I read Carl Jung’s monologue on Ulysses by James Joyce and thoroughly enjoyed it. Ulysses was a book that I forced myself to read because I wanted to know what its attraction is for some readers. After having finished the book, I was, if anything, more baffled than I had been prior to reading it as to why anyone with a pulse would think it a good book.

Jung’s scathing criticism was a worthwhile read, even though it came much later than my read of the actual novel. He notes that he fell asleep on page 135, and then decided to read the book from back to front as it was equally nonsensical and equally boring no matter which end of the book one started at. He characterizes the book as an unbroken grey monotony, and says that, although the reader waits for something significant, nothing actually happens. It is akin to a relative’s comment to him that the devil tortures the damned in Hell by making them wait. Jung at a later point notes that the book is not merely dissatisfying, but an actual path of misery that the reader must trudge through, making his tedious way through 735 pages (Jung mentions the actual number of pages in his edition multiple times, with evident irritation that he wasted so much of his limited time on Earth on this book).

However, Jung notes that he has an obligation to analyze the book because he is a psychiatrist and because there is obviously more at work in Ulysses than meets the eye. He immediately dismisses the charge, leveled against Joyce following the release of the book, that it is the work of a schizophrenic. The book is not the product of a madman, but rather, akin to literary cubism. Jung believes that Ulysses represents the death of a traditional style, but not something new. Its attempt at alienating itself from traditional society is therefore not an innovation, but a form of suicide or murder of one form of expression that needs to take place before a new, better form can rise from its ashes.

It is evident that he does not see Joyce as an innovator because he finds him mired in a Mediaeval Catholic Irish world. His studied attempts at distancing himself from this background are like, in Jung’s words, the aristocratic Bolshevik who revels in not shaving. Silly and symbolic gestures are taken to remove the author from his background, but it only reinforces that he is still a slave to a particular mindset.

On a psychological level, the novel itself is also flawed. Although Jung believes that there is an attempt to associate with a dream world, he finds Joyce’s novel far too sober and everyday to effectively tap into the dream-consciousness of the reader. Likewise, although he sees clear association of the major characters to archetypes with which a reader can identify, the nature of the association is too shallow to have any real resonance.

Jung’s conclusion is that the only good thing one can say about the book is that the painful ritual can lead the “homunculus” to distill a new consciousness of the world (Jung is intentionally using alchemical language throughout this last statement).

I am wondering who here has read Ulysses, which I have characterized as little more than verbal diarrhoea shat out onto a page and left for us to attempt to clean up. Does anyone actually like this book? Jung clearly shares my view, though he expressed it far more elegantly and with much more clarity and precision. I also haven’t met anyone in real life who has said, “Oh yes, I love Ulysses” and I suspect that those who do are either trying to sound pretentious and educated when they are not or are lying about having read the book, or both.

Thoughts?