In a world full of distractions, tackling James Joyce’s notoriously difficult novel seemed like an impossible task. It turned out to be one of the most rewarding literary experiences in my life, writes rdassaly
of Squidward watching from his window as SpongeBob and his friend Patrick prance around below. I read and enjoyed Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” when I was in my early 20s, and fully intended to tackle “Ulysses” at some point. But as time wore, the responsibilities of adulthood cropped up like weeds, and my attention span grew fractured and horribly thin. The prospect of tackling a prohibitively onerous tome like “Ulysses” started to feel more and more remote.
Reading books, particularly fiction, has always been something of a safe haven — a way to fully engage my brain and immerse myself into an experience, even if it is not my own. But in recent years, even this activity has fallen victim to my rapidly deteriorating attention span. A normal person might see a chapter break as an opportunity to make a cup of tea; to my brain, it represents an off-ramp to go check my inbox or my Twitter DMs.
The above might sound relatively straightforward, even conventional. But “Ulysses” is the farthest thing from conventional. The key to clearing this initial hurdle is, firstly, to realize that Joyce never intended each reader to understand each reference, especially not on the first reading. “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality,”Second, you must determine a relationship with annotations that works for you.
“Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone.” In “Nausicaa,” the infamous episode that sees Bloom spying on young women on the beach, Joyce adopts the voice of a pulpy romance novel. “Circe,” a treacherously long episode that finds our protagonist and a drunken Stephen hanging out in a brothel, takes the form of a play that shifts rapidly between reality and Bloom’s delirious waking nightmare.
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