There is a moment, late in Ulysses, when Bloom remembers the death of his father. The prose falters, folds in on itself, becomes breathless and bruised:
Death that is, Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth were trying to say it better.
That sentence, or what comes before and after it, is why I kept going.
I have finished Ulysses for the first time. There is no sense of mastery. Its difficulty is not remote; it is intimate and unrelenting in its closeness.
Parts are tedious. The “Oxen of the Sun” episode pushed me to the edge. And yet I read several pages admiring the prose without any real sense of what was happening. That was enough. There are depths and riddles I may never comprehend unaided. Still, Joyce has written the story of a man called Bloom.
Declan Kiberd suggests Joyce embedded devices into the prose to slow the reader down. Repetition, near-homophones, tangled syntax. He quotes: “When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…” The book resists speed. It asks not to be skimmed. Kiberd is also helpful in loosening the aura of sacredness around the text. He reminds us how uneven it is. Joyce, one imagines, would have laughed at the idea of “monumental perfection.”
Nabokov, in contrast, dismissed the Homeric scaffolding altogether, warning against reading the book as puzzle: “There is nothing more tedious than a protracted and sustained allegory based on a well-worn myth.” Yet even he conceded its greatness. The text need not be solved. It must be entered, walked through, sometimes backward.
Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me… Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts…
I read it slowly, uncertainly, over weeks. It is not a book to be understood; it is a book to live with. There are pages I will never revisit, and others I already have. Even the tedium, maybe especially the tedium, becomes part of its voice. The beauty does not rise above it; it emerges within it.
>You've inspired me. I've never managed to read Ulysses properly – the first attempt was a portuguese translation, can you imagine that? Or any other translation for that matter?So I just got a used copy of Portrait of the Artist at Skoob in London and I'm thinking of getting the Notes to Ulysses by Gifford as a companion to Claudia's Great Summer Enterprise.
>Claudia: How anyone but Joyce could translate this incredible book I cannot imagine. Where would a translator begin ?I'm pleased that I read A Portrait as preparation. Although I'm trying not to get too bogged down understanding every allusion, Gifford is useful from time to time for Joycean words that are not in the OED.It is a Summer Enterprise. To do this book justice will take a couple of months. There is no better way to spend that time though.