I look at it like this:
Many of the very best musicians seem to produce more and more complex work, going from fairly accessible in their early works to “way out there” in the later works. In the truly great musicians, it seems, the later works are so far out there that practically nobody understands all the complexities, and the great majority of the listeners get lost and just go, “Whatever. I couldn’t get into it.” However, even in these extreme cases, there is a really, really strange core of listeners (most of them musicians themselves) who spend rapt hours grooving to the music and talking about things most of the rest of the world has no idea even exists.
James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner seem to be literary versions of the same phenomenon. Practically no “normal” person reads them for enjoyment, yet a certain group of people (like English profs and other literary geeks) really, really dig them.
I have not read Ulysses, but I have read some of Joyce’s shorter works, and enjoyed them. The two that come to mind are Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and “Araby.” “Araby,” in particular, formed such strong images in my mind that I can still recall very specific details about the story more than ten yeaars later, despite the fact that I read it only once.
Maybe Hemingway is the same thing, and I just never had the ability to “get it.”
A committee is a lifeform with six or more legs and no brain.