Ulysses
I first tried to read Ulysses when I was 18. I made it to - what I now realise is the infamous - Chapter 3 (Proteus, following the semi-official Odyssey structure). This is the chapter where Stephen Dedalus walks along Sandymount Strand and thinks about things, and also sees a dog I think. It is dense and difficult to follow, and while at that age I most definitely did not have better things to do, I called it quits and bailed out.
The next time I tried to read Ulysses I was 28. I think I told myself that I’d come back to it in ten years both as a way of not totally giving up out of shame, but also putting it off for long enough that if I forgot about it, well, who can blame me. A lot can happen in ten years. In the meantime I finished college, moved to Japan, travelled for a year, moved to London, got a job, got married and then thought I should give Ulysses another crack. And as far as I remember, I made it all the way through. I absorbed and remember absolutely zero.
So here, the back end of 2022, one hundred years after publication, aged 38, the same as Leopold Bloom, the time came around once more to try and read it. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan comes down the stairs again. The opening is easygoing. Stephen hangs around in the tower he for some reason lives in. Mulligan mucks around. Stephen goes to work in a school full of useless kids. After this I arrive at Chapter 3 again, and do my best to break through it.
Once that hurdle is overcome, we get to Leopold Bloom. He has breakfast, and goes to Paddy Dignam’s funeral. His meditations on death are actually pretty hilarious; talking about saving space by burying people standing up, but that would run the risk of their head popping out one day, “what is cheese? corpse of milk”. It’s all very approachable, there’s nothing really dense or nutty - other than maybe Stephen’s theory of Hamlet being the ghost of Shakespeare’s grandfather or somesuch - until Chapter 14 (Oxen of the Sun), which parodies all of English literature including - to quote Wikipedia - “Malory, the King James Bible, Bunyan, Pepys, Defoe, Sterne, Walpole, Gibbon, Dickens, and Carlyle, before concluding in a Joycean version of contemporary slang”. I have read exactly one of these authors, Dickens, and the whole thing was very much a slog. I think someone gave birth in this chapter.
However, this comes immediately after probably the most controversial section, Nausicaa, where Bloom gets flashed in a fairly minor and non-revealing way, and immediately has a wank on the beach. It’s not as explicitly spelt out as some other weird sex bits in the book, but you’re not left in much doubt.
There’s some mad shit in Circe, done in the form of a play, set in a brothel, which features some British soldiers (British people have not changed in a hundred years) and also King Edward VII while we go very deep into Bloom’s weird sexual hangups. It’s difficult to follow exactly what’s going on, but that’s probably half the point.
There’s the penultimate chapter done in the form of a Q&A, which is far funnier than it sounds, before ending on probably the most famous bit, Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness which sets her up as really being just as perpetually horny as Leopold and ultimately, I guess, a good match.
I’ll come back at 48 and revisit my life choices.