William Cook

How to read Ulysses

After a century, James Joyce’s revolutionary work still only makes sense to Dubliners

A statue of James Joyce in Dublin (Credit: Getty images)

In the labyrinthine basement studio of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, Irish actor Barry McGovern is doing something that would be inconceivable in any other country. Remarkably, he’s reading the whole of James Joyce’s Ulysses out loud. Even more remarkably, a substantial audience are paying good money to sit and watch him. He’s been hard at it for five days, and he still has two days to go: 33 hours (plus toilet breaks) spread over an entire week.

Like a lot of people, I’ve always found Ulysses a dreadful struggle, so why do I persevere with it? Partly snobbery, of course. Having scratched a living for 30 years writing about the arts, I’ve lost count of all the boffins who’ve told me it’s the most important novel of the 20th Century, yet I could never make head nor tail of it. Was there something wrong with me? Maybe a visit to Bloomsday, Dublin’s annual James Joyce jamboree, would help me get inside the book which even Joyce himself called ‘usylessly [sic] unreadable.’

Hearing McGovern recite it, Ulysses suddenly makes a lot more sense. I still can’t quite work out what’s going on, but it sounds a lot better out loud. The trick, I soon discover, is not to follow it too closely, but to let the words wash over you, like music. It’s strangely soothing, like the hubbub of drunken conversation. It’s also dangerously soporific – I almost nod off once or twice. Three hours fly by, Barry takes a bow, and we shuffle out into the street, blinking in the sunlight, wondering ‘What the hell was all that about?’

My beef with Ulysses isn’t with the book itself. It’s a magical, perplexing work, an endless source of wonder and befuddled fascination. The thing that gets my goat is the industry that’s grown up around it.

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