That's subvocalization. But you can read without subvocalizing and still figure out tone as you read.
The problem I had reading Ulysses when I tried at fifteen was the opposite. I was so bent on reading Ulysses as Serious Great Literature that I couldn't read it as something amusing. So I got to the weirder parts of the book and concluded, as a lot of people unfortunately do, that it was pretentious crap. It's funny how pretentious masturbation sounds in a book when you don't let yourself think it's funny.
There's another passage in particular that has the same effect on people. Leopold Bloom looks at the sky and calls it "the grey sunken cunt of the world". A lot of people jump on that passage and accuse Joyce of gratuitous swearing for shock value and assume he's being a bitter, wordy arse; once you convince yourself to read the passage as being thought by a cranky Irishman, it suddenly becomes hilarious.
No. I'm saying there are two ways to call the sky a sunken grey cunt. The first is to strive earnestly to describe the sky in just the right way to define the sky. When you decide the proper thing to call the sky is a cunt, then you might be accused of a bit of pretension, and bad taste.
The second way to call the sky a cunt is to be a grumpy Irishman in the morning who calls the sky a cunt whimsically, if annoyed. It's the difference between the clean-shaven trendy beret-wearing guy who pronounces "cunt" with much deliberation, and the long-nosed family man who says cunt like a curse.
They're both saying the same words, but the one guy's being an ass, and the second guy is hilarious. I'm saying that the people that think Joyce is pretentious are the people who haven't figured out he's hilarious.
You can do the same to any comedian, incidentally. Take George Carlin's rant on reducing the ten commandments to two, remove his inflection, focus on the words, and that could easily be some dick's attempting a hoity-toity statement about religion with no humor whatsoever. Steven Wright talking about the museum that has all the heads and arms from all the other statues can be less of a joke and more of a self-involved critique on the nature of art and decay. But it's not, because it's Steven Wright telling a joke, and in his case we know to laugh.
I am saying that I find it irritating when people take rational statements and attempt to make them absurd.
The problem I had reading Ulysses when I tried at fifteen was the opposite. I was so bent on reading Ulysses as Serious Great Literature that I couldn't read it as something amusing. So I got to the weirder parts of the book and concluded, as a lot of people unfortunately do, that it was pretentious crap. It's funny how pretentious masturbation sounds in a book when you don't let yourself think it's funny.
There's another passage in particular that has the same effect on people. Leopold Bloom looks at the sky and calls it "the grey sunken cunt of the world". A lot of people jump on that passage and accuse Joyce of gratuitous swearing for shock value and assume he's being a bitter, wordy arse; once you convince yourself to read the passage as being thought by a cranky Irishman, it suddenly becomes hilarious.