Bloom, Odysseus, Molly and Me

by Charlotte Reads Classics

I put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.

I have journeyed through Ulysses and have lived to tell the tale! This book is nothing but filled with highs and lows. The beginning and ending of the book are amongst the best of any book I have read, but the middle was a winding, secret path full of language and styles that I couldn’t quite grasp.

Ulysses has been described as a modernist thesaurus of possibility which, I think, says it all. When I think of Modernism, I think of Joyce and Woolf striving to write individual subjective experiences. They aren’t like Austen or Eliot whose narrators understand and interpret the world for the reader. But modernism is also a break from past traditions of culture, as well as writing; sexuality, humour, frankness, city scenes, consumerism and so on. What a revolution reading this book would be, if you had never even considered the possibility of a book capturing someone’s thoughts and listening to those thoughts as they come sprawling through white noise. To be able to read a book that represented your own life.

I think what made Ulysses a scandal is the same thing that makes it readable (in parts). For every classical allusion, there is a joke. There are crude bits, bodily bits, bawdy bits, rude bits. It is frank, honest, and real. Whilst these are things today’s reader can appreciate – I suppose because we have conversations that are all of those things – early readers found the novel depressing and chaotic. I wonder what people will make of it in the future? Imagine Ulysses being quaint and outmoded!

The sentences I really loved were the descriptive ones: Joyce certainly is a master of language. I wasn’t expecting to find sentences like the ones I quoted from Telemachus in a book like this one. And I’ll just mention again how great Molly’s soliloquy is… just so you know I really mean it. IT’S WORTH IT. When I read that episode I wished there had been more of her in the book, but I don’t think the chapter would have had such an impact. It’s impossible to think of ways Ulysses would have been improved, because every little detail that I didn’t like makes the book the book it is. For example, I didn’t like some of the styles Joyce used because I found them confusing, but if you take the experimental parts away then it just wouldn’t be the same.

I would recommend reading The Odyssey first, or at least try looking into the incidents that Joyce names his episodes after. According to Joyce, Odysseus was the greatest character in literature and Charles Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses was a massive influence. This version of The Odyssey splits the story into individual tales, much like the structure of Ulysses itself. Leopold Bloom and Odysseus are, on the surface, very different people. The absolute ordinariness of Bloom’s day – and the book – meant (I think) that any man’s day is an Odyssey. The puzzles and enigmas referred to in the book aren’t always the classical, mythological, high brow references you might think – you can look those up, after all. The puzzles and difficult parts often occur from ordinary circumstances (like the horse race that confused me so greatly). To fully understand anyone’s life, any person’s thoughts is tricky.

All in all, its been good to read a book I was afraid of. I was taken on a voyage through Dublin, through the history of language, through style and thought and description. Reading Ulysses was my very own Odyssey.