More Joyce Words

I’ve almost completed my Odyssey through James Joyce’s Ulysses. 

I’m a smart enough person, but I was baffled by the claim that the book is a retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey. I could occasionally catch glimpses of the original, but most of it was lost on me. 

I admit that it’s been a while since I read the original, almost fifty years, in fact. I read it for fun, as an adventure story when I was fourteen or fifteen. I do remember most of the story: leaving Troy, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, Cyclops, coming home to his wife and a house full of suitors.

I couldn’t see any of it. Over the period of twenty four hours, Leopold Bloom, the principal character, eats a kidney for breakfast, goes shopping, attends a funeral, bar hops, visits a bordello and eventually arrives back home with his friend Stephen Dedalus in tow. Cyclops? Nowhere in sight. Sirens? Maybe in the bordello, although all the singing takes place in a bar. Wife’s suitors? She is having an affair with Blazes Boylan, but he hardly fills the house with his presence, although both bloom and his wife have itemized her affairs by the last chapter.

If the other story is there, it’s buried so deep, only a literary critic could find it, and when she does, she’s welcome to it.

Ulysses is alleged to be one of the top ten masterpieces of English literature. I wonder what criteria were used to make that selection.

The book is wildly innovative, to the point of bizarre. I’ve seen stream-of-consciousness before and I don’t like it. The only story like that I’ve read and liked was Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne, and it wasn’t because of the writing style.

The middle of the book, which mostly takes place in the bordello, is written as a play script, complete with stage direction. During the course of this passage, characters transform in dress, appearance and gender to suit the thread of action. People and scenery appear and disappear Deus ex Machina, although in Joyce’s case, God creates more problems than he solves by his intervention. If the story had been written fifty years later, I would have assumed Joyce was on LSD at the time.

Joyce often gets lost in his own puns and word play. Stream-of-consciousness allows him gross violations of English grammar and sentence construction, an opportunity to which he frequently avails himself.

If I was constructing a list of great English literature, I would certainly include plenty of Shakespeare because he tells compelling, universal stories. I could include Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens, even though their language is colored by the conventions of their times. Mark Twain is on the top row. I might include Daphne du Maurier and certainly John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. Harper Lee would make my list. 

But James Joyce? No.

The others are all compelling storytellers. Humanity is almost defined by storytelling. Oral traditions passed across campfires for hundreds of generations form our myths and religious beliefs. Joyce’s telling of the Odyssey wouldn’t make it past breakfast. Most of his listeners would’ve been asleep before he finished the first chapter.

Sorry if I’m a heathen, a cretin, uninitiated into the finer points of modern literature. Virginia Woolf and Jack Kerouac will forever remain in the darkness beyond the glow of my library, where Joyce should have stayed.

In my view, there are many beautiful writers producing fiction today, but none of them are writing what I would call contemporary literature. That genre seems to be overpopulated with people who come off on the page as either totally demented or self-absorbed. Joyce would be in good company.

I understand that creativity is an endless quest for newness, hence the term “novel,” but novelty only works if the message works across the medium between writer and reader. Joyce, along with most of his modern kindred, seems to fail that test.

I don’t know what possessed me to pick him up in the first place.