Every year I attempt the same goal: to finish James Joyce’s Ulysses by Bloomsday. Bloomsday, for the uninitiated, is the anniversary of the day on which the events of the book take place: June 16th.

This year, I think I’ll make it. I’ve overcome the hurdles that always stop me, bore me, freak me out or otherwise cause me to never finish. Although I’ve probably read every part of the text at one point or another, I’ve yet to enjoy the novel straight through.

At first glance, one has to think: why bother? This thing is a work, all right—dense and difficult to comprehend. It took Joyce seven years to write it. What Joyce has done, in short, is assign each chapter in his book a corresponding episode in The Odyssey. He then tells each chapter in a different style and very explicity spells out a “theme” for each chapter and carefully crafts the setting as well. As Joyce tells the story of one particular day, it’s also about a lot more. According to Joyce, the book is about two nations, Israel and Ireland as well as about the human body in general. Additionally, one could probably spend the rest of one’s life reading the secondary material about Ulysses.

Now that I’m chest deep in it, I can tell you this: the water’s fine! This is, without a doubt, one of the most remarkable books I’ve ever read. Even in the postmodern world we live in, the edge to which Joyce has taken writing and fiction in general still strike me as shockingly inventive and fresh. And it’s not just all about how obtuse Joyce can get. The book is filled with eroticism, humor, history and well-crafted, entertaining dialog.

But Joyce can get weird, especially when he enters the mind of his characters, a technique he pioneered which now is called the “internal monologue.”

Witness the Proteus episode of Chapter 3. Stephen Dedalus is moping about on the beach. Having been mocked during the morning by his roommate Buck Mulligan, and paraded about like a jestor for their English houseguest, Stephen’s feeling a bit down on himself, the artist’s life, and Ireland itself. He gets out of teaching his class, gets paid and heads for a stroll on the beach to kill time before meeting Buck Mulligan for pints at 12:30.

In most novels, I just typed what is needed to describe the action, albeit not very artfully. But in Ulysses, the reader is transported inside of Stephen’s mind while he participates in the above action. And so we get this version of an intellectual poet and his thoughts while he’s taking a piss into the sea:

His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck’s castoffs nebeneinander: He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein another’s foot had nested warm. The foot that beat the ground in tripudium, foot I dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt’s shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris. Tiens, quel petit pied! Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all.

In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing chafing against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.

Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary: and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniurias patiens ingemiscit. To no end gathered: vainly then released, forth flowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a toil of waters.

Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now.

Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.

A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man. Old Father Ocean. Prix de Paris: beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.

Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there? Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect, Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum. No. My cockle hat and staff and his my sandal shoon. Where? To evening lands. Evening will find itself.

He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make their end. By the way next when is it? Tuesday will be the longest day. Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet. Già . For the old hag with the yellow teeth. And Monsieur Drumont, gentleman journalist. Già . My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder? Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to a dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. Toothless Kinch, the superman. Why is that, I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?

My handkerchief. He threw it. I remember. Did I not take it up?

His hand groped vainly in his pockets. No, I didn’t. Better buy one.

He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully. For the rest let look who will.

Behind. Perhaps there is someone.

He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.

Basically, I think this is the start of the story, even though it happens at the end of chapter three. Stephen’s creative act of pissing into the sea begins the book, and now we can following our Ulysses, Leopold Bloom.

One could argue that the main objective of concocting such a complex and calculated work is to show off. One time, I gave a girlfriend a copy of Nabakov’s Pale Fire. When she returned it and I asked her how she liked it, she exclaimed, “Nabakov is a narcissistic motherfucker!” Certainly it takes a lot of will and a healthy dose of ego to push something complicated out to the uncomplicated masses, but those sorts of dismissals are really dismissals of the art of writing. Many times, when an author uses confounding syntax, unusual techniques, or even, as is the case withPale Fire, obscures the fact that his novel is even a novel at all, the author is exploring the very ideas and theories surrounding meaning itself. I think that Joyce was trying, in the best way he knew how, to present the state of culture, the arts, Dublin, politics and the collective and individual psyches of early twentieth Century humanity and nothing less. Such a task is necessarily complex.