Ulysses

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:02 -0500

Man, this book was an experience. Not altogether pleasant either. I’ve never read a book before where I felt like the author almost wanted you to quit reading it. Really, I’ve just never read a book like this one before. Published in 1922 banned by censorship panels in various countries for around a decade, this book is a groundbreaking work to be sure. In short, this book describes events that take place on June 16, 1904, in Dublin, mostly focused on two characters Leopold Bloom and Stephen Deadalus. There is nothing special about the day it could have been written about 2 other characters in a different place in a different time and had the same effect. It seems to be a meditation on how everyday contains the entire range of human experience. Like every day is a universe onto itself or something like that. The best way I can explain the experience is to imagine being trapped inside someone’s brain where you could hear every thought they had but could not experience the world in any other way. So, you never hear anything you instead hear the processed thought the sound triggers. You never see anything, you instead piece together the outside world through flashes of objects and impressions. This style produces two effects. The first one is that I’ve never felt so intimately connected with a character in a book before. By the end of the book, you literally know Leopold Bloom better than his closest friends and maybe even himself. One example of this is that I’ve never read a book where you live through someone taking a shit. It was described so well you feel like you are actually sitting inside a dude’s head while he is sitting on a toilet reading a book and making a big mud pie. The second effect is confusion. There is no explanation in this book. Everything just “is”. A character has a memory of so and so doing this and that, but I have never heard of so and so and I don’t have any context for why them doing this and that is important. This confusion is unavoidable for the style though, as you would be this confused being jacked into someone’s stream of conscious. The other thing is that this book is deeply rooted into Dublin. Joyce plotted out each character’s movements in a map and calculated their positions based on average walking speed, etc. So again, you are almost required to know Dublin to not get overwhelmed with a long list of roads, landmarks and other geographically accurate markers. On top of all this everything can shift from episode to episode. You may be at one place in time at the end of one episode and without warning start in a completely new place and time in the next with no explanation, or sometimes actually go back in time. The writing styles also shift as Joyce seemed determined to flex on Shakespeare. In fact, there is one episode where he parodies every single writing style in western literature from Herodotus to Dickens. Then there is also the fact that the line between a character imagining an event taking place and an event actually taking place isn’t demarked by anything. Again, remember that you aren’t seeing anything, you are hearing about what someone saw, or in some cases imagined. Finally, this book was written to be read and re-read. So, there are many things that don’t really make sense at all in the beginning that you are “supposed to know” but you don’t until later on. Overall, this was not a fun read. I wouldn’t recommend it to most people. I ended up finding a helpful companion guide because some episodes were so confusing that I really had no idea what was going on. Check out website where someone plotted out all the characters movement/places in the real world in a single episode to see the complexity Joyce was working with. That being said I’m glad I read it. It was incredibly written and unbelievable complex. I know if I was smarter, I would appreciate it more. I’ll come back to it someday and maybe enjoy it more on the second read. The most unique book I’ve read in a while, so if you’re interested in novel styles I’d recommend it, but you’d have to be REALLY interested. I’ll leave this review with a quote that was memorable and seems like a good example of the overall tone.

Intimate_characterization on George's Blog

Ulysses