Ulysses and me

Of all the novels I have ever read, the one that I know the best is probably Joyce’s Ulysses — a book with which I have a curious history.

In February of 1980 I took the woman I was dating out for dinner and asked her to marry me. She said Yes, which was good, but as we drove to her parents’ house to tell them the news, the brakes of my car went out: we shot off an interstate highway exit, blazed straight through an intersection, and crashed into a culvert. That was not so good.

And not an auspicious beginning to our life together. (Though in the end things worked out pretty well.)

Teri was okay, but I had whiplash and spent the next couple of weeks in (a) much pain and (b) a neck brace. Now, this happened in the middle of the last semester of my undergraduate education, so I fell behind in all my classes. I was able to catch up, eventually … except in one. That was my German class, which was double the credit hours of a typical course and taught according to the Rassias Method — the ideal way, IMO, to learn a language in a university setting. But my classmates had made so much progress in the two weeks I was away that I felt completely lost, so I had to drop the course.

This left me six hours short of the credits required to graduate. I went to my favorite teacher, the only real mentor I ever had, John Burke, to ask him whether it would be possible for me to do an independent study with him in the summer for six credits. Dr. Burke — a Massachusetts Irishman, by the way — responded first with with words of warm sympathy and then with a mischievous smile. He said he would gladly allow me to do an independent study with him … on one condition.

The previous semester I had taken a seminar with Dr. Burke which featured two chief texts: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Joyce’s Ulysses. The core idea of the seminar was that these books told the story of “the representation of reality in Western literature” (as Auerbach’s subtitle has it) in two very different, but intimately and intricately related, ways. The seminar was great, but I hated Ulysses — I deeply despised it. I complained to Dr. Burke about it on several occasions, and though he gave me good reasons for persisting with the book to get a better understanding of why Joyce does the peculiar things he does, I was unreceptive and unrepentant about my unreceptiveness.

So when I asked Dr. Burke to do an independent study, he said of course he would — but only if what we studied was Joyce’s Ulysses. I returned his mischievous smile with an ironic one; I had to acknowledge the poetic justice at work.

And by the end of that Joycean summer — which I also spent preparing to get married and move to Virginia for graduate school — I was ready to tell anyone who would listen that Ulysses is among the greatest books ever written.

A little more than a decade later, when I had begun teaching a course in 20th century British literature, I didn’t dare assign Ulysses — partly because of the difficulty, but also because I knew that it would occupy us for maybe a quarter of the term. It’s not the sort of book that you can do quickly. You have to give it time, and I didn’t think I had the time, so I taught Dubliners instead. But the challenge of teaching this book that had once alienated and flummoxed me … I couldn’t let the idea go. And once I decided that I was willing, just as an experiment, to take a big chunk out of one term and teach it properly, I discovered that my students found it really interesting. They were up for the challenge. They struggled, of course, but by the time we got done, they understood a good bit of what Joyce was was trying to do, and they understood, I think, why the book is so influential and why it is so revered. I realized then that the investment of time was worthwhile.

I don’t know that I’ve ever worked harder to prepare for teaching a book. I spent an enormous amount of time reading and rereading and rereading Ulysses, annotating it, putting sticky notes in it, writing out long outlines of what I wanted to talk about, and then, of course, reading a good chunk of the enormous body of criticism about it. I made big handouts like this one. And because I worked so hard to teach it well, and ended up teaching it for every year for over 20 years, I got to know the book intimately — more intimately, as I suggested at the outset of this post, than any other book. I haven’t been able to teach it since I’ve been at Baylor, but when I looked over it again recently, I was surprised by how well I still know the book — and reminded how much I loved teaching it, and how sad I am that I’ll not teach it again.

The odd thing is that I have never written about, or wanted to write about, Ulysses. I have always approached it as a teacher, not as a scholar. It is to me a book for the classroom, which is to say, a book to be read and discussed with others. And while Joyce was uncomplimentary about academics, I think he would appreciate that.