Written by: Hattie Kennedy
When I was 13 I started at a new school. I made a friend called Elie, and one day, when we were in the library, we struck a deal. We swore that before we left that school in July 2004 we would both have read James Joyce’s Ulysses. Back in the heady days of the Michaelmas Term 1999, 2004 was a long way in the future. We had barely started to think of GCSEs, let alone A-Levels, and so this seemed an entirely conquerable feat.
I am a bookworm, I am never happier than when I have a book in my hand and I will read anything. I can’t leave the house without a book in my bag; even on a night out with my friends I will shove a small paperback into my handbag. You never know when you might have to wait in line at a club, or to use the toilet in the pub. The thought of being alone with my own mind scares me somewhat. The idea of having to make small-talk terrifies me.
I can read a page of an airport novel in just under 20 seconds; I can recall 90%+ of the information on that page. I read a 200 page novel in an hour. When I go on holiday I have to take a book for every day that I’ll be away and then 2 or three extras in case I get stuck in hospital with a rare flesh rotting disease. I don’t include any books my fellow holiday makers take with them in these calculations. These are bonus books.
None of this is intended to be in any way boastful. All I am trying to demonstrate is that a) I like reading, b) I read quickly, c) I read a lot. I may also have managed to demonstrate that I am d) a slightly mentally unstable and e) a social incompetent.
So, back to Ulysses. As you have probably guessed, I never read it while I was at school. Nor did Elie for that matter, so I never felt too badly about it. I knew that my choice to study English Literature at Uni would bring me face to face with the book soon enough, and therefore I saw no reason to worry about this hole in my literary knowledge.
Second year of University. A course entitled ‘Literature and Text’, the kind of course that I love. On the book list, you guessed it, Ulysses. The term moved by quite quickly and suddenly the Easter holidays were upon us. Now, being kindly folk, our lecturers had set Ulysses as the first text to be studied after the break, giving us all the more time to read it. Despite this I had been carrying my copy of Ulysses around with me since the end of January. I was convinced I would read it well before the holidays and, due in no small part to my delusion, I was suffering some quite serious back pain. Bemoaning aloud the fact I had just one unread text on my booklist, someone suggested that I was suffering from what he termed Ulysses Fear. I quickly scoffed at the idea, I who had read not one but two completely unreadable Alan Hollinghurst novels, being scared of a book that was undoubtedly going to actually be good. The very idea was preposterous.
Yet the summer exams rolled round and I never quite managed to plough my way past page 68 of Ulysses and so I avoided it in the exams. My accusatory friend, meanwhile, scoffed in the corner at my feebly uttered excuses.
I resolved to read Ulysses over the summer, perhaps on the beach in Brighton, perhaps while I worked over the summer in that very school where I had made that thoughtlessly disregarded promise. This time, I was sure that I would succeed.
I don’t know what it is that is stopping me. It can hardly be the length as I have read most of Maeve Binchy, ploughed through a smattering of Elizabeth Elgin in my life and recently embarked on an Anne Rivers-Siddons immersion exercise.
Needless to say my cycle of failure continued when I promised myself that I would take Ulysses with me to Montréal as a piece of light reading for my year abroad. As it turned out I didn’t even have space for a French dictionary, let alone a ridiculously battered yet still unread copy of what I had now decided was a nigh-on unreadable text.
As I sit here, 3000 miles from that detestable copy of the novel, taking a class where once again Ulysses has been placed on the reading list, I am determined that this summer will be the summer when I, Hattie Kennedy, will conquer Ulysses. In September I am taking yet another course with it on the reading list and I refuse to let this book conquer me when so many others have tried and failed. Ulysses is the kind of book I should love. I really like intertextuality. I really like pretentious books. I’m currently geeking out over an interactive biography of the Quebecois author and revolutionary Hubert Aquin, it has interviews, and postcards, and pull out letters; it is simply called HA!.
So, I sit here, listening to an album conceived as a biography of a certain Jewish teenager (I told you that I like pretentiousness and intertextuality) and I declare that I, Hattie Kennedy, have Ulysses Fear, but that I will conquer it before September.
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10 Comments
While prolific reading in and of itself is, of course, massively important, I personally struggle with the idea that one is meant to read certain texts, much like I’m uncomfortable with the notion that one is supposed to have seen certain films and caught every episode of a given TV show, all the while keeping up with five broadsheets a day and learning Cantonese.
(Not that you implied this; just a related tangent.)
I wonder how much value finally completing Ulysses will add to your life; I suspect the completion of the book, of the task, will be far more satisfying than the item itself. But I may be wrong. If, however, that turns out to be a truism, you could have got the same end result with pretty much any book (even one of Jeffrey Archer’s). But, naturally, you couldn’t know this until you actually completed Ulysses.
Even I feel like I’m invested in this now. I’ll expect notes.
Most people i know who have tackled it say that attempting to read it as a narrative work makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a book that you can open at random pages, read a little of, and take something away from. I’ve never bothered, to be honest. I’m in good company though:
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25341-2647599,00.html
I read a lot and finish most things, but I must have abandoned hundreds of books along the way. There is a certain point were the effort put in doesn’t feel worth it for what you’re getting out. If you carry on, in most situations you are merely completeing the task of reading the extra 200 pages and have disengaged with the actual work.
I’ve never attempted Ullyses and having struggled with Joyce’s A Portrait…. I have no inclination to do so.
In a way I’m approaching it with much the same logic that I do a film starring Adam Sandler. I’m pretty sure I won’t enjoy it but how can I have all the fun of telling people how rubbish it is unless I’ve watched/read it.
This way I can only be impressed or at least feel slightly smug at having acheived my aim. It’s the little things in life.
My biggest problem, as I’ve said before many times, is my eternal shift of interests. I’ll be really, really into the subject of a given book when I begin it but 100+ pages in I’ve usually moved on from that, which culminates in an increasingly endless trail of unfinished books forming a disorderly line behind me.
I consider myself a prolific reader - certainly if one considers text on t’Internet (which of course I do, and so should any other sensible person; it is 2008) - but I’m a terrible finisher of books.
@Hattie, love that you’ve set up a blog on this (the link to which can be found in the Incoming Links area, to the right of this comment area on this page. :)
Oh, Joyce. I have vague (and horrible) memories of trying to read Dubliners some years back.
It was rather like reading Welsh backwards whilst trying to juggle burning monkeys. In short, it left me feeling more than a little weary and confused.
I’ve had a similar long-standing vacillation about picking up War and Peace. But 900 pages in I’m actually quite enjoying it, although about 400 pages have been people crying and/or shouting ‘Hurrah!’.
Alan Hollinghurst is a national treasure. Sort of.
Hattie, now I understand it all!
tu vaincras Ulysses, I’m pretty sure about it! I’m just wondering if you have taken it with you for this 3-week trip!
baisers
I stopped reading “Recognitions” because — because they all smoked too much. Somewhere in the middle, on every bloody page someone is lighting up and puffing and so forth and despite the obvious greatness of this American classic in so many ways, I just couldn’t take it any more.
I gave up “Glastonbury” cause I got sidetracked looking up on Google Earth all the little towns and hamlets he used in the book and that got to be more fun than the read.
My sister gave up “Magic Mountain” because she thought it a nasty trick of Mann to put in so much French.
One of your commenters gave up on Dubliners - hard to understand that - I suggest they try Anne Pigone’s The Ugly”. It’s The Dead rewritten to take place a 100 years later with all the characters having switched gender.
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