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On Finishing 'Ulysses'
This very name of this blog, "Wandering Rock," comes from one of the chapters in James Joyces's Ulysses. I've been toting around Ulysses, reading a few pages at a time, for years--perhaps as far back as the summer of 1998, when Modern Library named it the best novel of the century. This summer, I finally finished it off. Wow.
For a (very) quick overview of Ulysses, see Ulysses for Dummies, an inspired little cartoon encapsulating each chapter of the novel into one animated gif. It's the early internet at it's best.
I can't say I got a whole lot more than that out of the novel, though. Much of it isn't too tough to read (and the famous final unpunctuated 'Penelope' chapter went surprisingly smoothly), but then you bang up against paragraphis like this:
"INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see."
And that's just the ineluctable modality of the visible. Wait till you get to the ineluctable modality of the invisible!
But some things did come through - Leopold Bloom's kindness, his longing for is dead son, the streets and people and food and life of Dublin, the many turns of phrase like "Shut your eyes and see."
It's a very deep well - no one gets everything out of it the first time....
Sunday, October 29, 2006
7:21 PM
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