Maximally Perverse Obscurantism

There is an especially gnarly chapter more than halfway through Ulysses called the “Oxen of the Sun” in which Joyce’s weirdly adversarial virtuosity takes the form of a pastiche of the evolution of English prose, which is at the same time an allegory of the nine months of fetal gestation (the chapter is set in a maternity hospital). It is mostly a slog, but it is an exhilarating slog. As you hack your way through Joyce “doing” Malory and Bunyan and Swift and Pepys and Defoe and Sterne and Goldsmith and Burke and Gibbon and Lamb and De Quincey and Carlyle and Pater, and on up to “Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel,” a part of your reading mind succumbs to a serenely disbelieving loop: He did this. He did this. If “Oxen” occupies a region of Ulysses where Joyce’s exquisite ear for memorably musical sentences (“Mild fire of wine kindled his veins”) takes a back seat to the leaden hum of meta-literature, that is no reason not to be awed by his chutzpah.