Damn it. I've done it! I've scaled the Everest of literary snobbery-- and survived. I've read James Joyce's Ulysses (First Vintage Books Edition, June 1986; which follows exactly the line divisions of the critical & synoptic edition of Garland Publishing, New York, June 1984).
It's silly but what actually led me to read the book was an Eve Arnold's photograph: "Marilyn on Long Island (New York) Reading James Joyce's Ulysses" (1955, Magnum Photos, Inc. New York, U.S.A; see above). It was (I think) a magazine cut out pasted on the bare wall of the passageway leading to the bathroom of our two-storey apartment in Cubao, Quezon City (--it was already there when we moved in). Thus it may be said that it was juvenile voyeurism that led me into reading Joyce's Ulysses. I was twelve years old then.
I would be in my 20s when I had my first encounter with Joyce's book. It was in a pile of pre-owned (probably stolen) books being clandestinely peddled in a back alley in Sta. Cruz, Manila. I immediately recognized it from the photograph. After handing over a few pesos for it, I opened the book to browse it (the vender wouldn't allow me to even open the book-- which was wrapped in plastic, until I've paid for it) and quickly realized I was in way over my head. The book is peppered with text I can't even pronounce much less understand (-- there are fragments of French, German, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Scandinavian and perhaps other languages I did not recognize). I tried to exchange it for another book but the toothless vender menancingly pointed to his "No Return No Exchange" sign.
After realizing that the book is not an easy read I wondered if Marilyn Monroe was really reading it or was it just a prop. Upon reaching home I looked at the photograph again and noticed that Marilyn Monroe was on the last few pages of the book. I leafed through the pages of my copy. Ms. Monroe was apparently reading from the final episode of the book-- Molly Bloom's soliloquy (which I later found out was reviled by the censorious as that "dirty book's" most "dirty part"). I was intrigued. But to get to the "dirty" part I have to wade through the entire book. It was much too dense for me. I gave up.
Two decades would pass before I picked up the book again-- no, not the copy I bought, but a digital copy. Ulysses, perhaps more than any novel, was made for the digital age. Why you ask? Well, I have to read three other books to read this one book! To carry three extra books to be able to begin to understand a book seems too taxing intellectually if not physically. But, something that could be accomplished with an iPad.
Ulysses has a reputation for density and inscrutability that makes me suspect that many who claimed to have read the book is at worst lying or at best didn't understood what the book is all about. I've tried several times in the past to read the book in its entirety but soon encounter texts that daunts me; frustrated, I give up. I have resorted to episodic rather than consecutive reading and could claim, at that point, that I have managed to read only three of the eighteen episodes (or chapters, Joyce didn't say)-- "Telemachus", "Nestor" and "Calypso"-- which introduced Leopold Bloom, the book's hero. I skipped "Proteus" which came before "Calypso" (The original text did not include episode titles, Joyce simply numbered them consecutively; the titles originate from the Gilbert schemata; Stuart Gilbert claims that Joyce referred to the episodes by their Homeric titles in the latter's correspondences to him). In "Telemachus" and "Nestor", Joyce's meager use of punctuation makes it difficult to distinguish between third-person narrative, interior monologue, and dialogue. In "Proteus", the difficulty is not on how to distinguish the narrator's (Stephen Dedalus) monologue from everything else, but more on how to follow the twists and turns of that monologue itself. Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique, structuring and experimental prose— full of puns, parodies, and allusions, as well as its rich characterisations and broad humour, make the narrative quite hard to follow. I soon found out that I would encounter the same literary roadblocks when I picked up the book again, but I wasn't giving up this time.
Two schools of thought exist about one’s first reading of Ulysses: some staunchly advise reading it cold without recourse to outside materials, and others recommend reading it in parallel with all the guidebooks one could tolerate-- I myself managed to move forward by the second approach for the simple reason that my education and life experiences did not equip me with the tools to decipher Ulysses.
The good news it that there is a glut of guidebooks, summaries and annotations out there in the world wide web that could be easily procured extra-legally. The bad news is that these guidebooks could get in the way of your reading. Or worst you could end up poring over the never-ending details provided by the guidebooks, lose your way in the labyrith and totally forget about the book you're suppose to be reading in the first place. I stuck with those that came highly recommended and I settled on three:-- Harry Blamire's (1) The new Bloomsday Book, A Guide Through Ulysses, 3rd Ed. The New Bloomsday Book is a sort of Ulysses-for-Dummies book that summarizes each episode in easy to comprehend language.
I also have Stuart Gilbert's (2) James Joyce's Ulysses, the most famous of the guidebooks. Be warned though that critics have described Gilbert's contribution as a dour book that managed to suck all the fun out of Joyce's work. And my go-to guidebook, (3) Don Gifford’s indispensable compendium of Ulyssian knowledge, Ulysses Annotated, Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses, 2nd Ed. It's a must-have for a first time reader, who-- like me, has no reference point to the world where the characters in the book live in and has a limited literary background. It's a quick reference of Joycean words and phrases. Gifford clarifies passages which otherwise would almost certainly remain hopelessly opaque to first-time readers. As bonus, Gifford provides maps of the action traced through the Dublin streets!
I didn't just read Joyce's Ulysses, I also listened to an audio-book. I was actually reading along as I listened. Honestly, it was the only way I could go over the really incomprehensible Latin words that Joyce had put in his novel. I also listened to Joseph Campbell's "Wings of Art" lecture series on Ulysses (along with Joyce's "Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist" and "Finnegans Wake"). And to top it all off, I watched the 1967 British-American film adaptation of the novel. The film was obviously a low budget stab at an "unfilmable" book but it served me well because I had a glimpse of Dublin (though Ulysses was set in 1940, the film portrayed the city as it was in the 1960s). The infamous Molly Bloom soliloquy takes up almost a quarter of the running time of the film and perhaps as an admission of defeat, all that the film maker could muster was a voice over of the whole thing.
It took me thirty years to read Ulysses the first time. I'll read it again but I would like to see a digital edition of the book with links to annotations, maps, summaries and commentary-- and perhaps even with an accompanying audio book that could be played as a read-along companion for the literary challenged, in a single "book". Maybe they could throw in the film adaptation as well to make for a total experience.
In 2018, I finally got hold of a hard copy-- an actual book, of Ulysses. The text is still unwieldy, still indecipherable.
