Thumbs down on Ulysses

David Frum discusses his life-long, never-completed relationship with James Joyce’s Ulysses (a description that makes it sounds like Leopold Bloom’s relationship with his wife). Frum never could finish it in college, and, feeling guilty about that, had tried to read it several times over the years and gave up, and recently made one last heroic effort to read the whole thing (or rather to listen to it on audiotape) and was just too turned off by it to finish. I can relate. I myself read Ulysses twice, when, having returned to undergraduate school at the age of 27 I wrote a massive paper on it as part of an independent study project. My view of it: while it is very rich and brilliant, it is not, in the final analysis, a valid work of literature. It is not a part of the Great Tradition. In fact, immersing myself in Ulysses was the thing that decided me against going to graduate school in English. My thought was, if this was the work that was considered by English professors and literary critics to be the commanding masterpiece of twentieth century English literature, then that was not a field I wanted to join.

My own confession is that I’ve never read War and Peace. I tried many times, but found the main characters to be stick-like and unconvincing, then finally gave up and never tried again. At the same time, I consider Anna Karenina to be perhaps the greatest novel.

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A reader writes:

You should quote some of what Frum says, he gets to the nitty-gritty, of course it’s also a little dirty necessarily when it comes to describing Joyce.

That’s silly about not going on in lit because of Ulysses, the attitude in literary studies then was at least to respect genius and the value of literature, and you could always choose other modern figures, or another field not involving Ulysses. What happened to lit studies since then is much much worse.

LA replies:

You’re not seeing that modernism (which neocons approve of) was the pathway to post-modernism. (Just as neocons don’t grasp that the “good” liberalism, which they approve of, is the doorway to cultural leftism that they oppose). I instinctively grasped this. I sensed there something was rotten in the state of literature, and recoiled from it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 03, 2007 03:15 PM | Send