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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.
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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 teacherhttps://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🤷♂️" title="Achselzuckender Mann" aria-label="Emoji: Achselzuckender Mann">
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."
