Jonathan Russell Clark

The Most Dangerous Book | The Georgia Review, Spring ’15
At Oxford, on the day we began our discussions my professor, an impossibly handsome Irish man, watched me awkwardly flip back and forth between the prose of the novel and the endnotes of my edition. He interrupted me and told me never to reference the notes again. “If you don’t understand it,” he said, “then let yourself not understand it.” He said people had placed too much emphasis on “understanding” Ulysses, as if it were merely some puzzle to be solved. “Listen to the language,” he said. “Joyce wanted you to hear the music of it.” This was the best advice he could have given me. After that tutorial, I read on unencumbered by any fear of my inferiority in the face of the text. Ulysses was something you experienced just as much as something you understood.