"Oxen of the Sun" is, in a sense, the apex of English literature to me. The modernists had a knack for essentially believing that if they just tried hard enough and wrote with enough complexity, they could capture essential truths about existence, and this chapter is the height of Joyce's effort in that regard. It is a chapter both about and structured like the birth and evolution of language, incorporating a density of reference and linguistic type that is somewhat absurd in its breadth.

This is all to say that Ulysses is a book written for people who like the idea of a Rube Goldberg machine of literature. I happen to be one of those people, but there are brilliant literary scholars who hate the book.

Everyone I know who loves it also has a scholarly level of knowledge about fiction so I suspect it has a lot of requisites to fully enjoy, like having to know a lot about american media to enjoy arrested development. I've been wanting to give it another go since I didn't enjoy or finish it last time, and my favorite book of all time (Wolfes Book of the New Sun) took three false starts to really get into it.

I've harbored a wholly unsupported, yet persistent, notion that no one really likes Ulysses, but that it's become an "emperor has no clothes" situation, where those who decide which books are "great" picked it on a lark, and dared others to say they didn't like it, knowing that none would lest they appear as the rube who couldn't appreciate great literature, resulting in a lineage of thinkers who encountered the beast, read it in horror, then told their colleagues about how much they loved it because obviously it's the brilliantest work of English, all while secretly hoping they weren't grilled too closely about it.

I love Ulysses because of what it says about growing into middle age, facing irresolvable insecurities about yourself, and the solace against these that you can find in friendship—the way you can feel your soul sing when you find someone who wants to understand you. It's a very beautiful and humanistic book. I'm sorry that you weren't able to connect with it.

I confess a little envy of your enjoyment of it. I wanted to like it and wish I could've gotten as much out of it as you did. It just didn't hit for me.

I wish I could find a kinder way to put this but... Don't you think that sounds like something an Ayn Rand villain would do?

Having not read Ulysses, nor having ever moved in the kind of circles where many if any acquaintances had, I can't really vouch for whether it has any specific literary value. Not am I really that interested in finding out for myself, from what I do know of it. But the idea that there's some grand cultural conspiracy behind it sounds just a little bit paranoid.

I don't mean to attack you personally, I don't know you and if I had more time I'd write a more sensitive post. I just wanted to make the Rand connection because I see little mention of her villains when she's brought up, and your post reminded me of them so strongly!

Hah, I could live with being a Rand villain. I suspect it’d be closer to a David Foster Wallace kind of subplot though.

I don’t actually think that’s what happened. However, if it came out that it did, I wouldn’t be entirely shocked. It’d be less “I knew it!” and more “huh, that explains a lot”.

Fair. People sure can act in that sort of way, for all sorts of reasons. We do what we can to navigate the social world we're part of, and if that means lying about having understood a word of Ulysses, then that's what we'll do!

For me, Joyce is the pinnacle of the English language. I can't say I understand too much of what is happening but noone writes more beautifully. I just love the sound of his words and the images he conjures.

This is a bizarrely anti-English take. There's appreciation for the beauty of the language for literature/poetry in every language, as far as im aware. Look at Japanese poetry for one obvious example that takes appreciation of beauty in language to its absolute extremes.

There's an entire genre -- poetry -- dedicated to expressing ideas in the most beautiful and elegant way possible.

I consider flowery artifices to be the opposite.

Same thing in all languages I know well enough to read books in.

I can't at all explain how or why it works, but certain kinds of writing style have an almost magical effect on me. This feeling of well-rounded beauty, even when the content is barely relevant, is just amazing. One could maybe describe it as a kind of brain hacking, which is also what drugs do.

Maybe poetry is just not for you?

That’s completely fine, but hopefully you can take people’s word on that it can be very beautiful to them.

It feels a bit like saying “if you don’t have meaningful lyrics, why even sing a song”: Different people can appreciate different layers of literature differently.

> Aren't meaning, insight and import of more consequence than beauty?

You are close to setting up a false dichotomy here. It isn’t those qualities or beauty, it’s those qualities and beauty.

I first experienced it when I read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. I was able to enjoy the book on the usual axes of plot, character, etc… but there was another level that had me rereading pages because every chapter, paragraph, and sentence felt perfectly constructed. Some of it I read out loud to myself because the rhythm of the words and sounds were musical. It is a great story, beautifully told.

That said, I’m not a fan of Ulysses and I’m sure a lot of people here would call me an uncultured rube for enjoying Odaatje’s writing like I did.

This happens in every language. I'm Norwegian, and there's an old Danish translation of Whitman I much prefer over the English original, not for ease of reading (Norwegian and Danish are close to mutually intelligible without much effort) but because the translation is beautiful.

I wish I could remember the edition.

There are books I prefer in one language or other. English tends to feel like it has a "darker" texture to me (no, it makes no logical sense) and so the same book - Lord of the Rings is an example I've read in both English and Norwegian - will hit me very differently emotionally depending on language.

Sometimes I'll read something just for the beauty of it. Other times I just want to get at the ideas.

For me, reading fiction is all about beauty. I liken it to listening to good music. It isn't really to learn anything "substantive." It is to experience a feeling or be transported to another place. In fact, I like to listen to (typically instrumental) music while I read as a sort of "soundtrack." I would liken reading a good book to watching an epic movie. I guess you might occasionally gain some insight into the human condition, but it isn't primarily an informational medium.

I feel the same way about reading beautiful language that I feel about reading a beautiful mathematical proof. It's not that it doesn't have substance, it's that the substance is put together in such such an elegant way that you don't just marvel at the content but also at its presentation.

It is very different, indeed possibly the opposite of a show off of cleverness. It is beautiful because it feels that it's just the right way to do it.

As a writer, I think I can speak to this. I can certainly understand a non-native speakers frustrations with the complexity of english grammar, the enormous number of synonyms and colloquialisms, the variety of 'codes' and kinds of 'jargon' that must make learning and reading English profoundly difficult. Especially where the non-native speaker or reader's mother tongue isn't a romance language. I get that it must make certain forms of English - from the dense AAVE of the wire, to Elizabethan sonnets all but impenetrable.

However, I see this 'pragmatism in all things, including art' perspective quite a bit on hackernews, and rarely enough anywhere else. Most often concerning fiction, but also contemporary and modern art. I'm not sure if it's a neurodiverse perspective, or a philistine one, but I can confirm that it's missing the aesthetic function of art. i.e.: the pleasure many people obtain from creating and experiencing it. There seems to be a frustration that some people who don't or can't engage in producing or enjoying certain kinds of art have - that becomes a denial of the value of the work altogether. 'I don't get it, so there's nothing there to get'.

Specific to Joyce and the modernists is an absolute mastery of the complexity and nuance of a wide breath of kinds of English (and in Joyce's case numerous other European languages). To a native speaker with a strong grasp of language, and a love of words, reading Joyce or TS Elliot, or Yeats etc, is like listening to a complex piece of classical music. The use of reference, of meter, of onomatopoeia, the play with homonyms and antonyms, and at a higher level with the structure of stories and narrative traditions etc - all give the reader pleasure. In the hands of a truly great writer, like those above, they also serve to create layers of meaning in the way a koan or painting can contain complex fractal patterns of meaning. Reading a great writer, working with the nuances of language and narrative can literally lift the reader into a state of heightened consciousness. A place where new realisations about society, the self, the emotional depths and nuances of other people are elucidated in a way that's genuinely mind expanding.

It's absolutely fine if you don't find this in literature - whether in a second language or your own. It's naive to assume that it doesn't exist because you personally can't perceive it. Aptly enough - that's a contradiction many writers have explored. Our tendency to diminish the inner lives of others, or the worth of things we cannot appreciate. One piece that springs to mind is David Foster Wallace's essay 'This is Water' - https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

To put it bluntly:

> Different strokes for different folks

Don’t you think you’re exaggerating? I would imagine there are fans of written language in every language. English isn’t special in this context.

I agree with your take on the literature. My point wasn’t in response to Ulysses or criticism of it, but of your statement regarding over-obsession with the English language.

I had the exact same experience. Struggled through it, searched hard for the genius that was supposedly exuding from the pages. I didn't see any of it and I don't remember a lick of the story. I was simply bored. Perhaps I'm not intellectual enough to "get it."

Same, same. I'm an avid reader. I don't shy away from complex literature. I also don't take great pleasure from overcomplication.

Computing analogy: It's like seeing that someone wrote "fizzbuzz" using a microservice architecture, quantum computing, multiple LLMs, and some custom hardware. Bravo! Cool that you pulled it off and made this monstrosity! I don't want to use it though, nor do I care to see the details of every bizarre choice, and I'm not impressed at the number of references to COBOL that you shoved into the diode layouts of the CPU you invented for it. I can see why other people would find it fascinating. I am not one of them.

As I was reading I felt like my 'visibility' at any given time was only like 1-1.5 pages into the past. Sometimes less.

Meaning the context for what I was reading, my understanding, went back about that far.

So I basically experienced it as "word soup" with some identifiable parts in like the last page, that I could sort-of kind-of divine a narrative from, somewhat.

It’s a good one for ebook. Read it once and never touch it again.

Same. I actually took a course on Ulysses, taught by a guy who's been teaching it for 50 years. So that's about as ideal a reading experience as you can have.

Verdict: meh. Revolutionary for its time, maybe (100 years ago).

100 years ago is very recent