James Joyce, Ulysses
I finished reading Ulysses last Friday, making this officially the longest time it has ever taken me to finish a single book. 32 days. (I know the exact date because I began reading it on June 16th, the day the book is set. In other words because I am incurably pretentious and ridiculous.)
There were two main surprises for me in this book; first, how difficult it is to keep up with. The style shifts so dramatically and so frequently that it is like reading a new book every 40 pages or so, so that you never have the sense of solid ground under you as you progress through the novel. It shifts from dialogue to monologue to catechism (fucking catechism!), and never lets you feel comfortable for a second. The only thing that carried me through was the second surprise for me, which was how relatable and everyday it’s concerns are. I was afraid when starting this that Joyce’s topics and concerns would fly far above my haed, that the book would be a thicket of philosophical ramblings I wouldn’t be able to make any headway through, but the wonderful thing is that it’s not. At all. Underneath the stylistic experiments and the superimposed mythological framework, it’s really just a book about an everyday kind of guy dealing with his life. And as I followed Leo Bloom through his day, I kept thinking of a quote from David Foster Wallace -
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
And Bloom really is a kind of heroic figure, in a way the modern age desperately needs, in that his trials are not monsters or opposing armies or villains, but rather the trials of navigating the waters of modern life without becoming bored or switching on auto-pilot. Bloom goes about his life in a sensitive and thoughtful way, and is constantly curious about the world around him. And he does sacrifice for the people around him, in “myriad petty, unsexy ways.” Everything I had read of Ulysses before reading it stresses what a marvel Joyce had achieved by recreating the daily life of the city of Dublin. But the real marvel is Bloom, or rather, Bloom’s consciousness of the city, and his life in it.
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