Books: The Dangers of Ulysses

I have read James Joyce's Ulysses. Yes, I out it off until I was in prison. But not so much as not having a choice at that point as it was I was writing again. Before I did not want the rebuke of running away from what others thought as my talent. I believe Joyce could write anything and he included them in his novel. That novel is now 100 years old.

Anne Enright explains why the novel remains worth reading in Dangerous, voyeuristic, transgressive, exciting. Some excerpts:

Dublin, Ulysses was considered the greatest novel in the world and the dirtiest book ever written. I bought a copy as soon as I had money and it was taken away from me when my mother discovered me reading it – though Lolita, for some reason, had passed unnoticed in our house. I was 14. I was outraged, and delighted with myself, and a little confused. Ulysses contained something worse than sex, clearly, and I did not know what that could be.

***

The irony is that the freedom Joyce brought to the Irish tradition has been more useful to female writers than to male. His heretical legacy has been welcomed as a gift by writers such as Edna O’Brien, Eimear McBride and Mary Costello, while his innovative genius is more often declared a burden by the men.

***

More than any other book, Ulysses is about what happens in the reader’s head. The style obliges us to choose a meaning, it is designed to make us feel uncertain. This makes it a profoundly democratic work. Ulysses is a living, shifting, deeply humane text that is also very funny. It makes the world bigger. 

When it starts making the world smaller, then comes the day of its irrelevance.

sch

1/29/22