Stream of Consciousness

Ulysses has long been hailed as James Joyce's revolutionary masterpiece, considered the greatest novel of the 20th century by some.  Joyce spent over 10 years writing it, editing and re-editing up to the very moment it was sent off to the printers and then immediately marking changes once it was hot off the press for the next printing.  It isn't so much a book as a weirdly organic outcropping of the author's enormously ambitious mind, the kind of epic slab that causes undergraduates to quail and shake in terror.  Academics have spent entire careers trying to decode its mysteries.  For many English majors, it's a kind of rite of passage, a trial by fire. It's a monumental work, and it's what I'm currently facing, in paperback form.

Unfortunately for me, I can't stand it.  My professor, bless his heart, is doing his best to keep us motivated and interested, but the book is just slowly sapping away my will to live.  The stream of consciousness technique that characterizes so much of the novel is just unbearable.  I don't like stream of consciousness.  I like sentences.  I like clarity.  I don't really feel the need to get inside anyone's head.  My own head is quite enough.  With Joyce, it's like reading an extremely dull freeform blog, only with a wagon-load more of literary pretension. 

The novel's vocabulary clocks in at some 30,000 words or so, with many of the words being made up from existing words.  And not fun words like in Lewis Carroll; stupid words, like "whitesmocked" or "hidingplace".  Why not just separate them like normal people?  Is that too hard, adding a little space?  Noooo, he needs to make an artistic statement, damn it.  In addtion, he likes to use unconventional grammar and punctuation--actually, no,"use" is too gentle of a word.  "Use" makes me think that he bought a semi-colon a drink in a divey bar, spent the night and then didn't call the next day.  No, this is a lot more like Joyce taking language and then anally violating it up against a back alley wall. 

What's worse is that there's virtually no plot to follow; it's simply the events of a single day in Dublin, and the characters are just ordinary people.  For all of Joyce's careful construction, they're not that interesting and arouse no great passions in me.  I can't find it in myself to care about these characters, whether to love them or despise them, and my general attitude towards Bloom, the primary protagonist, is one of lingering indifference.  As with the rest of the book, I just don't care.  But I have to read it, so it makes me crazy.

I think part of why the book frustrates me so much is because of the hypocrisy that surrounds it.  People who have never managed to finish the book still feel compelled to sing its praises.  If it was so good, why didn't they finish the damn thing?  Joyce has been famously quoted as saying about Ulysses, "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 insuring one's immortality."  So...if I write something that nobody else can understand, I'll be remembered as a great writer?  A model like that just gives rise to hundreds of other writers who feel Joyce is endorsement enough for their own self-indulgent ramblings!  Argh!!!  This is supposed to be the greatest novel of the 20th century?  Did 20th century literature really suck that bad?  Christ, no wonder I prefer my Ancient Greek theatre class.  They may have had gods running around turning people into snakes, but it still makes more sense than Ulysses.