Reading James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ in the time of TikTok

This Friday, book lovers around the world will gather in parks, museums and pubs to celebrate Bloomsday, an annual event that pays tribute to the life and work of Irish novelist James Joyce. The celebration is centred around Joyce’s crowning masterwork, “Ulysses,” which tells the story of a day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom on June 16, 1904 — a date that also marks Joyce’s first sexual encounter with his eventual wife, Nora Barnacle.

It’s a niche holiday, obviously, marked by a small but dedicated cohort of readers who have managed to finish “Ulysses,” an incredibly dense and revolutionary work of modern literature written just over a century ago. Widely considered one of the most difficult novels in the Western canon, it’s sometimes referred to as the “book that everyone knows, but no one has read.”

I’ve always observed Bloomsday events with envy and from a distance, like that meme of Squidward watching from his window as SpongeBob and his friend Patrick prance around below. I read and enjoyed Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” when I was in my early 20s, and fully intended to tackle “Ulysses” at some point. But as time wore, the responsibilities of adulthood cropped up like weeds, and my attention span grew fractured and horribly thin. The prospect of tackling a prohibitively onerous tome like “Ulysses” started to feel more and more remote.

Perhaps this stems from my work as a journalist who spends most of my day on the breaking news desk — a job that requires splintering my focus across several screens at once, monitoring a myriad of scandals and tragedies as they unfold across the globe. Or perhaps it stems from an unchecked social media addiction — not uncommon among Millennials — that mindless (and increasingly alienating) flow of hollow distractions that pull me away from reality.

In recent years, things have somehow gotten worse. Going for a walk means booting up Spotify. Watching a TV show or basketball game now requires two screens. Doomscrolling has replaced any quiet reflection that might take place before sleep.

Reading books, particularly fiction, has always been something of a safe haven — a way to fully engage my brain and immerse myself into an experience, even if it is not my own. But in recent years, even this activity has fallen victim to my rapidly deteriorating attention span. A normal person might see a chapter break as an opportunity to make a cup of tea; to my brain, it represents an off-ramp to go check my inbox or my Twitter DMs.

I still read a lot, and was proud of my Goodreads profile — but each Bloomsday was a reminder of a “Ulysses”-sized hole in my spirit that needed to be filled.

Things changed when my friend JP and I were having a pint and at Noonan’s, an excellent Irish pub on the Danforth, when we began chatting about a framed illustration inspired by “Ulysses.” After a couple “crystal cups of foaming ebon ale” as Joyce wrote, we decided we’d go for it — “life’s too short not to read the great books,” the Guinness explained. “How hard could it really be?” Plus, I had a couple other nerdy friends — Zak and Tim, both political theorists, and Bill, a nurse practitioner — who I figured might be up for the task.

Over the course of the next five months, my purple, five-pound copy of “Ulysses” became my constant companion, acting as a desperately-needed antidote to my fractured attention span and its attendant anxieties. Relentlessly dense and almost overwhelmingly difficult, making my way through the 552-page behemoth — that’s not counting the 250 pages of annotations — required focus, dedication and time. But the novel also became a portal into a highly rewarding world of language and ideas — one that felt refreshingly far removed from the doomscroll and firehose of electronic stimulus that make up my day-to-day existence.

Getting started

Stripped to its most basic elements, “Ulysses” documents a busy, but mostly ordinary day in the life of Leopold Bloom — an eccentric and quietly charming advertising agent living in early 20th Century Dublin. Intelligent, sensitive and empathic, Bloom has many friends, but — as the son of a Jewish immigrant — is alienated from his middle-class peers, who treat him as an outsider. Bloom is married to a relatively successful opera singer, Molly, who is having a not-so-secret affair with a strutting businessman named Blazes Boylan. Bloom has a daughter, but is haunted by the loss of his only son, who died as an infant. Throughout the novel, he seeks to fill the hole left by that death by courting friendship with a young, aspiring poet named Stephen Dedalus (Joyce’s literary alter ego, who played the hero in “Portrait,” but who in “Ulysses” is depicted as an arrogant and directionless anti-hero).

The above might sound relatively straightforward, even conventional. But “Ulysses” is the farthest thing from conventional.

The most challenging part of “Ulysses,” and the reason most readers give up after a few dozen pages, is the fact that it’s absurdly allusive.

The novel’s structure is loosely based on “The Odyssey,” and draws heavily on elements of “Hamlet,” reflecting Joyce’s bold ambition to create a work of art that would stand next to Shakespeare and Homer in the pantheon of literature. But in addition to assuming prior knowledge of ancient Greek poetry and Elizabethan literature, Joyce makes thousands of literary, religious and historical references — sometimes dozens in a single paragraph. A complete understanding of “Ulysses,” therefore, would require an impossibly encyclopedic knowledge, spanning Aristotle, Nietzsche, Dante, Renaissance poetry, the Bible, Irish history, mysticism, and so on and so forth.

The key to clearing this initial hurdle is, firstly, to realize that Joyce never intended each reader to understand each reference, especially not on the first reading. “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality,” he once said of the book.

Second, you must determine a relationship with annotations that works for you. Zak’s approach was to read each chapter straight through, and then to reread it a second time, referencing only the annotations that seemed interesting or particularly relevant. Tim started off referencing annotations, but gave up halfway through. I made the perverse decision to read every single annotation included in my edition of the book as I read it (my theory is that my approach was conducive to my shortened attention span).

Third, find a helpful reading guide to keep you on track (we relied on this excellent guide from Joyce scholar Patrick Hastings).

Pushing the boundaries of the novel as a form

The second major hurdle to tackling “Ulysses” is also one of the greatest parts about the novel: its ever-shifting style and magically untethered approach to language and prose.

Much of the novel’s early chapters are written in “free indirect discourse,” a technique in which the narrator directly presents a character’s consciousness in that character’s natural idiom while retaining the third person perspective. In other words, the story is not told from the perspective of Bloom (or Stephen), but we are frequently exposed to, or interrupted by, their thoughts and experiences of the world.

The result is one of the most fully-realized and intimately drawn characters in Western literature — readers find themselves with Bloom’s mind and exposed to his most intimate thoughts as he cooks his breakfast, as he attends a funeral for a friend and as he pleasures himself on a beach (in a chapter that contributed to the book’s early banning). In one hilarious early scene, readers are treated to a description of Bloom reading a newspaper as he relieves himself on the toilet.

“Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone.”

This technique is a big part of what makes the books so absorbing — I recall early on, feeling, for perhaps the first time, that I wasn’t reading about a character, but almost experiencing life in 1904 Dublin from their perspective. Indeed, by the novel’s end, as Joyce scholar Hastings posits, “we may know more about Bloom than is possible to know about another human being.”

But this just scratches the surface. In an episode titled “Sirens,” Joyce adopts a highly musical style of writing to describe a scene in a hotel bar, as Bloom listens to other patrons perform songs on a piano in an adjacent room. Throughout the chapter, Joyce uses onomatopoeia, linguistic refrains and syncopated syntax in an attempt to replicate the qualities of music — a style that Hastings refers to as ekphrastic writing.

“A duodene of bird notes chirruped bright treble answer under sensitive hand. Brightly the keys, all twinkling, linked, all harpsichording, called to a voice to sing the strain of dewy morn, of youth, of love’s leave-taking, life’s, love’s morn.”

In “Nausicaa,” the infamous episode that sees Bloom spying on young women on the beach, Joyce adopts the voice of a pulpy romance novel. “Circe,” a treacherously long episode that finds our protagonist and a drunken Stephen hanging out in a brothel, takes the form of a play that shifts rapidly between reality and Bloom’s delirious waking nightmare.

“Oxen of the Sun,” which takes place in a maternity hospital, is another insanely difficult but fascinating episode. Containing 40 paragraphs that correspond to the 40 weeks of pregnancy, the episode shifts style several times, charting the evolution of Western literary style, from pagan incantations through to Middle English through to 19th century novelists like Charles Dickens. “I think this episode might also have been called Hades for the reading of it is like being taken the rounds of hell,” Harriet Shaw Weaver, one of Joyce’s benefactor’s famously quipped.

In “Ithaca,” the novel’s penultimate episode that takes the form of Catholic catechism, Bloom and Stephen step outside after a long discussion in the morning’s early hours:

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaven tree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

But the final hurdle in “Ulysses” is its last episode, “Penelope.” Consisting solely of the thoughts of Molly Bloom — Leopold’s wife — as she lies in bed late at night, the chapter unfolds as a dizzying and confounding stream-of-consciousness that lasts dozens of pages, completely devoid of punctuation. Brazenly intimate and shocking in its details — D.H. Lawrence (no prude) famously called it “the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written” — I found Molly’s monologue highly engaging, humorous and even romantic. What’s more, I found that her scattered thoughts and anxieties — which bounced rapidly from subject to subject, across time and place — were remarkably relatable, and all the most absorbing for that reason.

***

It’s been a couple months since we finished “Ulysses,” but our group chat continues to buzz with discussion.

Tim has become particularly interested in a “Jungian” interpretation of “Ulysses,” which understands the meeting between Bloom and Stephen as “a projection of the Jungian confrontation between the Ego and the Shadow. Zak, who was always drawn to the novel’s mythological framework, has been diving into theory that positions Bloom as Messiah.

We’ve spent hours dissecting the beauty of Joyce’s prose, and the humanity and humour contained within it; discussing Bloom as a modern archetype — worldly, scientific, a subversive blend of masculine and feminine attributes (a “new womanly man,” as Joyce described him) — and “Ulysses” as a compelling and humane vision of everyday modern life, in all its complexity and mundanity, its richness and pathos.

Since completing the book, I’ve largely reverted to my old habits, mindlessly consuming TikToks before bed or after work. But as I prepare to celebrate my first Bloomsday, I remain grateful for the months I spent reading “Ulysses,” which reintroduced me to the unmatched rewards of tackling a great novel, and the unparalleled joys of group reading.

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