6 ms·

James Joyce's "Ulysses": Why you should read this book

81 points by pclark 14y ago

gruseom 14y ago
Does he actually give any reason why one should read Ulysses? I didn't see any. [Silly bit deleted here.] But I think the problem is deeper really. If you have to make an argument about why the humanities have value beyond pure entertainment (which is really what "why you should read Ulysses" boils down to), you've already lost the war, so why bother fighting the battle? I go back and forth on this. Sometimes I think that our civilization has taken a major wrong turn in believing only in the technical and eschewing the great shared traditions. Other times I remember that the percentage of humanity who cared about this stuff was always very small. But let's hear from people who've read Ulysses. For those of us who haven't: why should we?
- vhf 14y ago
  Keep in mind you're posting this to a site where most people, or at least the most vocal people, don't think the arts and letters have much value and think that pure technocracy would be a fine thing. I won't argue further, but it's neither my vision of most people here, nor the vision I have of most vocal people here. And I really hope I'm not mistaken. :)
  - gruseom 14y ago
    You know, you're right. I'm too sensitive on this point. Also, I see I did that annoying thing where someone makes an untrue generalization about HN and inadvertently (or advertently, as the case may be) changes the subject. I'm going to edit that out.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    I'm not sure of the precise representation on HN, but I would say that statement is consistent with the modal line of thought in my engineering school.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      At my engineering school, I took a whole quarter long class on Joyce, the vast bulk of which was focused on Ulysses. We did a chapter a week as I recall, with the last week focused on the first page of Finnegan's wake. Well, the first couple paragraphs, really. So there's some of us out there, even in the engineering schools.
- ams6110 14y ago
  Other times I remember that the percentage of humanity who cared about this stuff was always very small. Yep, most people are too busy surviving.
- Tycho 14y ago
  His reasons were that 1. it's like Shakespeare in its engagement of both the high brow and low brow of human psychology, 2. it's good for the digital age where we can hyperlink text and bring things like annotations and intertextuality to the forefront (previously the mainstay of literature departments where people had the time to study such things) It would make a good iPad app actually. Btw, I think you'll find there's lots of people on Hacker News quite willing to entertain a discussion about something like Ulysses. It's a diverse community.
  - gruseom 14y ago
    But those aren't reasons. The first is a non sequitur on top of an appeal to authority: Shakespeare did X, Joyce does X, Shakespeare is good so Joyce must be good. The second is beside the point; a book that isn't worth reading isn't more worth reading on an iPad! (Reminds me of Chesterton's quip: if a job is worth doing it's worth doing badly.) The closest he comes to saying why Ulysses is worth reading is that it is a "great psychological novel" and that just begs the question. By the way, I recognize the phenomenon as a former grad student in (Russian) literature: when you're immersed in something, it can be hard to articulate its value to outsiders. You keep pointing to things that you take for granted, but others don't.
    - Tycho 14y ago
      Well I think it's implicit that one of the things he thinks makes Shakespeare great is this engagement of 'poetry and patter' and he thinks Joyce also does this. It's not really an appeal to authority to say 'if you like Shakespeare, you'll this...'; and also implicit that the book is widely understood to be good, just difficult/inaccessible (but the digital age can solve that problem. Like, if ever there was a good time to read Ulysses, it's now).
  - scarmig 14y ago
    Someone was working on a hypermedia version of Ulysses a couple years back. Unfortunately, copyright issues and the Joyce estate killed the project.
- Muzza 14y ago
  > Keep in mind you're posting this to a site where most people, or at least the most vocal people, don't think the arts and letters have much value and think that pure technocracy is a fine thing. Please. There is a difference between criticizing what passes for art these days[1] and believing that arts don't have value. [1] E.g. going around switching prices on items in a grocery store, or acting mentally disturbed in public in order to get committed to a mental institution (both of those where graduation projects at Konstfack in Stockholm).
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- ryanmolden 14y ago
  I haven't (read Ulysses) so hopefully I am not hijacking the conversation, but your comment on why, beyond pure entertainment prompted me. I rarely get the chance to trot out one of my favorite Twain quotes, but now is the time: The classics are the books which everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read. In my experience a big part of "the classics" seem to be using them as some kind of gamer achievement to prove your erudition. An argument can be made for them leading to a wider world view or exposure to thought provoking/timeless concepts, but I don't think enough people truly read them at that depth/for that reason. I like to read and have a reasonably broad library, but I find it tiresome to discuss literature with a lot of people as I don't have a formal education in the space and most people that want to chat about it snicker if you say you first encountered Boethius in A Confederacy of Dunces or that you prefer Candide to The Metamorphosis or you like One, No One and One Hundred Thousand over, say, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
- thyrsus 14y ago
  The idea Ulysses reinforced in me is that anything, from shaving in the morning to looking for a place to relieve oneself, if perceived properly, is beautiful, or funny, or tragic. It becomes significant to the extent we consider it. Or, humorously: https://xkcd.com/915/ https://xkcd.com/915/ Perhaps I was peculiarly ready to read the book because of my Catholic intellectual family, and an education that included reading Edith Hamilton and a reasonable translation of the Odyssey. When I was nine, I learned to love challenging language and imagining alien culture as I devoured the complete Sherlock Holmes. I'm sure Ulysses contains many allusions I missed entirely, but perhaps not too much. I read much more slowly than some smart folks I know, but part of that is hearing the sound of the words in my head while I imagine what perceptions and beliefs the speaker is responding to (which will never be exactly the reality in which they are fictitiously or actually embeded).
Tycho 14y ago
I enjoyed Ulysses, but only after the first 100 pages. Not sure if this was because the first 100 was lower quality, or if it just took me that long to 'acclimatise' to what Joyce was doing. What I recall not liking was having no idea what was going on. In a given scene I wouldn't be sure where the characters were, how many were there... even who the characters were. Somewhat like looking at one of those Picasso paintings where you recognise a few fragments of familiar objects but the overall picture is just confusion. I'm tempted to re-read it to see if those things make sense now. Maybe back then I wasn't able to keep track of the abstractness.
- gruseom 14y ago
  It may well have been a question of acclimatization. That's a great way of putting it, by the way. I find this is often the case with any great work that is remote from where one is, whether in time or culturally or aesthetically. One must be willing to put in an initial good faith investment to "fund" the effort of reading it, with the expectation of profit later. Usually it begins to pay off before too long. Sometimes it never does. Here's an interesting question. Among books that one has truly appreciated (i.e. excluding total writeoffs), which took the longest time before you broke even?
  - frozenport 14y ago
    In Faulkner's Sound and The Fury, the first 100 pages are the disjointed mental images. For example, yelling at a golfcourse will trigger paragraphs of memories about his sister Caddy. In contrast to Ulysses we are only given aleatory images for the first 100 pages. I sometimes feel that the work was compromised with such a modernist artifice.
vhf 14y ago
"Ulysses" is fun—maybe the best book you take to the beach this summer. Well, Ulysses is indeed a great read, but certainly not one I'd take to the beach. It's far from an easy read, I would not advise anyone to read it in a place where distraction is so easy. And Ulysses is fun iff you enjoy litterature, just as Godard's movies are fun iff you enjoy experimental movies. I do enjoy both, but I would not say "it's fun" to anybody. Just like saying "debugging embedded assembly is fun". Could be fun for you, but not so fun for the majority of people.
jackfoxy 14y ago
It took Joyce seven years to write Ulysses at a page per day. It's not an easy read. It is a great book. On the other hand Ken Kesey wrote Sometimes a Great Notion in three months, and to my mind it compares favorably to Ulysses in many ways. It is also a great, though overlooked, novel.
Joeri 14y ago
I've tried to read it two times already, and never got past page 100 out of utter boredom. I will try one more time, but some books are not for everyone.
- colmmacc 14y ago
  I grew up in Dublin, and lived in Chapelizod - close to where Joyce did - and always felt a weak pressure to read Ulysses. It's talked about so much it almost becomes a nuisance not to have read it. Like you, I could never get past a few chapters ... but it all clicked for me when I read the final chapter first. The final chapter is very readable, very fun, and very risque ... and to me it was a surprising read, it's not what I expected at all from an Edwardian Dubliner. Having read the final chapter, I was much more motivated to read the rest ... I wanted to read more of what this writer was up to.
- coffeeaddicted 14y ago
  I got approximately to the middle, but I'm still wondering if I should have tried the original instead of buying a german translation (it's my mother language). Maybe all the enjoyable parts got lost in translation? The part where I gave up was a chapter written with such a heavy dialect that reading each sentence started getting a chore.
jseliger 14y ago
"Ulysses" is perhaps the most written about book ever after the Bible, which should tell you something. It's definitely a better read. Sláinte! The writer is also missing something important: it's virtually impossible for a normal person, or even an abnormal person, to read Ulysses without a guide to the book that describes its allusions and what's going on. If you're trying to read Ulysses without the superstructure of a guidebook or guidebooks, or a class, you're almost certainly going to fail, because very little of it, taken as a free-standing narrative, makes any sense. This is doubly true for those without an in-depth understanding of Irish history and religious practices / cultures. I read Ulysses in a grad seminar, one or two episodes per week. Without that guidance, I don't think I would've finished. Or could have, in any meaningful sense of the word. Ulysses seems like it was written to be written about, or to be treated like a puzzle, more than to be read like a novel. Some people obviously enjoy this sort of thing. I don't think I'm one.
- madrona 14y ago
  When I went on a foreign exchange trip to China in HS, I brought along a bunch of coursework for my other classes back home. Of all the books I chose to write a report about, I chose Ulysses, because of its critical reception. Once I arrived in China I cracked open the book for the first time, and the nightmare began. I searched in vain for any English-language bookstore I could find in the hopes of replacing Ulysses with something more... comprehensible. Writing that report was more painful than wisdom teeth extraction.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    How long ago was this? I can imagine the experience wouldn't be nearly as painful with internet access.
    - madrona 14y ago
      1997
      - w1ntermute 14y ago
scarmig 14y ago
Literature has intrinsic value. Good literature has more intrinsic value than bad literature. Ulysses is even better than typical good literature. That's all the justification it needs. If you disagree with the first premise, you shouldn't read it. Being well-read and cultured is dying as a signifier of cultural superiority or as a topic of social conversation, so those utilitarian purposes really don't hold. But if you appreciate the intrinsic value of writing, then Ulysses is one book worth reading. Why over other books? It's a very textured, complicated book: figuring it out is great if you enjoy puzzles, and it's deep enough to survive multiple readings. (Just read it once, and it was great, but it's definitely not a quick beach read.)
yaks_hairbrush 14y ago
Here's a take on Ulysses written by a former math professor of mine. http://www.dougshaw.com/Reviews/review1.html http://www.dougshaw.com/Reviews/review1.html I've not read Ulysses myself, having disliked Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
- gruseom 14y ago
  I disliked the Portrait as well. But loved Dubliners.
rabbitonrails 14y ago
I read Ulysses 3 years ago. After initial skepticism, I discovered that it is truly a great work of literature. One example that impressed me was the chapter Wandering Rocks, where Joyce implements a virtual Dublin that operates like a massive, clockwork simulation tracked over one hour -- he follows many different events and points of view as the characters walk through the city, experiencing events in accurate time that ripple across their perspectives (e.g. a clock chiming heard by 10 different people at different times and intensities according to their distances from the clock, echoes from the walls of surrounding buildings, and the speed of sound -- all mapped to Joyce's deep knowledge of Dublin's geography). Ulysses requires a lot of work and time to understand. I would like to recommend the following to anyone who wants to read it: 1. Give yourself about 6 months. 2. Do not read the text at first go. Instead, listen to the excellent audio recording. http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Naxos-AudioBooks-Joyce-James/dp/9626343095 http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Naxos-AudioBooks-Joyce-James/d... James Joyce was a lyricist and singer and incorporated many auditory elements into his wordplay. Many voices interact in this work, forming a weave that can be baffling on the page but which acquires a certain harmony read aloud. I would even suggest that much in the way rap musicians take utter (often ridiculous) liberty with the English language, creating works incomprehensible on page but that can be understood in the context of song, Joyce experimented with language-as-lyric. Joyce was known for waking up his wife by laughing out loud as he was writing this work -- he found the wordplay ridiculous and hilarious -- so don't approach it with the severity of a religious text. 3. Do not worry if you get lost or zone out. Just keep going and review or re-read later. If you try to understand everything you will never finish and become discouraged. 4. While you are listening to Ulysses, read Vladimir Nabokov's Harvard lectures on Ulysses. http://books.google.com/books/about/Lectures_on_Literature.html?id=jP5-XRoUVBgC http://books.google.com/books/about/Lectures_on_Literature.h... This is a wonderful chapter-by-chapter companion that will make sense of the chaos. 5. If you want a warm up, read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Mithrandir 14y ago
While we're on the subject of modernist literature, I would suggest taking a look at In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. It's quite a bit longer than Ulysses, at about 1.5 million words, but I find it really fascinating. The flow of his words, to me, seems almost musical. However, I'd like to also point out that you shouldn't read ISoLT or Ulysses or any other book for that matter, just for the sake of saying that you were able to read it. I think that you lose the depth, the meaning of the words when you read to "show off". You "read" the book, the words flowed into your brain, but did you really understand what the author said? Unfortunately, I think modernist literature is often susceptible to "half readers", where people start the book, but never finish it. Modernist style can seem pretty alien to some people (Background, as jseliger pointed out, is also important to understanding the "meaning".) As Wikipedia puts it: >"For the first-time reader, modernist writing can seem frustrating to understand because of the use of a fragmented style and a lack of conciseness. Furthermore the plot, characters and themes of the text are not always presented in a linear way. The goal of modernist literature is also not particularly focused on catering to one particular audience in a formal way. In addition modernist literature often forcefully opposes, or gives an alternative opinion, on a social concept."
- stan_rogers 14y ago
  Just a note: you're more likely to find an English-language version of À la recherche du temps perdu titled Remembrance of Things Past rather than In Search of Lost Time.
  - Mithrandir 14y ago
    Yes, the title "In Search of Lost Time" became popular when D.J. Enright revised the previous English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, which were titled Remembrance of Things Past. ("Remembrance of Things Past" came from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, "In Search of Lost Time" being a literal translation of the original French title.) Pretty much all the English translations are based off of Moncrieff's work. There's also a new re-translation being done by Penguin; only the first four are out, the rest are supposed to be out in 2018(?). I think the delay is due to some of the volumes being under copyright still.
robocat 14y ago
The book is out of copyright now, so is available on Project Gutenburg in a variety of file formats. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300
diiq 14y ago
For me, the moment that transformed the book from a chore to a delight was the moment I realized it was funny. I was allowed to laugh, but I was also allowed to miss jokes, miss references. There are so many, that if one flies over your head, then next one will fly straight into your open mouth. The Rise of The New Bloomusalem is hysterically funny. I could never have made it through, if it were merely an intellectual exercise. It's a slapstick, pun-filled, over-the-top festival. There are songs, and dances, and plays, and fights, and sex (maybe), and proofs by algebra that Hamlet was Shakespeare's grandfather, or vice versa... IT'S FUNNY.
- wisty 14y ago
  Postmodernism - funny writers being studied by people with either no sense of humor, or a very mean-spirited one. (Oh wait, it's HN). What I mean, in long form: Postmodernist works (e.g. Catch 22) are often hilarious. The hallmarks of postmodernism (references, subverting memes, subverting conventions, subverting everything, breaking the fourth wall) are the kind of thing you see more in British comedy than "serious" literature. Postmodernist writers either miss the jokes completely, or kill them with overanalysis. I am postulating that either the academics we call "postmodernist" don't actually get the jokes, or are very wryly re-telling them with a straight face, then secretly laughing at the people who don't realise it's all a joke (which I consider mean-spirited).
  - diiq 14y ago
    I subscribe to Danto's 'post-historical' description of PoMo (though it's fallen somewhat out of favor). He claims that, with the end of modernism came the end of rules and sweeping movements -- it was no longer possible to distinguish, on physical examination, between art and non-art. So everyone started making art in ten thousand different ways. By that measure, all writers writing today are, technically, postmodern; but even among those writers who are writing difficult, academic, contemporary literature, there are stuffy pompous ones and funny snarky ones and everything in between. It's hard to think of it, because we don't consider the books we like as literature. Vonnegut, certainly by Timequake, is deeply postmodern. Murakami undoubtedly is, and is often very funny; Jasper Fforde tickles; hell, a very strong case could be made for Douglas Adams as a leading Postmodern humourist.
cooop 14y ago
I'd be interested to hear what novels others think should be read and why...
jonnathanson 14y ago
I find that Ulysses is a completely different book every time I read it. Perhaps that's because I'm under the influence of whatever analysis, essay, or bit of commentary I happen to have read about it, or class I happen to be taking, just before diving in. Or perhaps it's because I've been in a different life stage, or state of mind, each time. But honestly, if I weren't a strict unbeliever in the supernatural, I'd swear that Joyce hastily rewrites the book, from beyond the grave, each time I open it up. I know of no other book that has this effect on me.
sophiabatka464 14y ago
nice movie http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/09/john-carter-720p-bluray-free-download/ http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/09/john-carter-720p-bluray-f...
bdr 14y ago
Check out joyceimages.com for Ulysses "illustrations". We use images from the time the book is set in. Some of them are of a specific person or place that's mentioned, while others just demonstrate the mood of a line.
rabidsnail 14y ago
> Are we really too busy for one of history's great psychological novels? Yes.
Tloewald 14y ago
Having read the article, I downloaded Ulysses, which I have bounced off before, and tried again. Nope, still not my idea of fun. Tolstoy is not my idea of fun either, but more fun than this. Of all my friends, the only one who has read Ulysses (and claims to adore it) cannot articulate its virtues. He also loves Umberto Ecco -- I suppose for similar reasons. I just don't see the point. I love how when writer who knows a huge amount of obscure crap and wraps contorted references to it into an unreadable mess is considered some kind of genius of erudition if the obscure crap involves, say, dead languages, religion and literature, but if it were dungeons and dragons and Harry potter it would be considered at best pop culture pastiche and at worst pathetic.
- jseliger 14y ago
  >I just don't see the point. That's in part because Joyce had synthesized the previous couple hundred years of literary history and the movements within literature, and he very consciously wanted to do something very different from what had been done before (he also wasn't interested much in what readers of conventional novels would think). If you don't have a lot of context regarding, say, literature from Paradise Lost and Shakespeare to 1921, you're going to find the point very hard to see. If you do, then the novel can be sublime. Joyce was writing during the time we now call Modernism, and the Modernists really broke the link between popular and critical success / pleasure, and we've been living with the results, as a culture, ever since. If you're curious about these issues, Peter Gay's Modernism is a decent place to start.
  - Tloewald 14y ago
    So you're saying that I do see the point. Excellent, I can move on.
bigthingnext 14y ago
"Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailerand Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer."
joycer 14y ago
It is my belief that Ulysses is the one true novel. All other novels are attempts to achieve what Joyce accomplished. A sort of Platonic Ideal. My reasoning is the evidence, meaning the reason it is the one true novel is because I believe a novel is: the act of attempting to fully represent an individual's experience; If you disagree with my definition of novelisation, that's fine, but it is how I classify novels, and in so much Joyce achieves the nearest perfection of this through the novels seeming opaque or random nature. One's experience is a cloud of infinite affects and effects that one could attempt to catalogue, but would fail miserably. Here is exactly what Joyce achieved. Through Ulysses' failures it achieves perfection. Like Dali's belief that all things are latent with hidden meanings, or how if you hate Warhol because you think his work is crap then you should recognise that you actually love his work because his message was to show you that all mass manufacture is simply the production of crap. It is more than What?, it is Why?. Finnegan's Wake is an even a better example of this belief in practice, but it throws out the rules which unjustly garners it ire. Ulysses plays by the rules, that is grammar`dictionary`genre, and that is why I believe it is held in higher regard. tl;dr : if you think Ulysses is difficult to read and incomprehensible, you are reading it correctly. Read it without guides, they dismantle the work's truth.
josephjrobison 14y ago
I've been reading it off an on for about a year and a half. I'm halfway through right now. At times it is extremely captivating and pretty funny, then the next chapter I'll get completely lost. I'm only using Sparknotes as a guide, which is probably my first mistake.
abolibibelot 14y ago
Nabokov, which incidently is one of the too-impressive great writers mentioned in the comments, beside writing some of the best novels ever, taught literature for years in Cornell. I cannot recommend enough his "Lectures on literature". His take on literature is not post-modern at all (he was not too fond of surrealism and he loved Joyce for his style and not his devices). In one of these lectures, the famous "Good readers and good writers" (http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.html http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.htm...) he said that "There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three — storyteller, teacher, enchanter" (Nabokov himself strongly leans to the latter...) I will quote the end of this short lecture, as an answer (a very Nabokovian answer) to that nagging and essentially unimportant question: what makes a great novel? "It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass." Yes, Ulysses is a precise work, full of riddles and references. Having an annotated edition may give you good grades, or give you insights on the making of the novel, but the device used are not that important - what makes it exhilarating is the joy of the language, the way it sings uniquely, and the way this song builds or subsums the world. That's my take on what Nabokov meant when he said a great writer is an enchanter. Nabokov's "Ada or Ardor" is an enchantment, as a whole and fractally, down to each single sentence, to each single word. Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu" is an enchantment, a very long river of neverending sentences. Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" is the work of a mean and sarcastic enchanter who uses rythm as a weapon. Just as reading Joyce makes you speak in his special brand of English (or if you venture into Finnegans Wake, his special brand of Gibberish), reading Proust, Flaubert or Nabokov (or Céline or Pynchon) infects you with what they've made of their language to suit the needs of their work.
lec 14y ago
A good first read of Ulysses can be done via the librivox version of this book. At first blush the beginning chapters seem amateurishly read, however you soon realize that this was done on purpose in keeping with the tone of the work. Once you are in on the joke, you can see how this haphazard narrative adds to the experience.

81 points by pclark 14y ago

Does he actually give any reason why one should read Ulysses? I didn't see any. [Silly bit deleted here.] But I think the problem is deeper really. If you have to make an argument about why the humanities have value beyond pure entertainment (which is really what "why you should read Ulysses" boils down to), you've already lost the war, so why bother fighting the battle? I go back and forth on this. Sometimes I think that our civilization has taken a major wrong turn in believing only in the technical and eschewing the great shared traditions. Other times I remember that the percentage of humanity who cared about this stuff was always very small. But let's hear from people who've read Ulysses. For those of us who haven't: why should we?

vhf 14y ago
Keep in mind you're posting this to a site where most people, or at least the most vocal people, don't think the arts and letters have much value and think that pure technocracy would be a fine thing. I won't argue further, but it's neither my vision of most people here, nor the vision I have of most vocal people here. And I really hope I'm not mistaken. :)
- gruseom 14y ago
  You know, you're right. I'm too sensitive on this point. Also, I see I did that annoying thing where someone makes an untrue generalization about HN and inadvertently (or advertently, as the case may be) changes the subject. I'm going to edit that out.
- rayiner 14y ago
  I'm not sure of the precise representation on HN, but I would say that statement is consistent with the modal line of thought in my engineering school.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    At my engineering school, I took a whole quarter long class on Joyce, the vast bulk of which was focused on Ulysses. We did a chapter a week as I recall, with the last week focused on the first page of Finnegan's wake. Well, the first couple paragraphs, really. So there's some of us out there, even in the engineering schools.
ams6110 14y ago
Other times I remember that the percentage of humanity who cared about this stuff was always very small. Yep, most people are too busy surviving.
Tycho 14y ago
His reasons were that 1. it's like Shakespeare in its engagement of both the high brow and low brow of human psychology, 2. it's good for the digital age where we can hyperlink text and bring things like annotations and intertextuality to the forefront (previously the mainstay of literature departments where people had the time to study such things) It would make a good iPad app actually. Btw, I think you'll find there's lots of people on Hacker News quite willing to entertain a discussion about something like Ulysses. It's a diverse community.
- gruseom 14y ago
  But those aren't reasons. The first is a non sequitur on top of an appeal to authority: Shakespeare did X, Joyce does X, Shakespeare is good so Joyce must be good. The second is beside the point; a book that isn't worth reading isn't more worth reading on an iPad! (Reminds me of Chesterton's quip: if a job is worth doing it's worth doing badly.) The closest he comes to saying why Ulysses is worth reading is that it is a "great psychological novel" and that just begs the question. By the way, I recognize the phenomenon as a former grad student in (Russian) literature: when you're immersed in something, it can be hard to articulate its value to outsiders. You keep pointing to things that you take for granted, but others don't.
  - Tycho 14y ago
    Well I think it's implicit that one of the things he thinks makes Shakespeare great is this engagement of 'poetry and patter' and he thinks Joyce also does this. It's not really an appeal to authority to say 'if you like Shakespeare, you'll this...'; and also implicit that the book is widely understood to be good, just difficult/inaccessible (but the digital age can solve that problem. Like, if ever there was a good time to read Ulysses, it's now).
- scarmig 14y ago
  Someone was working on a hypermedia version of Ulysses a couple years back. Unfortunately, copyright issues and the Joyce estate killed the project.
Muzza 14y ago
> Keep in mind you're posting this to a site where most people, or at least the most vocal people, don't think the arts and letters have much value and think that pure technocracy is a fine thing. Please. There is a difference between criticizing what passes for art these days[1] and believing that arts don't have value. [1] E.g. going around switching prices on items in a grocery store, or acting mentally disturbed in public in order to get committed to a mental institution (both of those where graduation projects at Konstfack in Stockholm).
deleted 14y ago
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ryanmolden 14y ago
I haven't (read Ulysses) so hopefully I am not hijacking the conversation, but your comment on why, beyond pure entertainment prompted me. I rarely get the chance to trot out one of my favorite Twain quotes, but now is the time: The classics are the books which everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read. In my experience a big part of "the classics" seem to be using them as some kind of gamer achievement to prove your erudition. An argument can be made for them leading to a wider world view or exposure to thought provoking/timeless concepts, but I don't think enough people truly read them at that depth/for that reason. I like to read and have a reasonably broad library, but I find it tiresome to discuss literature with a lot of people as I don't have a formal education in the space and most people that want to chat about it snicker if you say you first encountered Boethius in A Confederacy of Dunces or that you prefer Candide to The Metamorphosis or you like One, No One and One Hundred Thousand over, say, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
thyrsus 14y ago
The idea Ulysses reinforced in me is that anything, from shaving in the morning to looking for a place to relieve oneself, if perceived properly, is beautiful, or funny, or tragic. It becomes significant to the extent we consider it. Or, humorously: https://xkcd.com/915/ https://xkcd.com/915/ Perhaps I was peculiarly ready to read the book because of my Catholic intellectual family, and an education that included reading Edith Hamilton and a reasonable translation of the Odyssey. When I was nine, I learned to love challenging language and imagining alien culture as I devoured the complete Sherlock Holmes. I'm sure Ulysses contains many allusions I missed entirely, but perhaps not too much. I read much more slowly than some smart folks I know, but part of that is hearing the sound of the words in my head while I imagine what perceptions and beliefs the speaker is responding to (which will never be exactly the reality in which they are fictitiously or actually embeded).

Tycho 14y ago

I enjoyed Ulysses, but only after the first 100 pages. Not sure if this was because the first 100 was lower quality, or if it just took me that long to 'acclimatise' to what Joyce was doing. What I recall not liking was having no idea what was going on. In a given scene I wouldn't be sure where the characters were, how many were there... even who the characters were. Somewhat like looking at one of those Picasso paintings where you recognise a few fragments of familiar objects but the overall picture is just confusion. I'm tempted to re-read it to see if those things make sense now. Maybe back then I wasn't able to keep track of the abstractness.

gruseom 14y ago
It may well have been a question of acclimatization. That's a great way of putting it, by the way. I find this is often the case with any great work that is remote from where one is, whether in time or culturally or aesthetically. One must be willing to put in an initial good faith investment to "fund" the effort of reading it, with the expectation of profit later. Usually it begins to pay off before too long. Sometimes it never does. Here's an interesting question. Among books that one has truly appreciated (i.e. excluding total writeoffs), which took the longest time before you broke even?
- frozenport 14y ago
  In Faulkner's Sound and The Fury, the first 100 pages are the disjointed mental images. For example, yelling at a golfcourse will trigger paragraphs of memories about his sister Caddy. In contrast to Ulysses we are only given aleatory images for the first 100 pages. I sometimes feel that the work was compromised with such a modernist artifice.

vhf 14y ago

"Ulysses" is fun—maybe the best book you take to the beach this summer. Well, Ulysses is indeed a great read, but certainly not one I'd take to the beach. It's far from an easy read, I would not advise anyone to read it in a place where distraction is so easy. And Ulysses is fun iff you enjoy litterature, just as Godard's movies are fun iff you enjoy experimental movies. I do enjoy both, but I would not say "it's fun" to anybody. Just like saying "debugging embedded assembly is fun". Could be fun for you, but not so fun for the majority of people.

jackfoxy 14y ago

It took Joyce seven years to write Ulysses at a page per day. It's not an easy read. It is a great book. On the other hand Ken Kesey wrote Sometimes a Great Notion in three months, and to my mind it compares favorably to Ulysses in many ways. It is also a great, though overlooked, novel.

Joeri 14y ago

I've tried to read it two times already, and never got past page 100 out of utter boredom. I will try one more time, but some books are not for everyone.

colmmacc 14y ago
I grew up in Dublin, and lived in Chapelizod - close to where Joyce did - and always felt a weak pressure to read Ulysses. It's talked about so much it almost becomes a nuisance not to have read it. Like you, I could never get past a few chapters ... but it all clicked for me when I read the final chapter first. The final chapter is very readable, very fun, and very risque ... and to me it was a surprising read, it's not what I expected at all from an Edwardian Dubliner. Having read the final chapter, I was much more motivated to read the rest ... I wanted to read more of what this writer was up to.
coffeeaddicted 14y ago
I got approximately to the middle, but I'm still wondering if I should have tried the original instead of buying a german translation (it's my mother language). Maybe all the enjoyable parts got lost in translation? The part where I gave up was a chapter written with such a heavy dialect that reading each sentence started getting a chore.

jseliger 14y ago

"Ulysses" is perhaps the most written about book ever after the Bible, which should tell you something. It's definitely a better read. Sláinte! The writer is also missing something important: it's virtually impossible for a normal person, or even an abnormal person, to read Ulysses without a guide to the book that describes its allusions and what's going on. If you're trying to read Ulysses without the superstructure of a guidebook or guidebooks, or a class, you're almost certainly going to fail, because very little of it, taken as a free-standing narrative, makes any sense. This is doubly true for those without an in-depth understanding of Irish history and religious practices / cultures. I read Ulysses in a grad seminar, one or two episodes per week. Without that guidance, I don't think I would've finished. Or could have, in any meaningful sense of the word. Ulysses seems like it was written to be written about, or to be treated like a puzzle, more than to be read like a novel. Some people obviously enjoy this sort of thing. I don't think I'm one.

madrona 14y ago
When I went on a foreign exchange trip to China in HS, I brought along a bunch of coursework for my other classes back home. Of all the books I chose to write a report about, I chose Ulysses, because of its critical reception. Once I arrived in China I cracked open the book for the first time, and the nightmare began. I searched in vain for any English-language bookstore I could find in the hopes of replacing Ulysses with something more... comprehensible. Writing that report was more painful than wisdom teeth extraction.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  How long ago was this? I can imagine the experience wouldn't be nearly as painful with internet access.
  - madrona 14y ago
    1997
    - w1ntermute 14y ago

scarmig 14y ago

Literature has intrinsic value. Good literature has more intrinsic value than bad literature. Ulysses is even better than typical good literature. That's all the justification it needs. If you disagree with the first premise, you shouldn't read it. Being well-read and cultured is dying as a signifier of cultural superiority or as a topic of social conversation, so those utilitarian purposes really don't hold. But if you appreciate the intrinsic value of writing, then Ulysses is one book worth reading. Why over other books? It's a very textured, complicated book: figuring it out is great if you enjoy puzzles, and it's deep enough to survive multiple readings. (Just read it once, and it was great, but it's definitely not a quick beach read.)

yaks_hairbrush 14y ago

Here's a take on Ulysses written by a former math professor of mine. http://www.dougshaw.com/Reviews/review1.html http://www.dougshaw.com/Reviews/review1.html I've not read Ulysses myself, having disliked Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

gruseom 14y ago
I disliked the Portrait as well. But loved Dubliners.

rabbitonrails 14y ago

I read Ulysses 3 years ago. After initial skepticism, I discovered that it is truly a great work of literature. One example that impressed me was the chapter Wandering Rocks, where Joyce implements a virtual Dublin that operates like a massive, clockwork simulation tracked over one hour -- he follows many different events and points of view as the characters walk through the city, experiencing events in accurate time that ripple across their perspectives (e.g. a clock chiming heard by 10 different people at different times and intensities according to their distances from the clock, echoes from the walls of surrounding buildings, and the speed of sound -- all mapped to Joyce's deep knowledge of Dublin's geography). Ulysses requires a lot of work and time to understand. I would like to recommend the following to anyone who wants to read it: 1. Give yourself about 6 months. 2. Do not read the text at first go. Instead, listen to the excellent audio recording. http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Naxos-AudioBooks-Joyce-James/dp/9626343095 http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Naxos-AudioBooks-Joyce-James/d... James Joyce was a lyricist and singer and incorporated many auditory elements into his wordplay. Many voices interact in this work, forming a weave that can be baffling on the page but which acquires a certain harmony read aloud. I would even suggest that much in the way rap musicians take utter (often ridiculous) liberty with the English language, creating works incomprehensible on page but that can be understood in the context of song, Joyce experimented with language-as-lyric. Joyce was known for waking up his wife by laughing out loud as he was writing this work -- he found the wordplay ridiculous and hilarious -- so don't approach it with the severity of a religious text. 3. Do not worry if you get lost or zone out. Just keep going and review or re-read later. If you try to understand everything you will never finish and become discouraged. 4. While you are listening to Ulysses, read Vladimir Nabokov's Harvard lectures on Ulysses. http://books.google.com/books/about/Lectures_on_Literature.html?id=jP5-XRoUVBgC http://books.google.com/books/about/Lectures_on_Literature.h... This is a wonderful chapter-by-chapter companion that will make sense of the chaos. 5. If you want a warm up, read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Mithrandir 14y ago

While we're on the subject of modernist literature, I would suggest taking a look at In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. It's quite a bit longer than Ulysses, at about 1.5 million words, but I find it really fascinating. The flow of his words, to me, seems almost musical. However, I'd like to also point out that you shouldn't read ISoLT or Ulysses or any other book for that matter, just for the sake of saying that you were able to read it. I think that you lose the depth, the meaning of the words when you read to "show off". You "read" the book, the words flowed into your brain, but did you really understand what the author said? Unfortunately, I think modernist literature is often susceptible to "half readers", where people start the book, but never finish it. Modernist style can seem pretty alien to some people (Background, as jseliger pointed out, is also important to understanding the "meaning".) As Wikipedia puts it: >"For the first-time reader, modernist writing can seem frustrating to understand because of the use of a fragmented style and a lack of conciseness. Furthermore the plot, characters and themes of the text are not always presented in a linear way. The goal of modernist literature is also not particularly focused on catering to one particular audience in a formal way. In addition modernist literature often forcefully opposes, or gives an alternative opinion, on a social concept."

stan_rogers 14y ago
Just a note: you're more likely to find an English-language version of À la recherche du temps perdu titled Remembrance of Things Past rather than In Search of Lost Time.
- Mithrandir 14y ago
  Yes, the title "In Search of Lost Time" became popular when D.J. Enright revised the previous English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, which were titled Remembrance of Things Past. ("Remembrance of Things Past" came from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, "In Search of Lost Time" being a literal translation of the original French title.) Pretty much all the English translations are based off of Moncrieff's work. There's also a new re-translation being done by Penguin; only the first four are out, the rest are supposed to be out in 2018(?). I think the delay is due to some of the volumes being under copyright still.

robocat 14y ago

The book is out of copyright now, so is available on Project Gutenburg in a variety of file formats. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300

diiq 14y ago

For me, the moment that transformed the book from a chore to a delight was the moment I realized it was funny. I was allowed to laugh, but I was also allowed to miss jokes, miss references. There are so many, that if one flies over your head, then next one will fly straight into your open mouth. The Rise of The New Bloomusalem is hysterically funny. I could never have made it through, if it were merely an intellectual exercise. It's a slapstick, pun-filled, over-the-top festival. There are songs, and dances, and plays, and fights, and sex (maybe), and proofs by algebra that Hamlet was Shakespeare's grandfather, or vice versa... IT'S FUNNY.

wisty 14y ago
Postmodernism - funny writers being studied by people with either no sense of humor, or a very mean-spirited one. (Oh wait, it's HN). What I mean, in long form: Postmodernist works (e.g. Catch 22) are often hilarious. The hallmarks of postmodernism (references, subverting memes, subverting conventions, subverting everything, breaking the fourth wall) are the kind of thing you see more in British comedy than "serious" literature. Postmodernist writers either miss the jokes completely, or kill them with overanalysis. I am postulating that either the academics we call "postmodernist" don't actually get the jokes, or are very wryly re-telling them with a straight face, then secretly laughing at the people who don't realise it's all a joke (which I consider mean-spirited).
- diiq 14y ago
  I subscribe to Danto's 'post-historical' description of PoMo (though it's fallen somewhat out of favor). He claims that, with the end of modernism came the end of rules and sweeping movements -- it was no longer possible to distinguish, on physical examination, between art and non-art. So everyone started making art in ten thousand different ways. By that measure, all writers writing today are, technically, postmodern; but even among those writers who are writing difficult, academic, contemporary literature, there are stuffy pompous ones and funny snarky ones and everything in between. It's hard to think of it, because we don't consider the books we like as literature. Vonnegut, certainly by Timequake, is deeply postmodern. Murakami undoubtedly is, and is often very funny; Jasper Fforde tickles; hell, a very strong case could be made for Douglas Adams as a leading Postmodern humourist.

cooop 14y ago

I'd be interested to hear what novels others think should be read and why...

jonnathanson 14y ago

I find that Ulysses is a completely different book every time I read it. Perhaps that's because I'm under the influence of whatever analysis, essay, or bit of commentary I happen to have read about it, or class I happen to be taking, just before diving in. Or perhaps it's because I've been in a different life stage, or state of mind, each time. But honestly, if I weren't a strict unbeliever in the supernatural, I'd swear that Joyce hastily rewrites the book, from beyond the grave, each time I open it up. I know of no other book that has this effect on me.

sophiabatka464 14y ago

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bdr 14y ago

Check out joyceimages.com for Ulysses "illustrations". We use images from the time the book is set in. Some of them are of a specific person or place that's mentioned, while others just demonstrate the mood of a line.

rabidsnail 14y ago

> Are we really too busy for one of history's great psychological novels? Yes.

Tloewald 14y ago

Having read the article, I downloaded Ulysses, which I have bounced off before, and tried again. Nope, still not my idea of fun. Tolstoy is not my idea of fun either, but more fun than this. Of all my friends, the only one who has read Ulysses (and claims to adore it) cannot articulate its virtues. He also loves Umberto Ecco -- I suppose for similar reasons. I just don't see the point. I love how when writer who knows a huge amount of obscure crap and wraps contorted references to it into an unreadable mess is considered some kind of genius of erudition if the obscure crap involves, say, dead languages, religion and literature, but if it were dungeons and dragons and Harry potter it would be considered at best pop culture pastiche and at worst pathetic.

jseliger 14y ago
>I just don't see the point. That's in part because Joyce had synthesized the previous couple hundred years of literary history and the movements within literature, and he very consciously wanted to do something very different from what had been done before (he also wasn't interested much in what readers of conventional novels would think). If you don't have a lot of context regarding, say, literature from Paradise Lost and Shakespeare to 1921, you're going to find the point very hard to see. If you do, then the novel can be sublime. Joyce was writing during the time we now call Modernism, and the Modernists really broke the link between popular and critical success / pleasure, and we've been living with the results, as a culture, ever since. If you're curious about these issues, Peter Gay's Modernism is a decent place to start.
- Tloewald 14y ago
  So you're saying that I do see the point. Excellent, I can move on.

bigthingnext 14y ago

"Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailerand Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer."

joycer 14y ago

It is my belief that Ulysses is the one true novel. All other novels are attempts to achieve what Joyce accomplished. A sort of Platonic Ideal. My reasoning is the evidence, meaning the reason it is the one true novel is because I believe a novel is: the act of attempting to fully represent an individual's experience; If you disagree with my definition of novelisation, that's fine, but it is how I classify novels, and in so much Joyce achieves the nearest perfection of this through the novels seeming opaque or random nature. One's experience is a cloud of infinite affects and effects that one could attempt to catalogue, but would fail miserably. Here is exactly what Joyce achieved. Through Ulysses' failures it achieves perfection. Like Dali's belief that all things are latent with hidden meanings, or how if you hate Warhol because you think his work is crap then you should recognise that you actually love his work because his message was to show you that all mass manufacture is simply the production of crap. It is more than What?, it is Why?. Finnegan's Wake is an even a better example of this belief in practice, but it throws out the rules which unjustly garners it ire. Ulysses plays by the rules, that is grammar`dictionary`genre, and that is why I believe it is held in higher regard. tl;dr : if you think Ulysses is difficult to read and incomprehensible, you are reading it correctly. Read it without guides, they dismantle the work's truth.

josephjrobison 14y ago

I've been reading it off an on for about a year and a half. I'm halfway through right now. At times it is extremely captivating and pretty funny, then the next chapter I'll get completely lost. I'm only using Sparknotes as a guide, which is probably my first mistake.

abolibibelot 14y ago

Nabokov, which incidently is one of the too-impressive great writers mentioned in the comments, beside writing some of the best novels ever, taught literature for years in Cornell. I cannot recommend enough his "Lectures on literature". His take on literature is not post-modern at all (he was not too fond of surrealism and he loved Joyce for his style and not his devices). In one of these lectures, the famous "Good readers and good writers" (http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.html http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.htm...) he said that "There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three — storyteller, teacher, enchanter" (Nabokov himself strongly leans to the latter...) I will quote the end of this short lecture, as an answer (a very Nabokovian answer) to that nagging and essentially unimportant question: what makes a great novel? "It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass." Yes, Ulysses is a precise work, full of riddles and references. Having an annotated edition may give you good grades, or give you insights on the making of the novel, but the device used are not that important - what makes it exhilarating is the joy of the language, the way it sings uniquely, and the way this song builds or subsums the world. That's my take on what Nabokov meant when he said a great writer is an enchanter. Nabokov's "Ada or Ardor" is an enchantment, as a whole and fractally, down to each single sentence, to each single word. Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu" is an enchantment, a very long river of neverending sentences. Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" is the work of a mean and sarcastic enchanter who uses rythm as a weapon. Just as reading Joyce makes you speak in his special brand of English (or if you venture into Finnegans Wake, his special brand of Gibberish), reading Proust, Flaubert or Nabokov (or Céline or Pynchon) infects you with what they've made of their language to suit the needs of their work.

lec 14y ago

A good first read of Ulysses can be done via the librivox version of this book. At first blush the beginning chapters seem amateurishly read, however you soon realize that this was done on purpose in keeping with the tone of the work. Once you are in on the joke, you can see how this haphazard narrative adds to the experience.