James Joyce’s Ulysses
The last line of Ulysses (1922) is not, in fact, the famous orgasmic affirmation of life and love from Molly Bloom – ‘and yes I said yes I will Yes.’ – but the postscript note added below: ‘Trieste-Zürich-Paris, 1914–1921’.
Europe was ripping itself apart, but James Joyce, exiled from Ireland and trekking across the continent to steer clear of the bombs and generalized belligerence, was knocking together one of the most compassionate and civilized visions in the history of humanity, the idea of a more charitable and considerate cosmos. Yet this was no distant utopia, no pastoral never-never land. It was a world absolutely rooted in reality and modernity: the city of Dublin during a single day, 16 June 1904 (a date now known to Ulysses’s devotees as ‘Bloomsday’ after the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom).
It is the warmest, wittiest, wisest of books, but Ulysses is now, exactly 120 years after that first ‘Bloomsday’, as famous for being famous, and for being ‘difficult’, as it is for being ambitious and entertaining. Every year, every month, there seem to appear newspaper pieces that love to ridicule the book’s apparent impenetrability, or show off the article’s author’s ‘hilarious’ inability to finish it.
It is certainly true that many of the (especially later) chapters/episodes – there are eighteen in all – of this 900-page tome are complex, taking language and fiction into undreamt of places. The fourteenth, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, is perhaps the most infamously difficult – and ingenious. It takes place late at night in a maternity hospital, its prose charting the whole of English literature. The character of the language shifts via thirty-two parodies (plus three trimesters and nine subsections), representing the ‘embryonic development’ of English literary style from its pagan origins to Malory, Milton, Defoe, Swift, Sterne, Gibbon, Dickens and many others.
Often amusing and sometimes – like pregnancy/childbirth – quite hard to endure, it is perhaps the supreme example of Joyce’s literary dexterity and extensive knowledge of both the English language and its literature (though his later cultural-linguistic tour de force, Finnegans Wake, would go even further, taking on the world and its languages). But with patience and curiosity, most of the Oxen’s marvels can be safely navigated and are well worth the effort. Moreover, of course, readers shouldn’t worry about getting every reference in Ulysses, or be ashamed about consulting the many excellent printed or digital guides.
The bulk of the book is as straightforward to traverse as any well-written work of modern literature. James Joyce was, after all, quite a good writer, wanting – willing – to communicate. Except where confusion is the game, in Ulysses he does not intend to confuse or perplex us: he wanted us to understand his vision (even if it often needed determination and concentration). Like most writers, he liked the idea of voluminous readers – and, more crucially, strongly believed art, not least his art, should be for all.
Gazing from his Paris apartment window one day, the Irish author pointed at the concierge’s son playing on the steps: ‘One day that boy will read Ulysses’. Joyce knew that his book could reach the humblest of lives, the most ‘ordinary’ of readers. It wasn’t intended only for the academics, the chin-strokers, or that curious contingent of contemporary bibliophiles who masochistically enjoy only books which are absolutely incomprehensible. Joyce himself famously preferred to talk art and literature with waiters or postmen rather than writers, musicians, scholars or other assorted professionals and connoisseurs. If there might, on occasion, be a certain vanity or inverted snobbery in this, he also knew the value and charisma of everyday opinions and everyday folk, for Ulysses is a book that treats everyone as an equal. And everyone interested James Joyce: labourers and landowners, shopgirls and saints, cab drivers and kings.
If this was both a moral and a social principle, it was also an aesthetic one. Joyce knew the fabulous grist to his artistic mill that was simply lying there in the streets around him, ready for the taking, the creative gold to be mined in the world entire via the knowledge, experience and material that was in every city, every house, every brain. Thoughts and dialogue needed to be fashioned by an expert author’s quill, but their source was the humanity Ulysses would celebrate.
That said, for all its appeal in both subject and style to the ‘common reader’, Joyce’s masterpiece is no pushover. It requires attention, inquisitiveness and a certain stamina. But, there again, we should be challenged as readers, as human beings. Life, after all, is hard, and wanting his art to mirror life, Joyce knew that some areas of text would need more work than others to negotiate. But that’s half the fun. We don’t want to be spoon-fed, do we?
In Ulysses we truly travel back to that Dublin day of 1904, as authentically as if we had finally got that time machine working. We soar above the city like an eagle or a drone, glancing down at its furious activity, its splendid scale, before zooming in not just to intimate domestic situations or to the busy streets and rowdy pubs, but actually inside someone’s head. We follow the character’s thoughts, often only half conscious, half formed or half verbalized, as thoughts often are, as they tumble or track through their mind.
And, of course, the best thoughts are usually not about Aristotle or Achilles but food and sex, lust and linen, wine and whims. Bloom, especially, takes us on boundless compelling personal journeys around both his city and his mind: both in all their dirty, energetic splendour; both in all their marvellous spirit and mischievous caprice. Everyman and superman, Leopold Bloom is a glorious literary companion and guide (to Dublin and the cosmos), his head full of idioms, eccentricities and accumulated knowledge, and we often yearn for him when the novel spends time with other people.
And what a novel it is. Clever and sincere. Kind-hearted and funny. An absorbing catalogue of literature and vast register of human thoughts, emotions and sensations. Possessed of a virtuoso technique, Ulysses is also a ravishing spectacle of language, some of the most exuberant and exciting ever written. There are countless examples, of course, but one particular line seems to sum up its rapturous wonder of words and the world. It comes in the penultimate chapter, during the so-called ‘Ithaca’ episode, a rocky and rollicking delight which intermingles the languages of science and encyclopaedias with those of prose fiction, with predictably hilarious consequences. It is splendidly pedantic and precocious; Joyce called it the ‘ugly duckling’ of Ulysses – and we all know what happens to ugly ducklings…
We are near the end of the book, near the end of that Dublin day a century and more ago. It is late and Bloom has returned home with Stephen Dedalus (with Molly Bloom, one of the three lead characters of Ulysses; many will know him from his starring role in Joyce’s earlier novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Following the evening’s various bibulous diversions and entertainments, they are in Bloom’s garden and relieve themselves. This (literal) expression of physical corruption and vulgarity, ordinariness and ugliness, becomes – in true Joycean style – the opportunity for its opposite, for a manifestation of beauty and fertility, for the faulty and fragmented inflections of earthly existence to become the triumphant emblems of infinity. The language of the episode suddenly loses its scientific character, becoming entirely its converse: poetic, for nature is not just statistics or data but beauty, astonishment, euphoria. Glancing up to the sky Stephen and Bloom witness
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
For all the difficulties – most of which can be navigated with patience, Google, or by simply skipping ahead – the main pleasures (and there are many) of Ulysses lie in the beauty of its language, in the endless humorous and studious insights, the linking of the modest and the majestic, the everyday and the eternal, the profound awareness of how human lives are lived, with all their private thoughts, quiet tragedies and tender ecstasies.
Dr David Vernon is the author of four books: Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama, Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies, Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Beethoven: The String Quartets. His next book, Sun Forest Lake: The Symphonies and Tone Poems of Jean Sibelius, will be published in November 2024, while a study of Yukio Mishima’s novels is planned for 2025.