A mid-journey report from the Ulysses
June 23rd, 2011
Joyce's Ulysses. How should I describe it? The book is too great to be spoken of in words bound within the sorry perimeters of rationality. It's turbulence itself. It's the ravings of a supremely eloquent madman, a continuous fear of falling from a cliff as you tread carefully a ridge infinitely high and extremely thin. It's the disintegrated shards of a spent bullet. It's alternatively Beethoven and Duchamp and the regularity with which it changes character leaves you asphyxiated and disoriented. It's at once a supreme effort in vanity and contempt, a relentless dissection of orthodoxy, an erudite commentary on history and art, a squirming message written on the walls of a school lavatory, a mockery of custom, an inexcusable experiment! It's like a dream whose essence and beauty can only be remembered in parts and whose memory and understanding escapes you as soon as you try to grip it too hard. It's one of those great great pieces of art which restore your faith in the towering human intellect and make you feel privileged to belong to a specie which has the potential to think at such a level. But more than anything else, it's the purest form of individual expression - untethered from the morass of custom it reaches the giddy heights and suffocating depths which normal people do not even know exist. It's not for nothing that Ulysses is almost unanimously considered the greatest English book ever written.
And it's been 3 months and I'm still only half way through.
