Rogue 7 - James Joyce
The 12 types of people who should not read Ulysses
The 120th anniversary of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of Joyce’s Ulysses, was last month. It’s always on June 16 because that’s the day on which Ulysses takes place. Talk about literary legacy: for over a century, based on the day you set your novel, people will retrace the steps of your main characters and recite their lines while trashed on warm Guinness. The Swedish Academy may have shunned him, but Joyce had the last chuckle.
It took Odysseus ten years to get home, and Leopold Bloom one day, and it’s a tossup to say which was more epic. As a fellow supplicant of Bloomsday, I offer this Rogues Gallery on Joyce, which focuses entirely on Ulysses.
And what, you may ask, about Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Finnegan’s Wake? Well, the few times I’ve tried to read Dubliners I’ve put it down. What can I say? Not for me.
Portrait is, in theory, more to my taste – the ultimate coming-of-age liberation story, you might say – but it’s still too self-serious. I’m all for flying by those nets of nationality, language, and religion through silence, exile and cunning, but I need more madness in my prison breaks.
That said, there’s a tipping point to madness. Finnegan’s Wake is too far off the deep end. That’s unreadable except for crazed Joyce scholars and linguists and future alien visitors with bigger brains.
Ulysses, on the other hand, is right in the sweet spot. No novel has wowed and wooed and whammed me with its protean wizardry as much as Ulysses did. I can’t imagine any other book ever will. Never mind the claims that it’s unreadable or difficult or blah blah. It’s for Everyman and you are Everyman.
So, yes, read Ulysses. But so that you don’t go blaming me in case you go off the rails in your summer reading, I offer here 12 types of people who should not read this novel. (Why twelve? Because it’s been 12 decades – or, to put it more aptly, 12 Odysseys – since the 1904 events of Ulysses. Duh.).
Don’t despair if you fall within one of these twelve personality types. You can still read Ulysses. All you need to do is work on changing everything about yourself.
12 Types of People Who Should Not Read Ulysses
GO IT ALONERS – You will shipwreck and die on your proud rock. If you are looking to read Ulysses, do so with James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Study by Stuart Gilbert. Joyce was frustrated that no one was getting any of the allusions and so he sat down with Gilbert and talked him through his structuring. After every chapter of Ulysses, read the corresponding chapter in the Gilbert book. It will be the most brain-opening CliffsNotes experience of your life.
FRAGILE EGOS – You’ll discover that, contrary to what you thought, you’re not all that bright. Reading Ulysses is the closest I’ve come to understanding what that overused, vapid label of ‘genius’ might mean. Sure, I can say Einstein or Feynman is a genius, but that’s just me parroting others since I don’t know physics. But I do know how to read. And Ulysses left me with a feeling that it couldn’t have possibly been written by one person due to its immensity and scope, but at the same time (again, because I know how to read) could only have been written by one person due to its unity and intricacy. Unless thousands of people were able to synch their minds, only one could accomplish this. Genius.
THOSE WHO THINK ChatGPT WRITES WELL – This is the only personality type where I can definitively say that Ulysses will never be for you.
IMPRESSIONABLE WRITERS – If you are young and drawn to Joyce’s headiness and allusive luxury and mythologic density, proceed with caution. Otherwise, as a 22-year-old writing your first novel, after reading the “Circe” episode in Ulysses, you just may end up veering off into territory like this:
Hardboiled Leboyer Method
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read part 1 here [Warning: this passage contains graphic accounts of consensual violence and autocannibalism that may not be suitable for squeamish readers or dullards] MADAME (in throes of delighted anguish) Start scooping! Stanovich begins gouging out Madame's abdomen, hewing out hoary spoonsized hu…
PRUDES – This is a book that was banned in the U.S. from 1920 to 1933 on obscenity grounds. It’s not for you if you can’t handle big bulging veins on penises (“he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst”) or comedic ass-kissing (“He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere”) or hallucinatory cuckoldry & BDSM fantasies (“BLOOM: Thank you, sir. I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot? (He holds out an ointment jar.) Vaseline, sir? Orangeflower…? Lukewarm water…?”).
In short, if phrases like “scrotumtightening sea” (the Joycean version of Homer’s wine-dark sea) make you blanch rather than chuckle, Ulysses isn’t for you.
MEAT & POTATOES READERS – This book isn’t for you if you dislike pyrotechnics. If you’re looking for Hemingway, you’re in the wrong aisle.
NORMIES – Ulysses is the anti-establishment that becomes its own establishment. It’s the bull in the china shop that refashions the shards. It’s the freak warp in the space-time continuum. Normies, proceed at your own risk. Then again, this may be the electroshock therapy that you need.
SERIOUS PEOPLE – Joyce is a rogue who specializes in panning the self-serious. No sacred cow goes unslain. Here’s his parody of the Theosophist obsession for Sanskrit terms (what we’d today call New Age jargon) from his Cyclops chapter: “Interrogated as to whether life there resembled our experience in the flesh he stated that he had heard from more favoured beings now in the spirit that their abodes were equipped with every modern home comfort such as tālāfānā, ālāvātār, hātākāldā, wātāklāsāt …”
MEMBERS OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY – You may end up questioning your expertise and the validity of your institution for passing over him.
AUDIOBIBLIOPHILES – Ulysses requires lingering and A-ha!ing over puns and intra/extratextual references, which just isn’t possible over audio book. Now I’ve also heard it claimed that the far more impenetrable Finnegan’s Wake is best read with one’s ears. But that’s because only the most devout fanatics will make any headway through Joyce’s insane wordplay, so an audio version at least offers the diversion of Joyce’s musicality. Here’s an audio recording of the author himself:
ADHDers – Just kidding. This category, when loosely defined, encapsulates most of the population (you’re only special in the sense that everyone is special). Just put your phone on Airplane mode, pop that illicitly acquired Adderall, take a deep breath, and get to it.
HATERS OF ULYSSES – This is a large and passionate community, and Ulysses wouldn’t be what it is without them. As one reviewer put it, “For Ulysses to be any worse of a book, it would have to break into your house and defecate on your bed.” All I can say is it would if it could.
See the previous Rogues Gallery pinups here, including:
There isn’t enough adderall in the world. I always think I’m smart until I try to read a book over 100 pages.
I loved this post, especially because I tried to read Finnegan's Wake in high school and failed miserably. Perhaps I should try Ulysses now that I am an old crone.