Ulysses at Its Hundredth Birthday

The art of the inaccessible.

On February 2, 1922, Ulysses was published. The book was already famous before it existed, due to controversies surrounding serialization. A decade later it is still something people say they want to read, but do not actually do.

This is not because it is poorly written. Quite the opposite. Ulysses may be the best-written English prose ever. Every page is technically brilliant. But it is also unreadable. Not difficult. Unreadable. There is a difference.

Difficult prose asks for effort. Difficult prose you can work through. Unreadable prose refuses passage. Joyce sometimes writes in a mixture of language and private reference and unfinished thought-streams, and you cannot catch the pace. You cannot follow. You are lost.

Many critics considered this intentional. Joyce wanted, they said, you to get lost. He wanted to decentralize writing from reading, so that reading itself becomes a labor in place of reception. This sounds avant-garde and probably it was. But it means the book is not for all readers. It is for readers who have learned to feel incomprehension.

What engages me is not Joyce's innovation, but what Ulysses says about the economy of art. The book is not a bestseller. It never will be. A century after publication, fewer people read Ulysses than say they would like to read it. The gap is immense.

This could mean that Joyce lost. That the book does not communicate. But you could also reverse it: Joyce won. The book exists, makes no concessions to readability, and yet: it is canonical. It is revered. Billions of words have been written in commentary.

This raises the question about beauty as sweetness. Many artists believe you must reach an audience, that you must be accessible, that you cannot isolate yourself in difficulty. But Joyce proves that inaccessibility itself can be powerful. The threshold makes it rare. Rarity makes it valuable.

What Ulysses says may not be in the book itself. It sits in the fact that it exists as artwork you cannot consume the way you consume a novel. You must struggle with it. You must give it time. And many people simply cannot muster that.

The book is an artwork not despite its inaccessibility, but partly because of it. That is uncomfortable. It says something about the relationship between beauty and inequality that you do not like to hear.

Sources: James Joyce, Ulysses (1922); studies by Richard Ellmann, Terence Cavein