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Ulysses means more to me than any other book. Part of the reason why is that I first read Ulysses before knowing *anything* about Ulysses. Here’s a #Bloomsday2020 thread.
My family didn’t read much beyond the pulpiest of pulp. Danielle Steel and Wilbur Smith. I’ve always loved reading, but reading was mostly limited to Stephen King (I still read a lot of King!). Aside from library borrows, there were never many books in our house.
After high school, I barely scraped into university, but somehow made it in to one of Australia’s more prestigious ones to study Education with a minor in English. To become a school teacher
I had no idea what to expect. Before enrolling, the only tertiary graduates I had encountered were school teachers, medical professionals, and a mate’s weird older brother.
The whole thing was massively intimidating! I didn’t know what was expected from me, and I really felt, for the first time, what it meant to be working-class in the sense of being deprived access to a whole world of experience and all the confidence that seemed to instil.
I attended classes three days a week and worked the other four. On those three days I would spend around four hours in transit. My friends live back home and where I was, in the city, I was yet to find my people.
But what I found was the university bookstore! And I started buying things purely on cover design: Utopia, White Noise, At Swim-Two-Birds, the Iliad. I had never heard of these books or their authors but I bought and read them. Or tried to read them.
The fifth book acquired this way featured a picture of a castle-looking thing with superimposed text. Huge, thick novel. Penguin Classics. Silver spine. Blurb from Anthony Burgess: didn’t he write A Clockwork Orange? Cool-sounding title: Ulysses.
To be perfectly clear: I had no idea who James Joyce was or what Ulysses might have meant (or how to pronounce it). I bought the book, tried to read it, and quickly discovered that I didn’t know how to read. The prose felt like walking in dense fog.
But, from within that fog, concrete figures slowly emerged: and, unlike anything else, they were familiar as human. The sense was warm and beautiful and stupid and ugly and sad and funny – it swarmed with revenants of a lifeworld that I thought I was having to leave behind.
I carried this book around for about two years straight, reading and re-reading, trying to live in the minds and bodies of these fictional creations – to inhabit their world.
That time spent with a language that was both deeply familiar and profoundly alien, a world that was both mine but so concretely elsewhere and for others, made me want to spend my thinking life doing something with books – helping others feel and experience that, perhaps.
I changed degrees to focus on literature, started receiving decent marks for my writing, and now – fifteen years later – I’m about to have my first run at teaching an entire courses dedicated solely to Ulysses.
Last tweet. Jezza was right: "Read a little bit at a time and think about it and then move on, but don’t beat yourself up if you don’t understand it."
