How did popular consensus pick an incomprehensible piece of meaningless shit to be "the best novel of the 20th century"?

How did popular consensus pick an incomprehensible piece of meaningless shit to be "the best novel of the 20th century"?
Did an entire generation of critics fall in line just to save face and avoid appearing like they "don't get it"?

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Maybe try reading it.

What parts did you find incomprehensible?

facstaff.bucknell.edu/rickard/synopsis.html

I found it really hard the first time through, but after that I found it endlessly enjoyable, and no other novel I've ever read has made its way into my world like ulysses. It's a quasi religious thing too.

shit, not OP, but thank you, this helps me a lot

I got through the first 3 chapters and while I got the general idea it seems I still felt lost as hell. At least this lets me confirm that I am somewhat on track. Going to try to finish reading this thing now.

It reminds me of Milton when I was in school and having to look at a footnote 3 times per sentence just to figure out wtf he is on about

You know, despite certain chapters being a bit oblique and some passages being obscure, it's not that difficult a novel. I first read it at 16. I had already read Homer and Portrait of the Artist, so the correspondences made some sense to me, but that's not crucial. Look:
Part I: The Telemachiad.
It's 8:00 AM on June 16, 1904 in Dublin. Buck Mulligan, a boisterous medical student, calls Stephen Dedalus up to the roof of the Martello tower they're roommates in, and they have a tiff (Buck's letting an English anti-Semite student stay over). Stephen hands over the key and stalks off. He goes and teaches a history class and gets his pay from the anti-Semitic headmaster. He wanders to Sandymount Strand and mopes around, mulling various philosophical concepts.
Part II: The Odyssey
Back to 8:00 AM. Leopold Bloom, a part-Jewish advertising canvasser, gets sausage, makes breakfast for his cheating wife Molly, reads a letter, takes a shit. Bloom makes his way to Westland Row post office where he receives a love letter, buys soap, goes to the baths. He then takes a funeral carriage with three others, including Stephen's father, and they drive to Paddy Dignam's funeral. Later at the office of the Freeman's Journal, Bloom attempts to place an ad, and just misses Stephen, who heads to the pub for lunch with the editor and some other guys. He sees the guy who's fucking his wife and flees in a panic. Later at the National Library, Stephen explains to various scholars that the key to Shakespeare is that he was a complete cuckold. Then we have nineteen short vignettes depicting the wanderings of various characters, major and minor, through the streets of Dublin, and a cavalcade that encounters several. Bloom has dinner with Stephen's uncle at a hotel, while Molly's lover is headed to meet her. An anonymous narrator takes over, goes to Barney Kiernan's pub where he meets "The Citizen". When Bloom enters the pub, he is berated by the Citizen, who is a fierce Fenian and anti-Semite. Later, a young woman on Sandymount strand, contemplates love, marriage and femininity as night falls., and we gradually figure out Bloom is watching her and whacking off.

aww whats the matter babby, too hard?

After, he decides to visit Mina Purefoy at the hospital (who's about to give birth) and finally meets Stephen there, who has been drinking with his medical student friends and is awaiting the promised arrival of Buck Mulligan. They continue on to a pub to continue drinking, following the successful birth of the baby. Stephen and Lynch walk into Nighttown, Dublin's red-light district. Bloom pursues them and eventually finds them at a brothel, and everyone is truly fucked up and having guilty visions. Bloom has a series of hallucinations regarding his sexual fetishes, fantasies, and transgressions. Stephen hallucinates that the rotting corpse of his mother has risen up from the floor to confront him. Terrified, Stephen uses his walking stick to smash a chandelier and then runs out. Bloom quickly pays for the damage, then finds Stephen engaged in a heated argument with an English soldier, who punches Stephen. The police arrive and the crowd disperses. As Bloom is tending to Stephen, Bloom has a hallucination of Rudy, his dead child.
Part III: The Nostos
Bloom and Stephen go to the cabman's shelter to restore the Stephen to his senses. They encounter a drunken sailor and get confused. Bloom returns home with Stephen, makes him a cup of cocoa, chats, and offers him a place to stay for the night. Stephen refuses Bloom's offer and they go piss in the backyard, Stephen departs and wanders off into the night, and Bloom goes to bed, where Molly is sleeping (worn out from fucking around). She wakes up and questions him about his day. Then Molly lies in bed next to her husband and thinks about all kinds of stuff, ending with remembering Bloom's proposal to her.
The End.

seriously man thank you

>After, he decides to visit Mina Purefoy at the hospital (who's about to give birth) and finally meets Stephen there, who has been drinking with his medical student friends and is awaiting the promised arrival of Buck Mulligan. They continue on to a pub to continue drinking, following the successful birth of the baby. Stephen and Lynch walk into Nighttown, Dublin's red-light district. Bloom pursues them and eventually finds them at a brothel, and everyone is truly fucked up and having guilty visions. Bloom has a series of hallucinations regarding his sexual fetishes, fantasies, and transgressions. Stephen hallucinates that the rotting corpse of his mother has risen up from the floor to confront him. Terrified, Stephen uses his walking stick to smash a chandelier and then runs out. Bloom quickly pays for the damage, then finds Stephen engaged in a heated argument with an English soldier, who punches Stephen. The police arrive and the crowd disperses. As Bloom is tending to Stephen, Bloom has a hallucination of Rudy, his dead child.
This is both true and not true. Circe is really interesting in that way, because Joyce implies there's some true reality going on on top of what he portrays, but he's instead portraying what's going on in their subconscious. So in a sense, Bloom is both hallucinating and not hallucinating, and Stephen hallucinating and not hallucinating all these things during Circe. Joyce's consciousness, so to speak, separates us from them --- the overly poetic and disjointed way they speak and obscure literary references point us to the fact that Joyce, ineluctably (now there's a word you only read in Joyce), is there mediating this for us. Really experimental stuff.

>an incomprehensible piece of meaningless shit to be "the best novel of the 20th century"?

you don't know a goddamned thing

There's a total of one incomprehensible chapter in the entire book.

The whole novel was worth it just for the cab stand scene desu -- one of my favorite passages in literature, and I'm not even crazy about Joyce on the whole. Really the best praise I can give Ulysses is that it would have been a stellar novel even without all the formal innovation.

great wikipedia summary

OP sounds like bait but I'll bite as I just finished the novel. It's a fully realised vision of a character's mind. When you read this you almost literally live through a day in Dublin, thinking about life, old age, war, women, being cuckolded, death of your children, and more. There are moments when the characters are abysmally pathetic but also moments of their absolute triumph. It's life in short. Also with footnotes nothing is really incomprehensible.

Try getting the audio book or reading out loud. For me that really brought out the humour of the book.

id never thought about this, thank you man

That name is woke as fuck yo

Except Stephen really does hallucinate his mother. It's the one real hallucination in the chapter

Now that I think about it, Stephen Daedalus might be a little bit schizophrenic. The combination of stress and absinthe probably went to his head and made him see his mother

>It's the one real hallucination in the chapter
Boom becomes some divine ruler?
Also am I the only one who thinks Buck is just a chad who lays on the banter too heavy for Daedalus/Joyce to handle?