I believe it's generally thought that people learn to read at first by sounding out the author's words in their head, and as they become more proficient at reading, learn not to do that.

The problem I had reading Ulysses when I tried at fifteen was the opposite. I was so bent on reading Ulysses as Serious Great Literature that I couldn't read it as something amusing. So I got to the weirder parts of the book and concluded, as a lot of people unfortunately do, that it was pretentious crap. It's funny how pretentious masturbation sounds in a book when you don't let yourself think it's funny.

There's another passage in particular that has the same effect on people. Leopold Bloom looks at the sky and calls it "the grey sunken cunt of the world". A lot of people jump on that passage and accuse Joyce of gratuitous swearing for shock value and assume he's being a bitter, wordy arse; once you convince yourself to read the passage as being thought by a cranky Irishman, it suddenly becomes hilarious.

The set of all people that think Joyce is pretentious is the same as the set of all people that can't imagine the author speak in an Irish accent.

elaborated to emphasize absurdity

The second way to call the sky a cunt is to be a grumpy Irishman in the morning who calls the sky a cunt whimsically, if annoyed. It's the difference between the clean-shaven trendy beret-wearing guy who pronounces "cunt" with much deliberation, and the long-nosed family man who says cunt like a curse.

They're both saying the same words, but the one guy's being an ass, and the second guy is hilarious. I'm saying that the people that think Joyce is pretentious are the people who haven't figured out he's hilarious.

You can do the same to any comedian, incidentally. Take George Carlin's rant on reducing the ten commandments to two, remove his inflection, focus on the words, and that could easily be some dick's attempting a hoity-toity statement about religion with no humor whatsoever. Steven Wright talking about the museum that has all the heads and arms from all the other statues can be less of a joke and more of a self-involved critique on the nature of art and decay. But it's not, because it's Steven Wright telling a joke, and in his case we know to laugh.

I am saying that I find it irritating when people take rational statements and attempt to make them absurd.

You're overshooting your target a bit when you rant about Joyce being utterly readable. He is and he isn't. There're passages in Ulysses that will make thirteen-year-olds stitch up, but it's a very rare thirteen-year-old who will endure the whole thing. I'm reading Ulysses right now (a third attempt, and will finish it this time around, soon; I was too impatient before) and it's both utter delight _and_ there are dozens of pages difficult to get through, when you insist on closely reading the text. Those dozens of pages aren't boring, they're mostly terrific, but the density can be overwhelming. I think you know this and you talk about this a bit in your post, but in this comment you kinda gloss over this and overshoot your target. Insisting that Ulysses can be read as a stand-up delivery of a hilarious Irish comic is misleading. It isn't just shits and giggles; it's shits and giggles _and_ hard work (and much besides).

The rest of this comment is my opinion about your long post; it's about things I disliked in it, which isn't to say I disliked all of it - I agree with most of the rest, and think it's well-written. Take it for what it is; and if the tone seems too didactic, ignore the tone, I couldn't afford the time to fine-tune it.

Generally, I think you're not trying hard enough; to put it coarsely, _you're not highbrow enough_. You've put Joyce on the pedestal of the impossibly perfect and feel content with throwing the rest of literature to its feet. That is a terrible trap to fall into; it can rob you of appreciating brilliant things in other writers that you won't find in Joyce. It slowly saps you of the ability to understand and connect to true genius elsewhere. Most Joyceans in the academia, for example, are in this position, and their work is usually no good as the result. They start out with exactly the kind of all-encompassing rush of delight and certainty that _nothing can compare to this_ that you're feeling, and slowly work themselves into little more than extreme fanboyism, clad in respectable academic jargon.

Your comparisons are evidence of this shortcoming. You mention, when speaking of contemporaries, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. What about Kafka, Proust or Platonov? There is in Proust the frightening (because it's so effective) clarity of description, the ability to pinpoint an echo within yourself that you've never heard clearly until now and magnify it for you hundredfold, that is unmatched by anything in Joyce. There is in Kafka the ability to give voice to despair and desire that is unmatched by anything in Joyce. And yes, Joyce can also do what they can't, and you speak eloquently of that. But reading these writers properly (and others) may give you the same feelings of almost transcendent wonder and all-encompassing joy that reading Joyce gives you and me. I just don't think it's likely to happen in the frame of mind that throws Joyce up there into the clouds, to oversee the rest of the humanity. There isn't anything wrong by itself with subjectively feeling that Joyce is the greatest writer who's ever lived; it simply turns out to be pragmatically a bad idea to make this one of the pillars of one's approach to literature or art. It causes one's vision to slowly tunnelize. And there are signs in your post of that happening. Talking of "a higher level" is a giveaway; when people start explaining things in terms of higher and lower levels, it almost always means they don't _really_ understand their preferences well enough and can't _really_ justify them to themselves. "Levels" are weaselly words; I've caught myself abusing them many times, and now try to actively force myself to avoid them. And talking about "any other before or after" is just unjustifiable hubris. It's so easy to fall into this hubris with Joyce precisely because he's so great; but it's a trap nevertheless.

The best thing to do to a work of genius that seems to overflow you, sustain you, and define a large part of you from now on is to absorb it, cherish it, delight in it, learn from it, and overcome it. To overcome it doesn't mean to stop loving it, or even to treat it "objectively" whatever that means; it means to let it flow in yourself rather than overflow yourself; to balance it in your understanding and appreciation with other wonderful things foreign to it and even alien to it; and to see flaws where there're flaws (yet not exaggerate them) - and nothing is completely flawless. You're not highbrow enough because you've set up a pedestal with Joyce on it (and Beckett as an understudy) and this state of affairs is too complacent. You should be hard at work on overcoming your inner Joyce.

P.S. If you haven't, you ought to pick up and read Helen DeWitt's _The Last Samurai_, as soon as possible.

Yeah: I tried to mention that in the post as best as I could; in the comment I was addressing that sneering idea that nobody's able to read Joyce. I didn't mean to suggest that Ulysses is a breeze.

> Take it for what it is; and if the tone seems too didactic, ignore the tone, I couldn't afford the time to fine-tune it.

Not at all: Thanks for taking the time to make an argument!

> Generally, I think you're not trying hard enough; to put it coarsely, _you're not highbrow enough_. You've put Joyce on the pedestal of the impossibly perfect and feel content with throwing the rest of literature to its feet. That is a terrible trap to fall into; it can rob you of appreciating brilliant things in other writers that you won't find in Joyce. It slowly saps you of the ability to understand and connect to true genius elsewhere. Most Joyceans in the academia, for example, are in this position, and their work is usually no good as the result. They start out with exactly the kind of all-encompassing rush of delight and certainty that _nothing can compare to this_ that you're feeling, and slowly work themselves into little more than extreme fanboyism, clad in respectable academic jargon.

I tried not to sound like this by bringing up Beckett as a contrast. I do think Joyce is incomparable, but it's not because he's somehow the Best Writer. It's that for what he wanted to do, he captured it on a grander scale than anybody could hope to compete with. Other writers on a similar scale — certainly what Kafka I've read seems like he's comparable; Proust I haven't started yet, though I have a copy of his works lying ten feet from me — are similar in that they're not writers you can compare others to except to note differences.

With literature it's tough because I honestly don't think there are very many great novelists. The novel is an extremely difficult form of writing, and not many are able to really pull together and make something dense and powerful. I think it's easier to clarify what you're trying to say by talking music. The Beatles are brilliant, for instance, but so are the Beach Boys, and Velvet Underground, and Frank Zappa, and so even in the short frame of the 60s you have a dozen absolute geniuses who are unique and incomparable, all in tandem, and there's no one "right" musician among them. When you expand into world music and the avante-garde the point is proven even more, because at some rarefied points every single musician in a scene is equally brilliant because every single one of them is constantly pushing at boundaries.

With novels I don't get that as much, because the novel form is so immense that I feel there ought to be an enormous amount to justify it. So I don't just think of Joyce, but there're only a dozen or two writers I'm really in love with in that way. Even among them, though, there's an enormous variation in ambitions and goals between them. So I include Steven King on that list because his novel It encompasses horror better than anything else I've ever read, on a level nobody, King included, can hope to match. Anybody who writes a comparable horror novel will have to do so by fundamentally changing the nature of horror.

So at once it's highbrow and lowbrow. It's highbrow in that you constantly have to strive to find bigger and better things, and it's lowbrow in that you can find those things almost anywhere, even in unconventional places.

tl;dr: I agree with you completely. :-)

(I've never heard of The Last Samurai; placed an order at your recommendation.)