Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Faulkner

Faulkner’s line is a dare disguised as advice: stop pretending Ulysses is a book you can “solve” and start treating it like a text you enter. The jab lands because it’s doubly irreverent. He picks the illiterate Baptist preacher, a figure stereotyped as anti-elitist and suspicious of high culture, then makes him the model reader for the most canonized modernist brick in the English language. The joke is that the preacher’s authority doesn’t come from decoding; it comes from conviction, performance, and a willingness to be carried by language he can’t fully parse. Faulkner is giving Joyce the status of scripture while also demystifying the act of reading him: not scholarship, not plot-tracking, but surrender.

The subtext is an argument about modernism’s social economy. Ulysses had already become a kind of cultural password by midcentury: a book people name-drop, buy, fear, and abandon. Faulkner punctures that anxious prestige. “With faith” reframes difficulty as an experience rather than a deficiency. You don’t read Joyce to extract a clean message; you read him the way congregants receive a sermon or a psalm: letting cadence, repetition, and sudden radiance do their work before you can explain them.

There’s also a Southern edge to the metaphor. Faulkner knew the preacher as a local engine of storytelling, rhythm, and communal meaning. He’s quietly aligning Joyce’s radical technique with older oral traditions, suggesting that the avant-garde isn’t the enemy of belief - it’s another way of practicing it.