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Rachel Lu's Reviews > Ulysses
Ulysses
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Ulysses defies the subjective, insufficient 5-star rating system; though I finished it a month ago, I could only let it continue sitting in the virtual space of my ŷ “Currently Reading� shelf, this convoluted, humorous, frustrating, famously “ingenious� novel rooted in the tumultuous discourse turn-of-century Dublin’s need to break away from the British empire, yet simultaneously filled with levity. Facetious pflaaaps, nose picking, dick jokes, mrkgnaos. How can this book be both some of the most brilliant, talented and smart prose I’ve read, but also so incredibly exasperating and nonsensical? How can I feel these moments of tranquil lucidity when the rest of the novel feels like a slow drowning?
Having read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which ends so beautifully on Stephen’s embryonic hope and yearning to venture into the world as a burgeoning poet, I was genuinely excited to see Stephen's progression. It is so full of hope and wonder that I cannot help but be excited (“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race� Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead�).
Ulysses Stephen is Portrait Stephen on steroids, his intellect fully realized but even more distanced from the reader than he was in Portrait. So impenetrable are his chapters at times that his emotions become as inaccessible to us as it is to everyone around him. Rarely do they bob to the surface, but when they do, they are heartbreaking moments that left an indelible impression on me. His inability and unwillingness to help Dilly when he sees her buying a French primer text with the two shillings she extracted from their impoverished father, his empathetic recognition at her yearning to learn but the fear which ultimately overwhelms him that helping her will only place him in the same situation; wrestling with his guilt over rejecting his mother’s dying wish to convert back to Catholicism, which manifests in his frightening hallucination of her rotting corpse; wandering Dublin at dawn with Bloom after his supposedly close friend abandons him in his drunken state and realizing he has nowhere to go and no one to turn to. But these moments, few and far between, are buried beneath Joyce’s overly scholarly writing.
Bloom, much more accessible both in terms of emotion and in writing, is much more of the protagonist here, Joyce’s satire of the modern day version of the hero, shitting on the toilet, jerking off to a young, disabled girl. He is allegorically Odysseus, searching for his son—Rudy who died ten years ago—and finding it in Stephen. He is the traveling wanderer, arguably intellectually superior and definitely more humanitarian than his coevals, unable to vanquish any mystical monsters (re: hostile anti-Semites) but surrounded by hatred, says, “Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.� Like Bloom, these depicted diurnal tasks are a parody too; as they are being lifted up through the allegory to the epic, they are also being satirized through this 600 page venture of mundane day-in-the-life description from Bloom/Stephen/Molly’s perspective. Rather than an ostensibly thick, hyper-intellectual novel, Ulysses becomes a funny parody of the scholarly writing that pervades it.
Still, there is so much to discuss. Post-colonialism displayed Sinn Fein’s opposition to the British government, feminist dialogue through Molly and Gerty reclaiming their sexual agency, in which males move as pawns around them, the discussion of the other portrayed through anti-Semitism, the characterization of Bloom as a “womanly man� and the oriental, what makes art, our limited understanding of the world around us because of our limited senses (“ineluctable modality of the visible,� “manshape ineluctable�).
I don’t think I would wish it upon anyone to undertake the arduous task of reading Ulysses, but damn it if Joyce isn’t brilliant and emotionally wrenching with his endings, if it didn’t make me want to shout out yes, resoundingly yes, the affirmative tingling throughout my body, repeating “yes I said yes I will Yes.�
Having read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which ends so beautifully on Stephen’s embryonic hope and yearning to venture into the world as a burgeoning poet, I was genuinely excited to see Stephen's progression. It is so full of hope and wonder that I cannot help but be excited (“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race� Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead�).
Ulysses Stephen is Portrait Stephen on steroids, his intellect fully realized but even more distanced from the reader than he was in Portrait. So impenetrable are his chapters at times that his emotions become as inaccessible to us as it is to everyone around him. Rarely do they bob to the surface, but when they do, they are heartbreaking moments that left an indelible impression on me. His inability and unwillingness to help Dilly when he sees her buying a French primer text with the two shillings she extracted from their impoverished father, his empathetic recognition at her yearning to learn but the fear which ultimately overwhelms him that helping her will only place him in the same situation; wrestling with his guilt over rejecting his mother’s dying wish to convert back to Catholicism, which manifests in his frightening hallucination of her rotting corpse; wandering Dublin at dawn with Bloom after his supposedly close friend abandons him in his drunken state and realizing he has nowhere to go and no one to turn to. But these moments, few and far between, are buried beneath Joyce’s overly scholarly writing.
Bloom, much more accessible both in terms of emotion and in writing, is much more of the protagonist here, Joyce’s satire of the modern day version of the hero, shitting on the toilet, jerking off to a young, disabled girl. He is allegorically Odysseus, searching for his son—Rudy who died ten years ago—and finding it in Stephen. He is the traveling wanderer, arguably intellectually superior and definitely more humanitarian than his coevals, unable to vanquish any mystical monsters (re: hostile anti-Semites) but surrounded by hatred, says, “Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.� Like Bloom, these depicted diurnal tasks are a parody too; as they are being lifted up through the allegory to the epic, they are also being satirized through this 600 page venture of mundane day-in-the-life description from Bloom/Stephen/Molly’s perspective. Rather than an ostensibly thick, hyper-intellectual novel, Ulysses becomes a funny parody of the scholarly writing that pervades it.
Still, there is so much to discuss. Post-colonialism displayed Sinn Fein’s opposition to the British government, feminist dialogue through Molly and Gerty reclaiming their sexual agency, in which males move as pawns around them, the discussion of the other portrayed through anti-Semitism, the characterization of Bloom as a “womanly man� and the oriental, what makes art, our limited understanding of the world around us because of our limited senses (“ineluctable modality of the visible,� “manshape ineluctable�).
I don’t think I would wish it upon anyone to undertake the arduous task of reading Ulysses, but damn it if Joyce isn’t brilliant and emotionally wrenching with his endings, if it didn’t make me want to shout out yes, resoundingly yes, the affirmative tingling throughout my body, repeating “yes I said yes I will Yes.�
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