In a mood of denial or resistance you approach this novel. For it is not an enticer to take on, due to its size and reputation. You expect certain loftiness and intransigence on the part of the author, which makes it difficult to decipher what is going on: in the story. You have read a few more novels of this time and earlier.
You find that you were not wrong about how you should take it. You read on trying to grasp as little as possible and think about all other things but the story you are reading.
You are distracted at times, by the act of a character, for an instance, who possibly is having an affair with a married woman; or that he is constipated by the food he eats to need to read a literature while defecating. That he wipes himself with that literature afterwards shocks you a bit. For the character possibly wants to make a comment about the quality of the reading it made.
But you read on without caring much. For it is always in a very convoluted language which you are never sure about, so you never know what is going on. The sentences are very short at times. But they illuminate very little and the writer presents many new words he invented and he only used, which are many times longer than his sentences in terms of the alphabets used. At times it annoys you to think that you are reading a largely acclaimed masterpiece of the last century.
Then you think that the First World War was going on while this novel was being written. You understand that the writer is disturbed greatly by some thing. Then you read his loathing of Jews. Then you relate it to the rise of Hitler in the later years and his even more emphatic loathing of this community even in his autobiography. Then you discover a character who soaks himself in a hot bath and reverentially considers his floating pubic hair and settled genitals.
It possibly is the dissatisfaction of the writer with his life or the people around him that his characters in this novel do such eccentric activities and find an immense peace and happiness in them. Possibly their lives were much stultified and they felt accordingly thwarted, to the extent that there were limited ways for them to express themselves and they ended up doing such things.
You know that times were far more troubled then. The artists too even found it difficult to come to terms with something unfamiliar or different. But the characters in this book never seem to give up and try to put up a resistance with their strange thoughts or actions.
That age is possibly gone forever, you would like to assume. And the more forthcoming and tolerant artists than Joyce hence have created a world where literature could be not so opaque and extreme to provoke a similar response among its audience. But you discover that, mostly, the perspicacity of the more recent literary products is almost appropriated before it is produced to the extent that it looks as if it belongs to a world one never has known. For the simple reason that it has forgotten to strive almost totally.
And the world is unpleasantly surprised by something it has always ignored—which is illuminated, perchance; exceptionally by someone from out of the scheme of the things. One thought if one needed an alien to make such a discovery, for the rest have been already been taken on board.
Continuing to read similarly, you wait to be surprized by proven wrong about your perception of the book or writer. That it was not that an unhappy place where the writer lived, and all the good weather and warmth in human relations existed in a far away place like Ceylon, which produced also the tea a character liked.
But you cannot forget to empathise with the characters, who possibly do their best to make a life where they are and by what they are. It is the longings and the pathos which they try to pass on, hinting that it was not easy to do so, which echo in your mind to remain with you afterwards. Possibly a writer does his best to explain himself and his times, knowing that he is bound to fall short.
For, falling short is a virtue in a writer which elucidates his times more than his explanations, more so in a work of fiction. A book of which might outweigh a whole library of nonfiction books.
It opens the way for a reader to similarly approach life which has not become any more perfect since. And keep a well-deserved grudge that the literature created by the likes of James Joyce will never lose its relevance.
K C Bhatt.
WOW ! World Of Words. 