Just Finished Reading Ulysses by James Joyce

Back in the late 1970s, when I attended the University of Florida here in Gainesville as a student, I would go to the Reitz Student Union to relax...it's been rebuilt two or three times since.  But then on the first floor, on the west end of the building, was a student lounge area where we could sit back in big comfy cushioned swivel chairs and watch TV.  On the opposite wall was a painting that looked as if anyone at random had just taken their brush and thrown up different colors...an abstract work, but one that "experts" in the field no doubt thought possessed a high degree of aesthetic value.  That's kind of how I felt after reading Irish writer James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses: it's widely considered by many in the literary field to be one of the greatest works in English language literature...but it often left me scratching my head in confusion...and a little anger.  The main characters are compelling enough: Leopold Bloom, a Jewish Dubliner in his middle ages, is portrayed going through "a day in the life".  He knows about  his wife Molly's infidelity and hides from her suspected lover whenever their paths cross.  The secondary protagonist is Stephen Dedalus, who is frustrated with his manipulative roommate and struggles to make a name for himself as a writer and a scholar of Shakespeare.  Joyce presents these characters and others they meet by revealing their streams of thought...which usually meander in all kinds of directions, causing at least with me a sense of drift and uncertainty as to who is doing the thinking and often wondering what happened to the general story line.  Many times while reading Ulysses I had to stop and ask myself whether the narrative was the real progression of the plot or an imagining of one of the characters: Joyce seemed not to care how he presented his story, and I suspect he probably deliberately obfuscated it to encourage a sense of mystery and intrigue to provoke readers and scholars to analyze it more deeply.  Also, I was not in Joyce's Dublin at the time and do not know the different references to contemporary personalities nor the political and religious divisions and issues of the time, other than that Ireland had been seeking independence from the United Kingdom after an armed insurrection and was negotiating an agreement.  The language in dialogue is often steeped in dialect and as such difficult to comprehend. Much is made of Bloom's Judaism and his place in an Irish society with Catholicism being the dominant religious presence. Joyce named his novel after Homer's The Odyssey and the characters Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus supposedly correspond to Homer's Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus, respectively...and the book's chapter titles reference sections from the ancient Greek epic.  I had read The Odyssey beforehand, thinking that it would help me better understand Ulysses: didn't work...

All that having been said, I felt that there was a lot of humor in Ulysses, and I concentrated on following the sections of narrative in bite-sized chunks instead of trying to integrate everything I encountered into the larger story.  This book was initially declared obscene in the United States due to its often explicit sexual references, and although it was first published as a complete novel in 1922, it wasn't until the mid-1930s that it became available for general reading in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.  Well, if you're going to write with the view of recording people's real thoughts, then I guess you're probably going to throw in a bit of sexuality as well, humans being wired as we are...I had no problem with the sexual content, but then again I'm looking at it from the vantage point of 2019 and our society's values, not 1922 and theirs.  Ulysses is a difficult book to read, for sure...I'm glad I read it but am also glad that the other books I have read were mostly written with more consideration for me as their reader...

An afterthought: I mentioned before that Ulysses was about "a day in the life" of Leopold Bloom.  I wonder whether the late Beatles great John Lennon had been influenced by Joyce and his defining work, since he also had a tendency to play around with words, both in his own literature and his song lyrics...including, of course, A Day in the Life...