and they will happily sit with you and hold a conversation. You might be surprised at how like you they and their characters are. The best part is that you can ask them to repeat themselves as many times as you like; it’s as though the same paragraphs or verses throw different shadows each time you read them, or gradually come more into focus as you grow. I don’t think educational background need necessarily affect your ability to do this – if you don’t get (say) a Classical mythology reference, you can look it up, and no-one will think less of you (or if they do, you have my full endorsement in smacking them about the face with a Classical Greek-English lexicon).

Taking Exception [link]

It's also possible, of course, that on meeting a particular writer you find that you don't really get on with them, or that you find that a writer that you once felt you had something in common with feels distant, or trivial. It will occasionally happen that their world-view strikes you as actively harmful, and so should be kept away from those at risk from it; sometimes you know this yourself as you used to get on with them, but now see that they affected you negatively, much as can happen with people. That case isn't really what we’re examining here, though.

How do you react to this lack of a spark? I think an indication of having achieved a certain level of growth is that you can like or dislike a work without needing to justify your decision, but without your decision needing to demonise or canonise the work in question. That is, you can dislike a particular author without needing to pass a value judgement on them, and without the need for a third party to agree with your judgement; if asked, you might be able to crystallise the particular reasons why you dislike their work, but your preference essentially stands alone, set in enough respect for its own validity that it doesn't need to beg.

In this light, dismissing an author (and again, this extends to musicians, painters and directors) becomes quite a serious statement. It implies a certain lack of respect - both for the author themselves but also for anyone who happens to enjoy their work. For works that incite jingoism, hatred and small-mindedness, it is precisely a lack of respect that we show by dismissing them, and with good reason. To my mind, though, it is a sign of immaturity to dismiss something that we once admired purely because we have grown out of it. I don't see any shame in writing for a particular audience; we don't dismiss teachers for spending their time with children instead of adults in their workplace. Who’s to say that in the future, you might not find what you enjoy now similarly childish? Or, indeed, that you might not find a new appreciation for what you now dismiss?

This requires a certain humility, even as it requires a certain level of pride. It seems to me that you have to say "I will not understand all of this, or I may see more than is in fact there" at the same time as saying "I am worthy of attempting to read this". There’s nothing to stop you going forth into the Canon and sampling its riches; all you have to do beyond paying the price of admission (which is frequently nothing in these days of Project Gutenberg and streaming) is to lay down the awful burden of needing to understand everything, or worse, to have everything explained to you.

Child- and Adult-Level Learning [link]

I think this latter curse comes from the schools method of learning being regretfully applied to literature. We take Hamlet and carve it into scene-by-scene homework analysis, predigested with modern English "translations", glossaries for old words and Classical allusions, and scene-by-scene summaries so that you never read an honest pentameter without a swarm of angry explanations cutting it into a train of textureless mouthfuls.

This is what I think of as child-level learning. As children (in the intellectual sense) we are presented with gobbets of information that are simply to be swallowed. This is in order to create a foundation for our adult understanding of the world. You don't need to know the rich history of the Latin alphabet, travelling as it has right from the Egyptian hieroglyphs through millennia of sacred knowledge to the present day, when you are learning to read and write; similarly, when bringing up a small child there is little place for negotiation - you tell it "no" without further discussion so that it learns to accept other people’s needs and opinions as equally and occasionally more valid than its own.

What I think of as adult-level learning requires what was learnt as a child as its spring-board. Instead of force-feeding, education takes the form of kindling: a teacher ignites the fire of interest in a particular field by dousing the dry materials with just enough explanation that the resultant passion can sustain itself, and steps back as the pupil's knowledge hopefully feeds itself. On this level the goal of teaching is not to fill the pupil with enough solid foundation that they can function in general in adult society (or, more cynically, that they can pass a series of exams), but to present a particular view of a subject that will excite their pupil's intelligence so that they charge forward into it in search of more.

You could compare this to the learning of a musical instrument, or of a foreign language. If you are learning on a child-level basis, you will swallow enough (hopefully) to be able to perform in an exam or on the spot if absolutely necessary; if you move to an adult-level one, you will spend your free time practising and perfecting for the sheer enjoyment of it, and achieve more than you ever could on the child level.

Invitation to a Canon Ball [link]

If you have never had this experience in reading (or other media), then I can give you no greater gift than to suggest that you find a copy of a Shakespeare play and just read it straight through. I would recommend Hamlet or The Tempest if you haven't had them dissected in school, or failing that any of the better known tragedies or comedies; get an edition with absolutely no critical apparatus to distract you. (The Gutenberg editions I've linked might be a bit stark, but there are plenty of others if you look around.) Start at the beginning, and read. There will be words and references you don't understand, sure, but ignore them, or try to guess them from context. If you don't understand a passage at all, by all means go back and read it again, or just move on. Resist the urge to look up the answers. Read the words aloud in your head, and (if you're not going to disturb anyone), try reading out a speech or two. Don't stop until you get to the end. They're not that long without the critical padding.

Hopefully what will happen is that the beauty, wit and magic of the play will come alive for you. You are sitting face-to-face with Shakespeare over coffee, and he's cancelled his plans for the afternoon to sit quietly with you and tell you a story. You end up laughing frequently. The whole place is empty apart from the two of you; every now and then he smiles at you as he talks as if to say, "I hope you like this part. I'm proud of it - I wrote it as a present, just for you." This is the magic trick with great works - he says the same to everyone who reads it, and for everyone who reads it it's still true.

You have the right to stride into the Canon and order whatever you want; all you have to do is to allow your teeth the time to sharpen, if you've only been fed on lighter fare before. I think it really is enriching to take on a work that feels as though it's heavier than you are. There's certainly a joyful feeling of achievement in getting onto familiar terms with a name you'd normally see written about to show off a character's erudition - they rarely bite.

Constructive Criticism [link]

And then, if you like, you should read a critical evaluation. I don't know about you, but I never read the introduction to a book before I read the book itself. It means that you're no longer alone with the author - you've got some interloper sitting next to you butting in with "Well actually, I think..." every couple of seconds. If you read criticism afterwards (in the proper sense of the word, that is, "judgement" as in "weighing up"), you have your own knowledge of the work in question, and it becomes more of an even discussion. Frequently, if the critic is a good one, you will end up with new perspectives on the work which will add to your own appreciation of it - but they won't ever try to replace yours, or suggest that they know "the real" so-and-so, and if they do you should feel free to take what they're saying with a large pinch of salt. (Also, by that I don't mean to knock really good stuff like the Introducing... series. I'd say that's more like giving you a push so you don't end up flat on your face with the Big Things.)

This is what real analysis is, if you've only ever been made to find all the instances of Atticus Finch being a good father in To Kill a Mockingbird. You read a phrase or a work, it makes a certain impression on you, you try to fish out what it is about it that made you feel that way. There might be currents underneath the surface that you had no conscious awareness of; a good critic will make the case for their existence, and if you deem it valid they will add to your understanding of the work in question. Good analysis never makes its subject less alive. It might mean that you can no longer take the work seriously, but it will not make you incapable of seeing it as anything more than a collection of bones, cartilage and soft tissues percolating a puddle of blood.

In Summary...

My intention has been to try to convince you, if you are unconvinced, that attempting to fight above what you feel is your weight is a worthwhile and nourishing thing to do. I would be distraught to think that this comes across as a defence of singing the praises of "having read" books - what I mean to suggest is that expanding your "reading for fun" books (or "consuming for fun" media) to include ambitious things (even if they don’t end up agreeing with you) is a rich and rewarding experience, and more than worth the increase in intellectual outlay over, say, rereading a young adult novel series.

(Don't take the link attacks too seriously. They're not meant to be. Hope that was at least thought-inducing, and see you in a week!)