Happy Bloomsday!
Although ripping James Joyce to shreds seems to be in vogue at the
moment, I still think Ulysses is a masterpiece and today's centenary of
the day Leopold Bloom wandered Dublin is worth celebrating.
The first time I tried to read Ulysses, I had trouble, I am not ashamed to admit. But that was simply because it was literature so unlike everything I had tackled before. I didn't make it all the way through. Yet, when I tried again a year later, my reading ability has matured sufficiently to find it quite easy going. Of course I still haven't picked up all the references and some aspects of it are cloudy, but so what? Any book that doesn't have some of those moments really isn't challenging you enough.
Unfortunately, most of the commentary decrying Ulysses seems to come from people who are proud in their inability to make it through the book. And the very nature of the book means that it is not about the summary of the story that is important - it is how the words are used and the effects to which language can be put.
I often just dip into Ulysses for fun, having read it in sequence a handful of times now, and almost always find a new phrase, sentence or paragraph that really grabs me, often because of how it relates to something that has happened to me. Bloom is supposed to be "everyman" in some sense, and the book is always effective at providing a way for a reader to connect with the text.
So to all those people who think the book is worthless just because they can't handle that it is so different to the mindless pabulum that is fed to us as literature so often - get over yourselves. Read the damn thing with an open mind and you'll discover an amazing world.
The first time I tried to read Ulysses, I had trouble, I am not ashamed to admit. But that was simply because it was literature so unlike everything I had tackled before. I didn't make it all the way through. Yet, when I tried again a year later, my reading ability has matured sufficiently to find it quite easy going. Of course I still haven't picked up all the references and some aspects of it are cloudy, but so what? Any book that doesn't have some of those moments really isn't challenging you enough.
Unfortunately, most of the commentary decrying Ulysses seems to come from people who are proud in their inability to make it through the book. And the very nature of the book means that it is not about the summary of the story that is important - it is how the words are used and the effects to which language can be put.
I often just dip into Ulysses for fun, having read it in sequence a handful of times now, and almost always find a new phrase, sentence or paragraph that really grabs me, often because of how it relates to something that has happened to me. Bloom is supposed to be "everyman" in some sense, and the book is always effective at providing a way for a reader to connect with the text.
So to all those people who think the book is worthless just because they can't handle that it is so different to the mindless pabulum that is fed to us as literature so often - get over yourselves. Read the damn thing with an open mind and you'll discover an amazing world.
10:50:32 AM Your views []
