On James Joyce’s novel Ulysses
The Irish Times ran a brief piece recently on the one-century anniversary now of Joyce’s novel. Two paragraphs from it:
“Almost 100 years after its publication, James Joyce’s Ulysses has finally attained the recognition it deserves – as Ireland’s premier tourist attraction. State agencies and Irish diplomats around the world are stepping up their marketing campaigns in this centenary year, leveraging Joyce’s novel to boost visitor numbers. This is exactly what Joyce would have wanted. To maximise the book’s selling power, however, some hard decisions must be taken.
For the city-break market, the book’s length is an issue. A few judicious edits, starting with that 4,000-word final sentence, could cut Ulysses in half at little cost to the non-existent plot. “I fear those big words,” says Stephen Daedalus, “that make us so unhappy.” He’s right: remove the big words, starting with honorificabilitudinitatibus. The book’s dramatic climax – “yes I said yes I will Yes” – is actually repetitious and should be replaced with the more elegant “Absolutely”. Only Joyceans will notice these changes. Having officially run out of original things to say about the book in 1992, however, they will feel solemn delight at having new textual arcana to parse.”
The multiple “yes” sentence that ends the book doesn’t bother me; it seems almost poetic. But one editor accused me in part in an essay considered for publication of “semantic layering” and placed his scalpel to my initial text. It reminds me of a joke from the TV show Cheers: “So you’re saying I’m repetitive, that I’m redundant, that I repeat myself?”
My graduate school had an entire course on the novel that I took; it may have yielded my best essay. My favorite brief critic’s comment on the book was that it shows a single day can be an epic. A fellow student said it shows Catholic belief in the redemptive power of suffering. A professor qualified this as redemption through unwarranted suffering.