Ulysses

Opinions of the novel range across the spectrum. Some readers insist that Ulysses is a superior novel, a tour de force marking a turning point in modern literature. Others insist that it is an inferior novel, an extremely boring work featuring long passages with a chaos of strange words that are a penance to read and a hell to fathom. There can be no gainsaying, though, that Joyce has been highly influential. Through stream of consciousness–and through sometimes manipulation of language–he allows readers to view the complicated, perplexing, and sometimes irrational workings of the human mind. His display of this technique inspired later writers to use it in their own literary works. Unfortunately, because of its mission and its experimental nature, Ulysses tasks the reader like no other novel before it, making him plod through jungles of obscure symbols, perplexing allusions, and boring portraits of ordinary Dublin life. Admirers of Joyce acknowledge that the novel is difficult. Passages like the following (part of a chapter in which Joyce writes in various ideas evolved during the development of the English language) make it so:

A liquid of womb of woman eyeball gazed under a fence of lashes, calmly, hearing. See real beauty of the eye when she not speaks. On yonder river. At each slow satiny heaving bosom's wave (her heaving embon) red rose rose slowly sank red rose. Heartbeats: her breath: breath that is life. And all the tiny tiny fernfoils trembled of maidenhair.

Since its publication, many scholars, distinguished writers, and average readers have exalted Ulysses as a work of enormous significance and brilliance. Probably just as many scholars, distinguished writers, and average readers have dismissed it as an unremittingly dull, tedious, and tiresome work–a waste of time. The verdict: The novel needs another century or two to ferment, marinate, or whatever literary works do when they go through the "test of time" (as literary tastes change and standards evolve) to reveal itself in all of its fullness to an unbiased judge. This much can be said for certain about the novel: Except in academia, not many people read Ulysses. Those who do decide to have a go at the thick, allusion-laden, language-bending tome frequently put it down after reading a few chapters, never again to pick it up.