On Not Having Read Ulysses

 On Not Having Read Ulysses

 

 

Or perhaps my title should be “On Not Having Finished Ulysses”, or “On Only Having Dipped into Ulysses”. For on my shelves is a dog-eared and yellowing Penguin paperback edition, which has reproachfully followed me around over the years. It dates from the mid 1970s (price £1.50).

 

The volume’s dog-ears and slightly torn cover emphatically suggest some handling by some reader or readers. But perhaps none of those readers was me. I might have “borrowed” the already read copy long ago; it might have been left with me by a departing flatmate; it might have been read or attempted by a sixth form child.

 

Whatever its obscure history over nearly half a century, the book now lies before me, like a medieval memento mori, or perhaps memento legere. Its reproach is insistent and unavoidable. I must have a (another?) go..

 

I write this piece as the centenary of the publication of Ulysses falls (2 February). No middle-to-highbrow newspaper or periodical allows one not to notice.

 

In The Guardian, the Irish writer Anne Enright writes drily and perceptively. Asked by some journalist about “the burden of confronting Joyce for the contemporary Irish novelist”, she retorts that Joyce is no burden, but a boon. (She might also have pointed out that she is no “contemporary” of Joyce.)

 

In Prospect magazine, Jeremy Noel-Tod, a youngish academic, writes an engaging piece about the history of companion guides to Ulysses. Joyce himself briefed the authors of the first two, near contemporaneous, commentaries. He knew that, without author’s clues, the book would be too much of a puzzle. (My Penguin is piloted by the eminent scholar Richard Ellmann.)

 

I can’t just sit and nod along to these and doubtless many other proclamations of admiration. More reasons to read the thing.

 

One unfortunate by-product of the Joyce-Fest is that the term “modernism” is being bandied about copiously. Ulysses is deemed to be a paradigm of literary modernism, inevitably paired with TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (oh yes, that centenary falls later this year).

 

Anne Enright writes: “Joyce refused to fix the meaning of words on the page and left the reader to fend for themselves”. May we say the same for the word “modernism”? It is surely a portmanteau and tautological term, which embraces pretty much all artistic, literary and philosophical movements since about 1870, no matter how diffuse or, indeed, opposed such movements are or were.

 

Fascism is modernist, Leninism is modernist, TS Eliot, the High Anglican, is modernist. And so on, ad many finitums. 

 

At least, as I understand, with architecture the concept has a relatively simple reference. It is design that celebrates the materials of modern building, especially steel, concrete and glass. Especially, in Brutalist form, concrete (regard London’s South Bank structures of the 1950s). 

 

Otherwise, my advice is: faced with any debate about modernism, include yourself out.

 

February 2022