“There is not one serious line in it,” Joyce himself insisted. Too much reverence towards this bible of modernism can lead us to forget how ribald and remorselessly profane it is as a novel, how brimming with humanity and, above all, humour. The best readers of Ulysses de-emphasise the decoding and the annotations, while insisting that Ulysses is not a book to be mastered but to be experienced and enjoyed in the half-light, with some understanding and much confusion, a bit like life itself. All readers since have understood some but not all of its cultural range. The enthusiastic first readers in Paris in 1922 did not pick up most of the specific details about 1904 Dublin. Sure, it can be “difficult” in one sense, partly because of its encyclopaedic allusions to Homer, Shakespeare, Aristotle, European history, the Catholic Mass, music hall, Irish politics, Jewish folklore… But nobody gets all those references. Yet – as enthusiasts never tire of beseeching – Ulysses should not be a chore or an exercise in dutiful self-improvement.
A century after its publication, Ulysses is too often on the hole-in-the-bucket list: not those things you really want to experience before you die (snorkelling in the Maldives), but those you feel you should accomplish but probably won’t (fitting back into your wedding clothes). There it sits on the bookshelf, unread, or only partially so, reminding you of yet another thwarted good intention. It’s a shame that James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, has become such an old scold. A century after its publication, the difficult reputation of Joyce’s seminal novel has overshadowed its pleasures
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