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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Carl Jung did not like Joyce’s “Ulysses”

Brian Leiter

This is rather amusing:

I had an uncle whose thinking was always to the point. One day he stopped me on the street and asked, “Do you know how the devil tortures the souls in hell?” When I said no, he declared, “He keeps them waiting.” And with that he walked away. This remark occurred to me when I was ploughing through Ulysses for the first time. Every sentence raises an expectation which is not fulfilled; finally, out of sheer resignation, you come to expect nothing any longer. Then, bit by bit, again to your horror, it dawns upon you that in all truth you have hit the nail on the head. It is actual fact that nothing happens and nothing comes of it, and yet a secret expectation at war with hopeless resignation drags the reader from page to page… You read and read and read and you pretend to understand what you read. Occasionally you drop through an air pocket into another sentence, but when once the proper degree of resignation has been reached you accustom yourself to anything. So I, too, read to page one hundred and thirty-five with despair in my heart, falling asleep twice on the way… Nothing comes to meet the reader, everything turns away from him, leaving him gaping after it. The book is always up and away, dissatisfied with itself, ironic, sardonic, virulent, contemptuous, sad, despairing, and bitter…

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20 responses to “Carl Jung did not like Joyce’s “Ulysses””

  1. s. wallerstein

    I had a Joyce course in graduate school, now over 50 years ago, and we read or tried to read both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

    In retrospect I don't believe Joyce "has much to say". Both books are technical feats, with impressive use of language and of different styles, but there's no message.

    Probably for many people the "message" in fiction is not of primary importance.

    By "message" I don't mean a thesis that can be put into a paragraph of prose, but rather what one gets from reading Kafka, who "has a lot to say".

    Even Proust stays with you, After reading one volume of Search for Lost Time, the character and narrator Marcel is someone who'll stay with you the rest of your life.

    Maybe there are "message" readers and "style" readers. Carl Jung and I read for the message, while others read for style. I'm not claiming that one type of reader is "superior" or "better" than the other.

    Reply
  2. Jake McNulty

    But Jung was also a dour cultural conservative who would have abhorred the book's materialism, its sexual frankness, its irreverence about religion, and its modernist experimentation with language.

    Reply
  3. Dean C. Rowan

    I have read and admired Ulysses twice, but I failed twice with Finnegans Wake, even though I enjoyed what I read. Covid-19 interrupted the second effort, which might explain that particular lapse. The "message" is rarely important to me, and sometimes "style" is sufficient. Anita Brookner's novels are fairly predictable, but no matter. I love "how" she wrote. But there is still another category of reader, those who simply enjoy the confrontation with print on paper, those like me who will read a users manual (or some of it), who read the backs of cereal boxes, who are happy merely to have an object imprinted with language. I'm also a fan of work in which "nothing happens." To the Lighthouse has something of the quality, and I adore it. Kenneth Koch's marvelous and hilarious long poem, When the Sun Tries to Go On, is almost nonsensical. Anyway, even if Jung didn't like Ulysses, it seems at least he "got" what he read of it.

    Reply
  4. Howard

    @ S Wallerstein

    I read Ulysses with the occult references eluding me
    However, prima facie, I think there are two "messages" people take away
    One, we need to increase our awareness of all the little moments of our day
    Two, life is exhilarating if we let it. Jung was a Christian, not Jewish. The message of Judaism at its best is that the everyday is sacred. Leopold Bloom makes his odyssey in an otherwise meaningless day and Bloom is Jewish.
    He delighted in a day of his and Dublin's creation and Joyce's
    And the language for me is worth the price of the book

    Reply
  5. John Rapko

    One way of thinking about Ulysses that might help is to note its similarities to Moby Dick: 1. They're about working people. 2. They offer new kinds of English that bring to the surface and focalizes the language's vast latencies and resonances, especially the mythic and religious dimensions. 3. It takes three tries to read them.

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  6. Michael Joseph DeNiro

    Jung wrote in the excerpt, "It is actual fact that nothing happens… ."

    Vivian Mercier wrote in the Irish Times in 1956 that Samuel Beckett had "written a play [Waiting for Godot] in which nothing happens, twice".

    Reply
  7. Dean C. Rowan

    I would never have considered that comparison until you made it explicit, and it's entirely apt. I am presently taking a very long time to reread Moby-Dick, loving every page of it.

    Reply
  8. Dean C. Rowan

    Let me add 4. They're both doorstops.

    Reply
  9. John Rapko

    Dean, while you're re-readying Moby Dick, check out C. L. R. James's essay on Whitman and Melville in the James Reader–it's life-changing.

    Reply
  10. Lealdo

    Great comment by Jung — I would pose however that he (at least in this review) thoroughly failed to see in the book both the sweetness (when Joyce wanted it happen) and the beauty (likewise). Sad, despairing, bitter? Sure. But also many, many other things.

    Reply
  11. John Fischer

    Ulysses can be enjoyed for the beauty of its prose and uniqueness of presentation, quite apart from familiarity with the arcane references. But Finnegan's Wake is another story–obscure references combined with puns: a toxic cocktail.

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  12. Dean C. Rowan

    Oooo, thank you. That will hit the spot.

    Reply
  13. Rob Hughes

    Another amusing review of Ulysses is in Judge John M. Woolsey's opinion ruling that the book is not obscene. The conclusion:

    "But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that, whilst in many places the effect of 'Ulysses' on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac."

    Judge Woolsey also called the book an "astonishing success" at its "difficult objective."

    United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, 5 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1933).
    https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=5544515174778878625

    Reply
  14. Sean McAleer

    I’ve been culling books lately but I can’t seem to let go of a shelf of Ulysses-related stuff, even though I haven’t looked at any of it in 30 years. I wrote my senior thesis on Ulysses as an undergrad, and I guess I still have an attachment to that weird, wonderful book that dominated my life for a while. I once humped around Dublin, following Bloom’s path, my then-mate good naturedly tolerating my geeking out at being in the Martello tower captured in the book’s opening chapter and later seeing the actual door from 7 Eccles Street, preserved in the side-room of a bar whose name escapes me.

    I remember Ted Cohen’s presidential address at the Central years ago — more accurately, I remember that in it he mentioned two of my favorite things: Joyce’s Ulysses and the White Sox (the latter of which has provided more agita than joy in recent years).

    I don’t know what to make of Jung on Ulysses; his reaction seems to say more about him than it does about the book. It’s not a book that’s easy to enjoy or even understand the first time through (at least it wasn’t for me) but when I learned how to read it and it could reveal itself — well, it became the source of a distinctive, exquisite joy like no other. It’s probably condescending to pity old Carl, but I do. I prefer Tom Stoppard’s take:

    “Well, it was a long time ago. He left Zurich after the war, went to Paris, stayed twenty years and turned up here in December 1940. Another war… But he was a sick man then, perforated ulcer, and in January he was dead … buried one cold snowy day in the Fluntern cemetery up the hill… I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination, case practically won, admitted it all, the whole thing, the trousers, everything, and I flung at him––'And what did you do in the Great War?' 'I wrote Ulysses ,' he said. 'What did you do?' Bloody nerve.” (Tom Stoppard, Travesties)

    Reply
  15. John Fischer

    Sean,

    Thanks for this wonderful post, Sean.

    I too went to Dublin to follow the course of Leopold Bloom's wanderings during the single day depicted in Joyce's Ulysses. I too have a whole shelf of Ulysses-related books (and also The Portrait and Finnegan's Wake). I make no pretense to understanding or enjoying Finnegan's Wake, but some of the puns are cool, such as "laities and gentilemen" and "that's what makes lifework leaving," etc. And the last sentence wrapping around to the first–beautiful writing, and thank you Vico and Joyce. Is time circular? Dunno, but that would make it easier to reply to worries about the fixity of the past (or would it?)

    Not light reading, though, and often I don't feel like putting in the work. I prefer Jane Austen, and even more, Succession!

    Reply
  16. John Fischer

    Oh, and also from Finnegan's Wake, one of my favorites (but maybe not Jung's):
    "When I was Jung and easily Freudened…"
    You gotta hand it to Joyce!

    Reply
  17. Sean McAleer

    This has been a terrific thread. My favorite thing about Finnegans Wake is the way the final sentence abruptly breaks off, only to be completed (“completed”?) by the opening sentence.

    Reply
  18. Dean C. Rowan

    Samuel R. Delaney's Dhalgren, which I have not read, imitates the feature. "Delany has pointed out that Dhalgren is a circular text with multiple entry points. Those points include the schizoid babble that appears in various sections of the story.Hints along those lines are given in the novel. Besides the Chapter VII rubric mentioned above (containing the sentence 'I have come to to wound the autumnal city'—the exact sentence that would be created by joining the novel's unclosed closing sentence to the unopened opening) the most obvious is the point where Kid hears "grendal grendal grendal grendal" going through his mind and suddenly realizes he was listening from the wrong spot: he was actually hearing 'Dhalgren Dhalgren Dhalgren' over and over again. The ability of texts to become circular is something that Delany explores in other works, such as Empire Star."
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhalgren

    Reply
  19. Ludovic Marsillach

    Brings to mind this somewhat famous (or notorious) comment by the late Harold Bloom apropos Infinite Jest: "You know, I don’t want to be offensive. But ‘Infinite Jest’ is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent…We have no standards left. [Wallace] seems to have been a very sincere and troubled person, but that doesn’t mean I have to endure reading him."

    Infinite Jest would be the name for the cultural vacuity inherent in the intellectual products that the salient of the military industrial complex known as the "prestige" publishing houses in the US and UK disseminate with a gaslighting intent coupled with barely disguised derision for the middling middle classes that stand outside looking in at the likes of the Derridean & Zizekian factories of obscurantism, which seem but a mirror of the obscurantism of the plutocratic neoliberal state.

    I'd argue Joyce's Ulysses is actually the antithesis of the mockish/obscurantist ideological function described above because it encapsulates and therefore is a boon to actual thought: to a density of thought both qua content and in the architecture that organizes and structures said content. There is no thoughtlessness to the thought that went into the creation of Ulysses: every iota and atom of its composition, of its architecture, is a testament to the linguistic and narrative masterfulness of its creator. Every act, to be sure, of writing constitutes the engrafting or recording of a particular human mind, it is its phenomenological score, obviously with no need of level of awareness of this.

    The greatest works of modern literature are evidently neither doctrinaire nor incoherent, least of all mindless, regardless of how ironically self-aware they may pretend to be in this regard. Instead they seek to sincerely manifest and elevate even the most quotidian phenomena into a 'phenomenology' or extended study of human perception that is a faithful recording of the unity of "external" nature to internal inescapable state of man's existence executed in a style that would seem to extract a sort of mathematic beauty from words, and ultimately from the world at large, or at very least from the mathematical sensibilities of the human mind, whether they be manifested in pure mathematics, music, drawing, poetry, or prose.

    Specifically in the case of literature, one is dealing with the transformation of language into a faithful echo of the nature of emotion, of its relationship both arbitrary and determinative of one's understanding of truth, so that one might say the nature of emotion is inseparable from the nature of truth: emotions are indisputable states of truth; can a mind exist without them, without any of them, and continue to be recognizable as human?

    Now a work like Ulysses may be radically innovative, but not thoughtless, superfluous, or indeed a consequence of unchecked neurosis, rather embodying the supervening of the ugliness or brutishness or incoherence to which all minds are at least occasionally subject, by the transformation of any and all states into a language that is thoroughly encoded or representative of an emotional ledger that has been rendered almost musicologically compositional in its expression and condensation of emotional truth: the intelligence that exists before language and is indeed a sort of ur language and which at its most sublime is surely equatable with what used be described as the "music of the spheres," constitutive of a sublime, seemingly otherworldly synchrony of "subject and form," evincing or hinting at the mathematical unity of the whole.

    Reply
  20. Dean C. Rowan

    I am reading the essay and others in the Reader. Absolutely mind-blowing, incisive, inspirational work about Melville. Boundless thanks, John, for the suggestion. Not only do I love Melville all the more, but I need to devote serious time to James.

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