1904 The author later memorialised this day by turning it into Bloomsday, when the action of Ulysses (1922) takes place. Ulysses spends its 265,000 words elaborating the ordinary events and thoughts during the day of Stephen Dedalus, a struggling young writer who has to teach bored children for a living, Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman, and Bloom’s wife, Molly.
Bloom’s peregrinations through Dublin take him to the post office, where he receives a clandestine letter from his lover, to a funeral, to the office of a newspaper to sell advertisements, the National Museum to gaze at the beautiful rear end on a statue of Venus, the National Library, and a maternity hospital. From time to time his path intersects with that of Dedalus, but they never really interact.
Along with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the first of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, which also came out in that same annus mirabilis of modernism, 1922, Ulysses remains one of the paradigms of modernist literature in English. Like those other works, the novel reinvents the classics for a contemporary readership. It is revolutionary in technique – for example, in the stream of consciousness in Episode 3 and in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end, and in its range of tone and reference, powered by the contrast between its classical register and its vernacular events and their expression, including sexual explicitness.
Above all, Ulysses is modernist in its elaborate parodies, puns and other wordplay, and in making the medium part of the message. Episode 14, ‘The Oxen of the Sun’, in which Bloom visits the maternity hospital, enacts the whole process of gestation in terms of the evolution of the English language itself, with the conjunction of Latin and Anglo-Saxon producing the embryo, developing in skilful parodies of Middle English, the prose of the King James Bible, 18th-century essays, Dickens and Carlyle, before being born in the slang and street talk of contemporary Dublin.