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For the past four weeks, I have been reading (or attempting to read) the enigmatic modernist novel Ulysses by the Irish author James Joyce. To say it has been a struggle would be an understatement on par with calling the Hindenburg disaster a modest campfire. It is the single most difficult text I have ever attempted to comprehend, surpassing the Bible, Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, the Qu’ran, and Green Eggs and Ham. I will now do my utmost to convey what I have gained from reading this god-forsaken piece of literature.
This novel is an excellent piece of literature that truly foregrounds the style of ‘stream of consciousness’ pioneered and perfected by authors such as Anthony Burgess and Jack Kerouac. However, this does make the novel extremely hard to comprehend and read, due to it’s maddening format and colloquial lexicon drenched in early 20th-century Irish slang. This informal format can be incredibly distressing; however, it is something that I actually adore James Joyce for. Before him, there were not that many educated, distinguished authors who wrote in the vernacular. Many authors of that time period were forced to write in the Oxford-English, embraced by the educated elite as the ONLY form of English for writers in Great Britain. With his most well-known novels and vignettes, namely Finnegan’s Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the Dubliners, the vernacular was used consistently, allowing him to become popular within the not-so educated elite of Ireland. This historical context allows me to better appreciate this novel, despite the numerous cerebral aneurysms this book has given me.
Like, seriously. Who writes in disjointed sentences of Latin, Welsh, English, Irish-English, and gibberish all on the same page? How in the sweet name of Ben Bernanke am I supposed to unravel this Irish knot of nonsensical literature? I truly do enjoy his works, especially A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist, but sometimes it’s hard to appreciate some literature when they make about as much sense as Brianna’s sleep schedule.
I am afraid I do not have that much more to say about Ulysses. I’m well into the book now, and I still don’t know what the hell is going on.