Ulysses?! Really?

    

Ulysses?! Really?

    What do we expect from a novel? A gripping plot, compelling characters, and the writer’s craft weaving it all together—at least, that’s what captivates me. So, when I opened Ulysses by James Joyce—a towering 1,000-page literary monolith often crowned as one of the greatest novels of all time—I was ready to dive into a great story.

And then… I got lost. Not in the story, but in the styles.

I can’t honestly recall much of the plot. What lingered, instead, was the sense of Joyce juggling literary techniques like a circus act, each chapter morphing into a new experimental form. For lovers of philology, this may be a goldmine. For me, it was a slog, I struggled to keep on. Somehow, I clawed my way to the final page—perhaps motivated by the bragging rights, or maybe just curiosity about where this labyrinth would end. But truthfully? I found it dull.

That’s the danger with long novels: the longer the story, the more pressure there is to hold the reader’s attention, build stakes, and deliver a payoff that ties it all together. Joyce tosses that structure aside. Instead, riders drift through a single day in Dublin, immersed in a torrent of internal monologue, meditations on marriage, affairs, funerals—endlessly looping in on itself.

Years later, I stumbled into a Twitter debate about Ulysses, surprised to find so many people who genuinely loved it. They praised its linguistic audacity, its depth of introspection, and its groundbreaking form. I respect that. I get it, in the same way I understand how some people find beauty in abstract jazz or obscure poetry (though they often leave me cold).

And yet—here’s the twist. The very fact that Ulysses resonates so deeply with others, while leaving me unmoved, is oddly comforting. It reminds me that the world is far richer and stranger than my own tastes can capture. What I see as confusion, someone else sees as genius. And that’s beautiful.

Because if literature has any real magic, maybe it lies there: not in agreement, but in the way it stretches the boundaries of what we think art should be.

Toni Font, Aberdeen 20/07/2025