After a few decades of procrastination, I have finally gotten around to reading Ulysses.
All this time I was intimidated by two aspects of the book. First its reputation for being excessively difficult, which it is not. And second by its sheer Dublinness, which I got over.
For the first aspect I’ll concede that the book is certainly full of arcane jokes and it has something of a radical format. But the parts that are supposed to be clear and and the parts (such as the Circe section in Nighttown) which are not should be obvious enough to the reader. And any lack of clarity is not not willful obscurity — it is an aspect of design the reader will understand.
Nobody who isn’t James Joyce himself will probably get all of the reference unless they begin with an annotated copy of the book — a tactic I’d not recommend because the novel, however unusual, is immersive and nothing breaks immersion like a squad of annotating professors. Footnotes, especially good footnotes, make more noise than an active bomb-testing site, or a daycare before nap-time.
A lack of annotations may indeed cause problems. It may be that the youngest prospective readers of the book wouldn’t be familiar with catechisms or newspapers (both of which lend their forms to chapters). While neither of these genres are as central to the culture as they were in 1904 when the book is set, or 1922 when it was published, such a prospective young reader would likely know they exist and need only minimal instruction in their use and format.
The second aspect I got over by working with The Here Comes Everybody Players (who I have written of before) a Boston-based Irish theater troupe. Talking with the actors, and hearing them speak onstage, taught me how to hear the people of Dublin — and the great novel of Dublin. Thrown in to that experience was learning about the constant popular culture references that are mixed into the book and we now call Trad Music which I knew from growing up around Boston.
What I didn’t expect was that the book would be so much fun. Ulysses has a reputation of being plodding obscure and dismal. Perhaps this reputation was fostered to be the counter to those who called it scandalous and pornographic when it was published. If so they needn’t have worried. Nobody actually takes book recommendations from the Post Master General. It’s dark and weird but playful and — no matter how much commentary I had heard about it — full of surprises. It proved to be the opposite of its reputation and was swift, readable, and joyful.
Thomas Olivieri 