James Joyce began writing Ulysses at the edge of a war that changed people’s understanding of scale. In June 1914, a Serbian assassin walked up to Archduke Ferdinand’s motorcade in Sarajevo with a semiautomatic pistol, and by the end of the summer bombs were rumbling across Europe. The benchmark for a destructive European conflict was the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. In the summer of 1914, that war’s 250,000 dead soldiers seemed like victims of antiquated tactics. Modern weapons were so powerful that all anyone had to do was attack first to win—an invader would conquer in a matter of weeks. Everyone thought the same thing, and everyone was wrong by orders of magnitude. The Great War would last years. It would kill seven million civilians and ten million soldiers. And that was only part of it. The troop movements, the overflowing field hospitals and the miles of trenches laid the groundwork for the devastation of 1918, the Spanish flu. More than fifty million people were killed by particles too small for any existing microscope to see. The world was decimated by machine guns, fragmentation grenades and coiled packets of viral RNA.
Joyce never imagined the looming destruction when he left Ireland with Nora in 1904. They planned an unexceptional life in Paris’s Left Bank, where he would write and teach English and she would become a laundress, perhaps, or a seamstress. Joyce contacted the Berlitz School for a job opening and spent weeks scraping together money from anyone who would help, but he never told his father he was leaving with Nora Barnacle. When they departed from Dublin, Nora watched Joyce take leave of his family from a distance before she went striding up the ferry’s gangplank to start a life with a man she had known for less than four months. Joyce endured three years of silence before his father unburdened himself of his disappointment: “I saw a life of promise crossed and a future that might have been brilliant blasted in one breath.” Nora had no one to be disappointed in her. Neither of them would ever live in Ireland again.
But they never made it to Paris. After taking a temporary job in Pula, a small outpost on the Istrian peninsula, Berlitz found Joyce a long-term position in Trieste, the Austrian Empire’s only merchant seaport. Trieste was a gateway to Vienna, Ljubljana and Milan, and it was the second-largest port in the Mediterranean. Twelve thousand ships carrying 2.5 million tons of cargo passed through Trieste every year, and the city’s population grew by over a third in the first decade of the twentieth century. By the time Joyce and Nora arrived in 1905, there was a large demand for foreign language instruction—one trip to the market indicated how polyglot the city was. Italian dialects clashed with German, Czech and Greek. Albanians and Serbs haggled over prices while Croatians and Slovenians half-guessed their way through conversations. If Joyce had wanted to escape Ireland’s provinciality, he had found the perfect place.
Merchant ships from far-flung ports wedged themselves into the Grand Canal bringing fruits, spices, barrels of Arabian coffee and olive oil from around the Mediterranean. Steamships arrived with rubber and timber to build an empire, and Trieste’s wealth accentuated the young Irish couple’s poverty. They watched men in bowler hats tapping canes with handles made of ivory or gold rather than Joyce’s humble ashplant. Women wore ample Viennese gowns with ostrich feathers soaring above their hats. They would nudge each other and laugh at Nora’s cheap skirt, whispering words that, thankfully, she couldn’t understand.
Nora was pregnant when they arrived in Trieste, and landladies balked when she began to show. There was no ring on her finger, and the backlash was nearly as bad in Trieste as it would have been in Dublin. Nevertheless, Joyce remained adamant: asking a priest or a lawyer to ratify their relationship was out of the question. Joyce believed that marriage was the first step toward foisting upon their children the same nightmares of history and belief that they had traveled so far to escape. It was a coercive institution of property and power, and Nora’s pregnancy made that coercion clear—the couple was forced to leave three different flats.
In late July 1905, Nora gave birth to a boy. The baby came a month earlier than expected (the new parents had miscalculated), and Joyce named his son Giorgio in honor of his deceased brother George. About a year later, Nora was pregnant again. When Lucia was born in the hospital’s pauper’s ward in June 1907, the nurses gave Nora twenty crowns. The Irish couple had officially become a charity case.
Fatherhood was a burden for Joyce. At twenty-three, he was unprepared for the responsibility, and the prospect of dragging children from one impoverished household to another, as his own father had done, haunted him. The passionate life with Nora was fading, and she was indifferent to his work, which was more vexing than if she had despised it. When she saw him copying small scenes into his manuscript from loose sheets, she asked, “Will all that paper be wasted?”
Joyce’s brother Stannie joined them in Trieste a couple of months after Giorgio’s birth. He took a job at Berlitz, and together they made eighty-five crowns a week. It was on the lower end of the average Triestine salary, but it would have been sufficient for a thrifty lifestyle. To save money, they shared a flat on the outskirts of town with the school’s other English teacher, Alessandro Francini, and his wife. But Joyce was bad with money. Instead of saving the few spare crowns they had, he insisted that they dine out at restaurants, preferably the one with electric lighting. Later in the evenings, he would venture into the Cittavecchia, the old city, passing small wineshops and trundling oxcarts—some of the streets were too steep and narrow for carriages. He was drawn to working-class trattorias and grungy osterie where men shouted at one another in Czech or Hungarian. Joyce drank absinthe and sang songs with the wharf porters before making his way to the brothels.
When he didn’t return home one night, Francini searched the Cittavecchia and found Joyce’s limp body lying in the gutter. It was usually Stannie’s job to find him. He would drag his older brother back home from a bar, and the Francinis would listen to the Irish brothers insulting each other in a lilting, Dante-esque Italian they had learned in school. Stannie once scolded him, “Do you want to go blind? Do you want to go about with a little dog?” Nora’s barbs were sharper: “Faith I tell you I’ll have the children baptized tomorrow.” But no threat was effective. Joyce asked the Berlitz director for advances on his wages whenever the money ran out. He drank to evade the burden of fatherhood, and the expenses of drinking increased his burden, which compelled him to drink more. One night, when Joyce came home insensibly drunk after squandering money they hadn’t yet earned, Stannie began beating him. Francini could hear the awful sounds from his room. He got out of bed, despite his wife’s objections, and told Stannie, “It’s no use.”
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JOYCE TAUGHT ENGLISH by giving his students evocative, idiosyncratic passages to recite and copy down.
Ireland is a great country. They call it the Emerald Isle. The Metropolitan Government, after so many centuries of having it by the throat, has reduced it to a specter. Now it is a briar patch. They sowed it with famine, syphilis, superstition, and alcoholism. Up sprouted Puritans, Jesuits, and bigots.
They were, at times, like epiphanies, commonplace observations leading to deep insight.
The tax collector is an idiot who is always annoying me. He has filled my desk with little sheets marked “Warning,” “Warning,” “Warning.” I told him that if he didn’t stop it, I would send him to be f . . . ound out by that swindler, his master. Today, the swindler is the government of Vienna. Tomorrow it could be the one in Rome. But whether in Vienna or Rome or London, to me governments are all the same, pirates.
His students, bewildered as they must have been, would not forget the word swindler.
Joyce thought governments were swindlers and pirates because their authority was nonnegotiable. To be a citizen of a state was to be its servant, which Joyce considered an affront to his individuality, the quality that made him an artist. “Non serviam” is the creed Stephen Dedalus, the budding artist of A Portrait, adopts, and it was simultaneously a political and artistic motto: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church.”
Joyce’s individualism derived partly from anarchism. He acquired books about anarchy in Trieste and began calling himself an anarchist as early as 1907, though he was a “philosophical” anarchist rather than a political one—and his stomach, he said, was an incorrigible capitalist. His interest in anarchism stemmed from the tenet that all authority—governmental or religious—boiled down to control without consent. To govern is to violate an individual’s sovereignty.
We associate anarchists with chaos and bomb throwers, but their fervor derived from a rigid logic: if an agreement isn’t voluntary, it’s coercive. If you have not explicitly consented to an authority, then it is your master. Because all governments are compulsory, they are all oppressive. To overthrow a monarchy and create a democracy is merely to trade the tyranny of the king for the tyranny of the majority—if you happen to be in the minority, the distinction is irrelevant. Anarchists saw no real difference between limited and absolute authorities. Whether a law instituted traffic lights or a secret police, the violation of individuality was essentially the same.
For philosophical anarchists like Joyce, rejecting authority meant rejecting the entire conceptual category to which “authority” belonged: abstractions and foundational assumptions. Anarchists believed that states and churches rested upon phantom concepts (like legitimacy or moral obligation) masquerading as fundamental truths when they were really just inventions helping tyrants wield power. The philosophical core of anarchism was thus a skepticism of the ostensibly self-evident concepts that held sway over people. It was the conviction that big ideas could enslave, whether they be duty, rights or God; your home, your fatherland or your church.
Anarchism emerged as a response to the rapid growth of the modern state, and, more particularly, to the growth of one of the nineteenth century’s biggest ideas: the police. When the British Parliament created the Metropolitan Police in 1829, it invented a form of state power that was diffused throughout the city. Ten years later, Parliament empowered the police to arrest loiterers, “riotous” drunkards and anyone committing a misdemeanor whose name and residence couldn’t be verified. The act banned cockfighting and shooting firearms within three hundred yards of homes. It banned driving “furiously,” wantonly ringing doorbells and flying annoying kites. It banned the sale and distribution of “profane, indecent, or obscene” books, and the laws would only get stronger over time. By 1878, the British government had passed more than one hundred laws expanding police powers, and Britain set the example for police expansion all around the world.
For people suspicious of authority, the multiplying laws were self-perpetuating: more ordinances created more criminals and, thus, the need for more police officers and an ever-exploding government. The professionalization of law enforcement made patrolmen seem like foot soldiers in an increasingly centralized apparatus staffed with detectives, jailers and bureaucrats who thought of state power as job security. To artists like Joyce, who considered free expression sacrosanct, censorship epitomized the tyranny of state power, for the state not only banned obscenity, it decided what obscenity was. Unlike firearms or kites, the violation was arbitrary—the law hemmed the government in with limits of the government’s choosing—and the fact that censors acted as if indecency were self-evident only made the arbitrariness more blatant. To publish a gratuitously obscene text—to deny “obscenity” as a legitimate category altogether—was a way to expose and reject the arbitrary basis of all state power. It was a form of literary anarchy.
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TRIESTE WAS FERTILE ground for anarchist ideas. The city’s predominantly Italian population had been under Austrian rule for hundreds of years, but after the unification of Italy in 1861, Italian Triestines demanded inclusion in the new Italian state, and the divisions between Italians and Austrians became more palpable as the city became more prosperous. Italians resented the cultural infiltration of their city—a Germanic street name here, an Austrian monument there. Political plums and administrative favors all went to Austrians. When a fight broke out between German and Italian students at Trieste’s law school in 1904, the 137 students arrested were all Italian. Whether the authorities were Italian or Austrian, some portion of the city would be governed against its wishes. To be an Irishman in Trieste was to see your own country’s problems refracted through another empire. For Joyce, leaving home meant seeing global principles beneath local problems, seeing one collectivity pitted against another—Italianness and Austrianness, nationalism and empire. Individuals were crushed by big ideas.
Italy declared war on the Austrian Empire in May 1915. By June, the steamers and ships’ masts in the Grand Canal dwindled. Wartime trade plummeted and mines were planted in the Adriatic to help starve Vienna into defeat, and Trieste was empty. The trams were gone—their cables commandeered by the military—the coaches and oxcarts were gone, and the multilingual shouts from the bars were replaced by the shouts of soldiers demanding documents. The last of those soldiers to be called up for duty patrolled the streets with rifles from the Franco-Prussian War dangling from their shoulders on knotted pieces of string. The sounds of their boots echoed off the shuttered shop fronts in the Cittavecchia. High up on a hill on the old city, the San Giusto Cathedral cast an afternoon shadow over the nearby streets, and in a small apartment on one of those streets, with books crammed into the bedroom and empty chairs in the drawing room where students used to sit, James Joyce was busy writing something new.
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” In the opening chapter of Ulysses, Joyce recalled his days with Oliver Gogarty (Buck Mulligan) at the Martello tower in Sandycove before leaving Ireland with Nora. Joyce finished the first chapter on June 16, 1915, and it could not have been easy. The Berlitz School where he was teaching closed indefinitely that same day. Most of the teachers were conscripted, and the students had either enlisted or fled. And yet as the cannonades and air raids came closer to his apartment in Trieste, Joyce tunneled deeper into his novel. He composed the young men’s dialogue on the tower’s parapet while small crowds gathered on Trieste’s waterfront and listened to the gunfire coming from a town a few miles away. Austrian Triestines mocked the Italian battle cry by shouting, “Avanti, Cagoia!”—“Forward, snails!” The cheers grew louder with each explosion.
As an Austrian port with an Italian population and a mostly Slavic police force, the city began to tear itself apart. When news of Italy’s declaration spread, Austrian mobs roamed through the streets attacking Italian nationalists and destroying Italian restaurants and cafés. Sailors vandalized the statue of Verdi in one of the piazzas, and when they burned the offices of pro-Italian newspapers, the police simply watched. The Joyce family was placed on a list of enemy aliens, and Stannie, who made his Italian sympathies clear, was arrested and placed in an internment camp. By the end of May, the Triestine authorities dissolved the municipal council, censored the press and the mails, deported Italians en masse and declared a state of siege. When the last train for Italy left, Trieste felt like an open-air prison. Shops were shuttered. Lines formed all night in front of the last open bakery, and food prices skyrocketed. “Whoever has the last sack of flour,” Joyce said, “will win the war.”
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JOYCE WAS HARDLY in a position to embark upon a new novel, much less a novel as ambitious as Ulysses. In 1915, he was unemployed, perched on the edge of a battlefront with a wife and two children and as poor as he had ever been. A Portrait was unpublished, and Dubliners had appeared in bookstores two weeks before the archduke’s assassination. At the end of 1914 only 499 copies had been sold (120 of which Joyce was required to purchase himself), and the sales were crawling to a standstill. In the first six months of 1915, twenty-six copies of Dubliners were sold. In the last six months, only seven.
Ulysses began as a whim. It was originally an idea for a short story to tag along in Dubliners. Alfred H. Hunter—the lonely, benevolent Jew in Dublin who had lifted Joyce from the dirt in St. Stephen’s Green—was a hero of the Trojan War, the protagonist of Homer’s greatest epic, the king of Ithaca, Ulysses. The Hunter-as-Ulysses equation was well suited for a short story, but the concept had undergone some unforeseeable growth in Joyce’s mind. In 1914, he began gathering his ideas. Joyce mapped the events of the ancient tale of the Odyssey onto Dublin: a funeral in Glasnevin cemetery was a descent into Hades. His friend Byrne’s little flat on Eccles Street was Ulysses’ palace in Ithaca, and the barmaids at the Ormond Hotel were the Sirens. He had a name for his Ulysses: Leopold Bloom. Stephen Dedalus was Telemachus, Ulysses’ son. Stephen was a son whose father was lost, and Bloom was a father finding his way back to his son. His wife, Molly, was Penelope patiently waiting for her husband’s return from the Trojan War.
By the early twentieth century, the very idea of an epic seemed antiquated. The Odyssey represented the essence of a cohesive civilization, and if the war demonstrated anything, it was that Europe was fragmentary. An Irish Odyssey would be a mock epic, a tale that invoked classical comparisons to deride what civilization had become. For Joyce, there was a mischievous thrill in reimagining the epic stage as dowdy, dirty Dublin. Dublin’s Ulysses is not a king but an ad canvasser for a newspaper, and he returns home not to a faithful queen but to a wife who cheated on him earlier that day. To see the life of Leopold Bloom through the adventures of Ulysses was to peer into the twentieth century through the cracked looking glass of antiquity.
But the other side of Joyce’s thrill was transubstantiating the modern city’s quotidian surroundings. Joyce slipped across centuries from the mundane to the mythical and back. For years, he thought of an epiphany’s flash of insight as a moment revealing “the soul of the commonest object,” as Stephen Dedalus puts it. But in Ulysses, Stephen tells us that the “intense instant of imagination” is an insight across and into time. “So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.” Everything we are, everything we do, acquires its more durable meaning in belated recognitions, which will themselves be fodder for more distant moments. The epiphany belongs to the future. Joyce could see himself as a young man in Dublin now that the bombs were falling around Trieste. And so it is with civilizations telling their stories. Dublin, crossing the threshold of the twentieth century, could gaze back to see itself on the Homeric stage at last.
And Joyce added yet another level of complexity—something that fused the modern world’s disparate orders of magnitude. Instead of an epic unfolding over the course of years, Ulysses would take place on one day. In the twenty-first century, a circadian novel seems natural. We are accustomed to the tick-tock of live reports, RSS feeds, status updates, and twenty-four-hour news cycles feeding us the perception that global events turn on single days. Yet in 1915, the notion that a single day was an appropriate time frame for an extended novel, or that in the limits of smallness we could find a culture’s grand pattern, was, to say the least, exotic. A few writers had written single-day novels before Ulysses, but none on the scale that Joyce imagined—no one thought of a day as an epic. Joyce was planning to turn a single day into a recursive unit of dazzling complexity in which the circadian part was simultaneously the epochal whole. A June day in Dublin would be a fractal of Western civilization.
Joyce continued the story of Stephen Dedalus in the opening chapters of Ulysses. Stephen is twenty-two years old and swimming in his ideas. He walks along the shore in Sandycove, and he thinks not so much about what he sees as the fact that he is seeing it.
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane.
It was not the type of prose that flew off the shelves. It was, however, a new rendering of the way people think. Thoughts don’t flow like the luxuriant sentences of Henry James. Consciousness is not a stream. It is a brief assembly of fragments on the margins of the deep, a rusty boot briefly washed ashore before the tide reclaims it. Joyce wanted Stephen’s thoughts to be clipped and prismatic. He wanted to strip thoughts and emotions down to their essentials. He wanted density, the bones of communication, the sharp utterance, the urgent telegram, the MOTHER DYING COME HOME FATHER.