Does anyone read Ulysses today? That's what a friend asked a short while back, a rhetorical remark insisting, Oh god, no. Why would you waste your time? I was taken aback by the comment because I'd taught the novel regularly for decades. I often read the entire thing with students, in independent study, and parts of it in my course on the modern novel––those who were intrigued by the parts frequently asked if we could read the whole together.
Revisiting the work often has been part of my life, my experience and pedagogy, for some time. It's held a regular place, such that when I retired in 2018 I immediately began to miss it. Of course you can always read it alone, no problem, but reading Joyce's masterpiece with someone is the best way to enjoy it in my view––and it's meant to be enjoyed. Ruminated and savored conversationally. Reading it with others, or another, is the best way to learn from, be inspired by, and benefit from its offerings.
That's how I first set foot on that turf, communally; in a seminar at the University of Denver. It was a grad course of about a dozen challenged and slightly skittish twenty-somethings, sitting around a table––the advanced hype about the novel has that effect. We were armed with Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated, which had only been published a decade before, in 1974. Our guide, Professor Milton Feldman, had us read it twice, back to back, in the course of the semester. Like most people we were lost initially, though even the first reading came with a pay-off. If we wanted to run from it, and the course, we were also curious enough to plod on (to my memory no one actually did drop the course).
I remember Professor Feldman commenting to me, You're freaked out by the mess of it, aren't you? Who me? I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he read my mind, so I denied it, though in fact he was right on, because I preferred at the time the nineteenth century novel, going back to the epistolary and gothic, the romantic versions. Even when they get a little crazy, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, they still posit an ordered world, one in which chaos is presented as anomalous.
In Joyce's world chaos is the order of things, especially but not limited to psychic chaos; he was interested in cultural chaos just as much. Writing during the first world war he was aware, however tangentially in the novel, of shifts in the world order caused by weapons of mass destruction; bombs falling from the sky; trench warfare, all on a global scale. In an American parlance he knew we humans weren't in Kansas anymore. There was the double colonization of Britain and the Catholic Church, roiling the Irish, and Freud roiling received wisdom about the human psyche; not to mention Nietzsche roiling millenniums-old givens about history, culture, religion, and humans' hand in all three. Specifically history, culture, and religion as a burden, weighing us down. We created gods then subjected ourselves to them, in effect enslaving ourselves and each other. The question was how to get free of that burden.
All of that and much more is reflected in Ulysses. Perhaps it's Joyce's Nietzschean dimension that poses the greatest hope in the work. In the middle of an Irish culture freighted with doctrinal battles and the tussle of empire, in saunters Leopold Bloom, whose father was a Hungarian Jew who emigrated to Ireland and converted to the Church of Ireland, a protestant sect in a country dominated by catholics. In the novel we learn Bloom was raised in that culture but never let go of either his jewish or european roots; not does he escape that past in the minds of his acquaintances, who apart from Martin Cunningham see him as an other; an outsider.
The fact that Joyce chose a Jew as the hero of his magnum opus about christian Ireland speaks volumes about his rejection of christian religious and nationalistic orthodoxy, the trauma they've caused and would cause, including after the novel was published. That to Joyce Bloom is us, an everyman, a wanderer (the title references another famous wanderer in literature, not unlike Bloom), highlights the tenuous, unsettled nature of all our lives in the modern era, the programmatic mess of them.
Recently I started reading the book with a family member, and again I'm reminded how manifold, sprawling, funny, erudite, and expansive it is. How kind and reassuring. I'm struck by the way I've grown into it since that first grad course in 1984; I'm not only unfazed by the mess of it but see the Nietzschean logic behind it. I'm aware more than ever of the communal, even invitational nature of the work, the way it begs to be read with someone, preferably aloud, which we're doing, reading it aloud, from the first page to the last, together. We expect it to take about thirty-six hours, broken into sections.
Contrary to the dismissive nature of my friend, poohpoohing Joyce and his relevance, I think the work was never more topical than today, given the return to religious and nationalistic orthodoxy. The return to cultural chauvinism. Joyce couldn't have been more turned off by all of that, writing a century ago. He understood that world wars are the result. What he offers as a palliative is much more alluring, and indeed messy, democratic––and sane. He challenges us to stop with the border-obsessions already, to think broader, pan-culturally, a way that's not just geo-cultural but pan-special (as in beyond species). In a way Joyce was prophetic, though I'm sure he would have hated that word. After the lessons of two world wars we were getting there, in my view, until patriarchy, privilege, and everything that attends them reared again its ugly head. Reading Ulysses reminds not just how wrongheaded chauvinism is, of any kind, but that hope resides in rejecting it outright.
(Note: For anyone interested in reading or revisiting it I recommend the edition edited by Sam Slote and Marc Mamigonian, published by Alma Classics.)
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