Ulysses
by James Joyce
Ulysses by James Joyce is one of the masterpieces of modernist literature, a movement at the beginning of the 20th century when the traditional storylines of the Victorian novel were left behind to experiment with new ways of expressing human experience. Though hard to read, those who have made the effort are often enthralled by it and regard it as among the very best books they’ve ever read. For that reason alone, Ulysses is worth pursuing, possibly with the help of a guide.
Recommendations from our site
“It’s challenging, learned, filthy, and hilarious. In it, Joyce pushes the boundaries of language and the novel form. It’s easy to see how it was thwarted and censored four times during publication. At first, no one wanted to print it, because they could’ve been found liable for publishing pornography. Ulysses is one of those great novels that demands a level of concentration one can only get in isolation. Yes, it’s difficult and frustrating, but that’s because it wants to frustrate you—and the payoff is immense pleasure: no book gets closer to the ineffable experience of human play and tragedy, of being a fleshy mass of blood and bones in the modern world” Read more...
“This novel is still—after nearly a century—powerful, innovative and exhilarating. There is more going on in one sentence in Ulysses than there is in most contemporary novels.” Read more...
Robin Robertson on Books that Influenced Him
Robin Robertson, Novelist
“It is seen as the archetypal stream of consciousness novel. With more ambition than possibly any other writer, Joyce tries to get us into the inner monologues and dialogues of Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus. He didn’t invent the technique. but he makes it flourish in the most extraordinary way.” Read more...
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Charles Fernyhough, Novelist
“It’s a novel published after about 1910. It’s a novel that takes the traditional elements of place and time and mashes them up and reorders them. It attempts to capture the flow of human thought and human experience on the page in words and has no apparent interest in the conventions of the Victorian novel. It’s trying to represent the ordinary world in prose. Ulysses is a very brilliant, highly original attempt to put one man’s experience on one day to the pages of a book.” Read more...
Robert McCrum, Journalist
How to Read Ulysses by James Joyce
We asked Patrick Hastings, author of The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses and a long-term teacher of Ulysses, for some tips about how to read Joyce’s modernist masterpiece.
For those of us who have tried to read James Joyce and failed—or haven’t yet tried but want to embark on our expedition well-prepared—can you explain how exactly to go about it?
In order to build momentum, I recommend reading at least one episode per week, and I think readers benefit from completing their reading of that episode within 24 hours of starting it. If you try to read a page or two at a time, you’ll lose the thread and won’t get into the rhythm of the language or track the character development. So, perhaps you’ll want to carve out some time each week on Sunday afternoons or Wednesday evenings as your Ulysses time. Some readers might want to read the relevant Episode Guide in my book prior to reading the text itself; others might want to read the novel cold and shore up their understanding by reading the explanations I offer in my book afterwards. That is really up to what works best for each individual reader.
Any specific edition that we should be reading? Is the audiobook a good way into it (I ask this because one person I interviewed said that might be a solution)?
I have keyed my guidebook to the Gabler edition, which seems to be the most widely used edition in scholarly writing. It is a bit larger than the Vintage 1961 edition, so you have larger font and more space in the margins for notes. In terms of using an audiobook, the RTE performance of the text is really fun, but there are many other fantastic renderings out there. Lots of readers will enjoy hearing the poetry of the language out loud, but those listening should check in with the physical text every so often to get their bearings and pick up some of the purely textual elements. Some of the jokes only work on the page.
Why have you dedicated yourself to this book? Is it really something special?
I’ve yet to encounter another work of art that so successfully and thoroughly represents the human condition in the modern era. Ulysses is emotionally moving, intellectually invigorating, and super funny. I never fail to discover something new every time I read a page in the text. It is humbling and exciting in that way.
There are quite a few guides to Ulysses out there, did you feel they needed replacing?
There are lots of great resources out there, and every reader will find the one that best fits the type of reading experience that they are pursuing. In The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses, I sought to satisfy the reader’s desire for some clarity on what is actually happening in the plot in balance with succinct explanation of the innovative stylistic and allusive techniques. In this way, I hope for my readers to enjoy the story of the novel while also gaining an appreciation for the literary elements that make Ulysses such a masterpiece. I guess I felt that the time was right for a fresh voice to present the novel to a new generation of readers, and I wanted to package together for my readers lots of the scholarship that I’ve found really helpful to my own understanding of the book.