Did I get filtered?What the fuck am I missing? Why do people like this book?
>>24116351>Did I get filtered?Clearly
No one "likes" Ulysses, it only exists for people to wank over namedropping it being part of the special club who knows what the hell some of the sentences signify.
>>24116351>What the fuck am I missing?Quite a lot but it's hardly your fault. Ulysses has these really thick references through one line inner monologues which are surprisingly important to having a complete understanding. One that comes to mind is the stupid soap that Bloom is carrying around in his pocket all day. When I read this the first time I thought nothing of it, but instead it's an allegory between advertising, Bloom's occupation, and his dislike of being unclean. I'm not nearly clever enough to have picked up on this myself but with the use of a reading guide you can have a great time with Ulysses and kick yourself for it.
>>24116351every other word has a half page footnote
>>24116443>>24116446Well shit, that might actually be it. Thanks
>>24116351Filtered
>>24116351/Ulysses/ only really exists because of its style. In the Victorian-Edwardian age, there was a 'Grand Narrative'— pretty much all institutions agreed with each other about things like marriage and religion and what books and poetry should be like. But the political events of the 1910s (women's suffrage, WW1, Spanish Flu) completely turned this on its head, and everyone's sense of security in what the world looked and felt like very quickly dissolved. By 1922, when /Ulysses/ came out, there hadn't been enough time for people to decide what the world was like now— all there was was a sense of fragmentation/separation/dissolution. Mina Loy depicted this insecurity in her radicalism, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield depicted it in their works on the subconscious, Ezra Pound depicted it in his Imagism. Joyce depicted it by writing a book that broke all of the 'rules': it takes generations of scholars to glean any fucking sense of meaning from it; it completely ignores grammar and structure; it swaps format constantly; it talks explicitly about fucking and shitting and farting. It's the perfect capture of the philosophical chaos that the West was in.It should be noted that /Ulysses/ is a loose retelling of Homer's /Odyssey/. Joyce took this canonical epic, which represents moral certainty and is told in a really strict narrative, and turned it into something incomprehensible and chaotic. That's pretty much all Joyce was getting at.T. S. Eliot wrote (in a very complimentary way) that Joyce basing his novel on a classical heroic tale was his "way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history". Eliot thought that literature which combines incomprehensibility with classical myth (like /Ulysses/, and his own work /The Waste Land/) was kind of the only solution to moral bankruptcy. But Eliot was a fascist and not even in the way you 4chan boys like.tldr It's supposed to not make much sense but that is supposed to mirror the Modernist feeling that nothing makes sense
>>24116351Try reading along with something like litcharts or the ulysses project, because it was written for people of his time, more specifically irish people and atheistic intellectuals (what he was, some people call that a jerk-off) so missing the numerous historical references is to be expected. Joyce likely wouldn't get anything if you give him a book of similar stature, but with today's memes. Ulysses is ~40-50% like sitting at a comedy show as a kid and your mom has to explain the jokes to you.
>its about the referencesThis site is nothing but retarded larpers, at least learn what modernism is before trying to answer. It is about the characters and all you need to know about the references is what those references mean to the characters and Joyce gives you the vast bulk of that right in the text.
>>24117311>It is about the charactersThat is so for the more coherent chapters of the book, but you can't tell me that Aeolus, Oxen and Circe do much for them. Prose is the second most important thing in the book and in these chapters it reaches borderline tediousness to read. (I've only read the book once, my opinion is not set in stone).
>>24117409>Aeolus, Oxen and Circe do much for themthey provide context. I did not find them tedious.
>>24116351The walls of reasoning you see midwits erect to justify why they like this book IS the point of the book. Like staring intently at an indecipherable wall of vomit at an art gallery, claiming you enjoy it is a status symbol. You belong to the wank-yourself-off club. You signify your belonging with long strokes of meta analysis and all that bollocks.Read Flashman instead.
>>24117440It’s nothing like that. Two thirds of it is read easily enough. Another larper who has never read it or isn’t able to interface with the work deep enough to make definite statements.
