After
over a year and a half, I have finally managed to finish Ulysses. Ulysses,
Joyce’s infamous magnum opus. Some think it 'a masterpiece', whereas some
(including one of my English teachers) believe that 'life is too short for that
book' (same difference, perhaps). Last night I could finally close the
covers and put it on the shelf and feel quite smug and proud of myself.
So, is it
a masterpiece? Well, yes. James Joyce was a polymath, with an encyclopaedic
knowledge of literature, music, etc. and every page of Ulysses is testament to
this. Merely glancing at the 200+ pages of notes at the back of the Oxford
World's Classics (1922 text) edition will show you the depth the book holds.
Not a page goes past without some reference to a folk song, or a (sometimes
not-so-) obscure book title, or something similar. The entire novel is almost
an exercise in intertextuality.
That's
not to say the book is a hollow copy-and-paste of other people's work. I
haven't got enough time to explain how detailed and extraordinary the book
really is, in the detailed characterisation of the main characters through
their own thoughts and feelings; the experimenting, particularly in the second
half of the book, with what a narrator or a novel really is; even the progress
and lives of Dubliners we never meet, but glimpse a few times making their own
odyssey around the city. Any description of the book that would do it justice would be as long as the book itself.
Now all
we need is for this book (written as a comic novel) to be absolutely hilarious,
and it'll be the greatest thing ever written.
...ah.
I think I
laughed out loud whilst reading Ulysses around seven times. Seven times in 732
pages. That is on average one laugh every 104.57 pages (to two decimal places),
or 0.0096 laughs per page. That's not just a big problem, that's a problem you
could astroturf and call a football stadium.
And it's
not because I completely missed the jokes, either. Believe me, I had three
annotated versions and I was checking every single one of them. The problem is,
the majority of jokes in the book are either incredibly scholarly, spread
either end over about 300 pages (for example, we only find out later that the
'dragon' wound in Oxen of the Sun is a bee sting), or in some way have to be
explained. As many people know from experience, when you have to explain a
joke, nobody will laugh.
Maybe I'm
the wrong sort of reader for a book like this. Of course, with notes available
you don't really need a broad knowledge of Shakespeare or the history of
English Literature or astronomy or geography or Irish political history in order
to understand the book, but perhaps people who do will find the book funniest.
Let me
compare it, however, with my favourite comic novel (and probably my favourite
novel altogether), Joseph Heller's Catch-22. When reading it, you can scarcely
say that it isn't literary. The book's form and language have been experimented
with to reflect the madness of the military, and (as far as literary ancestors
are concerned) Yossarian is described thusly:
... he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees.
However,
not only is it experimental (although not nearly as experimental as Ulysses),
Catch-22 is funny. I mean, it's hilarious. Except for the final few
brilliantly dark chapters, not a page goes by without a laugh, and proper
laughs too, belly laughs and giggles and the lot of them. For me,
although it may not be the 'greatest' book (whatever that means), as a pure
comic novel it is miles above Ulysses.
Another
problem I had with Ulysses was the length. Roddy Doyle once said 'Ulysses could
have done with a good editor' and I'm inclined to agree with him. Particularly
in the second half of the book where episodes spread to about sixty - seventy
pages on average as opposed to the thirty page episodes near the beginning, I
found the general pattern was that I loved the first thirty to forty pages, and
then read the rest of it as quickly as possible to get it over with, usually
without the same pleasure I had before. Yes,
every page is testament to Joyce's intelligence. But there are a lot of pages,
and sooner or later you'll probably wish he'd just get on with it rather than
dazzling us further with his ability to parody Thomas Malory.
After all
of that, the chances are you've decided the book probably isn't worth bothering
with. It is. It really, really is. It was probably unfair of me to criticise
the book for not being laugh-out-loud funny, considering this is just one side
of an incredibly dense, multi-faceted piece of writing. Even when read as a
dramatic novel, or even an anti-novel, it is immensely enjoyable.
However, some advice:
- Buy an annotated edition (preferably the Oxford World's Classics 1922 text) and Cliff Notes (even if just for its character list). Even if you don't use them, they're useful to have just in case.
- Give yourself breaks. I once read an article on Ulysses which suggested you could read the book in under a month if you read two episodes a day. Whilst this is technically true, it's very draining and sometimes I found I needed time to let the book sink in. All I'd say is give the last episode, Penelope, some time, not because it needs to be read in one sitting but because it's quite difficult to find a place to take a pause.
- Read other books whilst you do it. Particularly easy to read books. Even paperback holiday lightweight stuff would do it, just to remind you that reading isn't just a chore.
- Know when to stop. If you've spent the last few episodes wishing the damn book would end (as many critics I've read of have), it's not worth the effort. No masterpiece should be suffered through.
- Read Catch-22 first. It's more fun.
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