Every year on June 16th, I start reading Ulysses again. Years ago, I had an English professor tell me about a former student of his with whom he kept in touch with every so often. All that remained of this former English major was that he read Ulysses every year. He hardly read anything else, and really never used anything that he had learned in college, but he would read Ulysses every year.
I rarely finish. I usually make it about halfway through before dropping it and turning to something else. It's not for lack of interest, more usually lack of time, energy, or focus to devote to it. I have finished it, more than once, and each time I make it all the way to the end, I experience a literary rush that is very difficult to describe. It is probably the closest I'll ever come to experiencing an actual satori.
Inspired by this professor's story, I attempted to read Ulysses by myself as an undergrad. Like many people, I was simply overwhelmed by the book. I found it inscrutable, a mystery that refused to reveal itself, a fiction that played by its own rules as opposed the rules that everyone else used, the rules that I was at college to diligently study. I tried for several weeks to make headway through it before finally dropping it and turning to something else. Hopefully, it was something I was supposed to be doing, but knowing myself at that time, I doubt that was true.
Years later, I found myself still in school, still trying to get a degree as an English major. I took an upper level course that just focused on Joyce, covering Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and finishing with Ulysses. I had enrolled late, over the course of the summer as opposed to the previous spring like the rest of the class, so I missed that she had met with them before the end of the previous year and gave them this piece of advice: read Ulysses over the summer. Don't try to understand it-- just read it. Read it through, all the way to the end without trying to interpret it. It would make it easier when as a class we went through the book that fall.
And I wish I had. As it was, when the semester started, she advised me to start reading it in my spare time, just so I'd have some of it under my belt. And I did, some, but didn't make it through before we started working on the book.
Dr. Kathleen O'Gorman is one of the best professors I experienced in my long and lengthy college career. She knew Ulysses, and once you start to get to know Ulysses, you understand what an accomplishment that is. In the middle of a random discussion in class, she could suddenly rattle off a quote from a completely different section, pause for a second, and then cite a page number. We would quickly flip through, and nine time out of ten, she'd be right. The tenth time she'd be off by a page, up or down.
She knew the world of Ulysses, and knew how to show it to us. Because that's the inscrutable part, that's the part I didn't get the first time-- it's not a novel, it's a living, breathing world. As a text, it is curling tendrils from nearly every English writing tradition. Motifs repeat and resonate. Symbols are cross-referenced and re-referenced, played with, toyed with, and then set aside.
It is a staggering work of genius, and I was fortunate to have an experienced guide to lead me through it.
I love Ulysses. There are few pieces of literature that give me such joy to read. Passages from it have become so familiar to me that they've slipped into my subconscious, popping up when I least expect it. A vulgar example: we went on a family vacation to Florida recently, and as I stepped into the surf for the first time, and as that first wave crashed into me, I thought, the scrotum tightening sea.
Perhaps that is part of what makes Ulysses so enduring-- its vulgarity, its pure, raw earthiness, its focus on sex, and food, and drinking. Sure, it's about love and loss, and fathers and sons, and husbands and wives, but it is also about so many basic human needs as well.
But I think the best way to describe Ulysses is like a piece of music. The more you listen to it, the more you'll hear each time. Dr. O'Gorman was so right to tell us to just read it all the way through without trying to understand it, because it makes some sense the second time through. It makes more sense the third time. And year after year, it reveals a little more itself to me, as I pick up my dog-eared, heavily annotated copy and start once again into its dirty, dear streets.
