James Joyce’s Ulysses: Cocktail Party Edition [The Ryan Dixon Line]

A Reader’s Guide to Not Reading Ulysses.

It can happen to anyone. You’re at a birthday party, Bar Mitzvah, or PTA meeting. The day has gone well, the weather outside is perfect, you’re happy to be alive. But then the rabbi, soccer mom super hero or neighbor’s boarding school brat references James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The innards of your bowels roar, your heart goes all NASCAR, a tsunami of sweat floods your brow, back and underarms. You flashback to Thanksgiving three years ago: the last time someone referenced Ulysses — you confused it with Homer’s The Odyssey. Five minutes later, the host informed you that, unfortunately, they had miscounted the table settings and you soon found yourself eating turkey at the kids table.

And now the book rises again like an unread wraith into your otherwise literate life. You have two choices: confess to never having read Ulysses or toss the Hail Mary question: “Is that the one where he masturbates?”

Neither choice has a happy ending. You go home alone, despondent. Food loses its taste, sex is mirthless, even an episode of Modern Family fails to elicit a chuckle.

You’re not alone. Every year, millions of American’s suffer in silence for not having read the greatest novel of the 20^th Century. But now there is hope.

I’ve read Ulysses so you don’t have to.

Your days of struggling through mile-long passages of impenetrable language and backbreaking bulk when all you really want to do is luxuriate in the grocery store prose stylings of James Patterson and Nora Roberts are over.

Just follow these three simple “Ulylessons” and you will sound like a second-year Joyce Studies PhD candidate to friends, loved ones and pets (all of whom have probably also never read Ulysses).

Ulylesson #1 – It’s Not Just About Masturbation

Ulysses is a big book. 650 pages and 265,000 words big. But the only thing most people know about it are the few paragraphs starting around line 715 in Chapter 13. This is where Joyce’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom jacks off while watching a limp Gerty McDowell strike seductive poses on the beach:

And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed an ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!

This section is famous and rightfully so. I mean, who wouldn’t want to masturbate with the poetic precision that Joyce endows Bloom’s j-session? But as anyone in a long-term relationship knows, all this focus on masturbation takes away from actual sex.

And Ulysses has enough sex to rival the Vivid Entertainment archives. Let’s look at a small sampling from Chapter 18 where the reader dwells within the mind of Bloom’s adulteress wife, Molly:

*he came on my bottom

*he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst

*they want to do everything too quick take all the pleasure out of it

*him put it into me from behind the way Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband made her like the dogs do it

*I had to get him to suck them they were so hard he said it was sweeter and thicker than cows

*after I tried with the Banana but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me somewhere

*I pulled him off into my handerkerchief pretending not to be excited but I opened my legs

*drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it theyre all like buttons

*going about with his tube from one woman to another

*yet I never came properly til I was what 22 or so it went into the wrong place

*think Ill cut all this hair off me there scalding me I might look like a young girl wouldn’t he get the great suckin the next time

*the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet

Ulysses spends so much time devoted to describing positions, fetishes and fantasies that it could really be sold as the Kama Sutra for Guinness drinkers. Wanting to cross sexual frontiers with your significant other like Joyce crossed literary ones? Then Ulysses is the book for you!

THE SCENE: Tomorrow night. You and your lover arrive home from Sarah’s birthday party. You’re both feeling frisky. This is the time to ask if you can do that thing you’ve always wanted to do (you know the one).

You know YOUR LOVER enjoys literary sex scenes (they buy the hard copy of Freedom, but load their kindle with Sandra Brown) and the best way to get them to do that thing you’ve always wanted to do (you know the one) is to remind them that it was done in countless classic novels.

But this strategy has its potential pitfalls: Mention the Marquis de Sade and suddenly you’re a sadist. Bring up Beloved, you have a plantation fantasy. List Lolita and they’re clicking on the Megan’s Law website. But Ulysses? Well, watch what happens:

YOU
It’s just…reading about it in Ulysses really turned me on.

YOUR LOVER
You’ve read Ulysses?

YOU
Yeah. So, can we—

(Already doing that thing you’ve always wanted to do…you know the one.)

Ulylesson #2 – Joyce Did It First

Aside from masturbating, the only other thing most people know about Ulysses is that it incorporated something called “stream of consciousness.” Basically “stream of consciousness” writing is a mashup of the classic Joe Montana SNL sketch (“I’m going upstairs to masturbate”—Note: I’m not just writing “masturbate” again and again to get more hits. I swear.) and sentences like this from Chapter 3:

She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the inelecutable modality of the ineluctable bisualy. She, she. She. What she?

And while much of Ulysses is written as a “stream of consciousness,” each chapter of the novel is an entirely different universe of language, technique and structure.

One way of explaining the “style” of Ulysses is to imagine a video game where each level is a completely different genre: level one a first person shooter, level two role-playing, level three sports, etc.  Now imagine if each level happened to be the greatest game of that genre ever made. That’s basically Ulysses. I’m pretty sure Ulysses is the only novel to ever have one of its chapters (15 — written as a play) turned into its own Broadway show (1974’s Ulysses in Nighttown, starring Zero Mostel).

After you’ve read Ulysses, every book written after looks a little worse. Chances are that whatever techniques or tropes the authors’ of your favorite books used were already tried in Ulysses. However, the good news is that you can use this fact to give the smack down to pretentious literary snobs.

THE SCENE: You’re enjoying a little alone time at your favorite coffee shop, playing a quiet game of iPhone Scrabble. Suddenly you’re distracted by the loud cackle of a Urban Outfitted Pseudolect (henceforth known as U.O.P) slouched at the table next to you with a copy of Infinite Jest spread open like the legs of… Molly Bloom. (See!!! Doesn’t if feel just great to be able to laugh at Joyce jokes!?!?)

U.O.P
Amazing book. Amazing. Wallace has these footnotes that go on and on, listing fake movies and shit. So fucking cool.

Before this blogumn, you would have suffered through an unending conversation on Wallace’s “maximalist sensitivity,” which would have only ended when you gave the U.O.P. your fake email.

But now, you can shut him up from the word go. Guess who also included lists of books, not to mention budget spreadsheets and musical notation in a novel written 80 years before Infinite Jest? Yep, just repeat after me: “Joyce did it first.” Let’s return to our friend at the other table:

U.O.P
Amazing book. Amazing. Wallace has these footnotes that go on and on, listing fake movies and shit. So fucking cool.

YOU
Joyce did it first.

U.O.P.
Really?

YOU
Yep.

U.O.P.
(Closing INFINITE JEST and taking out a PSP)
Ah…shit.

“Joyce did it first” — The comeback cure for any unendurable literary conversation!

Ulylesson Lesson # 3: Pprrpffrrppffff or:

No One Writes Better Fart Jokes than James Joyce

THE SCENE: A book release party in Tribecca. You find yourself standing around a group of brilliant and ambitious novelists, poets, agents and editors. A few well-placed jokes and some insightful commentary and you’ll get your Jr. membership card to the world of lit couture.

BIG PUBLISHING COMPANY ASSISTANT EDITOR
Has any modern novel explored the horrors of civil war, the power of metaphor and healing use of fable more effectively than Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife?

FIRST TIME NOVELIST
Did you read The Times review? Michiko Kakutani is comparing her to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Gunter Grass.

Finally! An opening to insert your own pithy quip (“Michiko Kakutani hasn’t been this happy for an author since Norman Mailer died.”), but there’s a problem: You arrived to the party straight from work. Starving, you gulped down a dozen cocktail franks. There’s now a gale force tornado twisting in your innards. Before you can let loose the Kakutani line, another bodily force surges forth…

Pprrpffrrppffff

The suffocating, noxious smell of digested, low-grade beef brakes through the barricade of your febrezed undergarments and enters the public air supply. Your first instinct is to make a joke about the campfire scene in Blazing Saddles, but Mel Brooks has been out of favor with the chattering class since the musical version of Young Frankenstein flopped.

The sniffing of the surrounding noses and disgusted glances in your direction is far more fatal than any guillotine. Like Jesus, you’re ready to accept your cultural crucifixion and run, red-faced, from the party.

Fortunately, you’re reading this blogumn. The phonetic fart, as seen above, so happens to be the punchline of Chapter 11 in Ulysses. It is Bloom’s final action in a chapter structured as a series of musical motifs. It is also all you need to mention to save yourself from apocalyptic embarrassment:

YOU
What? I’m just quoting my favorite line from Ulysses.

A moment of silent contemplation. Then the crowd guffaws with approval.  They’re not quite sure what you mean (they haven’t read Ulysses either), but anyone who can fart and quote Ulysses at the same time definitely belongs in the publishing Parthenon.

It should also be noted that Ulylesson #3 comes in handy on the rare occasion that Ulylesson #2 fails. If you ever blurt out “Joyce did it first” and your companion responds with, “Actually, I’ve read Ulysses and he didn’t,” let out an energetic fart followed by a “But he did that!” and leave the room as quickly as possible.

So, let’s wrap things up, shall we? You haven’t read Ulysses. You never will. But it doesn’t matter now. Just as long as you remember these three simple Ulylessons:

1.     It’s Not Just About Masturbation

2.     Joyce Did It First

3.     Pprrpffrrppffff

Lessons learned. Now you can go back to reading the newest Nelson DeMille.

Looking for advice on other books you don’t have to read? Follow me on Twitter @Ryanbdixon. Want to know what one book you MUST read? Then buy a copy of my graphic novel Hell House: The Awakening.