Ulysses unbound: why does a book so bad it "defecates on your bed" still have so many admirers?

Reason, July, 2004 by Tim Cavanaugh

Ordinary people are at the heart of the film Wynne and partner Fritzi Horstman have made. If the amateur criticism, re-enactments, and allusions share anything, it's an inclination to participate in a culture, even if you haven't done the reading. "There's a strange phenomenon," says Robert Spoo, a Tulsa-based Joyce scholar turned intellectual property lawyer. "People will tell you out of one side of their mouths, 'I will never read this book; it's the hardest book in the world.' And then out of the other side they'll say, 'I'm on my way to this Ulysses reading; do you want to come?' It has crossed over in a way that other modernist work hasn't crossed over."

Which is not the same as saying the book's appeal has no relation to academia; sharp-eyed readers will note how many of the sources for this story are college professors. Kevin Dettmar, chair of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and author of Marketing Modernism, says one of Joyce's cleverest career moves was recognizing the long-term importance of geeing your work into the university system. Ironically, though, one of the first negative critiques of Ulysses was not that it was too highbrow but that it was not highbrow enough. The reliably stuffy Virginia Woolf called it the "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self taught working man."

The comparison with Woolf (who paid Joyce the more sincere tribute of attempting to ape his technical innovations) is interesting. Eighty years later, the dichotomy between the two remains remarkably intact. Woolf and her Bloomsbury cohorts remain favorites of what remains of the cultural hierarchy: fodder for mid-list novels, frequent subjects of literary histories, an easy Oscar ticket for Nicole Kidman, and so on.

The Joyce industry, by comparison, continues to scrape by. Sean Walsh's no-budget Bloom is playing in Ireland and at some of the Bloomsday events in the U.S. but has no American distributor; Ulysses' entombment atop so many best-of lists is the sort of tribute that ensures nobody will ever have to read it or think about it again; even the Republic of Ireland has only recently begun to embrace Joyce, after decades of scrupulous neglect, and largely as a means of capitalizing on Bloomsday tourism. The book's academic reputation waxes and (at the present time) wanes, but its more durable appeal among fans is largely a DIY phenomenon. "The fan phenomenon has become a form of carnival," says Michael Groden, a professor of English literature at the University of Western Ontario. "It's a sign of how far the book has gotten into the culture."

Which raises an interesting question: Does high literary reputation put off more readers than it attracts? "The book's academic standing does cut both ways," says Dettmar. "In class, the one thing people know about Ulysses is that it's incredibly difficult. There's a compelling case to be made that that's Joyce's fault, that he set it up that way. But that's also part of the continuing appeal."

It also gives an odd power to nonacademic readers. Sean Latham, editor of the James Joyce Quarterly and author of Am I a Snob?, a study of modernism's exclusivity, notes that difficult texts are by their nature participatory, inviting the reader to complete the book's meaning with his or her own input. "Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in some ways deny snobbery, because nobody reading them has a privileged reading. That's why amateurs are attracted to these works."