Review of “Ulysses” by James Joyce

My God!

This was the most difficult book I’ve ever read, or even imagined. I thought it would be some kind of Horatio Alger story with a lot of eccentric characters. I was right about the second part. This long book (783 pp.) covers one day in the life of a man in his late thirties, and it isn’t an especially interesting day. Leopold Bloom is simply the instrument whereby the author introduced several writing techniques that collectively are called Post Modern. He invented this genre and, rather than introducing these techniques (e.g., stream-of-consciousness, allegorical writing, extreme third-person point of view, omniscient narration, flashbacks) in several works, he packed them all into this monstrous tome.

I can’t possibly write a review of this book, which is unnecessary anyway because it has become part of the literature curriculum in most colleges and universities. It has been analyzed, read between the lines, parodied, practically treated like a sacred scripture by literary analysts since it was written.

I’ll stick to what little I know, that is, what I read myself and what I thought about it. There is no plot, no protagonist, antagonist, conflict, nothing that belongs in a novel. There is no character development. Everyone is fixed, although they are an eccentric group. No epiphany. No denouement. Leopold Bloom, in addition to his primary function of letting James Joyce experiment with prose, is a tool for presenting the many woes of the Irish in the early twentieth century, mostly associated with the English presence on their island. These stories are presented through the eyes of working class people in Dublin.

Each of the eighteen chapters introduces another literary technique. Most of them are bad and have not been pursued by later writers I have come across. However, the author’s representation of stream of consciousness is breathtaking in detail. I’ve heard that the typical human has an attention span (when they’re not focusing) of about ten seconds; that’s about how long these characters (mostly Bloom) thoughts remain coherent. Joyce does this so realistically that I saw my own thoughts in his characters’ reflections. He also foretold what psychological research demonstrated fifty years later; men think about sex all the time.

I checked my comprehension by reading the chapter-by-chapter plot synopsis on Wikipedia after I finished a chapter. I didn’t miss much but I did reread a couple of sections where the metaphorical run-on prose lost me completely. Of course the writer of the Wikipedia page probably spent a semester studying this book.

This would have been an interesting novel if it had been two-hundred pages or so, but Joyce didn’t just go a bridge too far. He just kept going and going and going and going and going …

I have commented in previous review that I notice writer fatigue in most novels. There was no way to know if Joyce was burned out or not (he spent eight years writing Ulysses) because of the changing style. He probably was, which would explain the bizarre chapter where a visit to a birthing center becomes a medieval castle filled with knights and kings, ghosts … see what I mean?