with commentary by Philip Kitcher
Two adjectives follow Ulysses everywhere it goes. One is "major," even "the finest English-language novel" of the twentieth century. The other, as Philip Kitcher notes in his Rebind Classics reading, is "difficult," and for most would-be readers the second adjective wins. The most common answer to "Have you read Ulysses?", Kitcher observes, is some version of "Well, I tried once, but ...". His entire approach to the novel is built on changing what that difficulty means.
The answer itself is not mysterious. Ulysses is difficult for the reasons Kitcher names: a plethora of styles and a wealth of allusions — James Joyce wrote eighteen episodes, each in a different manner, dense with learning few readers share. Kitcher's deeper claim is that "difficult" is the wrong word for what those features amount to. The novel, he argues, is not a coded message to be cracked but an inexhaustible tapestry to be explored, and the frustration dissolves once you stop treating the book as a test.
The Difficulty Is Real
Kitcher does not deny the difficulty. He has taught the book for decades and knows the pattern: "almost all those who begin encounter difficulties," and "a significant percentage" give up. Readers are frustrated, he says, "by the plethora of styles and by the wealth of allusions." Educated in different subjects than Joyce was, they "just don't get it," and they "find the flaunted erudition irritating." The reasonable suspicion is that the book is "a deliberately obscure book apparently written as an enterprise in showing-off."
Rich, Not Difficult
But Kitcher's central move is to reframe the word itself. Joyce's admirers, he notes, "might substitute 'rich' or 'inexhaustible' for 'difficult.'" Kitcher prefers that substitution, and not only because it is kinder. It "leads away from the common thought of the book as having a predetermined message, one the reader is supposed to fathom." The difficulty feels punishing only if you assume there is a single hidden meaning you are failing to extract. Remove that assumption, and the difficulty becomes something else entirely: abundance rather than obstruction.
The assumption Kitcher wants to dismantle has a famous source. Joyce supposedly boasted that he had "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries, arguing over what I meant." That story, Kitcher argues, "reinforces the idea of these two novels as esoteric texts, challenging readers to prove their literary chops by cracking the code." His advice to first-time readers is to set the boast aside. "Don't think of a message concealed by some fiendish cryptographer," he urges. The book is not a lock, and you are not failing if you do not find the key.
A Tapestry, Not a Code
In place of the code, Kitcher offers a different image, the one that organizes his whole reading. "Think instead of a glorious tapestry," he says, "one showing an array of aspects of the world in vivid colors, something in which you could trace connections for an indefinitely long period, picking out those you find most beautiful and most illuminating." A tapestry is not solved; it is explored. There is no perfect score, only the connections each reader finds most rewarding, and, as Kitcher puts it, "nor are the bounties it bestows the same for everybody."
A Book for a Lifetime
This reframing has a direct, practical consequence for how Kitcher tells people to read. The familiar confession of the talented student, "I enjoyed it, but I don't think I got all of it," rests on a mistake. "Ulysses isn't a Literary IQ test," Kitcher insists, "on which ambitious readers can aim to achieve a perfect score." There is nothing to ace. Instead, "it's a book you can come back to over the course of a lifetime, one that will continue to deliver new things." The goal is not comprehension in a single pass but a relationship that deepens over years.
Even Joyce's apparent arrogance, Kitcher suggests, can be read generously. Rather than supposing the author was "a clever-clever braggart out to show up the academic elite," we might take him to be "claiming only to have provided enough possibilities for many different people, with highly varied backgrounds and interests, to be enriched by their reading." The puzzles, on this account, are not traps set to humiliate. They are doorways, more of them than any one reader could ever walk through, which is precisely the point.
So why is Ulysses difficult? Because it is inexhaustible, and inexhaustibility feels like difficulty only when you approach it as a test. Kitcher's reading gives first-time readers permission to relax, to stop hunting for the single right answer, and to trace the connections that speak to them. The difficulty does not go away. It simply stops being a wall and becomes, in his account, the very thing that makes the book worth returning to for the rest of your life.