The above picture is a pretty good summary of my life right now. Once banned, often excoriated still dauntingly difficult, Ulysses has become the canonical twentieth-century novel. Or so I keep being told, again and again. Ulysses is the obvious choice for a module based upon modernist literature of the 20th century. Yet I am not more than 200 pages in, and I join the ranks of its many readers, all of whom state how Joyce can almost bring them to tears with confusion; to read Ulysses is to be constantly frustrated, exhilarated, nettled and perplexed, on many varying levels. The complexity weaved into the novel is something that Joyce revelled in: "I've thrown in enough hidden meanings to keep all the critics going for hundreds of years". In the episode entitled 'Nausicaa', I can honestly say that the fact the protagonist Leopold Bloom is masturbating over a crippled girl did not leap to my attention at all. I only found this out after consulting a guide, and it still required me to read the passage several times to actual discern the true 'meaning'.
Whatever crafty intentions Joyce might have had, I wager he never considered how it would make the most inane activities, such as shredding napkins in Starbucks, suddenly seem fantastically interesting in comparison. Just working out what is going on, let alone who is speaking, is enough to cause a brain haemorrhage. I am hardly being original in stating this opinion. Yet I think we are doing little justice to Joyce's work (and the department showing little consideration for our social lives) by expecting my fellow literary peers and I to read and digest Ulysses in one week only.
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