The "Difficult" Third Book

A lot of people are put off reading so-called difficult literary works. I won't argue the toss, but Ulysses certainly is in this category by reputation, how true this is, we shall see. From my first few attempts on the cliff face of this day in Dublin, the first few episodes are a breeze, and then the language thickens (not quite Noam Chomsky density, but enough to thin my resolve and have me glancing over at some unread Stephen King). I thought I'd tote out a list of techniques that I find help when dealing with this sort of thing.

1. Treat your reading as a physical task. You are going to get comfortable and read for a certain amount of time.

At Uni I took a marvellous course called Madness in Literature taught by the lamentably deceased Paul Korshin (to give you an idea of what he was like, in one lesson he posed as a waiter in a restaurant that Kafka partially owned, and reasonably refused to supply anything that was on the menu). He had us read Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which is told in a series of never ending run-on sentences. You could go for pages without hitting a period, if a paragraph ended, you'd hold a small party. If you lost your place, it wouldn't be easy to retrace your steps there (just ponder the semiotics of that process my droogs). Korshin suggested we read as much as we liked in a sitting, but then mark the place you stop, actually mark it. Now, I come from a Hebraic tradition where books are considered semi-sacred, I get ill when someone cracks the spine of a paperback, the idea of defacing a book intentionally is sort of upsetting, but I could concede the point here.

Now, I'm hoping we don't have to resort to this sort of tactic with Ulysses. What I liked about the idea, however, is the sense that when we read, we traverse the text as we read. That there is a physical element, a journey over the small spaces of fonts, leading, tracking and page turning. I'm not suggesting it's an Olympic event, but it is a task, not just an eye-brain process.

2. Don't get bogged down.

There's a few of us here already that did English Majors. A pitfall of this negligible training is that we want to understand all the bits, we want to drown our reading in a flood of exegesis. We want to mine the meaning of the text and subtext. We want to know what the author was having for lunch whilst working out his known biographical foibles as he wrote that sentence.

Much will be unfamiliar here. This is a novel written about another country over a century ago, whose author had an immensely encyclopaedic knowledge. This will abound with colloquialisms and idiomatic, cultural, geographical and historical references, not to mention Joyce's paralleling of the Odyssey etc. etc. There will be Greek and Christian imagery. There will be Latin.

My suggestion is, short of complete incomprehensibility, don't stop reading, let some of the prose wash over you, even if you're not sure what some of the bits mean, or how it hangs together. Don't keep stopping to find out what exact method Guinness used to brew stout in 1904, or if the Sandymount tram really did intersect Grafton street. I was slightly worried when the academic shitstorm over definitive text came up because it's another dead end to travel down.

If there's something that really stands out, wait until you get to a good stopping point, go back and then hash it out, perhaps with the use of web resources and their flimsy provenance. Or make use of the semi-brain trust of this blog.

3. Don't rush.

One of my high school teachers suggested a sort of daredevil approach to reading Ulysses. It takes place in a day, so try reading it in a day. While this made a lot of sense to me, and appealed to my literary pretentiousness (of which more confession another time) in the same way that bungie jumping naked or extreme ironing appeals to danger junkies.

I probably could have managed this twenty five years ago, but there's not enough time in the day, or enough caffeine in the universe for me to consider doing this now. It's not like one of those parties where you get your mates together and sing the whole of Sweeney Todd.

4. Don't listen to me, what the fuck do I know.

This is the best advice I can give anyone. For at least the first third of the book, you'll be wondering why I even bothered writing this. As the book progresses, Joyce pushes his stylistic experimentation further and further, some of these suggestions may come in handy. I'm sure you're all much cleverer than me anyway, I didn't even have a blog until about 3 years ago.