A Year and a Day Married to James Joyce's Ulysses

“… In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring…” Section III of The Monumental Decision of the United States District Court Rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey Lifting the Ban on “Ulysses.”

James’ Joyce’s Ulysses always makes it to the top 100 best novels in the world, forever and ever, often making # 1. That’s like the Academy Award for the best movie ever made; the best Grammy in the history of the world, the Tony for every play ever produced on Broadway, the Booker Prize for life everlasting.

On New Year’s Eve, I asked numerous seriously-educated friends if they had ever read Ulysses—
“Half, maybe…”
“I tried, but we didn’t get along…”
“I’ve always been meaning to…”
I mean this is considered THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN!

Me? I have read half of Ulysses three times in my life—once when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley; once when I was a history graduate student in Colorado; and another as I commuted daily on the bus to and from University of Washington for yet another graduate degree. Each time I crawled my way to the halfway mark and simply could not go any further. I was worn out. I could never make it to the end--my Odyssey ended in the middle of the ocean. I gave up.

“Ulysses is not an easy book to read or to understand.” So said our Hon. John M. Woolsey when he had to plow through it for his rendered opinion. “The study of Ulysses is, therefore, a heavy task.”

This time, I’m going to finish James Joyce’s masterpiece—I am…I am...I am.

Like James Joyce in his loyalty to technique and who went about honestly attempting to tell fully what his characters think about, I will not funk my duty to read him fully, to think about what his characters are thinking about, and understand who they are and why they do what they do that one day in June in Dublin. I intend to read Ulysses as a piece of literature not a piece of scholarship. I want to read a story not a dissertation.

The Story: In a nutshell (again, thanks to the Hon. John Woolsey’s record-making opinion) … In Ulysses, Joyce takes persons of lower middle class living in Dublin in 1904 and seeks not only to describe what they did on a certain day early in June of that year as they went about the City bent on their usual occupations, but also to tell what many of them thought about the while.

Woolsey also believed that you can’t understand the book unless you have some companion studies. I’m armed with mine—Wikipedia (however, I’ve read the first episode of Ulysses and I’m already beyond the Wikipedia analysis); Ulysses on the Liffey by Richard Ellmanm, 1971 (me thinks he overanalyzes what Joyce enjoyed doing—interspersing bits from Homer, Shakespeare, and Mother Church), and A Lonely Voice by Frank O’Connor, 1961 (O'Connor preferred The Dubliners over Ulysses).

As I go along, I’ll pick up more “companion” pieces—this time around, we'll all get it right.

I’m armed…I’m ready and I’ve got myself a year and a day.

Oh--why Handfasting Ulysses as the title for this blog? Handfasting is an ancient Celtic marriage ceremony where the couple has a year and a day to decide if they want to stay in a marraige. I'm kind of feeling like I need such a commitment on this project.