It took a couple months, but I finished Joyce’s Ulysses! (I’m generally not an exclamation-point-kind-of guy, but that sentence deserves it.)

Note: Links in this post may be affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission, at no extra charge to you, if you make a purchase through such a link. Learn more here.

I started Ulysses once before, a few years back. Unfortunately, I’d waited until the end of summer to do so and became overwhelmed by the new school year before I gave up (a little over 100 pages in, judging by the scrap-of-paper bookmark I found).

Now that I’m retired, though, I figured I’d jump in again.

I remembered almost none of what I’d read before. Indeed, I’d misremembered a bit: I was expecting the opening to be Molly’s famous stream-of-consciousness passage, but it starts with Stephen Dedalus (well, technically it starts with another character, Buck Mulligan, but that’s just to get us to Stephen). (Stephen, for those who may not be familiar with Joyce, was the main character in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is apparently heavily autobiographical.)

Thus, even though I’d started before, it was as if I were approaching it for the first time.

I read without annotations. This was partly because I was approaching it as a reader, not a scholar, and Joyce didn’t write with annotations. But I also knew that it would take awhile to read on its own and didn’t want to add another several months reading footnotes. (The two famous books of annotation — Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated and Slote et al.’s Annotations — are around 700 and 1400 pages, respectively.)

So: as a friend of mine asked, did I understand it?

Certainly there ways in which I did not. Sometimes this was just at the level of vocabulary. Here is a snippet from the Q&A portion of the book (Joyceans call it the “Ithaca” episode and liken it to a catechism):

What were Stephen’s and Bloom’s quasisimultaneous volitional quasisensations of concealed identities?

Visually, Stephen’s: The traditional figure of hypostasis, depicted by Jahannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as leucodermic, sesquipedalian with winedark hair.

Auditively, Bloom’s: The traditional accent of the ecstasy of catastrophe.

Even in context, this question and its answer basically washed over me. (And damned if I was going to reach for a dictionary.)

I’m sure I missed a lot at the level of allusions, too, though I think I had a pretty good sense when he was alluding to things, even if I didn’t get what he was alluding to. (Of course, Dunning-Kruger suggests that I’m wildly overestimating this, and there’s no way to prove it without pulling out the annotations….)

And, to be sure, I struggled with many passages that were simply opaque to me. It’s a dense book, dealing deeply with a wide range of topics or issues: philosophy, literature (especially Hamlet), theology, and modernity; anti-Semitism in Ireland; Ireland’s history and, in particular, its relationship with England; love, sex, and gender (radically, in some parts!); death, mourning, and guilt.

My sense, though, is that Ulysses is more like poetry than treatise, and it’s meant to be experienced more than understood. I’m not saying it should not be understood — yay annotators! — but, rather, that “understanding” is not the same as intellectual comprehension.

Above all, I enjoyed reading it. Early on, I was concerned that my Tik-Tok-raddled brain wouldn’t be up to the task, and it certainly was a challenge. In the end, it took almost two months of reading pretty much daily — on average, 15 pages per day, with some passages taking well over half an hour to get through five pages. But the book engaged me. I never had a day where I wondered, “Why am I doing this, again?”

That said, I will probably never take on Finnegan’s Wake.

Top photo:  Photograph of a first edition, 1st printing of the book Ulysses by James Joyce, published by Paris-Shakespeare, 1922. No. 302 of a limited edition of 1000 numbered copies, held by the State Library of New South Wales RB/0131. Uploaded to Wikipedia by the book’s owner, Geoffrey Barker. CC BY-SA 4.0