Ulysses

I was introduced to this dense notoriously difficult book during post graduate studies at the Victorian college of the Arts in Melbourne about ten years ago.  I was fascinated by the stream of consciousness style of Joyce in this work and I really wanted to give it a try. While my professor advised me to read small portions every day, I was not successful at the time. Years later, I bought my own copy from a secondhand shop and read it all over a period of a year without understanding what it was about!  Gold star for perseverance.

Flow of consciousness, theatre, history writing, and thoughts are all deconstructed together in the chapters, which are a technical masterpiece. I am not a scholar of English literature. I find Ulysses difficult because it's written in a completely different way than any other book I've ever read. It's impossible to follow a particular structure, since it has its own unique styles and forms, like sections of text that describe events happening in another location interrupt the narrative at hand. Since English isn't my first language, it makes it challenging for me. However, if I don't have a companion guide, which you can find on the internet, I will be lost just as I was when I first attempted to read it. Before I listen to an episode, I read the study notes (the chapters are called episodes) on that episode.

One has to be comfortable with difference, enjoy Joyce's wit and whimsy rather than worrying about unpacking the significance of every sentence. Someone suggested that we read it as Joyce reflecting on his birthplace, a raw, earthy love letter to Dublin.  It’s a satire all written as if it were a classic epic like The Odyssey.

Ulysses is about life, a story about a day in the life of Leopoldo Bloom on June 16, 1904 as he travels Dublin and goes about his business, taking breakfast to Molly in bed, attending a funeral, buying soap, going to the library, walking on the beach, meeting his friends at the pub, obsessing over his wife's affair with another man and writing flirtatious letters to another woman. Ulysses is the story of a common man who is consumed by questions, fantasies, indiscretions, advertising jingles (he works for a newspaper), jokes, memories, smells, delights, disappointments and his own body functioning. It's about life for him, as he goes about his day, encounters people, runs errands, and is plagued by his overactive amygdala just like many of us.

If I can read Ulysses anyone can.  Perseverance is definitely needed and you need to rid yourself of the need to have to understand everything.  Let the text just wash over you.  It is for me another practice of being present in the moment like being with a difficult situation or person that I need to give my attention to.  A practice for my mind not to wander off to where it would rather go.

The victory is in finishing the novel.

I take chapter by chapter, no rush and so I go.