Ulysses

James Joyce

Having read it

★★☆☆☆

Well, it has plenty of words, of which some are made up – probably for points to be made – and sometimes the order of them makes coherent sentences, offering some meaning sometimes, though of what, one isn’t sure but no doubt helps the book’s slice of life approach and its openness to interpretation and critiquing of how it’s all meant to be perceived and interpreted ...a bit like life really, so maybe that’s its point.

Anyway, those words didn’t all live happily ever after.

The end.

A good passage

Well: if the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.

A second good passage

For who is there who anything of some significance has apprehended but is conscious that that exterior splendour may be the surface of downwardtending lutulent reality or on the contrary anyone so is there inilluminated as not to perceive that as no nature’s boon can contend against the bounty of increase so it behoves every most just citizen to become the exhortator and admonisher of his semblables and to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously command and promise which on all mortals with prophecy of abundance or with diminution’s menace that exalted of reiteratedly procreating function ever irrevocably enjoined?

A third good passage

It’s all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual
equality? I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. It’s a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, so to speak.