I Listened to All 25 Hours of James Joyce's Ulysses and it Was Horrible



As a "literary person" (whatever that even means) the specter of James Joyce's Ulysses is always out there haunting you. You know you should read it. You know you need to read it. You've probably tried to read it, and failed. I myself have read the first four pages of Ulysses at least five times over the past 20 years, but always stopped because it's absolutely excruciating. And yet...

...it continued to loom like a gigantic boulder in my mind, casting a long shadow over my claim of being a "well-read" person and a lover of books and literature. I needed to climb to the top of that boulder, just to do it. Even if it was a slow and torturous process.

Well, instead of scaling the boulder the old fashioned way -- by reading the 800 page tome -- I took an escalator to the top...and it was still slow and torturous. Listening to James Joyce's Ulysses on audiobook took me 25 hours spread out over two months of my life. I listened to it in the car, at the gym, on walks, in bed, and everywhere else you can listen to an audiobook (which is pretty much everywhere)...and here's what I have to say:


  • This might be the most vomitously boring book I've ever read in my life. It's 800 pages long and takes place over two days. If you'd stopped me at any one point in the book and asked me: "What is happening to the main character right now?" I'd have said something like: "I think he's maybe in a store, or a bar, or somewhere, talking to someone, about Shakespeare, or religion, or Ireland, or sex or all four at the same time, or maybe that's just going on in his head. Not really sure."
  • James Joyce was extremely talented but I have no idea how this book got published in this form. He has the material for about eight novels in this book and I think he'd have done better to write eight novels with plots than one plotless 800 page book that is basically a stream of consciousness prose-poem that amounts to well-structured and extremely erudite word-vomit.
  • I love Modernism in literature, but Ulysses is Modernism taken to a ludicrous extreme. The reason I think people went goo-goo over this book is because: a.) James Joyce is a really, really good writer (read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man) and he was so popular that whatever he did would have been lauded, and b.) People were just amazed someone could sit still long enough and be crazy enough to write an 800 page book that takes place over 48 hours. This book would never, ever get published today, precisely because James Joyce published Ulysses. Furthermore, I blame James Joyce for causing three subsequent generations of writers to believe that "literature" equals "well-written but without a plot."
  • I'd be lying if I didn't say there were times when I thought to myself that Ulysses is indeed an incredible literary achievement...but it's just so damned long that those thoughts quickly get trundled under the weight of the sheer confusion and boredom one experiences when one subjects oneself to this book. 
  • I am done reading books because I feel like I "have to." School is out, my friends. I'm in the real world now. I'm a working man trying to pay my bills and get ahead. I don't have any more time to beat my head against a wall trying to unpack great works of literature that take months and months of time. Call me uneducated? Fine. That's not for me. Now I just want to read for pleasure, read in the genres I'm writing in, and read for education in subjects I'm interested in. I'm no longer reading literature because I think somehow it scores me "points" on some imaginary score sheet. Ain't nobody got time for that.
  • Ulysses was not meant to be listened to on audiobook. I firmly believe this. It was meant to be read. In this way, I did myself and (I think) the book itself a disservice by listening to it rather than reading it. Oh well. It's over now...
Having said all this, I can't even conclusively say that I'm done with Ulysses. I may never try and read it or listen to it again (and certainly not end-to-end). But it will always loom on the horizon of my mind like some kind of literary Great Pyramid: a monstrous and immovable mystery. How did James Joyce write and why? What tools did he use? What was he trying to accomplish? And for God's sake what does it mean? These are worthwhile questions, even if the work itself seems outdated and excessive. 

Comments

Mark Cecil said…
The title of this post made me laugh out loud. Yeah. This book isn’t so much about expression and so little about communication. As a dear friend Said once about another book... “this book is so clever, it clearly doesn’t need ME to read it,”
Grant Catton said…
He was a literary writer, he was not out to write his generation's version of The Da Vinci Code. True enough. I just wonder where the line comes between expression and accessibility, and I think he overstepped that line by a few hundred miles.

Popular Posts