It takes the novel into previously unimagined directions and expressive forms, providing us with a more complete image of the human mind thinking than any novel before or since. The book is one of the great artworks, written – during the barbarism of the Great War – by one of the foremost geniuses of modern times. You might say that the reason is obvious. Why? How has this come to pass? Not even Shakespeare has a day set aside in his honour. This centenary year, like every other Bloomsday, there will be events and readings in cities around the world, including Australia, with throngs of people in Edwardian costume, many of whom have never read the book. It has its rituals, its pilgrimage and its annual feast day (Bloomsday, June 16, the single day in which Ulysses is set), where the faithful, and not so faithful but along for the fun, pay homage. Ulysses is frequently consecrated in that sense, separated from the wider reading public, attended by acolytes and devoted scholars, and at the same time held up to be venerated. To consecrate ( sacrere, literally to “make sacred”) traditionally also meant to separate, to take objects and customs away from everyday life so that they can be worshipped and ritualised. This is a parody that nonetheless plays with the idea that the novel will perform a sort of secular consecration: through Joyce’s art, the ordinary becomes mythic, an unremarkable day becomes “Bloomsday”, Leopold Bloom becomes the modern Odysseus. “ Introibo ad altare Dei,” he intones – “I go to the altar of God” – holding the bowl aloft, atop the Martello tower, his yellow gown ungirdled, surveying the snotgreen, scrotumtightening sea. Coincidentally, Ulysses, written long before Bourdieu, famously begins with an actual consecration, or a parody of one, as the stately, plump (and irreligious) Buck Mulligan sports his shaving bowl and razor in mockery of the Catholic Eucharist. How has Ulysses come to be one of the great unread books of the 20th century? Literary scholars, following the lead of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, use the word “consecration” to describe the processes by which an artwork becomes esteemed and highly ranked, worthy of veneration in our culture. “There is not one serious line in it,” Joyce himself insisted. Too much reverence towards this bible of modernism can lead us to forget how ribald and remorselessly profane it is as a novel, how brimming with humanity and, above all, humour. The best readers of Ulysses de-emphasise the decoding and the annotations, while insisting that Ulysses is not a book to be mastered but to be experienced and enjoyed in the half-light, with some understanding and much confusion, a bit like life itself. All readers since have understood some but not all of its cultural range. The enthusiastic first readers in Paris in 1922 did not pick up most of the specific details about 1904 Dublin. Sure, it can be “difficult” in one sense, partly because of its encyclopaedic allusions to Homer, Shakespeare, Aristotle, European history, the Catholic Mass, music hall, Irish politics, Jewish folklore… But nobody gets all those references.

Yet – as enthusiasts never tire of beseeching – Ulysses should not be a chore or an exercise in dutiful self-improvement. A century after its publication, Ulysses is too often on the hole-in-the-bucket list: not those things you really want to experience before you die (snorkelling in the Maldives), but those you feel you should accomplish but probably won’t (fitting back into your wedding clothes).

There it sits on the bookshelf, unread, or only partially so, reminding you of yet another thwarted good intention. It’s a shame that James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, has become such an old scold.

A century after its publication, the difficult reputation of Joyce’s seminal novel has overshadowed its pleasures

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