[joycer]

It is my belief that Ulysses is the one true novel.

All other novels are attempts to achieve what Joyce accomplished. A sort of Platonic Ideal.

My reasoning is the evidence, meaning the reason it is the one true novel is because I believe a novel is: the act of attempting to fully represent an individual's experience; If you disagree with my definition of novelisation, that's fine, but it is how I classify novels, and in so much Joyce achieves the nearest perfection of this through the novels seeming opaque or random nature.

One's experience is a cloud of infinite affects and effects that one could attempt to catalogue, but would fail miserably. Here is exactly what Joyce achieved. Through Ulysses' failures it achieves perfection. Like Dali's belief that all things are latent with hidden meanings, or how if you hate Warhol because you think his work is crap then you should recognise that you actually love his work because his message was to show you that all mass manufacture is simply the production of crap.

It is more than What?, it is Why?.

Finnegan's Wake is an even a better example of this belief in practice, but it throws out the rules which unjustly garners it ire. Ulysses plays by the rules, that is grammar`dictionary`genre, and that is why I believe it is held in higher regard.

tl;dr : if you think Ulysses is difficult to read and incomprehensible, you are reading it correctly. Read it without guides, they dismantle the work's truth.