Ulysses was Here

I’m reading James Joyce’s Ulysses as punishment for all my grammatical sins: split infinitives and ending prepositions. Actually, the reason I picked it up was because the Connemara north of Galway is referred to as Joyce country. Every other business there is owned by a Joyce. Of course James was from Dublin, and his family was from Cork, but I didn’t know that when I picked up the book.

I’ve heard Ulysses described as “… the greatest book no one’s ever read.” 

On one hand, I can understand why few people would read it. I’ve never liked stream of consciousness, and here I am confronted by that idiom in its highest form. I suppose that fact is its glory and downfall. Joyce is credited with perfecting that style of storytelling. Like much avant-garde literature, the text abandons many grammatical conventions like quote marks, and apparently according to the quirks of one of his principal characters, fails to finish many sentences, leaving thoughts dangling in mid-air.

I admit that he seems to capture the sights, smells and emotions of post-WWI Dublin, with its loosely obeyed but closely observed mores. I can find a certain attraction to the inner dialog of characters who precisely follow social conventions while deeply disparaging them in their private thoughts.

My problem with stream of consciousness and other modern fiction lies in my belief that writing is about storytelling. If the story is there, it ought to be accessible to the reader. Whatever voice the writer adopts ought to draw the reader into the story sufficiently that they feel at one with the characters. I can see how Joyce wants to do this. Capturing a person’s entire inner dialog has the potential to unite character and reader, but do we want to see all that on a page?

I take sleeping pills to escape from the voices in my head that Joyce records. I certainly feel no compulsion to share them with anyone else.

A quiz: Has anyone else read Ulysses? Does anyone actually like it? Does anyone actually understand it? 

I’ll stick with the Odyssey. It may have been written in verse, but at least I could follow the story.