1922
Ulysses is generally regarded as the world’s first great modernist novel. With its multiple perspectives, stylistic experimentation and innovative use of stream-of-consciousness techniques, it marks the overthrow of the traditional realist novel that had dominated the literature of the 19th century. Gone is conventional narrative and the conventional hero; gone too the polite avoidance of matters sexual and scatological. Above all, the traditional distinction between the self and an objective external world is almost entirely obliterated: reality here is constantly in flux, existing only in the flow of words with which the individual apprehends it.
The idea that eventually grew into Ulysses was originally to have been one of a collection of stories that the Irish expatriate writer James Joyce (1882–1941) published in 1914 as Dubliners. Instead, he worked on it for a further eight years, while living in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. The appearance of extracts in the American journal The Little Review between 1918 and 1920 led to a prosecution for obscenity in the United States, and publishers in Britain refused to take the book. The laws on obscenity were more relaxed in France, and Ulysses was published in Paris, in 1922, by Sylvia Beach’s English-language bookshop Shakespeare and Co. Eventually, in 1934, the book came out in the United States, the judge who cleared it observing: ‘Whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be aphrodisiac.’ Publication in Britain followed in 1936.
Although written while Joyce was in self-imposed exile from Ireland, the action of Ulysses is firmly located in Dublin, and Joyce was so keen to get details of the place right – such as street names and the wording on shop fronts – that he would bombard his friends back home with queries. It was later said that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it could be rebuilt from the descriptions in Ulysses.
The first of the principal characters we meet is Stephen Dedalus, who had earlier appeared as the hero of the author’s autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We then encounter Leopold Bloom and his unfaithful wife Molly, a professional singer. Bloom is a middle-aged seller of advertising space in a local paper, at once an outsider because of his Jewishness and an ‘everyman’ figure. This small, weak, vulgar, inadequate but highly sympathetic figure becomes an unlikely, unglamorous hero for the 20th century, the ‘century of the common man’. No fictional character before Bloom was pictured as intimately and unblinkingly – we even know what goes through his mind as he sits on the lavatory.
Bloom, the Odysseus-figure in Ulysses, is introduced in this scene, making breakfast for his wife.
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.
The coals were reddening.
Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry.
ULYSSES, EPISODE IV, CALYPSO, 1922
The novel is confined to a single day – 16 June 1904, the day Joyce first took out his future wife, Nora Barnacle (every year ‘Bloomsday’ is celebrated in Dublin with walks around some of the locations in the novel). The plot, if one can call it that, is closely tied, often ironically, to various episodes in Homer’s Odyssey, the epic of the wanderings of Odysseus (whom the Romans called Ulysses) before his eventual return home to Ithaca, and his faithful wife Penelope and son Telemachus. In Joyce’s novel Bloom is a modern, un-heroic Odysseus; the intellectual, guilt-ridden, self-obsessed Dedalus is Odysseus’s son Telemachus; and Molly is an unchaste, luxuriantly fleshy Penelope.
Bloom and Dedalus separately wander through Dublin – there are scenes in a Martello tower, a public bathhouse, a funeral chapel, the office of a newspaper, a library, a number of pubs, a maternity hospital, a brothel and innumerable streets – until they eventually meet up. Bloom, who refuses to join in the noisy patriotism of some of the other characters he meets, is throughout the novel plagued by his own inadequacy, by his knowledge that his wife is having an affair with her manager, the brash and confident Blazes Boylan, and by his lasting grief for the death of his son 11 years previously. Ultimately, however, it is an optimistic and positive book: Bloom’s befriending of Dedalus, his constant if undemonstrative feeling for his wife Molly, and his general kindness help him to an understated and restrained sort of triumph. Blazes Boylan is sent away, Molly commits herself to Bloom again, and good heartedness triumphs over bluster and bullying.
The final episode of the novel, an interior monologue delivered by Molly, ends with an affirmation of human warmth and affection. It encapsulates several of the particular qualities of Joyce’s masterpiece: the unstructured flow of consciousness, the author’s finely tuned ear that finds beauty in everyday speech, and tenderness and pathos in the very human situation of a young woman giving herself to her lover:
… and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
These are just the last few words of Molly’s monologue, which runs for some 25,000 words, divided into just eight sentences, the first of them around 2500 words long. This gives some hint of the great challenge that Ulysses presents to the reader. For a start, the novel is 250,000 words long – nearly a thousand pages. There is no page-turning story-line, rather an amassing of the infinite details of the world as we experience it from moment to moment, as images and thoughts elide with each other. The writing is often dense with allusion – literary, mythological, philosophical – and replete with parody, wordplay and Joycean neologisms (‘He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere …’). Joyce himself observed: ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I mean.’ And yet the book – full as it is with humour and high spirits – is as concerned with the mundane advertising jingle as with the esoteric theological reference, as focused on the progress of Leopold Bloom’s bowel movements as with challenging the reader to spot a particular Homeric parallel.
Those who manage to finish Ulysses find it an enormously rewarding experience, and the book is accepted as one of the most original, ambitious and finely written novels ever published. Its development of the stream-of-consciousness technique paved the way for writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), William Faulkner (1897–1962), Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) and Jack Kerouac (1922–1969). But like any great novel, its impact is not just literary: more than any other writer of the 20th century, Joyce articulated the quiet courage and determination of the common man. After Leopold Bloom, everyone could be a hero.