Ulysses

By James Joyce and Cedric Watts

With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex.

James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom's voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery.

Initially deemed obscene in England and the USA, this richly-allusive novel, revolutionary in its Modernistic experimentalism, was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway.

Scandalously frank, wittily erudite, mercurially eloquent, resourcefully comic and generously humane, Ulysses offers the reader a life-changing experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781848704480

Book preview

Ulysses

James Joyce

with an introduction

by Cedric Watts

WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

This edition of Ulysses first published by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2010

Introduction © Cedric Watts 2010

Published as an ePublication 2013

ISBN 978 1 84870 448 0

Wordsworth Editions Limited

8B East Street, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 9HJ

Wordsworth® is a registered trademark of

Wordsworth Editions Limited

Wordsworth Editions is

the company founded in 1987 by

MICHAEL TRAYLER

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Readers interested in other titles from Wordsworth Editions are invited to visit our website at

www.wordsworth-editions.com

For our latest list of printed books, and a full mail-order service contact

Bibliophile Books, Unit 5 Datapoint,

South Crescent, London E16 4TL

Tel: [phone]

Fax: [phone]

[e-mail]

www.bibliophilebooks.com

For my husband

ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

with love from your wife, the publisher

Eternally grateful for your unconditional

love, not just for me but for our children,

Simon, Andrew and Nichola Trayler

Introduction

‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.’ (James Joyce.)

‘Joyce’s discovery [...] was that the ordinary is the extraordinary.’

(Richard Ellmann.) [1]

1

James Joyce’s Ulysses is a supreme literary work. It is a dominant text of modernism, being radically experimental, difficult, challenging; in its technical and linguistic virtuosity, it is astonishing and sometimes baffling; and it is also a humorous, humane and moving novel. That term ‘novel’ is convenient, though in this case an understatement: for the work is also an anti-novel, fantasia, compendium, and epic; the author called it ‘a kind of encyclopaedia’; [2] and it can seem auto-generic, one of its kind, a squawking phoenix that could smash its way out of any labelled pigeonhole.

The setting is an intimately-rendered Dublin, but the text is culturally cosmopolitan – like its author, who lived for many years abroad. The career of James Joyce resembles a long creative odyssey, and Ulysses uses and transforms the life. James Joyce was born in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, on 2 February 1882. His father, John Joyce, came from a well-to-do family and attended Queen’s College in Cork, though without graduating. After a period as a tax collector, he never pursued a career, and became improvident. By James Joyce’s twelfth year, 1894, John had ten surviving children, numerous mortgages, and no remaining property. [3] James therefore experienced bitterly the decline in the family from relative affluence to poverty.

During his schooldays, he was a bright student, capable of winning grants and prizes. James first attended Clongowes Wood College, then the Christian Brothers’ school in Dublin, followed by Belvedere College, and later by University College, Dublin. He encountered the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, scholastic thinking, the Latin classics, and modern languages; and he became well aware of the pressures of Irish nationalism, at this time when Ireland had representation in the British Parliament but little control over its own destiny. The great nationalist leader, Charles Parnell, died in 1891 after a scandal involving his adultery with the wife of a colleague, circumstances which, among the Catholic-dominated public, caused bitter divisions: Joyce and his father mourned Parnell’s downfall and ‘betrayal’ by his party.

Nevertheless, James Joyce, as a sceptical student and precocious intellectual, sought to be culturally cosmopolitan. He studied Ibsen’s plays, read Dante in the original, translated the dramas of Gerhart Hauptmann, and, in the Fortnightly Review, published an essay on Ibsen’s late work, When We Dead Awaken, eliciting a grateful acknowledgement from the Norwegian dramatist. (His own play, Exiles, influenced by Ibsen, would be published and staged in 1918.) Joyce opposed British imperialism, Irish sentimentality and belligerent republicanism, and, in literary matters, advocated uncompromising realism. The Aesthetic Movement had publicised the image of the artist as dedicated, detached and unconventional: he would seek to conform to this nonconformist model. In Dublin, Joyce came to know the Anglo-Irish intelligentsia: notably such influential figures as W. B. Yeats (who would term him ‘a man of genius’), George Moore, George Russell (‘Æ’) and Lady Augusta Gregory. A commentator has observed that although, in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus seems to be spurned by the cultural élite, ‘Ireland’s leading literati actually gave Joyce considerable help, offering him publication opportunities, hospitality, letters of introduction and recommendation, and outright subsidies.’ [4]

After a spell in Paris, where he wrote verse and experienced poverty, Joyce returned to Ireland in 1903, as his mother was terminally ill: she died in August, but survives poignantly in her son’s works of fiction. He then took singing lessons and worked as a school-teacher. Joyce later stayed briefly as a guest of his friend or sparring-partner, Oliver St.John Gogarty (a source of ‘Buck Mulligan’), at the Martello Tower of Sandycove, the initial setting of Ulysses; another guest was Samuel Chevenix Trench (adapted as ‘Haines’). Subsequently, he eloped to the continent with a young woman, Nora Barnacle, who had worked at a Dublin hotel, and whom he eventually married. ‘She’ll never leave him’, remarked his father, on learning her surname. [5] Though she came from a large and indigent family, and her education was limited compared with James’s, she was spirited, resilient and compatibly broad-minded: a model for ‘Molly Bloom’. The couple settled in Trieste, where the multilingual Joyce combined language-teaching with writing, and was loyally subsidised by his brother Stanislaus. One volume of lyrical poetry, Chamber Music, was published in 1907; another, Pomes Penyeach, would follow in 1927; and the fine collection of tales, Dubliners, eventually appeared (after protracted delays) in 1914, to acclaim by Ezra Pound in the periodical The Egoist. Pound, the ebullient impresario of the avant-garde, would energetically assist Joyce’s literary career (meanwhile goading Yeats to terse vigour, and trimming Eliot’s The Waste Land to resemble a cryptic kaleidoscope). Joyce’s Stephen Hero, a largely autobiographical work, evolved into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916.

In Stephen Hero, Stephen Dedalus expounds his theory of ‘epiphanies’, those moments when, to the artist’s ‘spiritual eye’, some entity, an object or situation, seems to become irradiated by intense significance. (He thus largely secularises a religious term, Epiphany, which to the faithful means ‘the manifestation of the divine, particularly the manifestation of Jesus Christ to the Magi’.) A caustic response comes from Stephen’s friend Cranly, who, appearing to behold entrancing significance in the view of the river, then says, with sarcastic bathos, ‘I wonder did that bloody boat, the Sea-Queen ever start?’ [6] In spite of this deflationary irony, the term has subsequently enjoyed great popularity among critics. Richard Ellmann remarks that one ‘epiphany’ might be Joyce’s encounter with Alfred Hunter, a kindly Samaritan when Joyce was involved in a street brawl. Hunter, thought to be Jewish and to have an unfaithful wife, helped to engender ‘Leopold Bloom’. Indeed, Ulysses as a whole has been termed ‘an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies’. [7]

A Portrait of the Artist vividly recalls events and incidents in Joyce’s upbringing: for instance, bullying at school; the Jesuit discipline and indoctrination; disputes at home; the sexual yearnings and an encounter with a prostitute; the domestic poverty (watery tea, crusts of fried bread, a pawn-ticket box ‘speckled with lousemarks’); and the growing fascination by language, culminating in Stephen’s determination to become a great literary artist: a Flaubertian figure who, ‘like the God

of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’. [8] He seeks to evade the ‘nets’ of ‘nationality, language, religion’: which means that he endeavours not to be blinkered by (among other things) Irish nationalism, the conventional use of English, or conformity to religion – particularly that disseminated by the Roman Catholic Church. Although the book is largely autobiographical, the protagonist is Stephen Dedalus, not James Joyce; and the very choice of name shows that Joyce’s view of his younger self is tinged with sceptical irony, though tempered by proprietorial affection. Stephen’s exalted ambitions can be regarded as imaginative compensation for his seedy circumstances; and he speculates that his love of vivid descriptions may be a compensation for being ‘weak of sight’. The stylistic experimentation and varied mimicry anticipate the major novels. The book was controversial: some reviewers found it offensively realistic; others found it original, beautiful and convincing.

Meanwhile, Ezra Pound continued to support Joyce, particularly through fund-raising and by helping Joyce towards publication and cultural recognition. An associate of his was the wealthy Harriet Shaw Weaver. She was one of the editors of The Egoist, which had published instalments of Portrait of the Artist; and she became an abundantly generous patroness of Joyce and his growing family (as Nora gave birth to a son, Giorgio, and a daughter, Lucia). Such help was vital, for the Joyces were often in debt, and James’s fondness for alcohol did not help their situation. ‘As proud as he was needy, Joyce conferred his debts like favors.’ [9] Another patroness was Edith McCormick, daughter of John D. Rockefeller. British benefactors and taxpayers also subsidised Joyce, via the Royal Literary Fund and a Civil List pension. (Yeats, Conrad and D. H. Lawrence were among the numerous other beneficiaries of the state’s generosity to needy artists.) After the ‘Great War’ against aggressive German imperialism, during which the Joyces had moved to Zürich in neutral Switzerland, the family returned to Trieste and then travelled to Paris in 1920, remaining there for many years. In Paris, Joyce’s friends and acquaintances included André Gide, Scott Fitzgerald, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Valery Larbaud and Arthur Power; he even met T. S. Eliot and Marcel Proust.

The basic idea of a work called Ulysses had occurred to him in 1906, and from 1914 its writing increasingly absorbed him. ‘Ulysses’ is the Latin equivalent of the Greek ‘Odysseus’, the name of the wily warrior celebrated by Homer. The ancient voyager was ‘My Favourite Hero’ to Joyce as a schoolboy, who was impressed by Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses. Joyce described (originally in Italian) his emerging work thus:

It is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life) [...]. My intention is not only to render the myth sub specie temporis nostri [into the likeness of our time] but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to condition and even to create its own technique. [10]

He imagined that the book might be an Irish version of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, or an Irish Faust: [11] both dramas offer precedents for the wild ‘Nighttown’ sequence of Ulysses.

With the encouragement of Pound, serial publication of the still-evolving work began in 1918 in the New York magazine The Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; but in 1921 the editors were thereby found guilty of publishing obscene material, and the serialisation was aborted. Four episodes were published in The Egoist in London in 1919. In Paris, from 1922 to 1930, the book was published in a sequence of printings by Sylvia Beach, who ran the left-bank bookshop ‘Shakespeare and Company’: ‘Yankee, young and brave is she’, sang a lyric. [12] In 1932, in Hamburg, the Odyssey Press produced a corrected edition. Meanwhile, in London, Joyce’s benefactor, Harriet Shaw Weaver, published an edition in 1922–3 at the Egoist Press, but 500 copies sent to the USA were seized by the postal authorities. In 1923 John Rodker tried to replace the seized copies by printing a further 500, but most of these were impounded by the English customs’ officers at Folkestone.

The book had thus gained ample notoriety, and pirated texts would furtively circulate. Other countries (France, Germany and Japan, for instance) proved markedly less censorious than Britain and the USA. In December 1933, however, a liberal American district judge, John M. Woolsey, deemed the novel to be an important literary work and not an item of pornography. In the course of a lengthy judgement which was both sensitive and robust, he said: ‘[In] Ulysses, in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist. I hold, therefore, that it is not pornographic.’ The sexually explicit features of the work, he said, were required by the author’s endeavour to give a full and honest account of human consciousness. The effect was sometimes ‘emetic’ but not ‘aphrodisiac’. Though ‘brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns’, Ulysses ‘is an amazing tour de force’. [13] The way was now clear for the publication of Ulysses by Random House in the USA; and the author, a celebrity and no longer ‘a Joyce in the wilderness’, [14] would be featured on the cover of Time magazine (first on 29 January 1934, next on 8 May 1939).

Continuing to ‘paddle down the stream of life his personal canoe’, [15] between 1923 and 1938 Joyce worked on a new magnum opus, the fantasia which became known as Finnegans Wake and was eventually published in book form in 1939. Here Joyce extended massively his linguistic experimentalism, moving farther from realism into a phantasmagoric territory: he declared his opposition to ‘wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot’. [16] Ulysses had been formidable enough; Finnegans Wake made it look relatively congenial. While Joyce’s international fame and recognition grew, this new novel, even while it was ‘a work in progress’, divided his followers. Ezra Pound, although his slogan was ‘Make It New’, flinched from the innovations he encountered. ‘Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp [sic] can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization’, he declared. Harriet Shaw Weaver, who feared that Joyce was now both profligate and a heavy drinker, remarked: ‘It seems to me you are wasting your genius’. Even Joyce’s brother Stanislaus inferred ‘the beginning of softening of the brain’, finding the material ‘unspeakably wearisome’ and ‘witless wandering’. H. G. Wells called it ‘a dead end’. [17] Others came to its defence: these included not only William Carlos Williams and Rebecca West but also the young Samuel Beckett, who worked as unpaid secretary to the author. Influenced by Giambattista Vico’s theory of cyclical history, and true to the nursery rhyme ‘Michael Finnegan’ (‘begin again!’), Finnegans Wake could be interpreted as an infinite novel, its last sentence being completed by the narrative’s opening words, turning the reading into a cycle; and Beckett could seem to emulate his master in the 1963 drama called Play, which, near the apparent ending, has the daunting stage-direction, ‘Repeat play’, again generating a theoretically interminable work.

Thanks to generous patronage, the Joyces could enjoy an affluent lifestyle in Paris in the 1930s, entertaining guests lavishly, dining at expensive restaurants, and travelling abroad for holidays. On the other hand, there were protracted misfortunes: James was beset by ocular troubles which required frequent operations, and near-blindness impended; his daughter Lucia, erratic in behaviour, became increasingly deranged; and Giorgio’s wife, too, would suffer appalling mental illness. Then war, again, obliged the Joyces to travel to the haven of neutral Switzerland, returning to Zürich in December 1940. Here, illness impended: Joyce experienced excruciating pains in the stomach; was carried from a hotel to hospital on a stretcher, ‘writhing like a fish’; and, after surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer, died on 13 January 1941. When a Catholic priest sought to provide a religious service, Nora responded: ‘I couldn’t do that to him.’ [18]

Joyce’s reputation continued to be controversial. The influential Cambridge-based literary critic, F. R. Leavis, liked to contrast the healthy vitality of D. H. Lawrence to what he deemed the arid experimentalism of Joyce: Ulysses, he declared, had ‘no organic principle’; it was ‘a dead end’; and Finnegans Wake was ‘not worth the labour of reading’. Joyce had distrusted ‘Noah’s arks’ made ‘by Engels and by Marx’: in turn, some Marxists, at a time when ‘socialist realism’ was their dogma, deplored Joyce’s devotion to ‘formalism’ and his lack of solidarity with the workers. Subsequently, other Marxists, notably Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton, offered subtler views, Williams arguing that ‘the greatness of Ulysses is [its] community of speech’. In 1905, the author had said: ‘[M]y political opinions [...] are those of a socialistic artist’; though, later, he remarked: ‘I have no wish to codify myself as anarchist or socialist or reactionary.’ [19]

Both Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist are now acknowledged literary classics, ‘set texts’; but critical disagreements about the formidable Finnegans Wake seem likely to continue, although it appeals seductively to theorists. Jacques Derrida termed it a ‘definitive book’, ‘a thousandth generation computer’ which pre-empted all commentators. Steven Connor has likened it to ‘a model of the expanding universe, preserving faithfully in every molecule the record of the primal explosion that brought it into being, and yet receding unstoppably away from that moment in space and time’. Harold Bloom has said that if æsthetic merit were ever to prevail, Finnegans Wake would put Joyce alongside Shakespeare and Dante; while David Spurr claims that ‘its celebration of comic freedom is made possible by its power to render ideology ridiculous’. In contrast, Andrew Sanders has suggested that the work ‘shunts the modern literary experiment into a siding’. [20]

Meanwhile, although Ulysses has gained international recognition as a phenomenal literary achievement, its voyage has proved appropriately stormy. One early reviewer said that it ‘appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine’; the Quarterly Review called it ‘literary Bolshevism’; and Alfred Noyes, the poet, repeated the ‘literary Bolshevism’ phrase and (perhaps slandering apes) told the Royal Society of Literature: ‘[T]here is no foulness conceivable to the mind of madman or ape that has not been poured into its imbecile pages.’ George Moore reportedly remarked, ‘How can one plough through such stuff? I read a little here and there, but, oh my God, how bored I got!’ Edmund Gosse, who had helped to win funds for Joyce, declared Ulysses ‘an anarchical production, infamous in taste, in style, in everything’, which made a ‘perfectly cynical appeal to sheer indecency’. The pro-Catholic Dublin Review alleged that ‘In this work the spiritually offensive and the physically unclean are united’; reading this book would be ‘the commission of sin against the Holy Ghost’; the Vatican should ban it. At the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934, Karl Radek declared Ulysses ‘a heap of dung, crawling with worms’. Other Marxists found ‘a most reactionary philosophy of social pessimism’, and a method ‘too inseparably connected with the specifically decadent phase of the bourgeois culture he reflects’. [21]

In contrast, there were numerous early defenders, among them, predictably, Ezra Pound, who in The Dial, June 1922, declared: ‘All men should Unite to give praise to Ulysses; those who will not, may content themselves with a place in the lower intellectual orders’. T. S. Eliot was another influential admirer, famously announcing that Ulysses’ ‘mythical method’ offered a way ‘of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’. Ford Madox Ford stated: ‘Certain books change the world. This, success or failure, Ulysses does.’ Other admirers included Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. In course of time, numerous scholarly studies, of which Stuart Gilbert’s was an important early example, demonstrated the novel’s deliberate and complex organisation. In America, Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin and Hugh Kenner produced perceptive studies. Levin declared Ulysses ‘a novel to end all novels’. [22]

The author had indeed seen how to ‘keep the professors busy’. With the expansion of higher education in so many lands, the Joyce industry has grown immensely and shows no signs of diminution. That industry is one of commentary, conferences, explication, assessment, appropriation, editing, translation, transmission and adaptation. The adaptations of Ulysses include an electronic picture-book version. A famous instance of effective transmission occurred in 1955, when a publicity-photograph depicted Marilyn Monroe gracing a striped swimsuit and apparently studying a hardback edition of the work. (She found the novel ‘hard going’ but ‘liked the sound of it’, which seems an honest and sympathetic response.) [23] Influenced by the cinema, Ulysses was filmed in 1967, directed by Joseph Strick, with Milo O’Shea as Bloom; and the movie was banned in Ireland. Other films (notably Nora and Bloom) and stage dramatisations have followed.

In academe, the burgeoning of numerous forms of literary theory

in the 1960s and thereafter demonstrated that Ulysses had generally anticipated the theorists, who frequently sought to appropriate and advocate the volume. Admirers of the novel would have been well prepared for Mikhail Bakhtin’s commendation of the ‘carnivalesque’ (a quality of disruptively ‘polyphonic’ works); indeed, Ulysses could be deemed a thesaurus of Bakhtinian ‘discourse types’: David Lodge claimed that ‘Bakhtin’s theory of the novel needed the work of Joyce to confirm and fulfil it’. [24] Furthermore, in comparison with the earnest and often Delphic jargon of the academic deconstructionists, the languages of Ulysses seemed richly fecund and its humour liberatingly tonic. Its puns, portmanteau words, quotations and allusions made it vigorously inter-active, luring the reader into the labyrinthine hinterlands of the text. Joyce had knowingly helped to set the academic agenda, declaring that each episode of the novel had not only a distinct Homeric parallel but also (usually) a distinct setting, bodily organ, art, colour, symbol and technique. Accordingly, episode 7 has the title ‘Aeolus’, the scene ‘The Newspaper’, the hour ‘12 noon’ onwards, the organ ‘Lungs’, the art ‘Rhetoric’, the colour ‘Red’, the symbol ‘Editor’, and the technique avowedly ‘Enthymemic’ (an ‘enthymeme’ being ‘a syllogism in which one premiss is not explicitly stated’, or ‘an argument of probability only, not certainty’). [25]

The novel’s influence on creative writers has been immense, and can be found in works by authors as diverse as Vladimir Nabokov, Dylan Thomas, B. S. Johnson, William Burroughs, Antony Burgess, Salman Rushdie, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Umberto Eco, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, [26] Will Self and Martin Amis. A commentator aptly adds: ‘The impact is no less felt on television, film, popular music, and Bloom’s own profession, advertising, in their use of montage, open-ended narrative, pastiche, parody, multiple viewpoint, neologism.’ [27] The novel anticipated a range of surrealistic comedy, whether by Spike Milligan, ‘Monty Python’ or Mel Brooks. Since ‘metempsychosis’ (the transmigration of the soul) is a theme of Ulysses, it may be apt that ‘Leo Bloom’ materialised as a character in Mel Brooks’ film The Producers.

2

Ulysses stands alongside T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the pinnacle of modernism. Both appeared in 1922, in the same year as Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod. Modernism, a cultural movement which burgeoned in the period 1890–1940, was a way of addressing the immense and rapid historic, demographic and cultural changes which were evident in so many areas. Urbanisation and industrialisation, social mobility, scientific and technological advances, Darwinism and thermodynamics, theological doubt, Marxism and socialism, psychoanalysis, feminism: all these led to radical questioning of orthodoxies. Modernism’s identity derives from a number of features which can be found in many cultural periods; but those features became particularly pronounced and frequent in artistic productions within that specified time-span.

Of course, modernist works differed greatly, and their authors were often quarrelsome. On reading Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence exclaimed: ‘My God, what a clumsy olla putrida [putrid pot, Spanish mixed stew] James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness’. According to Joyce, Lawrence ‘really writes very badly’. Yeats found ‘vulgarity’ in Ulysses. Meanwhile, in ‘The Holy Office’, a satiric poem, Joyce mocked Yeats as an appeaser of ‘giddy dames’ frivolities’. [28] Nevertheless, recurrent ‘family characteristics’ give identity to the modernist movement. In literature (and there have often been musical, painterly, sculptural and architectural equivalents), those characteristics may be listed thus:

1. The work effects ironic juxtapositions of the ancient and the modern, as a way of ‘taking stock’, of assessing cultural changes, gains and losses. (The Elizabethan, Augustan and Romantic eras, too, had defined themselves largely by re-addressing ancient texts, myths and legends.)

2. The work emphasises subjectivity and the relativism of perception.

3. It suggests that the present is a time of crisis in which old certainties are crumbling.

4. Victorian orthodoxies are challenged by various heterodoxies; and Victorian respectability and piety are challenged by radical or egregious views and conduct.

5. In a related challenge to ‘common sense’ and everyday rationality, hospitality is extended to the apparently irrational, deranged, dream-like or nightmarish.

6. Significance becomes problematic; and so, therefore, does language itself. Structural and linguistic experimentation burgeons.

7. Favoured techniques include ironic obliquity, symbolic density, and (as item 1 indicates) allusions to myths, legends and literature of the distant past.

8. Partly for the reasons indicated previously in the list, the work presents some challenging difficulties: obscurities, ellipses and ambiguities.

The items listed above are prominent in the literary works at the crest of modernism, notably Ulysses, The Waste Land, The Cantos, Women in Love and To the Lighthouse; but numerous other modernist works display all, or most, or some of these features. What complicates matters is that, just as diverse human families blend and crossbreed, so do cultural traditions. Conrad’s Lord Jim, for instance, is modernist, but inhabits the long tradition of the Bildungsroman, the type of novel in which the protagonist develops from youth to maturity; it can be situated in the literary tradition of the disgraced man who makes good; and

it evokes Victorian adventure-fiction of exotic exploration. Thomas Hardy is another ‘hybrid’ writer. (Joyce thought that Hardy’s characterisations were marred by the author’s ‘conventional ideas of class’.) [29]

In course of time, as modernism became associated with the period 1890–1940 or thereabouts, another term was thereafter needed for works which maintained the modernist tradition of radical challenges but which emerged after that period: hence ‘postmodernism’. This in turn generated the question: is postmodernism simply an extension of modernism, or does it have a different character? The answer was necessarily untidy, given the diversity of works surveyed. It was said that postmodernism offered extreme relativism, undermining all certainties, whereas modernism had assumed some valid ground, basis or core of experience. Postmodernism, according to its theorists, offered diverse surfaces and denied depths; it was ‘anti-foundational’; it was self-referential; it rejected any master-discourse (a rejection which constituted its own master-discourse); it denied authorial identity (except when its advocates signed their works and claimed copyright); and, at its most extreme, it denied truth (except for the truth in its denials). Nevertheless, notwithstanding the postulated contrasts, appropriate selection of texts and details could reveal considerable confusions of modernism and postmodernism. For instance, The Waste Land displays a postmodernistic self-referentiality in the line ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ and the invocation of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy – in which play an earlier macaronic literary item is the vehicle of revenge against corruption. Within the untidy flux of both periods, although a broad shift can be observed, the characteristics of each literary family can thus be repeatedly discerned. This should not be surprising. After all, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, that ostentatiously eccentric eighteenth-century novel, has been deemed both modernist and postmodernist, and Joyce himself cited it as anticipating the methods of Finnegans Wake: ‘many planes of narrative with a single aesthetic purpose’. [30] In Joyce’s œuvre, Ulysses seems relatively modernist, Finnegans Wake postmodernist; but each has complex connections to the other (as when Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, its hour ‘infinity’, anticipates Anna Livia Plurabelle’s); and each criticises the generic categories which seek to define but threaten to confine.

As that reference to Tristram Shandy indicates, one of the traditions which Ulysses inhabits is the literary Saturnalian tradition, the home of unruly, eccentric, learned, comic and satiric works of literature. [31] These are pedantic and anti-pedantic, replete with learning while mocking learning; now they lure us into their fictional worlds, and now they alert us to their fictionality. A Saturnalia was a riotous festival in which slaves and masters changed places; and this literary tradition has qualities of exuberant deliberate disorder, invoking boundaries and anarchically transgressing them. Like a rebellious servant, the author or narrator may be self-revealing instead of being self-effacing, and may expose the devices which are normally concealed, making deliberate breaches of generic and structural decorum. Conventions may be exploited, extended, and exposed as conventions; modes of discourse may jostle on parade; and language may perform acrobatics. Elaborate erudition is often combined with farcical, bawdy and indecent humour, corporeal grossness mocks pedantic solemnity, and apparent piety may be counterpointed by modes of irreverence or scepticism. The Saturnalian tradition is well over 2,400 years old, extends through postmodernism to the present day, and is likely to continue for many years to come.

In addition to Tristram Shandy, works in – or entangled with – this tradition include Aristophanes’ The Frogs (the croaks echo in the Wake), Petronius’s Satyricon, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (read by Molly Bloom), Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Pope’s Dunciad, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Tale of a Tub, and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. Almost all of these have been connected with Ulysses, a twentieth-century extreme of the literary Saturnalian. Joyce’s novel is thus, again, both strikingly modern and deeply rooted in ancient culture. The Irish contribution to this tradition is marked: Swift, Sterne and Joyce have been followed in it by, for example, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien. One reason for this may, perhaps, be the national awareness of possessing a rich traditional oral culture but using an imposed language, English; an awareness provoking sometimes a subaltern’s rebellion in discourse, resulting in fluent yet estranging linguistic experimentation. As Stephen in A Portrait says of the Dean’s English: ‘His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech.’ [32]

Ulysses is exuberantly experimental in its rendering of consciousness and in its endeavour to exploit, with immense virtuosity, the resources of language. It expects from the reader a sense of humour, a readiness to connect detail to whole, an ear for themes and leitmotifs, a memory for the riches of literary and musical culture, a sensual responsiveness, and immense imaginative stamina. It is indeed a tour de force on the part of Joyce, but it requires a generously co-operative response from us. The novel offers extreme inflictions of the shock-tactics of modernism, not only in the linguistic experimentation, but also in the frank rendering of the sexual, the scatological, the supposedly perverse and the privately peculiar. Although his own dedicated career was amply romantic

and idealistic, Joyce claimed that most people were made unhappy by disappointed romanticism or idealism, so that an anti-romantic, anti-idealistic impetus might be tonic. [33]

The action of Ulysses is centred on three main characters. One is Leopold Bloom, a salesman of advertisements who is Jewish by ancestry, Christian by baptism, Irish by birth, sceptical by reflection, and kindly by nature. Then there is his wife, Marion (Molly), an attractive, street-wise, broadminded and talented singer. The third is Stephen Dedalus (teacher, writer and eloquent literary theorist), who had been the central character in those largely-autobiographical Bildungsromane, Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The main time-scale of Ulysses is limited to about twenty hours, most of Thursday, June 16th 1904, and the early hours of the subsequent Friday. It commemorates the date of Joyce’s first excursion with Nora Barnacle; and eventually that date would be celebrated, in Ireland and abroad, as ‘Bloomsday’, a life-affirming contrast to ‘Doomsday’. The novel presents the location of Dublin, its coastal region, riverside, bustling streets and centre, its taverns, offices and ‘Nighttown’, in details sharply remembered and obsessively researched, rendered in styles ranging from the melodiously lyrical to the abstrusely scientific.

For all the experimentalism, the novel can be regarded as largely grounded in realism: then, as it rearranges itself helpfully (if ironically) before the observer’s scansion, it offers a centrally realistic plot-structure which holds ample ‘human interest’; indeed, humour, irony, poignancy and tragedy. Stephen, whose mother has recently died, is a son who needs a benign father-figure and perhaps some mothering. He seems to be alienated from his family and particularly from his unsympathetic father. Leopold Bloom, on the other hand, is a bereft father who needs a surrogate son, as his own son, Rudy, had died in infancy, eleven days old. His father, Rudolf Bloom (originally surnamed Virag, a convert

to Christianity) had committed suicide. During their peregrinations through Dublin, Stephen and Leopold meet and become friends; they visit the brothel area, Nighttown; Bloom acts as Good Samaritan when Stephen is involved in a rowdy brawl with soldiers; and they proceed to Leopold’s home.

In Gulliver’s Travels, an academician of Lagado sought to extract sunbeams from cucumbers; and details of Ulysses may coax the reader to emulate him by envisaging a happy ending to the story. In this conjectural ending, after Leopold offers Stephen accommodation (Bloom’s daughter, Milly, being conveniently absent, taking a photography course), Stephen moves in, and a congenial family unit is completed.

Stephen is intelligent but self-centred; he is determined to be a creative writer, but, though adept in theory, is limited in achievement. At the end of Portrait of the Artist, he had set out to live abroad and – he believed – fulfil his destiny as a writer. But the irony of his strange classical surname, Dedalus (contraction of the customary ‘Daedalus’), becomes obvious. He there addresses the legendary Daedalus as his tutelary father: ‘Old father, old artificer’; which puts him mainly in the position of the son, Icarus. And whereas Daedalus successfully flew to freedom, Icarus, defiantly ambitious, flying too close to the sun, lost his waxed feather-wings and fell disastrously. So, not surprisingly, when we meet Stephen again at the beginning of Ulysses, we find that instead of completing some masterwork of literature abroad, he is back in Ireland (‘Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering’), eking out his living as a part-time teacher. He can still theorise eloquently about literary matters, but remains excruciatingly self-centred and self-mortifying. He seems painfully lonely. What he lacks and needs is what Bloom so evidently possesses: a voracious curiosity, an incessant interest in the life around him, and a caring nature.

Leopold Bloom constantly endeavours to empathise with others. For instance: how does whiteness feel to a blind man? (He puts his own hand experimentally on the skin under his shirt to find out.) Does Bloom seem high as a tower to his cat? (No – ‘she can jump me’.) How will Paddy Dignam’s children fare without their father? (He makes a generous donation.) He even desires ‘to amend many social conditions, the product of inequality and avarice and international animosity’. [34] His altruism would complement Stephen’s tendency to self-absorption. Stephen, furthermore, seems to need, in various senses of the cliché, ‘the love of a good woman’. We can imagine that the combination of the abilities of Stephen and Leopold would generate creativity in Stephen and a sense of fatherhood and vicarious achievement in Leopold. Perhaps, in this ménage à trois, Stephen would become a lover of the commodious Molly: after all, Stephen believes that Shakespeare was crucially inspired by the love of the seductive older woman, Anne Hathaway. (Leopold would probably be complaisant. To help the family finances, by ensuring that she is booked to sing on a concert tour, Molly has – with his acquiescence – committed adultery that afternoon with Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan, the vainly virile impresario. Once in the past, when Leopold lost his job, he said that Molly ‘could pose for a picture naked to some rich fellow’.) But the ménage à trois is apparently not to be; or not yet. [35] Stephen, though invited to remain, proceeds on his way, and Bloom re-enters the house alone to rejoin his wife.

In a striking shift of viewpoint, Joyce gives the long concluding episode of the novel to Molly Bloom. For so much of the book, since her initial appearance, she has hovered at the periphery of events, while the men occupy their centre. Leopold Bloom’s thoughts, however, have often reminded us of her situation and adulterous liaison. Finally, Joyce lets us eavesdrop on Molly’s reflections, which are strikingly knowing, uninhibited, unillusioned and graphically frank: ‘I unbuttoned him and took his out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it’; ‘As for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit’; some other women are ‘sparrowfarts skitting around talking about politics they know as much about as my backside’. While her father was an English officer, Major Brian Tweedy, and her mother was Spanish (and perhaps Jewish), Lunita née Laredo, Molly’s literary ancestors include Homer’s Penelope, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Defoe’s Moll Flanders.

Towards the conclusion of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus (Ulysses) and his son fought and slew Penelope’s suitors and hanged the maids; after which Odysseus could return to bed, at last, with his devoted wife. In Ulysses, the suitors are defeated, not in battle by Leopold and Stephen, but by the judgement of Molly. She recalls the men in her life,

particularly Blazes Boylan (whom she deems arrogant); she assesses Leopold; and the implication of her reflections is that Leopold emerges as victor; she retains fond memories of their courtship and their love-making. It’s not an easy victory: Bloom has various peculiar ways and has long been inadequate sexually, and he shares some honours with Mulvey, the young lover of her Gibraltar days; but it suffices. The ending of Ulysses is thus, in some obvious respects, feministic. After

so much time spent among men, the novel gives the final role of adjudicator to Molly: we enter into her unconventional nature, under-educated, sensual, crusty and tough, but shrewd, sharp, good-humoured and life-loving. Arguably, here the themes of the work reach their culmination in an affirmation of love and life – though she would probably jeer at such phrasing.

According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the history of Britain began with the sack of Troy. The name ‘Britain’, he explained, meant ‘the Land of Brutus’, commemorating its founder, Brutus, great-grandson of the exiled Trojan prince, Aeneas. When he built the city now called ‘London’, he aptly named it ‘Troia Nova’, New Troy. [36] Joyce appropriates and transforms for Ireland the founding myth of Britain, making one of the conquerors of Troy a presiding spirit of his Irish masterwork or counter-epic. The relationship between Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey is diverse, complex and shifting; sometimes it is subtle, at other times tenuous; often it is ironically contrastive or parodic. Some salient features of that relationship are obvious. Ulysses, King of Ithaca, is a wanderer: after participating in the protracted siege that culminated in the devastation of Troy, he sets out homeward, and, following dramatic encounters, delays and diversions, reaches the arms of faithful wife, Penelope, after twenty years’ absence. Leopold Bloom proceeds in the morning from 7 Eccles Street, attends a funeral, and peregrinates through Dublin before returning to his unfaithful wife late at night: seemingly a parodic or bathetic contrast; but, as a person of Jewish and middle-European ancestry, he too belongs to a tradition of wandering and vicissitudes. Ulysses is unfaithful, becoming a lover of Calypso and Circe, while being chastely befriended by Nausicaa; Bloom conducts

an epistolary flirtation and merely masturbates. Ulysses, though initially reluctant to join the war, has become a battle-hardened warrior: he fights and kills repeatedly. Leopold, in contrast, is peace-loving. This quality is finely illustrated in the ‘Cyclops’ scene, in which Bloom, at Kiernan’s tavern, is confronted by an irascible ‘citizen’. It’s a clash that the narrative has led us to expect.

From the earliest pages of Ulysses, anti-Semitism emerges: Haines detests ‘German jews’. Later, when Mr Deasy at the school talks to Stephen while paying him, we come to realise that in this Dublin of 1904, anti-Semitic prejudice is widespread and often outspoken. Deasy declares: ‘England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation’s decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation’s vital strength [...]. As sure as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction.’ Later, laughing, he jests that Ireland never persecuted the Jews ‘because she never let them in’. Towards the end, Bloom and Stephen recapitulate an anti-Semitic song of infanticide. Bloom, although baptised, uncircumcised, and an eater of pork, is widely regarded as a Jew: ‘the sheeny’, the ‘kaffir’ with ‘mudcoloured mug’ and ‘plumeyes’, one of ‘the bottlenosed fraternity’, ‘cursed by God’. As we follow him, learning of those tragedies in his life (the suicide of his father, the death in infancy of his son), and experiencing his generally kindly and generous nature, we may wince on his behalf as his various companions and observers vent their anti-Jewish comments. To laughter, Simon Dedalus yells ‘The devil break the hasp of your back!’ at the aged Reuben Dodd. [37]

In the ‘Cyclops’ episode, the counterpart to the one-eyed monster who seeks to kill Ulysses and his men is a bigot, ‘one-eyed’ in the sense that he is biased and prejudiced. This ‘citizen’ is fiercely nationalistic, xenophobic, bellicose and anti-Semitic. Leopold opposes him not by fighting with fists or wielding a stake (or poking him with his cigar), but by reason. Ulysses, aided by his companions, had blinded the brutal Cyclops by driving a hot stake into his eyeball. Bloom in a sense ‘blinds the citizen with science’; more precisely, he baffles and enrages him by argument, saying: ‘But it’s no use [...]. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life. [...] Love’. And, when the citizen becomes even more infuriated and irascible, Bloom adds: ‘Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.’ The citizen’s wild response is replete with unwittingly self-mocking irony: ‘By Jesus [...], I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will.’ Like Odysseus, however, Leopold manages to effect his escape – though a biscuit-tin (not boulders) and much invective are hurled at him.

Thus, one of the most engaging features of Ulysses is Joyce’s sympathy with a protagonist of Jewish descent. Indeed, later, from 1938, the author would help Jews to escape from the Nazis. [38] Some of the leading modernist writers expressed anti-Semitic views. T. S. Eliot’s writings bear a sprinkling of anti-Semitic details, such as ‘The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot. Money in furs.’; and ‘reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable’. Joyce’s champion, Ezra Pound, became virulently anti-Semitic, and not only in his poetry: he made propaganda broadcasts from Rome during World War II, supporting the Fascist cause and denouncing what he deemed the Jewish world-conspiracy. ‘The Jews’, he said (echoing Deasy), ‘have ruin’d every country they have got hold of. [...T]he kikes have sucked out your vitals.’ The taint of anti-Semitism can be found in a great diversity of works prior to 1939: in addition to Pound, their writers include at least two whom Joyce knew personally, William Bulfin and Oliver St.John Gogarty.

In 1904, the year of Ulysses, an anti-Semitic campaign in Limerick

had attracted considerable publicity. Joyce himself once termed the Crucifixion ‘the one mortal sin’ of the Jews’. [39]

In this context, the depiction of Bloom seems remarkably tolerant and considerate. One large irony of Ulysses is that although anti-Semitic prejudice is repeatedly expressed by the folk of Dublin, those Irish bigots are part of a colonised nation, lacking independence, mourning ‘lost tribes’; a people also subject to prejudice and contempt. Bloom repeatedly seeks to cross boundaries and erode divisions, whether of nation, culture or gender. Of course, in comparison with the lofty, heroic stature of Homer’s Odysseus, Leopold may at first seem belittled, demeaned; virtually a pimp, collaborating in his wife’s rather sordid lifestyle. When we recall the epic precedent, then, one method of Ulysses may seem to resemble (on a large scale) that of Pope’s Dunciad or The Rape of the Lock: a mock-heroic method whereby the everyday activities of the modern protagonists seem the more absurdly trivial in comparison with their evoked legendary counterparts. Locally, that is indeed a recurrent source of the comedy of Ulysses. Nevertheless, the criticism often turns in the other direction, too.

The book’s very title obliges us to compare the character of Ulysses-Odysseus, wily, powerful, ruthless and at times murderous, with the character of Bloom, quirkily astute, enquiring, well-meaning, and sympathising; a man who endeavours to learn and to teach, an advocate of peace and harmony. On reflection, we may with reason prefer Bloom: he is, arguably, a hero that modern times need, in the sense that (though partly disreputable) he is a man of good-will and kindness, who seeks a pacific world. He advocates ‘union of all, jew moslem and gentile’: ‘It’s a patent absurdity to hate people because they live around the corner and speak another vernacular’. Instead of the overt victory of the legendary man of destructive guile and physical power, Ulysses offers, and in Molly’s reflections confirms, the covert victory of the mundane man of peace. Lenehan says, ‘He’s a cultured allroundman, Bloom is [...]. There’s a touch of the artist abut old Bloom’; and Flynn adds, he’ll ‘put his hand down to help a fellow. Give the devil his due.’ He can take a joke, even if it’s unwittingly cruel: a circus clown entertains the crowd and sounds a thematic discord by alleging that the bereft Bloom is his father.

There is much that is celebratory in this novel; indeed, among modernist works (so often fraught with anxiety and pessimism), it is unusual in its richly-humorous celebration of vitality. In the 1960s, Richard Ellmann influentially declared:

[That] literature embodies the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man is not a crotchet of Stephen but a principle of Joyce [...]. It is no accident that the whole of Ulysses should end with a mighty ‘yes’. [40]

Ellmann claims that Joyce offers a form of ennoblement of the mock-heroic mode: Bloom is as effective with words as Ulysses with a spear; he is everyman yet unique; he is a foe of narrow-mindedness. If both Bloom and Stephen seem rather passive physically, they are energetic in thought, tenacious in conviction. In any case, Bloom has the qualities of a Samaritan: he is kind to animals, helps a blind young man across a street, tries to prevent Stephen from drinking to excess, defends him from the police, guards his money, extends hospitality and offers him a home.

Ellmann’s view contrasted with another, associated with Marxism. Arnold Kettle, a British Marxist, had in the 1950s deplored what he saw as the novel’s negativity: ‘The tragedy of Ulysses is that Joyce’s extraordinary powers, his prodigious sense of the possibilities of language, should be so deeply vitiated by the sterility of his vision of life.’ [41] Kettle says that both Stephen and Leopold are isolated, lonely and sterile. Stephen is unproductive, failing to produce valuable literary volumes; and Bloom is no producer: his job is merely that of a vendor of advertisements. We are shown no ‘productive activity’, ‘no industrial workers’. Although Ulysses ‘tingles with life’ (and the critic gives detailed illustrations of its vitality), it remains ‘an epic of disintegration’: society and the family seem to be disintegrating. The moments of significance are often arbitrary, hinging on verbal coincidences; and Molly’s ‘affirmation’ is probably temporary and casual.

Kettle’s scepticism is understandable. Sterility is one theme of the book. Not only is Stephen unproductive, but also Bloom has had no normal sexual intercourse with Molly for more than a decade (‘Could never like it again after Rudy’): it’s on her backside that he emits his semen – or ‘his omissions’, in her apt malapropism. Bloom’s relationship with Gerty MacDowell is only onanistic. Gerty’s lameness, tardily perceived, implies that her chances of marriage are blighted: this imparts poignant retrospective irony to her romantic reveries. Molly risks catching venereal disease, which might induce sterility; indeed, she recognises that something is already amiss with her ‘insides’. Certainly, Leopold and Molly seem, in some of their reflections, to be kindred spirits; but it appears unlikely that they will ever express that mutuality warmly, explicitly and directly to each other. Loneliness in a crowd, suspicious misunderstandings, barriers to mutuality: these are widely evident. Bloom himself dissents from Stephen’s belief in affirmative literature.

Nevertheless, particularly when Kettle declares that the song ‘I belong to Glasgow’ contains more humanity than the whole of Ulysses, we may well doubt his case. The critic underestimates those humane, democratic features of the book that we have noted; the opposition to intolerance, prejudice and narrowness. The astonishing freedom of Joyce’s language itself assails conventional moral proprieties, social stratifications and gender divisions. Kettle seems to have underestimated the calculated paradoxicality of the work, in which sterility at one level is offset by rich fecundity at another, just as the funereal episode (6: ‘Hades’) is followed by an episode of childbirth (14: ‘The Oxen of the Sun’: Edward Mortimer Purefoy is born). And the critic’s reference to song reminds us of the lyricism of Ulysses. The text repeatedly evokes sounds; and the sounds of Dublin on that Bloomsday include virtually a festival of music, ranging from Irish folk-song, patriotic ballads and popular music-hall numbers to hymns, masses and Italian operas. Arguably, Joyce’s complex account of the response to the rebels’ song ‘The Croppy Boy’ may contain more humanity than the Marxist’s commentary. Bloom, for instance, is painfully reminded by the condemned boy’s words ‘I alone am left of my name and race’ that he himself, lacking a son, may be the last of his line. ‘Soon I am old’, he ruefully reflects. (In Nighttown, however, the Croppy Boy reappears in an obscene fantasy.)

The critic objected that ‘half the significances of Ulysses are arbitrary’: we see ‘the association method run mad’. Partly as compensation for the absence of the customary coordination provided by a prominent linear plot-sequence and a directorial ‘omniscient narrator’, Joyce has provided an exceptionally complex meshwork of allusions, quotations, leitmotifs and themes. Sometimes we may be locally baffled by the allusions; sometimes we may experience an aesthete’s pleasure in recognising an intricate pattern, or a puzzle-solver’s satisfaction in perceiving a cluster of connections. But repeatedly we find that the particular enriches the general, and that the detail leads to the larger human concerns. For instance, there are references to Millicent Bandmann-Palmer as an actress (or, these days, ‘actor’) who successfully played Hamlet. [42] We are thus reminded that numerous females have performed this role: for instance, Sarah Siddons, Jane Powell, Julia Glover, Charlotte Cushman, Sarah Bernhardt and Asta Nielsen. Hamlet’s sensitivity and vacillation were sometimes deemed feminine features; and E. P. Vining’s The Mystery of Hamlet (cited in the text) offered

the theory that Hamlet was really a woman who had suffered the misfortune of being brought up as a man, though the character’s gentleness, sensitivity and deviousness revealed the truth: hence Ophelia’s suicide. The allusions to Bandmann-Palmer not only supplement Stephen’s ingenious theories about Shakespeare but also enrich such central topics as the lost son, gender stereotyping, androgyny, and Bloom’s anti-stereotypical nature. [43]

Another critic, John Carey, in The Intellectuals and the Masses, went much further than Kettle, arguing that modernism itself was large-scale snobbery: it sought to exclude the general public, to deny their humanity. Joyce, according to Carey, almost escapes the charge, for he treats lovingly the everyday life of the humble Bloom. But, alas, because of its complexity and obscurity, this novel ‘embraces mass man but also rejects him’: ‘Bloom himself would never and could never have read Ulysses’. [44] In response to Carey, we may reflect that Bloom is quite likely to have sought Ulysses, given its early reputation as pornographic, and to have perused plenty of it out of curiosity in any case, before, like some later students, giving up. (Spinoza, however, is within his range, as are Byron’s poems.) Indeed, he could have contributed signally, alongside Stephen and Molly, to the writing of such a work.

As for Carey’s charge of élitism: it is certainly the case that Joyce belongs to an élite, being exceptionally imaginative, articulate and knowledgeable; but many surgeons, inventors, athletes and scientists also belong to élites of the greatly-talented, and the world needs them. Joyce was not élitist: he wished his texts to be made available to a wide public, welcomed publicity which would serve this end, and co-operated with writers who published guidance to his works.

3

One of the obvious technical paradoxes of Ulysses is that it pursues realism with almost fanatical intensity, but yet delights in the fantastic, the imaginatively anarchic, and the linguistically sportive and ostentatious. In this respect it is paradoxical on a vast scale. Many realistic novels – notably George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South – create, temporarily, the illusion of a comprehensive vision of human interactions in society. Ulysses, however, exposes the selectivity

of much realistic fiction. Joyce describes what realism hitherto had customarily censored. He renders, in detail, urination, farting, defecation, masturbation, fetishism and sado-masochism. Nothing seems taboo here: from menstruation to copulation, Joyce describes the human animal with alert and enthusiastic interest. Individuals are uniquely reflective, but their bodies have common demands and functions; our carnal needs accompany or ensnare our mental aspirations. Here the bawdy frankness and anarchic irreverence of the Saturnalian tradition invade and augment, often with satirically demeaning effect, the realistic tradition and its endeavours to be true to human experience. Realism can be tedious when it conveys respectable and familiar knowledge; but, when it is thus invaded or extended, the result can be engaging, surprising us into acknowledgement of unavowed knowledge, of what propriety would customarily suppress or censor.

Joyce’s novel was part of the widespread movement towards frankness in discourse, an endeavour to tear away veils of puritanical censorship and restrictive reticence. These days, that movement seems to be approaching its culmination and may be showing some signs of exhaustion: terms once taboo are losing their power to shock or disturb. Outrageous artworks, becoming a predictable tradition, may cease to outrage. In the media currently, there is little, apparently, which cannot be spoken or shown. Liberation may sire license; permissiveness may nurture decadence. Joyce, however, was writing at a time when his frankness was, for him, perilous and potentially costly; and it helped to create, in his pages, a new jocoserious tragicomedy of human life as reflective, fleshbound and mortal.

One obvious aspect of the realistic project of Joyce is the endeavour to render, fully and honestly, human consciousness. Such an endeavour is peculiarly problematic. As thinking beings, we are amply familiar with consciousness; yet, when we attempt to observe and report it, we encounter difficulties. Normal consciousness then seems to retreat elusively before the observing self, as if reluctant to be caught off-guard. A conspicuous method used in Ulysses is, of course, that of the ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘interior monologue’. Some commentators reserve the latter term for presentations in which the thought-process is apparently unmediated by narratorial interventions: so Molly’s soliloquy would be an interior monologue, whereas elsewhere we encounter a mishmash of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ observation. Other commentators use the terms interchangeably. Joyce’s originality lay in the intensity and frankness of presentation, and in his predilection for certain recurrent topics which were dear to him, rather than in the broad principles of the method, which had a long history. Joyce acknowledged the influence of Edouard Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887): it sought to represent events only as they impinged on the consciousness of the central character. [45]

Of course, countless fiction-writers had given close attention to the rendering of subjectivity, particularly when a character experienced emotional or psychological pressure. Ulysses resembles the intense culmination of a long-term quest.

It could be argued that the intensive rendering of the flow of consciousness accentuates isolation, retards time and solicits unemployment. The description of consciousness may seem to be facilitated when characters can hold private communion and are not preoccupied with a set task which dominates their awareness; they then have leisure to reflect freely on numerous issues. Leopold has a job of sorts, but it allows him plenty of time to socialise, stroll, observe and muse; Stephen, too, is seen predominantly outside the school-room, roaming reflectively; and Molly, reclining in bed, drifts mentally through the past and present. A mind dominated by a pressing task might be limited and predictable in its main concern. Again, a novel portraying a passage of history would be facilitated by a more rapid and relatively externalised technique. When Virginia Woolf sought to encompass the passage of a decade in the ‘Time Passes’ sequence of To the Lighthouse, her narrator necessarily moved beyond subjectivities and became an Olympian observer. In Conrad’s epic, Nostromo, the narrator was free to take an externalised view of historical events to complement the characters’ personal views of them.

When dealing with individual psychology, Joyce seems to know at least as much as Freud (and possibly more) about the pressures of desire and the devious ways in which desire may seek to evade censorship, about the power of sexuality and the multiplicity of sexual symbolism. Repressed feelings are abundantly indicated in Joyce’s rendering of consciousness: notably in Bloom’s reluctance to address consciously the details of Molly’s adultery: repeatedly he returns to the matter but tries to repress specific consideration of the physical act. (The repressed retaliates in Nighttown.) As the possibility of Molly’s being infected with venereal disease starts to obtrude, ‘Think no more about that’ is the response. Joyce delights in depicting the hop, skip and jump of the mind’s associative alacrity, and he exploits its comic, ironic, absurd and poignant aspects. The plenitude of rendition obviously cannot, however, be total: even Joyce leaves gaps, sometimes arbitrarily, sometimes necessarily. While specifying pieces of a character’s mental sequence, he often elides their causal connections, although these must have been operative in that mind; consequently, the reader supplies the causality, filling the gaps and becoming adept at ‘delayed decoding’ (which occurs when a writer describes an effect but delays or withholds the cause of that effect). Similarly, the reader must envisage various physical actions which the thoughts imply but do not specify. Then there is the general problem of the non-verbal, elucidated here by Harold Abrams:

The interior monologue, in its radical form [i.e., presented without interventions from a ubiquitous narrator], is sometimes described as the exact reproduction of consciousness; but since sense perceptions, mental images, feelings, and some aspects of thought itself are nonverbal, it is clear that the author can present these elements only by converting them into some kind of verbal equivalent. Much of this conversion is a matter of narrative conventions rather than of unedited, point-for-point reproduction [...]. [46]

Abrams is surely correct. Feelings of elation and depression may affect our reflections, but in themselves they are non-verbal. Some of our sensations are simply visual, aural, tactile or olfactory. If

Reviews for Ulysses

[eoin-311239 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

6stars? 100? My favorite book? Kinda. The book I've read the most? Definitely. This is a book you can read 10, 20 times and get something new out of it each time. There are dozens of books written about this book, and they add something too, but the thing itself is (really) thoroughly enjoyable. Still shocking in form after all these years, this is as good as a novel can be.

[dirkjohnson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This recording is better than I ever would have imagined. A superb job by the readers.

[jonfaith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh, that, "apathy of the stars." I am wistful and amazed.

P.S. I have since read texts by Julian Rios and Enrique Vila-Matas who devoted novelistic approaches to Ulysses that ultimately steer the reader back to Bloom and Dedalus. I know of no other groundswell that continues to percolate and excite.

[benfulton · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well worth wading through, if you have some annotations or at least Cliff's Notes on hand - at the very least to pick up on the references that don't make any sense to anyone who wasn't living in Dublin in 1916. The analogy that Joyce draws between the journeys of Odysseus to a day in the life of one ordinary man is very powerful, even though we work backwards through his life and at the end we probably know more about Leopold Bloom than perhaps any character in any book. The streams of consciousness that comprise most of the book seem appropriate to get a clear feel for Bloom's state of mind, and the play style of the hallucinogenic Circe scene works well. Perhaps the climaxes of the book occur when the ghosts of their dead loved ones visit both Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. But Joyce also drops in what appear to be random styles of writing, particularly in the Cyclops chapter, and the question-answer style of Ithaca is fairly difficult to follow. Does it add to the book? Not that I can see. There are also constant lists of what appear to be nothing in particular; other conspiracy-minded books (Focault's Pendulum, Illuminatus) hint at their respect for Joyce and provide similar lists; coupled with the coded letters that Bloom writes in the book I think it's pretty likely that at least some of the lists contain secret messages. Bloom is clearly a Freemason - I don't see how anyone could say otherwise. I didn't take the trouble to try to translate the messages but it seems a pretty good bet that the key to the code is in the line N. IGS./WI.UU. OX/W. OKS. MH/Y. IM., which is the coded address of the woman to whom Bloom sends letters.The long stream-of-consciousness of Molly Bloom that ends the book is also very telling concerning Bloom; a look at him through the eyes of the person who probably knows him better than anyone else. I'm not sure I find the hints of reconcilation convincing, but I don't see that a divorce or angry recriminations are in the Blooms' future either. And I'd be surprised if our Everyman hero ever has a huge resolution, or third act, an end to his drama, because I think that is precisely what Joyce tries to avoid. His hero will remain ambiguous forever. And in the end, isn't that what we really can expect?

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an experimental novel for it’s time that follows a Dublin school teacher, Stephen Daedalus through the events of June 16th, 1904. It is a pretty ordinary day. The cast of characters is large, with Molly Bloom and her husband Leopold dwelt on quite thoroughly. To sum up this is a major classic of English literature, and quite fun to read. First Published February 2, 1922.inished January 18th, 1971.

[cliffburns · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

WOW!Nuff said.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A brilliant book to read and reread, but not a book to love with the heart, more with the brains. Great variety in styles, themes, some experiments are a succes, others not. This is not about Dublin on 1 day, by 1 person, no, on the contrary, the multiple points of view are essential! It's kind of cubustic view on reality. A few of the topics Joyce touches: what is truth, what is reality? How can you know reality? And how, as a human, can you cope with this reality?

[richardderus · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Cacotechnous humbuggery.

[dreamingtereza_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Utterly perfect.

[tgamble54 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Impenetrable

[fledgist · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The magnificent, complex novel, detailing one day (16 June 1904) in Dublin. This is a magnificent, wonderful, detailed, human story. Nothing could be better, funnier, or sadder.

[hopingforchange · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I am not afraid to admit that this book was as far over my head as the deep blue sky. I didn't understand it. I never knew what was happening. I did not READ Ulysses, I just looked at the words on each page, and this was not from a lack of effort. It's an interesting experience to go through this book, but I am not sure I would call it enjoyable.

[cait815 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I am free at last!

This review will be all over the place, as I have so many conflicting thoughts regarding this book. While I did love certain sections, they just could not make up for the fact that the rest of the book was simply a form of literary torture. I don't think I've ever had such a roller coaster ride of a reading experience before. Joyce managed to make me laugh out loud one second, and the next I was sitting on my hands so as not to gouge out my own eyes. Am I glad that I read it? Absolutely. Will I read it again? Hell no.


I found Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison by Brown professor Arnold Weinstein to be an immense help while reading Ulysses. Honestly when I first started reading it, I was very cynical. Whenever I would hear people talk about how amazing Ulysses was, my brain always translated it into "I have no idea what the hell he's saying, so it must be brilliant!" But the author of this guide really opened my eyes. After reading certain explanations or interpretations of his, I found myself thinking "damn, that Joyce is a clever bastard". Through Weinstein's observations I also learned the best way (for me) to read the stream of consciousness chapters - which surprisingly have turned out to be my favorite. I've found that I love Bloom as a character (maybe it's the underdog thing) and I absolutely love being inside his head. My favorite episode was Hades, followed by The Wandering Rocks, Nausicaa, Penelope, and the first half of Circe (that one just went on way too long and it ceased to be amusing).


Unfortunately, none of that was enough to make me actually enjoy this experience. And as much as I loved the final page, it was a bit anti- climactic - I felt like Queen's "We Are the Champions" should have been playing in the background as I closed the book (forever). Or at least the "We Did It!" song from Dora the Explorer.

[amzzz_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I know this is supposed to be one of the greatest books of all time, but goodness did I struggle to get through it! Even when I was done I must admit I barely had a clue what had happened.

[juliaboechat · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
"...Yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another 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."
Gosto de uma frase do Faulkner, que diz “"You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith." Muitas pessoas pensam em um clássico como um livro frio, sem emoções, fechado. Principalmente um clássico impossível [sic] como o Ulisses. É um livro difícil (mais difícil, diz a lenda, pra quem lê a tradução do Houaiss do que pra quem lê o original), e é um livro excitante, que prende o leitor como poucos. Quando eu o li sabia apenas que o livro se passava em um só dia e que tinha um paralelo com a Odisséia. Não sabia nem mesmo que cada capítulo é escrito em um estilo, ou que começa e termina com a mesma letra. Isso foi excelente, porque eu pude notar isso, achar incrível, morrer de vontade de reler o livro e aí sim começar a tentar entendê-lo melhor. É um livro que vou reler minha vida toda. O fato de que mesmo assim eu nunca vou entender metade dele não me surpreende: não tenho a pretensão de entender completamente qualquer livro. Creio que não só os especialistas, mas muitas vezes os próprios autores não chegam a entendê-los completamente – a autonomia de seus personagens requer isso. Mas é um livro que vou reler minha vida toda com prazer e querendo descobrir mais.

[alanskinner-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are many books I have added to my list and for which, although I may have given them a rating, I have not provided a review. I have resigned myself to the fact that most of them will never have a review for it is unlikely that I will have the time. Tonight, though, I determined that I had to make the time to add some comments to Ulysses, for it is without a doubt one of the greatest of all books and deserves all the conversations possible with its readers.

It was a comment by AN Wilson regarding Tolstoy that began the chain of thought that led me here. All writers, he said, lived in the shadow of Tolstoy. To be fair, it seemed that he was referring to writers of historical fiction but there are those who believe it to be true of all writers.

All writers may well write in Tolstoy's shadow, but without doubt they labour in Joyce's light, which is a far more precious thing. For not only did Joyce shape the form, the consciousness and the soul of the modern novel, he did so with a skill of language and words that has rarely, if ever, been matched.

George Bernard Shaw once remarked that it took talent to start a new trend in art, but a genius to end it. So it is with Joyce, except that he was more than just a talent, but a literary genius of such magnitude that we may well have to wait a very long time for a greater genius to come onto the scene and re-define the novel. Countless attempts have been made, of course, but none that could over-shadow Joyce's Ulysses.

The secret to reading Ulyssses is not to take oneself seriously, and the book perhaps slightly less so. It is a book that reveals itself by simply reading it, letting it fertilise our intellect as we let the words wash over us. It is a song in which we can follow - albeit with difficulty at times - the literal words but which has beneath them, infused in them, a greater meaning altogether. Through sound, rhythm and pace, the words take on a new etymology that no dictionary could chart. They work together to create meaning and sense beyond the building blocks of language. It is the closest we have of prose as poetry.

Ulysses bursts with life, with humour, with optimism, with sensuality and a sheer delight in being human, including the painful parts of that condition. It is raw and sophisticated, delicate and brutal but never dull. I cannot recall reading it and finding a paragraph that didn't contribute or offer something.

Molly's soliloquy is one of the finest human reflections in literature since Hamlet and in its sheer essential humanity, and even greater comment on existence.

It would be folly and arrogance to assume that I could add anything of real value to what has already been written about Ulysses. All I can say is that this is an astounding book that has lit the way for every writer and every reader since.

[yeremenko_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I get why this is such a famous book. But, much of the style, taboo topics, etc are no longer as striking. Joyce is a singular talent, but man this is way too long.This book makes Derrick Jeter seem under rated.

[jeoblivion · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Three stars. I can't help but chuckle while clicking on the respective star, as it seems such an utterly absurd rating for a book that is really anything but mediocre.

Truth is: From my small-brained point of view there are brilliant passages and chapters that I devoured (if one can devour in baby-spoon portions, as this is the only way this book can be read I suppose), sometimes poetic, sometimes hilarious, sometimes just mind-bending.
There are other chapters my brain appreciates for the intellectual stunt they are performing but they aren't necessarily a pleasure to read. In fact they are hard, painful labour. And then there are chapters that might have caused irreversible damage to my brain.

To me, this book is the crazy, courageous, very clever and sometimes - yes it has to be said - extremely tiring attempt to turn every piece of dust on the streets of Dublin into a cross reference for the entire cultural history of mankind in general, and that of Ireland in particular while changing literary style chapter by chapter. Chapeau.
I am not sure this book is for reading though. It might be for studying, and one could do so for the rest of a lifetime. One day, when I am old and wise and have gained an unearthly tolerance to 400 out of 1122 pages of complete incomprehensibility I might pick this up again. Maybe sooner. For now I will happily lift the 1785g of German Annotated Ulysses back into it's shelf and watch it from a respectful distance.

[rmagahiz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Is this the best book ever written in English? Maybe not, but it does have a freshness and a sense of daring after all this time. Spending so much time seeing the world through the eyes and other senses of the characters is something only a few authors could pull off, and the places where this works here are dazzling.

[deanadav · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This novel (odyssey in fact) needs to be read with good notations and a focused mind, but is fulfilling and wonderful! I would recommend it a thousand times over! There are passages that I have laughed at and there are passages that I have skipped, but overall...there are no words to describe Ireland's 20th century epic!

[wrk1-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A stunning book. I've talked with several readers who got stunned by the time they reached chapter 4 and quit. Most would-be readers I've talked to are stunned by its reputation and never even try. I've talked to several academic readers who take Ulysses oh so seriously--some of them had been knocked into a corner professionally and can't get out. I read it and was stunned silly.

I believe the book is a an immensely intelligent set of parodies within an even more staggeringly conceived parody. Ulysses isn't a retelling of the Odyssey, it's a magnificently upside-down parody of the poem. Leopold Bloom isn't a heroic wanderer, trying to get home and take his rightful place--much the opposite; Stephan Dedalus, unlike Telemachus, wants to avoid finding a father and certainly doesn't want to be like Bloom; and Molly Bloom/Penelope sure hasn't been waiting patiently or cunningly for her husband to return.

Within the larger parody, each of the chapters is a parody of some writing style or publishing genre. Sometimes I was entertained and mentally exercised, sometimes I was bored, and sometimes I had no idea what was going on and had to go to the academics for help.

Re-reading Ulysses must be very rewarding, but right now I've decided to settle for smaller rewards elsewhere. I'm wondering, though, if I'll ever be satisfied with any book in which the characters are less intimately drawn. It's a world I might be compelled to come back to because all other book worlds might seem sketchy, thin, and dull in comparison.

[steadfastreader · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Yes. 'Unreadable' comes to mind. But I was listening to it on audio and I -still- couldn't stand it. I like to think I'm cosmopolitan in my reading and that I don't dismiss books because they're 'hard'.

But this book seems to be nothing but free association. Definitely there are some beautiful 'word matches' but there is little to nothing else to give it any substance or ... anything.

25% into the book and I know it's a no-go. At least for the near future. Gah!!

[rcasjwa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have given this book 4 stars because I realise that although it is a difficult book to 'enjoy' it must have been written by a brilliant mind. This is one of those books that we are all told we should read before we die. I am hoping to finish it by then - I have been reading it for about 2 years and I am nearly to the last section.

[linus_linus_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Personally Ulysses means more than a lot. To me, there are books and there is this bible. Was quite young the first time I tried it, couldnt drag beyond the first chapter. Then after two summers, lots of waters had passed under the bridge and many more truths collected when I picked it up casually at a friend's place and finished it in three days flat.Each word made perfect sense. Rare harmony:That experience of consciousness.

It is this consciousness that makes even most gifted writers kneel before its altar:

There is a story about how George Orwell was depressed after reading this. He wrote that how impotent he felt before the might of this book, that everything he ever wrote or read seemed like a speck of trivia.

And when Scott Fitzgerald met Joyce, he kneeled and sobbed like a smitten teenager asking him 'How does it feel to be great genius Sir?

Also, It has my favourite sentence in all english literature:

Love loves to love love. (Love-subject, object, verb, everything in the universe)

YES, Ulysses is not a book, its a Kingdom, love it or hate it, but deep down we all know English literature is simply divided into BU and AU- Before Ulysses and After Ulysses.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fittingly for the tale that launched a thousand professorships, Ulysses breaks down effectively like a course syllabus:25% tight realist novel with modernist flourishes - innovative in that regard, in a small ways - about fathers and sons, the quest for self, the breakdown of a marriage, repressed sexuality, even hipsters (isn't Buck Mulligan the very type of pudgy unshaven 30 year old with moustache and sweater who is friends with several bands and is either a gov schlub or an indie cartoonist or both, Vancouver, 2005) - you know, all the old standbys.25% spot-on-dialogue based mythopoeic journey into Ireland and the Irish, Dublin and its assorted Sidhe, and on that note I should cop that my favourite moment was when they're all in the bar and that caveman walks in. If Dublin disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow and you had to reconstruct it based on this book, you'd end up with - no disrespect to Dub and the Dubs - a weirder and more wonderful place. This stuff also makes you realize how Irvine Welsh (let's not even touch all the modernist and post-modern writers who we all know were influenced by Joyce, and reach across the aeons a little, because I did find this rather striking) is really surprisingly close to just being Joyce with a dose of Scottish pragmatism and a couple slaps upside the heid if ya dinnae stop greetin ya cunt40% fol-the-rol-the-ra-the-raddy and flibberty-bibberty bee! Amazing stuff, although come on, Molly Bloom's (awesome) soliloquy is just serial monogasentences with the periods shaken out. 40%, in other words, Finnegan's Wake.And the last 10 percent? Class participation, of course, which is where this book franly falls down and turns, for all its richness, too frequently from pleasure to chore. Because half this book wants to be read stone sober and half blind drunk - hell, by the end there drunk might not even cut it and you'll wanna be crunk or frunk or strunk and white or badunkadunkdunk. All of which are solid ways to be, except that the two halves are so irremediably entangled that it makes actually reading the fucker grindy and jarring and not at all smooth, because there you are getting hosed for the next paragraph and having to sober up before you can finish your sentence. And I like smooth. I think Ulysses begs to be read like how some people do with the Bible, where they stick a pin in it and that's their daily think. And books like that really annoy me, with all their intimations of psychological comprehensiveness and implicit claims to authority. So yeah, I didn't give this book as much time as it needs, but I think I gave it as much as it deserves.**(A month).

[lalaland_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I actually liked this book (despite the fact that it really isn't well-written, at least in my opinion). Extremely hard to follow unless you take an entire class on this one book (which I did). What I liked about it is the relationship between the two main characters and how it ended up. His ability to place a different emphasis on the same word a/o sentence amazed me. Never before had I read something that meant so many different things. I really this book as attempt to make as many allusions and insinuations as humanly possible, and he achieved that.As much as I want to find some sort of literary value in the book, I just can’t. It’s extremely interesting to read, but holds no entertainment value or otherwise.

[erinkennedy-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fantastic, amazing, poignant, funny, daring, excruciating, provocative. Read it once on your own, and then read it again in tandem with Burgess' guide. Read it one hundred times and you will always find something new. Best. Novel. Ever.

[brainannex · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I read it. I read the whole thing. Every frickin' word. Do I appreciate some of the inroads he has made for literature? Yes. Do I appreciate his language play and knowledge? Yes. Do I nod knowingly at his allusions and historical awareness? Yes. Do all of these combine to give this book such high praise? NO. It feels like someone you are vaguely acquainted with telling you about their dreamscape. Save your time and select a different classic into which to delve.

[spk27 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Whew.I know that it's a classic, and realize that many people consider it to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century.I was constantly amazed by what Joyce could do with words, and there were many times when I re-read lines, paragraphs, or entire sections just so that I could savour the beauty of the language.But I have to admit that there were at least as many sections that I had to re-read because my eyes had glazed over, my attention had floated away, and I was bored.On the whole I enjoyed and am glad that I finally got around to reading this book, but once was enough.

[garyseverance-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Ulysses" by James Joyce (1934) is a novel about the interaction of social responsibility and personal desires. It focuses primarily on three characters: Stephen Dedalus a self-absorbed scholar attempting to find his artistic voice, Leopold Bloom who tries to meet his social responsibilities in a culture that is not completely accepting of him, and Molly Bloom (Poldy's wife) who struggles with her feminine destiny. The novel parallels the structure of Homer's "Odyssey" that chronicles the 10 year struggle of Odysseus to return from war in Troy to his home in Ithaca. Ulysses, the Latin translation of the Greek name Odysseus, is Leopold (Poldy) Bloom who travels the streets of Dublin one Thursday on June 16, 1904. His goal is to accomplish his daily task of meeting his family's economic needs, forming social alliances with Dubliners (including Stephen), and satisfying his own drives for understanding and fulfillment. Odysseus sought to reunite with his wife and assess her fidelity in his absence, and Bloom looks forward to the end of the day when he returns to his home at 7 Eccles Street, concerned about his wife's unfaithfulness. "Ulysses" is remarkable in its descriptive detail of the physical and psychological environments of Dublin and its characters. The feelings related to immersion in the living Irish city are so strong that there may be some irrational fear of being unable to return to current life. The entrance into the reality of the lives of Stephen, Molly, and Poldy is uncanny as readers become physically and psychically connected to characters. It is a matter of proximity. You lose your own personality as you accompany these people when they converse, walk the streets, visit stores, drink and philosophize, reveal themselves in stream of consciousness monologues, argue, pursue bacchanalian extremes, and have private battles with loss and melancholy. The reader `sees' everything that day, the external locations and the inner worlds of the characters, with the "ineluctable modality of the visible." This is the direct and complete experience of Joyce's art without the restriction of our own frame of reference, history, obligations, and wants. It is intimidating to realize that your own life is changing, that part of your personal history now contains a new day of your own existence - you have extended your life for a day. Many people throughout the world celebrate a second birthday on June 16 (Bloomsday). After publication of "Ulysses," I believe that James Joyce (like a few other artists) spent the rest of his life amazed at his creation. As he lay dying in hospital waiting for his wife to return to his bedside, he had to wonder where his inspiration originated, where he summoned the ability to give the gift of another day of life to us all. The reader can benefit most from "Ulysses" by preparing to read it. Read (re-read) Homers "Odyssey." Pay close attention to the structure, the symbolic content, and the psychology of Odysseus. Odysseus was a flawed hero, externally brave but also self-serving and blind to parts of his own personality (like Bloom). Use "Ulysses Annotated" by Don Gifford to help guide you through the detail of theology, philosophy, psychology, history, rhetoric, and the physical layout of Dublin. This reference work is very good because it allows readers to have their own experiences by providing only supplementary content (facts) that help to understand the myriad allusions presented in the text. I suggest that you enjoy the many beautiful styles of prose presented in the 18 episodes pausing to quickly glance at the definitions in your opened copy of "Ulysses Annotated." Then before reading the next episode, go back and read the complete explanatory entries in this reference book. Give yourself a couple of months to enjoy the novel and add this new day to your life.