What’s a book you never finished but still think about?
I have tried to read Ulysses more than once. “Tried” may be overstating it. I can barely get started.
This has always irritated me. I am not frightened of long books, difficult books or books that demand concentration. I can read Nabokov closely, disappear into Knausgaard for hundreds of pages, and happily spend far too long considering how a novelist has built a scene, handled memory or shifted point of view. Ever Ken Follet is a 500-800 page journey! Yet Joyce defeats me almost immediately.
So, with a certain amount of embarrassment, I finally asked AI for advice.
Apparently, Ulysses is unusually good at making an experienced reader feel as though he has forgotten how to read.
That rang true immediately.
The difficulty is not simply vocabulary, allusion or literary cleverness. It’s that Joyce withholds many of the things I instinctively expect from a novel: clear narrative momentum, stable point of view, immediate emotional stakes and, above all, the reassuring sense that the writer is quietly helping me along.
Joyce doesn’t care whether I am keeping up.
Within a few pages I am dealing with Irish politics, Catholicism, Latin, literary references, jokes whose origins I don’t know, relationships that haven’t been properly explained and Stephen Dedalus wandering around inside his own head.
And because I approach a book like Ulysses conscientiously, I have probably been making things worse.
I stop.
I reread.
I wonder what I have missed.
I look at the sentence again.
I consider looking something up.
And before long I have spent twenty minutes reading three pages and completely lost whatever sense of movement the book might have had.
The advice was wonderfully simple: stop trying to understand everything.
On a first reading I only need to know, broadly, what is happening.
That is a very different proposition.
I also learnt something I really ought to have known before: the opening three episodes are heavily centred on Stephen Dedalus and are among the more cerebral parts of the book. Leopold Bloom—the character around whom much of the ordinary human pleasure of Ulysses gathers—doesn’t properly arrive until Episode 4, Calypso.
And suddenly there is breakfast.
There is a cat.
There are kidneys.
There are newspapers, toilets, sex, advertisements, streets, food, domestic irritation and curiosity about other people.
In other words, life.
This may be the breakthrough for me.
Instead of treating the opening pages as an examination I have repeatedly failed, I am going to read the first three episodes quickly. No annotations. No chasing references. No attempt to demonstrate to an imaginary examiner that I understand Joyce.
Stephen is young, intellectual, grieving his mother, troubled by religion, Ireland and his place in the world.
That will do.
Then I am going to get to Bloom.
From there I will try to read Ulysses not as “one of the greatest novels ever written”, which is surely one of the least helpful labels ever attached to a book, but as one man’s movement through Dublin on 16 June 1904.
I will follow him.
I will notice the streets, food, pubs, conversations, bodies, advertisements, embarrassments, sexual thoughts, funerals and chance encounters.
And when Joyce writes a paragraph I don’t understand, I am going to do something almost revolutionary.
I am going to carry on reading.
That may be the most useful advice of all.
Because Ulysses does not merely contain difficult passages. It keeps changing the rules. Just when I think I have learnt how to read it, Joyce changes form. One section behaves like fairly conventional fiction, another like music, another becomes parody, another turns into a stage play, another into questions and answers.
There may therefore be no point at which I finally “get” Ulysses and cruise comfortably towards the end.
Perhaps that has been another of my mistakes.
I have been waiting for the book to settle down.
It doesn’t.
What interests me most now, though, is something I had not considered before. I increasingly read novels as a writer. I am watching how scenes are constructed, how memory becomes narrative, how dialogue produces character, how detail is selected and how a writer creates momentum.
Perhaps Ulysses has frustrated me because Joyce appears at first to dismantle precisely those mechanisms.
But looked at another way, the entire book is an enormous experiment in them.
What can prose do?
How closely can it follow thought?
How much of ordinary life can be made significant?
How many different forms can a novel assume while remaining one novel?
Those are questions I understand.
So I am going back in.
This time I have rules.
I will not look everything up.
I will not stop because I have failed to understand a reference.
I will not reread every difficult paragraph.
I will get through Stephen and reach Bloom.
I will read for Dublin, people, bodies, humour and ordinary life.
And above all, I will give myself permission to get lost.
The best piece of advice AI gave me was this:
I may have been approaching Ulysses as though it were a book I ought to read through.
Perhaps it is better approached as a city I enter.
Walk around.
Get lost.
Ignore some monuments.
Follow Bloom.
And don’t worry about seeing everything the first time.
So that is what I am going to do.
I’ll have another go.
I’ll make a rare visit to the library – there’s no point in buying a book that I will probably never read.
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