Reading Ulysses: Splendid literature that can suck the life out of you and your family
Recently I decided to stop pretending I've read Ulysses
.
It is January 2025, I am 40 years of age, and when
James Joyce
's masterwork comes up in conversation, I have to stay quiet and listen respectfully to whoever is holding forth.
'Oh it's brilliant,' I'll tell anyone who asks.
It's not that I haven't tried over the years, haven't skipped hundreds of pages to the best bits (breakfasts, 'Nighttown', Molly), and soaked them up in intermittent bursts of awe and incomprehension.
I could tell you that Ulysses begins as 'stately plump Buck Mulligan' climbs the Martello tower for a morning shave, and ends with Molly Bloom in bed that same evening, thinking pleasurably about her husband, Leopold Bloom, possibly while reaching sexual climax.
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Like a lot of people I have started Ulysses and been enthralled, then given up when it became so inscrutable as to alienate and bother me.
Ulysses
must be the best novel almost nobody has read, and even fewer have finished. To quote the judge in America who ruled against banning
Ulysses for obscenity, 'it is not an easy book to read or to understand'.
But I make a decision: it is time for this reader to put an end to her ignorance and read what Joyce called his 'damned monster-novel', set over a day in
Dublin
, with 18 Homeric 'episodes', named by Joyce after characters from The Odyssey in the detailed charts he helpfully drew.
Really read it, cover to cover. It is early January, so I hope to finish it in good time before Bloomsday to write this article from a place of high Joycean authority.
Five months seems like a generous amount of time to beat through 933 pages. That breaks down to six or seven pages a night, which can easily be fitted around family, work, a bit of a social life and, well, the rest of the chaos.
Right? That's what I reckon anyway.
The book has been wrested from my late parents' book haul, a Penguin 2004 centenary edition celebrating 'Bloomsday 100″. On the cover is a bleak Martello tower overlaid on to the text of Molly Bloom's soliloquy, oddly spoiling the end.
Mum and Dad's copy is in suspiciously good nick. Sandwiched between its weighty pages I find a clipping of an article from this newspaper by the late
Eileen Battersby
, which I know my mother would have cut out and kept to serve her with some insights before a book-club meeting.
So on a friendless winter night, I shove all other books aside and open Ulysses.
Wow, yes, it's all coming back. Episode 1, Telemachus, instantly catapults me into the tower with Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus. Buck is a medical student given to rants with sprinklings of Latin, Stephen is a dreamy, self-serious schoolteacher sporting an ashplant. Their banter is so vivid I feel like we're all in the tower together making witty repartee. I'm sucked in, and my only question is: why read anything but Ulysses?
A few nights in, I'm lost. We have accompanied Stephen to pick up his pay cheque at school, where he ends up conversing with the dreary headmaster, Mr Deasy. We spend a good while in the schoolyard. At least I think we do. I have no need to read about schoolboys telling riddles and shouting about the church and money.
Maggie Armstrong, not contemplating a bunch of men talking about Shakespeare in the National Library. Photograph: Laura Hutton
Next then, our Stephen is crunching on shells along Sandymount Strand and philosophising to himself. Joyce's seascape is an intoxicating carnival, it's wonderful. But the famous 'ineluctable modality of the visible' passage comes on an evening my three-year-old has no interest in sleep. Eight o'clock crawls towards 10.30pm and I develop a frazzled unrest I associate with reading great literature while ignoring the call of duty. I resent these effete young men contemplating the abstract while the rest of the world toils at jobs and housework. Then the fourth wall comes down. 'Who anywhere will read these written words?', Stephen asks, and I think Joyce is defying me to read on.
In Episode 4, Calypso, we meet the curious Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew and advertisement canvasser, and his wife, Molly, a singer, who is having an affair with her disreputable boss, Blazes Boylan. Like Stephen, consumed by guilt over his failure to pray for his mother on her deathbed, there is raging inner conflict and big passion. So much has happened to these characters, there is little need for plot or incident to keep us engaged.
[
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Bloom's meandering thoughts make for a change from the doomscrolling I'd otherwise have lapsed into at this hour. He may be best known for eating the 'inner organs of beasts and fowls' but he's a dream husband. He slathers butter on the diva Molly's toast and fusses over her tea while he burns his own breakfast. He carefully chooses books and face cream for her. He lives with tragedy – standing at a funeral, imagining the things he would have done for his late, infant son Rudy ('teach him German').
And even if he does stroke himself on a beach near a group of teenage girls, there are lots of other things to like about him.
His inner world is not just a stream of consciousness, it's a gushing whirlpool of perception, ideas, memories, reported speech, with letters from his adorable daughter Milly bringing us teenage text-speak directly from Edwardian Dublin. The voices that jabber through Ulysses are real and magical, the words coined sparkle brightly. 'biscuitfully', 'mighthavebeen' (as opposed to 'hasbeen'), 'occultly', 'fruitsmelling', 'yogibogeybox'.
Though you might wonder: does Joyce write the way people think, or just the way he thinks? He being a genius. Maybe some minds are more eloquent company than others. I assume my consciousness on a good morning would be less of a stream than a sad few drops of conscious thought, something like 'coffee, coffee, late again, f**k sake,' or just non-verbal. I guess none of us have anything to compare it to.
The irrelevant godawful debates of insufferable bores from 100 years ago feel incongruous
On the nights when I'm already spent, or may have had a little wine, I really can't fathom the stream. I know it's full of treasure but that doesn't mean I want to read it.
I think back to 2022 when Ulysses turned 100, and it was proposed for my book club. We had the summer to read it. The conversation is quickly located on WhatsApp. 'Can't say I'm enjoying it!' 'Unfortunately losing the battle with Ulysses ... again', 'a bit lost in the woods'. 'There's been a bit of a witch hunt over who recommended it!'.
Our book club has about 33 members, all serious readers. For the Ulysses meeting our host welcomed a turnout of four. Ulysses was only ever mentioned again with accompanying sniggers, like schoolchildren pleased to have flunked their exams.
In Episode 7, Aeolus, Bloom goes into a newspaper office to sell some ads. That's my best guess, as we encounter a formal experiment whereby sections of text are turned into short newspaper articles. I would rather read anything else at all.
We are often told about the parts of Ulysses we should read but not about the parts we shouldn't. In Episode 9, Scylla and Charybdis, a bunch of men are talking about Shakespeare in the National Library, and why should I care?
Paging back to get a grasp of Episode 5, Lotus Eaters, the prose seems to mean to confuse me. The layering of speech alongside deepest thoughts can be like reading two books at once, or a whole pile of books at once. I put Ulysses off every day until so late that sleep will be a certainty, mid-sentence, waking to hear the thud of the book as it hits the floorboards.
Author Maggie Armstrong with her copy of Ulysse' by James Joyce. She has been reading a few pages a night since January of this year. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien
Reading Joyce's damned monster-novel at night-time is not working. It comes with me on the tram, it comes in my suitcase to Ennis, Sligo, Limerick, Dingle. It comes to the football sideline and swimming gallery and playground. I feel pretentious reading such a statement book in public and it wins me no new friends.
Ulysses becomes, by springtime, a deadweight, an utter drag, an albatross, creating feelings of endless guilt and homework. Someone, probably my eight-year-old, has decided to scrawl the leaves with a diamond pattern in permanent marker. The cover is cracked and the pages are dog-eared, so at least we have a seasoned copy now.
[
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]
In the rough, storm-tossed winter that delays the arrival of spring, when a book should bring comfort, I can't bear the sight of it. Something about all the men inside it talking. The irrelevant godawful debates of insufferable bores from 100 years ago feel incongruous in a life already stuffed with nonsense from the internet. The reason I read books is to escape the scintillating company of men.
In the bitter winter days of March I abandon Ulysses. The monster novel clogs the nightstand, a useless block of solid gold artistic wonder.
Bloomsday draws near and I feel guilty and bad to have failed on the Ulysses front. The only hope for completion is an audiobook. The acclaimed Andrew Scott adaptation is being hoarded from Irish listeners by the BBC, so I download a recording whose narrator (
Donal Donnelly
), sounds oddly like the late Gay Byrne. His delivery is droll, and Joyce is finally flowing in, even if I'm unconscious for a lot of it.
I listen in the night, then walking along the street, or driving the car, but the effort it costs to listen to such splendid literature does not make for a splendid experience.
[
James Joyce in a dozen great quotations
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]
I can say for sure that my bustling middle years were not the moment to have tried to read Ulysses. In fact I would be very seriously annoyed with anyone caught doing so. This novel of everyday life sucks the life out of you and your family.
It's one to read with time on your hands, ideally when you are young, retired or have a house husband as lovingly servile as Bloom. Read it a la carte, open it at random. But as a book to read straight through for pleasure, it should be banned.
Maggie Armstrong is the author of
Old Romantics
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