Splinters

[ The Modern Word: James Joyce ]

The well-worn myth that is still being circulated describes Ulysses (1922) as a long and difficult novel. Steve?s recent post over at This Space shows how unfounded this myth is. I would like add some extra pointers.

First of all, the novel is not long, at least by contemporary standards. It is a sad fact, but books are getting longer and longer all the time. Great American Novels, high fantasy soap operas and Tom Clancy clones: they are all pushing the average page count well beyond 700. The present-day reader is accustomed to hefty books.

Additionally, it is good to bear in mind that most of the 18 chapters of Ulysses are fairly short. The only notable exception is Chapter 15 which is presented in the form of an endless-seeming playscript. Seriously, Joyce could have done something about those feverish 200 pages!

Secondly, the difficulty of Ulysses has been greatly over-rated. ?What does it all mean? How should it all be interpreted?? Who cares? All that matters, at least during one?s first brush with the book, is that the reader gets a sense of Joyce?s literary Dublin and its various denizens. The gist of the thing, so to speak. Ulysses is not an exercise in cryptography. The lives of the Dubliners do not form an elaborate covertext for the supposed Homeric core of the book. There are no hidden depths, only infinitely fascinating surface details.

Nabokov (who loved to draw the sitting arrangements of a train car when teaching Anna Karenina) made the same point: "They [his students at Cornell] had to know the map of Dublin for Ulysses. I believe in stressing the specific detail; the general ideas can take care of themselves. Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths."

Much of Joyce?s language is built on irony and pastiche. Remember that Simpsons episode where Homer?s diction is temporarily augmented (Dr. Monroe's subliminal weight-loss tapes were sold out, so they shipped Homer a vocabulary builder instead)? At one point, he opens the fridge door, takes out a six-pack and exclaims: "O, a sextet of ale!". Ulysses operates on exactly the same principle. For example, the ridiculously complex and minute questions and answers that constitute the next-to-last chapter can be read with the voices of Graham Chapman and Eric Idle ringing in your ears.

I think the essential thing about Ulysses is best summarized by Anthony Burgess: "Also I enfold there the hope that it will not be long before everybody comes to Joyce, seeing in him not tortuous puzzles, dirt, and jesuitry gone mad, but great comedy, large humanity, and that affirmation of man's worth that more popular writers stamp on in order to make money."