I’ve heard that people are using the enforced isolation to tackle books they’ve never had the patience to read before. Even Stephen King is working his way through James Joyce’s Ulysses, and that’s inspirational. I love James Joyce with the passion of a pig rooting around in a fresh cadaver, so I wanted to encourage more of this kind of behavior. The world is full of sissies who are too chickenshit to ever try Ulysses, and I get the reluctance: it’s long, it’s hard, it’s got a scary reputation, but that’s the problem — its reputation scares people away. Everyone’s so intimidated by the book that they don’t actually read it. Because, to be honest, Ulysses is a blast.
Everyone should read Ulysses at some point in their life. It's a book unlike any other, a book that knocks you out of your comfort zone. A book that makes your brain strain like you're reaching for something on a high shelf. And it's really, really funny. I've read it a couple of times and here's my advice:
Step 1) RELAX.
You're going to miss things. It's okay. Some things are worth missing, some things are boring, some things are references that don't make any sense in today's world, so who cares? Joyce didn't want people to puzzle out his book like the answers to an exam, he wanted to present a slice of life in all its freaky majesty and stupidity. Keep looking up at the stars, not down at your feet.
Step 2) Like a shark, keep moving forward.
Reading this book is like trying to drink a waterfall. The point is the overall impression, not so much the individual details. Just keep pushing ahead, don't sit there with a magnifying glass trying to appreciate every single word. Joyce himself said he put in a shit ton of puzzles and tricks and things that don't make any sense just to mess with the heads of literary critics and scholars, so don't get hung up on the small stuff.
Step 3) There are no such thing as spoilers.
Seriously. Buy yourself the Seidman Annotations. This is your new best friend. The introduction to each chapter will get you oriented, and if you get hung up on a phrase, a detail, a bit of wordplay, they're like the board you stick under the wheels of your truck when it's stuck in mud.
Step 4) Remember that Joyce wasn't living in Dublin when he wrote this.
He hadn't lived there in a long time. So what Ulysses is, to some extent, is his attempt to rebuild Dublin in his mind, recreating the sights and smells and mindset and beliefs and feelings and streets and people he remembered, but doing it in an impressionistic way. What the impressionists and modernists did for painting, Joyce is doing for books. That's why it reads like he wrote it on drugs. Keep this in mind, the way you keep the north star in mind when you're navigating a ship (which I'm sure you do a lot). This is why the book is “important,” because it's an amazing act of sustained imagination. The same way that Superman has the Kryptonian city of Kandor trapped in a bottle, Joyce has one day in Dublin in 1904 trapped in a book.
Step 5) It's funny. It's really, really funny.
You just have to rewire your brain a little to get the jokes. Joyce always thought of himself as someone who was writing, primarily, a comedy. He's sending up the epic form by using the structure of The Odyssey to talk about people going to the bathroom, and masturbating, and getting drunk and making idiots out of themselves. But by doing this, he's not only elevating everyday life to the level of an epic, he's lowering the epic to the level of everyday life. And also: fart jokes. Everywhere.
Step 6) It's okay to skip.
Even the biggest Joyce scholars in the world agree: some chapters in Ulysses just plain old suck. Skip ‘em or skim ‘em, whichever you prefer. Joyce isn’t going to mind. He’s dead.
Here's my breakdown of the book, chapter by chapter. I'm using the chapter names that Joyce gave the Ulysses in another document, not the chapter titles that are in the book:
1- TELEMACHUS - come on, it's the first chapter. You've gotta read it. It's basically two roommates squabbling over money.
2 - NESTOR - a bit of a bore but also relatively short
3 - PROTEUS - this is the first long, boring, skimmable chapter. If you're deep on Joyce it's very “important” but it's also pretty impenetrable.
4 - CALYPSO - now we're in Leopold Bloom's part of the book and this is one of the three most famous chapters in Ulysses (the other two are “Circe” and “Penelope”)
5 - THE LOTUS EATERS - fine chapter, a bit dense, but readable
6 - HADES - one of the best in the book in my opinion, just totally Irish and death obsessed and there's even some plot.
7 - AEOLUS - from this chapter forward to “Cyclops” you're in a dense, unforgiving part of Ulysses. I recommend breezing through these chapters and catch up on what you’ve missed with the annotations.
8 - LAESTRYGONIANS - not so bad, but still tough stuff.
9 - SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS - ouch. Even Joyce scholars think this one's like getting hit in the head with a brick. Lots of academic nattering about Shakespeare.
10 - THE WANDERING ROCKS - a neat trick — 19 bits, told from around a dozen points of view. But apart from the sheer skill on display, it’s really just a walk around Dublin
11 - THE SIRENS - a sweet, lovely chapter with a whole lot of pretty wordplay. And that’s about all it is.
12 - CYCLOPS - alert! alert! The least loved and worst chapter in the book. No one can read and understand this one. Fortunately, it's the end of the worst section of Ulysses.
13 - NAUSICAA - a really perverted, really dense, very funny chapter.
14 - OXEN OF THE SUN - scholars love this chapter and it is fun, but don't take it too seriously. The point is to trace the history of the English language from early speech to 20th Century speech in one fell swoop. It's very complex and kind of unrewarding, which makes it a bit like “Cyclops” but not nearly so bad.
15 - CIRCE - essential
16, 17, 18 - EUMAEUS, ITHACA, PENELOPE - the last three chapters, and completely lovely, moving and awesome.
So my recommendation is to read about it as you read it so you can know what's going on, and save your strength for the better chapters, while avoiding getting hung up on chapters like AEOLUS (which is a bunch of hot air, like its namesake) PROTEUS and CYCLOPS. Also, this is one of the few novels you can read in almost any order and enjoy. But if you just want the highlights, I recommend the following order:
• TELEMACHUS
• CALYPSO
• HADES
• NAUSICAA
• CIRCE
• EUMAEUS
• ITHACA
• PENELOPE
Then you can go back and read the tougher chapters however you’d like.
You don’t have to read Ulysses to get into heaven, but sometimes it’s fun to stretch your brain a bit and read something you’d never tackle otherwise. And right now, we’ve all got nothing but time.