Ulysses – James Joyce, 1922 ★★½

Greeker than the Greeks

Just because I respect Ulysses doesn’t mean I have to like reading it.

For nearly a hundred years, it has been one of the world’s most influential books. Also, one of the most confusing. What is it about? How is one supposed to feel at its end? Is the whole novel about ignoring context and focusing on form, or favoring feeling over sight?

Who is M’Intosh? Am I wrong not to care?

Providing a synopsis of Ulysses may not only be pointless but reckless. Still, here goes: A young artist, seeking new accommodations after a disagreement with his flatmate, wanders through Dublin. An advertising salesman befriends the artist, perhaps to get him to have sex with the salesman’s wife as her current sex partner is not to the salesman’s liking.

None of the above information comes through in a first reading of Ulysses, nor is it all that important. Ultimately, Ulysses is a sprawling chuck of metafiction presented in kaleidoscopic form through a series of wildly different narrative lenses, sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously, but always with some twist that gets twistier as it goes on.

Ulysses begins inside this tower in Sandymount (on the coast of Dublin) where Stephen Dedalus lives. In 1904, it was briefly home to Joyce. Image from https://www.pinterest.ie/pin/497366352570966045/

At the end of one of Ulysses’ most unpleasantly challenging chapters, “Oxen Of The Sun,” Joyce throws out an offhand comment which might read as a sort of gauntlet to anyone who fancies him or herself as a capable reader: “Just you try it on.” 

People have been “trying on” Ulysses ever since, and if my experiences are any indication, the result is an infuriating and intoxicating read, not always both at once however.

I still remember the first time I read Ulysses, how I began with wildly optimistic thoughts. The opening chapter reintroduces Stephen Dedalus, title character of Joyce’s earlier A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, which I like, in something of sequel form. At the moment he is living with another artist named Buck, who is both successful and condescending. Stephen ponders this while teaching in Dublin.

That’s the plot of the first two chapters, or “episodes” as they are called, which I charged through with all the confidence of Custer galloping to Little Bighorn. Then came the third episode, known as “Proteus,” and all at once I realized I was in trouble:

His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her womb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayawayaway.

A short walk from the tower is this strand of beach at Sandymount, which is the setting for both "Proteus" and the later episode "Nausicaa." In the former one, Stephen contemplates Aristotle, dead dogs, and his broken family. Image from http://m.joyceproject.com/notes/030001sandymount.html.

“Proteus,” in which Stephen contemplates the mystery of life and working beyond “the ineluctable modality of the visible” is where Ulysses begins making its claims for greatness and challenging the nature of the novel itself as mere story-telling. I think it’s a terrible chapter myself, and perhaps Joyce agreed: he dumps Stephen then and there, only intermittently returning to him thereafter.

Instead, Joyce zeroes in on Leopold Bloom, 38-year-old hawker of newspaper ads whom we are introduced to having breakfast and soon after, enjoying the satisfaction of a bowel movement which Joyce relates in all its smelly glory.

Offensive? Joyce is just warming up.

This was quite a shock to many of Joyce’s readership in the 1920s, however hardened by dadaism and Picasso. H. G. Wells had already called out Joyce in Portrait for what he called his “cloacal obsession;” Joyce liked this ding so much he slipped that very phrase in Ulysses.

Joyce wasn’t simply trolling for shocks; he was obeying a guiding principle for his art, that of depicting life as he found it.

Author James Joyce as Djuna Barnes drew him in 1922, the year of Ulysses' publication. Stephen's poor eyesight comes up often in the narrative; 18 years later Joyce was nearly as blind as Homer, creator of the original Ulysses. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake.

Joyce also occasionally incorporates stream-of-consciousness narrative, or something rather like it, as when Bloom overhears a lesson walking by a school:

He passed Saint Joseph’s. National school. Brats’ clamour. Windows open. Fresh air helps memory. Or a lilt. Ahbeesee defeegee kelomen opecue rustyouvee double you. Boys are they? Yes. Inishturk. Inishark. Inishboffin. At their joggerfry.

It’s here that having some kind of guide helps, to explain that “ahbeesee” patter is a phonetic recitation of the alphabet, or that those “Inish” things are place names of Irish geography (or “joggerfry”).

Once you find this kind of help, either with an annotated copy of Ulysses or online at a site like this or this, the novel can be engaging, sometimes for pages at a time. Bloom is a much more likeable protagonist than Stephen, and his everyday life experiences offer amusement, empathy, and even identification.

Dublin in 1902, two years prior to the events of Ulysses. Constructing his novel in Paris, Zurich, and Trieste in Italy, Joyce employed multiple references, including street maps, business directories, and his own memory. Image from http://m.joyceproject.com/notes/030001sandymount.html.

The fact he is an outsider among his fellow Dubliners, as much for his sensitive nature as for his background (his Jewish father immigrated to Ireland from eastern Europe), gives Bloom a perspective of his home city that readers can relate to, once they decipher what is going on.

Mr. Bloom turned his largelidded eyes with unhasty friendliness:

-         My wife too, he said. She’s going to sing at a swagger affair in the Ulster hall, Belfast, on the twentyfifth.

-         That so? M’Coy said. Glad to hear that, old man. Who’s getting it up?

Poor Bloom is forever being teased about his wife, Molly, a professional singer with a loose reputation about to tour the north with a cad named Boylan, her newest lover. In fact, Bloom’s main business on this particular June day, known by literature buffs as “Bloomsday” when it rolls around on the 16th, is to keep himself occupied and pretend he knows nothing while Molly and Boylan entertain themselves in the Bloom bedroom.

Ostensibly, Molly is meeting her singing partner Blazes Boylan to rehearse the above song, often quoted in the novel. But somehow her husband Leopold knows what is really going on is an even older number. Image from http://m.joyceproject.com/notes/040035oldsweetsong.html.

How does Bloom know this? Joyce doesn’t really explain. Nor does he give details of Stephen’s main conflict, his friendship-sundering row with Buck. Time and again, Ulysses proves a novel for readers who want fiction to rise far above concerns about story and character development.

Instead, the novel shifts its very mode of expression with every new chapter, or “episode,” softly at first and then with growing force. Episode 7, known as “Aeolus,” takes place largely in a newspaper office where Bloom is trying to place an ad; it is presented in imitation of press dispatches with headlines and breathless “backwards-reels-the-mind” prose. Episode 9, “Scylla & Charybdis,” takes place in Dublin’s National Library, where Stephen resurfaces to explain his philosophy on Shakespeare and art in great detail.

Plot also takes a back seat in charming Episode 10, “Wandering Rocks,” an hour of lunchtime Dublin as experienced through the viewpoints of various characters. Even to a discarded leaflet Bloom tossed into the River Liffey draws Joyce’s attention.

“Cyclops” is written as a series of parodic sketches, mimicking Biblical verse, parliamentary minutes, and whatnot. It offers a lot of dialogue and a rare bit of open conflict, as Bloom walks into the wrong bar and bravely offers his liberal definition of what being Irish means:

-         A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.

-         By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.

Barney Kiernan's pub as it once existed. The setting of "Cyclops," it is here bitter Irish nationalists round on Bloom. Joyce might have chosen it from memory, or because it was ironically located on Little Britain Street. Image from http://www.joyceproject.com/notes/120004kiernans.htm.

The episode titles are not part of the original book. Rather, these titles come from schematics Joyce shared with friends, to identify how they aligned with sections of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, which according to Joyce was his guiding principle all along.

Sometimes I could see this working; sometimes I didn’t. Apparently I wasn’t alone. Even a writer as abstract as Joyce’s friend Ezra Pound found the ancient Greek angle to be strained.

I sort of think Joyce gets away with it only because the story itself is too thin on its own to be diluted by outside concerns. An entire episode, “Nausicaa,” focuses on Bloom spotting and pleasuring himself at the sight of a girl on the beach. Groundbreaking, yes, but beyond its use of masturbation as a plot device, one of Ulysses’ many dead ends.

That isn’t to say these episodes aren’t well-crafted, fascinating, and even amusing. Joyce wrote his novel in multiple directions, setting up open-ended situations in one episode only to resolve them in another, and his experiments in fiction remain bracing reading to this day.

Dublin's Monto district, a. k. a. "Nighttown," was presented as hell on earth in Ulysses's "Circe" episode. In recent years, locals dress as streetwalkers to celebrate Joyce's depiction of their corner of the world. http://www.bloomsdayfestival.ie/fringe-programme-2019/6/14/bloomsday-in-the-monto.

“Sirens” is a wonderfully playful chapter, not only for the rare chance of seeing the Odyssey allusion actually work (the setting is a bar, which functions in Dublin much the way the mythical sirens waylaid sailors on the Aegean) but the whimsical incorporation of musical motifs, like jingles and tappings, representing the sounds made by various characters.

Here Bloom ponders the nature of popular music as reservoir of pain:

Thou lost one. All songs on that theme. Yet more Bloom stretched his string. Cruel it seems. Let people get fond of each other: lure them on. Then tear asunder. Death. Explos. Knock on the head. Outtohelloutofthat. Human life.

If Joyce kept this up, I would have enjoyed reading Ulysses much more. But with every succeeding episode his impulse to raise the bar results in deeper impenetrability.

The last five episodes are really a death march, even with recourse to annotations. One, “Circe,” the longest of all these episodes in page count, is presented as a surrealist play a la Strindberg featuring a midscene sex change from Bloom, who announces “O, I so want to be a mother.” Worst of all by far for me is “Ithaca,” which presents literature’s last view of Stephen Dedalus in the form of a series of questions and answers made up in the form of a catechism, and includes notes on weight displacement and which character consumed his cocoa first.

Late in the novel, the two main characters finally connect as Leo looks after Stephen after the latter is abandoned by his friends. Here the scene is recreated for a 1967 film adaptation starring Maurice Roëves (left, as Dedalus) and Milo O'Shea as Bloom. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Featuring-Maurice-Roeves-Poster/dp/B074SX77YC.

The famous final episode, “Penelope,” is the one time the novel allows us to see Molly Bloom’s perspective. It’s a strange point of view, not only because it consists of a rambling narrative of eight run-on sentences but for how it presents her as basically a selfish, controlling minx. For years she was celebrated for her sex-positive outlook; today she’s condemned for Joyce’s vaginal view of what makes women tick:

…O thanks be to the great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me youve no chances at all in this place like you used long ago…

When I first read Ulysses, I actually got mad at it for chewing through so many weeks of my life and leaving me confused and frustrated. This time around, I rolled with it more and found more things to enjoy. It’s a great novel to experience; not so much to actually read.

Admittedly this makes no sense, but I find that par for the course with Ulysses.