James Joyce's Ulysses: A Personal Odyssey

I read Ulysses for the first time in my last year of high school. I had already decided by then that I wouldn’t go on to study literature, although it was my oldest love. Somehow this made reading Ulysses a “now or never” affair. I wasn’t going to stop reading fiction just because I’d study something else in school, but, to my 18-year-old self, Ulysses seemed like the kind of book I might never check out without the incentive of a required reading list. I was prone to bouts of self-pity at the time, so this quickly became the symbol of all those intellectual landmarks I was going to miss by not becoming a lit major. So it was decided: I had to read Ulysses. There was just one small problem...

So, like many conscientious readers before me, I embarked on The Reading Ulysses Training Camp™. Mine was the abbreviated version. I figured I needed to be familiar with three things before tackling Ulysses: The Odyssey, modernism and Joyce’s previous writing. I was on reasonably good terms with the first two, so I moved straight to Joyce. (In retrospect, I really wish I had added some remedial Irish History to the list.) I read Dubliners and liked it. I moved on to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and there the problems started.

I despised Stephen Dedalus. It was, I suppose, the effect of seeing oneself in a mirror. Like Stephen, I had problems. But they were not real problems. They were stock faux-intellectual problems and, it goes without saying, horribly self-centered. If I were to sum them up, I’d say they were all variations of a double question: “How do I find out if I am a tortured genius and what do I do if I am?” It felt good to indulge in this dilemma privately, but I didn’t really appreciate Stephen's endless navel-gazing (he'd probably call it "omphaloskepsis") and occasional assholery reminding me of it. (Although I do still have passages from Portrait of the Artist that I wrote down in a notebook, convinced they were Relevant to My Life. As you can see, at 18, I was somewhat worse at separating my personal life from the stuff I was reading.) 

The question of my genius status temporarily put aside (it has since been solved in the negative), I finally ascended to Ulysses. I drew the Gilbert schema on a sheet and proceeded to read one episode every day. I’d read the episode, read the notes, go back and reread the episode. In the beginning, I tried a translated version as well (my native language =/= English), but after “scrotumtightening sea” became “the sea that grabs you by the scrotum," I couldn’t go on. Did I like what I was reading? Yes and no. I liked the experience. I liked what it taught me about the way I read before, about how superficial I was. It was unusual for me to spend so much time on a book. I remember sharing bits of it with my friends. The dirty bits, of course, but also countless instances of “Just look at this passage. Joyce is nuts.” (My friends are very patient people.) I liked figuring out stuff. At one point I started reading Nabokov’s lectures and I liked Ulysses even more seen through his eyes.

And then I was done. I wanted to get myself a “I read Ulysses” badge, but even ignoring the snottiness of it, I was too lazy to do it.

That right there is my Serious Reader Award. I won it by reading Ulysses.
(And this right here is the propriety of the awesome

Allie Brosh / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

To tell you the truth, the whole thing was a little anti-climactic. I had read Ulysses. I was fond of it, mostly because of the amount of work I put into reading it, but I didn’t love it. If it hadn’t been for the Adorable Prof’s class (he of the faking Molly's orgasm fame), I probably wouldn’t have returned to it. It was that class that made me long to reread Ulysses and it took me more than a year to finally decide to do it.

I returned to Ulysses last Bloomsday. There are things that never change: my ability to fret about my life choices a good example of that. Years after my initial career freakout at 18, things had gone full circle. I was agonizing over whether I should go to grad school or join the circus instead. But there are things that change, too, and my relationship with Ulysses is, thankfully, one of those. It wasn't just that I read it and loved it this time. It was that I looked at the world through its net for months after I was done. It never faded or went away - at some level, I never stopped thinking about it. In a nice twist of fate, Ulysses has become one of the most personal books I've read. That is one reason I decided to write this post like this, instead of writing a review.

***

A few years ago, before my second reading of Ulysses, I went to a modern art museum. It was a big museum, the kind that offers folding chairs, if you want to sit and contemplate the art, and art books, if you want to read about what you're contemplating. By far the most crowded room was one where people sat on their chairs, their backs to the walls and read art books about what was on the walls. It was a perfect image, the kind that is made to stand as a metaphor for something or other. I thought of Ulysses, of the Reading Ulysses Training Camp, of all the notes I went through and of how I wasn't sure if I would have liked the book more or less (or at all) without those crutches. I wasn't sure I had seen the book.

I'm not sure I have a good explanation for why this book became so important for me the second time I read it. My escapism was still there and the stuff I read about it the first time around cannot be unread. But I like to think that it was something like the image in that museum. I first read this book with my back to the wall and then I turned around and finally saw it. I'm sure there is no rhyme and reason as to why this happens with some books and not others, why some books come to life even under all those words about them and others don't, and I don't care. I'm glad this one did.