Ulysses (novel)

"I never got very much out of Ulysses. I think it's an extraordinary book, but so much of it consists of rather lengthy demonstrations of how a novel ought not to be written, doesn't it? He does show nearly every conceivable way it should not be written, and then goes on to show how it might be written."

"The other book that I worry no one reads anymore is James Joyce's Ulysses. It's not easy, but every page is wonderful and repays the effort."

"Ulysses is my favorite novel, first read at age 20. It was the book, along with Dubliners, that made me want to be a writer, or at least it made me think about the formal possibilities of fiction. My second short story stole its structure from the Wandering Rocks section in Ulysses, only in my story it was downtown Seattle (my big swerve). I walked the length of the Belltown neighborhood with my notebook, trying for some of that Joycean precision. My third story was a cringy piece about the Irish Troubles called “Ourselves Alone”...My point is that Joyce is a life-long literary love. My obsession with novel structure was born with Ulysses. Whatever formal radicalism I aspire to have came from that book (plus Faulkner and Woolf)."

"In 1932, renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote a largely critical piece for Europäische Revue on the subject of Ulysses, James Joyce's groundbreaking, controversial, and famously challenging novel. From Jung's essay: "I read to page 135 with despair in my heart, falling asleep twice on the way. The incredible versatility of Joyce's style has a monotonous and hypnotic effect. Nothing comes to meet the reader, everything turns away from him, leaving him gaping after it. The book is always up and away, dissatisfied with itself, ironic, sardonic, virulent, contemptuous, sad, despairing, and bitter... Yes, I admit I feel have been made a fool of. The book would not meet me half way, nothing in it made the least attempt to be agreeable, and that always gives the reader an irritating sense of inferiority." In September of that year, Jung sent a copy of his article to Joyce along with this letter, which both made Joyce proud and infuriated him. Two years later Jung treated Joyce's daughter, Lucia, for schizophrenia; it was around this time that Joyce wrote in Jung's copy of Ulysses: To Dr. C. G. Jung, with grateful appreciation of his aid and counsel. James Joyce. Xmas 1934, Zurich."

"Ulysses is an epic because it breathes. It's an urban epic, which is remarkable in a small city. It's a wonderful epic in the sense that the subject is lyrical and not heroic. The subject is a matter of a reflective man, not a man of action, but a sort of wandering Jew. That's the width of that epic, that Bloom is the wandering Jew."