Nobody warned me about James Joyce. My mom told me she’d loved Ulysses in high school. When I asked her what it was about. She shrugged and said she didn’t remember too well. “Ireland,” she added. I was completely unprepared for the level of outrageous, difficult to read, and mind-fuckingly weird this book was.
For those of you considering embarking on this...dare I say…odyssey of a book, below are the five stages of reading James Joyce's Ulysses.
Confusion
Why aren’t there periods on these sentences? Who is Charles Parnell and why are all these people obsessed with him? If we just went to Paddy Digham’s funeral, why is he walking around Dublin? (Related: did his casket actually fall off the hearse, or did Leopold just imagine it?) Is Buck Mulligan actually talking to a group of soldiers or just Stephen? Why is everyone changing genders? Who even is Buck Mulligan and what does he does with his life besides yell witty things?
Disgust
Nationalism
OVERTHROW ENGLAND!
Secondary Catholicism
There’s a whole chapter written like a catechism. At some point it’ll just spill over and you’ll start crossing yourself. When Paddy Digham's ghost rises from the streets of Dublin, you'll enjoy the religious comfort.
Despair
This book makes no sense, and there’s several hundred more pages. None of the sentences have punctuation. Leopold is so sad. Ireland is still not free. You’re in too deep, though. You want to find out how it ends.
Disillusion
Buck Mulligan at one point, reads: "Every Man His Own Wife, Or, A Honeymoon in the Hand (a national immorality in three orgasms) by Ballocky Mulligan" and any lingering belief about the sanctity of literature and the basic civilized nature of the literature canon fly out the window.
Acceptance
It's a weird book. Not all of the sentences are sentences. But Leopold and Stephen got home okay, and Dublin is still standing (even though it kind of seemed like it was burning down a while ago). And when you put it down and inevitably miss it, there's always Finnegan's Wake.
