Zack’s Reviews > Ulysses > Status Update

We’ve made it to the chapter I’m looking forward to most.

I also got through the legendary Circe section this week, which is when the novel turns into a play for 150 pages—a section that allegedly took Joyce a year to write. Even if you don’t like this book, you have to admire how much went into writing it, especially because it does work exactly as it should.

Whole last chapter had Joyce parodying various styles of English—from travel writing of the 1400s, to Middle English, all the way to modern slang—and I almost quit the book here. It’s not fun and does nothing except entertain *Joyce*. Best comparison I can make is when contemporary Virginia Woolf wrote “Time Passes” in TTL, which does a similar stylistic thing but it serves the reader and the narrative

Leopold Bloom thinks like Yoda, and it’s really distracting. “Exhausted I am.” “At home she must be” are not real lines in the book but are pretty close to what’s actually there.

For all its annoyances, the truth is that the core of this novel is one guy wandering around Dublin and drinking with different people in bars throughout the day to avoid reckoning with his adulterous wife, and that rips.

I’m trying to resist the urge to call Joyce pretentious for layered line after line with Shakespeare and mythological allusions—especially because the point of this chapter is to assert Joyce as an equal writer to Shakespeare— but I do feel like it’s a privilege to engage with a consciousness that’s evidently smarter than my own, and we need to fight against raging anti-intellectualism

Obviously I will finish this and will read it closely to get as many allusions/hidden meanings as I can, etc. etc., but this is a violently unfun novel to read.

“Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound.

Buzz buzz.

But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.”

I should be having a good time but I resent passages like this so much

I do have to keep reminding myself that this is the first time some of these gimmicks were used. I appreciate what Joyce did for the novel as an art form. As usual, though, Joyce gets in Joyce’s way a lot of the time.

I’m not trying to be a hater, and I don’t think this opinion is based at all, but where I land on some of these stream-of-consciousness passages—especially coming off of Orlando, To The Lighthouse, and The Waves in the last two years—is: absolutely no one’s thought patterns are like this. “No cow, me, fun time? Sic parvis magna. Illusions: all: in us” this is not a real line, but it could be

Chapter 3: now we’re cooking. This is what I signed up for