Ulysses

By James Joyce and Enda Duffy

Originally reviled as obscure and obscene, Joyce's masterpiece now stands as one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century. Loosely based on Homer's Odyssey, the novel traces the paths of Leopold Bloom and other Dubliners through an ordinary summer day and night in 1904 — a typical day, transformed by Joyce's narrative powers into an epic celebration of life.
First editions of Ulysses rank among the modern rare book trade's most valuable finds. This reprint of the original edition is not only the least expensive version available but also the truest to the author's vision. Many experts have reinterpreted the novel's surviving drafts to produce revised texts, but this edition remains the version that Joyce himself reviewed and corrected prior to the initial publication. A new Introduction by Joyce scholar Enda Duffy offers an enlightening and enthusiastic welcome to a landmark of modern literature. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Mar 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9780486120720

James Joyce

James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish author, poet, teacher, and critic. Joyce centered most of his work around the city of Dublin, and portrays characters inspired by the author’s family, friends, enemies, and acquaintances. After a drunken fight and misunderstanding, Joyce and his wife, Nora Barnacle, self-exiled, leaving their home and traveling from country to country. Though he moved way from Ireland, Joyce continued to write about the region and was popular among the rise of Irish nationalism. Joyce is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. While his most famous work is his novel Ulysses, Joyce wrote many novels and poetry collections, including some that were published posthumously.

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Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2009, is an unabridged republication of the text of the first edition of the work originally published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France. A new Introduction by Enda Duffy has been specially prepared for the Dover edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Joyce, James, 1882-1941.

Ulysses / James Joyce ; with a new introduction by Enda Duffy.

p. cm.

"An unabridged republication of the original Shakespeare and Company

edition, published in Paris by Sylvia Beach, 1922."

9780486120720

1. City and town life — Fiction. 2. Dublin (Ireland) — Fiction. 3. Married

people — Fiction. 4. Jewish men — Fiction. 5. Artists — Fiction. 6. Psychological

fiction. 7. Domestic function. 8. Experimental fiction. I. Title.

PR6019.O9U4 2009

823’.912 — dc22

2009012713

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

47470402

www.doverpublications.com

Table of Contents

Title Page

Bibliographical Note

Copyright Page

INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION

I

II

III

INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION

You are holding in your hands the most beautiful book in the history of English literature. Ulysses is quite possibly the most brilliant novel written in any language in the twentieth century. It may well be the finest work of art ever to have come out of Ireland. It is often thought of as the greatest novel ever written. It is a joy to read; if this is your first time, what a pleasure is in store for you. Read it and be pleased.

Ulysses, on first reading and for the rest of your life, will provide you with some of your richest hours. It is beautiful: its strings of deliquescent verbs and portmanteau adjectives will dazzle you. It is hilarious: to read this book is to understand that reading can be physical, and that physical surrender begins when you laugh. It is filthy: its fidelity to how we really experience our bodies, and especially our sexuality, made it a scandal when it was first published, and arrests us still. It is loquacious: full of lists, diversions, and reappearances; teeming with happy returns, it plaits its excessive language into patterns of motifs, echoes, and Odyssean parallels. It is insightful: its twists and turns trace what it means to live, if not quite happily, at least contentedly, in modernity — how to be more or less at home, even now, in the world. It is modern: its concern with advertising (its hero, Leopold Bloom, works on commission as an advertising agent), with commodities, with city life, ethnic identity (Irish, British, Jewish), the care of one’s body, make it a mirror of concerns we still share. It is intimate: because you are given access to the most secret thoughts, feelings, embarrassments, and dreams of Poldy, Molly, Stephen, and many others, as you read you get to know them better than you know anyone else except yourself. And it is moving: the tale of Leopold and Molly Bloom is a love story that is as tender, and as troubled, as is real love.

Professors will tell you that Ulysses is difficult; it is not, except in the sense that life itself is difficult, and, like life, it is certainly worth the effort. It is a book about very ordinary things: shopping, eating, bathing, talking, walking, thinking, daydreaming, attending, making friends. It covers simply one single day, from after sun-up to near sun-up the day after, in the life of a middle-aged man, Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and a recent college graduate, Stephen Dedalus. It is June 16, 1904, a sunny day in Dublin. Stephen eats breakfast and goes to his job teaching in a private school: he is going to be paid. Bloom is brought into the book with one of the most famous introductions in modern literature: Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.... He takes Molly her breakfast in bed, sets off in his black suit to attend a funeral, and embarks on his day of endless wandering around Dublin. Molly, a singer, will be visited by Blazes Boylan, her promoter; they will have sex in the Bloom’s jingly bed. Bloom knows this; one reason he stays away from home is to avoid this meeting. Going about his business, at loose ends, a bit lonesome, Bloom more or less befriends Stephen, saves him from being arrested after a drunken fight in front of a brothel, brings him back to his house at 7 Eccles Street, offers him a bed, which Stephen refuses before leaving. In the darkness, Bloom joins Molly, who is still awake in bed; once he falls asleep, in the famous final episode Penelope, we are granted her flow of thoughts about her life, her loves, this day. There are, then, a few excitements, but mostly it’s the most ordinary day imaginable.

In this mundane day transformed into epic, insignificant moments come alive with something better than poetry. There is Stephen walking along Sandymount strand, thinking deep thoughts about the ineluctable modality of the visible, and hearing the sand scrunch when he shuts his eyes. There is Bloom watching the ankles of a maid as he lopes up Dorset Street with his breakfast kidney. There is Fr. Conmee S.J. slipping out of the presbytery, and the British viceroy and his cavalcade — for Ireland was still a colony of Britain in 1904 — trotting along the city quays. And here is Bloom again, in Davy Byrne’s pub, over his Gorgonzola sandwich and glass of burgundy, remembering the first time that he and Molly made love. Me. And me now, he thinks. Here he is again in the Ormond hotel, flitting out while the others are held by the singing of an Irish rebel ballad, The Croppy Boy; soon we meet him in another pub, Barney Kiernan’s, standing up for both his Irishness and his Jewishness. Soon, he is in the maternity hospital, in a brothel, in a cabman’s shelter showing Stephen an old photo of Molly, walking with Stephen up Gardiner Street towards home. And here is Molly, as Bloom snores beside her (they sleep head to toe, at opposite ends of the bed that is a gift from her father), thinking that I saw he understood or felt what a woman is.... The poetry of the everyday is the literary coin of Ulysses.

The book’s primary greatness is that it makes ordinary everyday incidents completely arresting. In the first place, it does this by honestly and keenly describing dozens of experiences about which we all know but which turn out never to have been described in literature before. For example, near the very end of the book — it is the second-to-last thing that happens — Molly feels her period begin. 0 Jamesy let me up out of this she cries; she’s relieved, however, that she’s not pregnant. Think of it: here is one of the most important aspects of every woman’s life, the sign, moreover, of fertility and of the human connection to the cycles of nature, and yet it has hardly ever been mentioned before in the whole course of English literature! If you want to be a writer but feel that everything under the sun has been written about already, Joyce’s novel is at hand to let you see that only the smallest portion of the spectrum of human experience has yet been represented in novels or poems.

Second, Ulysses turns the ordinary into epic by matching the events of Bloom’s day to moments in The Oclyssey. This seems mostly done in humor — why should a twentieth-century advertising salesman be reliving an ancient Greek epic without knowing it? — but it implies to the reader that her life may possess patterns she does not know of. There is also a hint of reincarnation in it — metempsychosis — one of the big words Molly finds in the book she reads in bed. The implication is that life, like the wanderings of Bloom back to his home in 7 Eccles Street, is a matter of many happy returns. It implies that the ways in which we think of those who have gone before us still matter, but that these ways have changed. Does ancient Greece matter to modern Dublin? Does Bloom’s Dublin alter the way western tradition regards classical Greece? To both questions, the answer is yes. The characters in the novel, however, are oblivious to the fact that their lives play out this particular drama of literature repeating itself with a difference.

Everyday events are strange and vivid in Ulysses because of its project to have us understand that the way the story is told determines our reaction to it. What happens is this: from Episode 7 onwards, almost every episode in the book (there are eighteen in all) is written in a different style. Aeolus launches this experiment: set in a newspaper office, the account of coming and goings there is broken up with joco-serious newspaper headlines. Later, Nausicca is written as a parody of a romance novel, while Circe, the phantasmagoric climax of the novel, set in the red-light district, is written as a play-script (or as a film-script with words, composed before movies had sound). Oxen of the Sun, the maternity-hospital episode, has paragraph after paragraph in different styles of English prose from Beowulf all the way to modern American, while Ithaca, which describes how Bloom and Stephen return to Eccles Street, is composed as a drumbeat sequence of questions and very full, scientifico-poetic answers. (The best question concerns Bloom’s thoughts as he gets into bed beside Molly: If he had smiled, why would he have smiled?) These experiments make reading a wild ride: as the novel shifts gears, you get no warning. What you grasp, however, might be this: every moment of our lives can be told from different points of view, and even that viewpoint changes depending on the language style used to describe it. The style chosen, from a huge potential repertoire of styles, may be termed a discourse, and Ulysses presents itself to its readers, episode by episode, as a portfolio of discourse all clamoring to tell, in different ways, bits of the same simple story. It is a polylogic text, a cacophony of music and talk in many accents and styles, a carnival of voices.

Which brings us to the novel’s absolutely best feature, its humor. Charles Baudelaire, the French poet and original modernist, wrote one of his best essays on laughter; Henri Bergson, one of the most notable early twentieth-century philosophers, wrote a book on the topic; Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian critic, wrote his best work on how novels stage comedy as carnival. The movies, as the new art form invented at the turn of the twentieth century, trafficked in comedy from the start. Yet if many of the heroes and heroines of modernist literature are the counterparts of Charlie Chaplin, comic hapless wanderers in dark clothes, most of them, unlike Chaplin, seem so laden down by their author’s sense of modernist alienation and angst that the books in which they feature seem dark with foreboding. Consider Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Mr. Prufrock in T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Clarissa in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, or any of the heroes of Franz Kafka’s fictions, such as Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, whose life is so dull that one morning he discovers that he has turned into a cockroach. Each of these works — especially Kafka’s — trades in its own brand of dark humor; it is only in Ulysses, however, despite a hero whose life is the most hopeless of them all, that the humor, comedy and laughter sweep over the whole work, evoking on every page a fusillade of jokes and belly-laughs. Ulysses has humor at every level, from raw laughter about body noises, to hints about hypocrisies, to enigmatic riddles about the philosophic implications of, for example, being in debt to others. It is the comedy of the underdog. It is achieved because Ulysses stands with the weak, the outcasts, the undervalued, and never misses a chance to take potshots at the pretentious, the big shots and the pompous. There is a moment when the book tells of Moses and the Ten Commandments, but might really be describing itself, when it celebrates The language of the [new] law, written in the language of the outlaw. This humor from below makes it unique among modernist masterpieces; it also makes its accounts of life so intimate that reading it is a visceral experience.

Ulysses is a novel about the senses, a handbook for the underdog on how one’s senses will always be pleasurable. It may be the most touching book ever written, literally, as it minutely annotates the lower, less-respected senses such as taste, smell, and touch, as well as the senses most valued in modernity, hearing and sight. Its stylistic experiments are often in the service of this sensual recording. By bringing us right into the characters’ minds, and letting us see the world mostly, but not only, out of their eyes, Ulysses gives us their experience of those events in real time with an intimacy and an exactitude far in excess of what has been achieved in literature up to this. This technique, using the phrase of a pioneering psychologist and brother of another famous author, William James, has been called stream of consciousness. It means that the text gives us, unedited, the characters’ thoughts as they occur.

In fact, Ulysses gives us much more than stream of consciousness. Ulysses never describes a scene, or a character, in the way more conventional novels often pause to do. Instead, the novel lets you join every conversation mid-stream, and lets you experience it through the eyes, ear, nose, tongue, and skin of usually one, sometimes more than one, of the characters. Joyce, it turns out, opened the very first cinema in Dublin, and his writing technique in Ulysses owes a lot to camera work. We see the city out of a character’s eyes, as those eyes, of the flaneur, the pedestrian in the city, pan its shop-windows, its signs, its other pedestrians. Besides sight, the other senses of each character, especially sound, but also smell, are delineated lovingly, lingeringly. This makes Ulysses an intense sensorium, a text-machine where the lived experience of the senses of each character are transmitted directly to the reader. The novel renounces all the usual narrative stratagems of persuasion that imply your tacit support for a given, and single, point of view; rather, with tremendous respect for you the reader, it provides you as closely as it possibly can with the actual minute-by-minute experience of the characters, and then allows you yourself to judge these characters, or better still, invites you not to judge them at all. This is why the novel is a revolutionary act of narrative: it renounces the whole apparatus of moral rectitude which supports almost every novel ever written, and instead gives you the characters exactly as they experience the world — allowing you to empathize before you judge.

You are holding in your hands a reprint of the very first edition of Ulysses. This is a reproduction of the original edition published by Sylvia Beach at her bookstore, Shakespeare and Co., Rue de l’Odeon, Paris, in 1922. Actual copies of that first edition are now among the rarest and most valuable volumes in the modernist rare books trade; and this reprint may possibly be the best value of any edition of Ulysses. There is a symmetry here that Joyce might have appreciated. To keep the original edition in print, for reasons that I will now explain, is a service to all of Joyce’s readers. First, however, note the best reason by far for making available a copy of this edition: of all the editions of the novel, it remains the most aesthetically pleasing, the most beautiful.

Within the seven-year saga of writing Ulysses, along with the high drama involved in getting it first published, is a tale of such determination, sheer fortitude, and the overcoming of odds that it deserves a memory-book as monument. Joyce originally envisioned what became Ulysses as a final short story for his collection Dubliners. As the final phrase of the novel indicates, it was written in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, between 1914 and 1921. Begun in Trieste, where the Joyces were a more or less impecunious young family and Joyce himself was a teacher of English, it was continued in Zurich, to which the Joyces, as holders of British passports, managed to move themselves for the duration of World War I. After the war, the family came to Paris on a visit, and remained; some of the novel was written in hotel rooms on the left bank with Joyce using a suitcase on his knees as a desk. Through this unsettled, disrupted life, it is a mark of Joyce’s massive determination that the novel got written. Above the disorder, Joyce wrote. It was as if the First World War, the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence in Dublin, the chaotic misrule of the Joyces’ own existence in a long list of flats, hotels and lodgings, all spurred him on. To read Joyce’s letters of these years, and the memoirs of his friends, is to trace how the experimentalism of each succeeding episode of the novel, the grand schema of correspondences, and the ways in which, time and again, the novel outdoes the brilliance it attained earlier, was all a dream of the baroque order of the literary manufactured above, and at the same time an eloquent correspondence to the confused comings and goings of the writer’s life. From this madly disrupted life came a superbly structured novel.

All of this, however, moved almost smoothly compared to the high drama which surrounded Ulysses’ possibilities for publication. Joyce’s attempts to publish both Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had prepared him for difficulties; in particular, the many twists in his long effort to publish Dubliners had left him feeling bitter. By the time he had written a good portion of Ulysses, he was already famous, but fame did not guarantee his work’s publication in an era of coteries, censorship, and scandal. While the book was being written, individual episodes were published in the U.S. in The Little Review, and in Britain in The Egoist. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editors of The Little Review, were tried for obscenity; Harriet Weaver turned The Egoist into the Egoist Press to publish Ulysses, but soon concluded that no British printer, for fear of British libel and obscenity laws, would take it on. At this apparently hopeless juncture, Sylvia Beach, the American owner of Shakespeare and Co., the expatriate bookstore in Paris, offered to publish the book in France, and Joyce cheerfully accepted. Ulysses would be sold by subscription; copies would have to be smuggled into the United States and Britain. Sylvia Beach recruited the firm of Maurice Darantiere, in Dijon, to set and print the work. Joyce demanded, and was given, multiple printer’s proofs, to which he added reams of corrections and new material. The first two copies of the book, one for Joyce and one for Shakespeare and Co., were delivered to Sylvia Beach by the conductor of the train from Dijon at 7 A.M. on the morning of February 2, 1922. It was Joyce’s fortieth birthday. Soon Beach, Joyce, and all at Shakespeare and Co. were busy dispatching copies to subscribers all over the world.

The drama of this big book was, however, only beginning. Ulysses was banned in both the United States and Britain. Moreover, the first edition, given the printer’s ignorance of Joycean English, the many corrections added by Joyce to the proofs, and the overall challenge of publication by an enterprising bookseller but amateur publisher, was replete with many thousands of errors. Joyce himself began preparing lists of these. The numerous editions since have worked, with varying degrees of success, to correct them. This work culminated in the 1980’s, when, with the new resources offered by computers, a group of scholars led by Hans Walter Gabler completed work on a ‘synoptic’ edition of Ulysses, eventually producing in 1984 an edition known as the Corrected Text. The avowed aim of this group was to review every surviving draft and edition of the book, discover in the case of every discrepancy or obvious error the original textual intention of the author, and thus produce a clean, and possibly perfect, text. This huge and utterly laudable effort resulted in an edition which was however immediately attacked, principally by John Kidd, for having introduced a considerable number of errors of its own. By now, there are a number of versions of the text in common circulation: the Corrected Text, now called The Gabler Edition, the new edition, corrected and reset, of 1961 from Random House, and a number of others. In this melee, the first edition, after all is said and done, is the one Joyce did approve, authorize, and enthusiastically put on sale, risks being forgotten. Hence the vital importance, amidst the clamor for authority of the editions backed by various experts, of keeping the original in print.

We might think of this edition of Ulysses as one thinks of the apparently unfinished slaves carved by Michelangelo. The point might be that it is their slightly unfinished rough surfaces, the trace of the improvisatory quality of their creation, which they refuse to hide, that is the very precondition of their intense aesthetic power. Might the same not be said of the original edition of Ulysses? When one considers the massive disruptions Joyce endured and overcame in writing it, the incredible good luck of its anomalous and heroic first publication, and, most of all, the way in which disruptive-ness, challenge, chance, fortitude, and an aesthetic of imperfection are precisely the very values (if one can speak of such) championed by the book and which it endlessly celebrates, then surely the dream of a perfect text is just that, and more, an impulse at odds with the very aesthetic of the work itself. Rather than wish for some perfect text that seems to invariably recede beyond the expert-editors’ grasp, we might see instead the first edition of the book as a magnificent, monumental punctum between the vagaries and massed challenges of the book’s writing, when it was in the care of its author, and the even more relentless attempts at subsequent righting by its publishers and editors, who quixotically think that they can improve on a masterpiece. In all of the twists and turns that have accompanied Ulysses since the day that Joyce dreamed it up, it is the original edition which stands as its great moment of triumph, when that first copy, carried north by the train conductor, was placed in Joyce’s hands. It is a facsimile of that edition which you are about to read. Stately... it begins. Read it, and enjoy.

ENDA DUFFY

SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY

12, Rue de l’Odéon, 12

PARIS

1922

THIS EDITION IS LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES : 100 COPIES (SIGNED) ON DUTCH HANDMADE PAPER NUMBERED FROM I TO 100 ; 150 COPIES ON VERGE D’ARCHES NUMBERED FROM 101 TO 250 ; 750 COPIES ON HANDMADE PAPER NUMBERED FROM 251 TO 1000.

The publisher asks the reader’s indulgence for typographical errors

unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances.

S. B.

I

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned :

— Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

— Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful Tesuit.

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

— Back to barracks, he said sternly.

He added in a preacher’s tone :

— For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.

He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.

— Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?

He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.

— The mockery of it, he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek.

He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet, laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered cheeks and neck.

Buck Mulligan’s gay voice went on.

— My name is absurd too : Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn’t it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?

He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:

— Will he come? The jejune jesuit.

Ceasing, he began to shave with care.

— Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.

— Yes, my love?

— How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?

Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.

— God, isn’t he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you’re not a gentleman. God, these bloody English. Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you have the real Oxford manner. He can’t make you out. 0, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knifeblade.

He shaved warily over his chin.

— He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his guncase?

— A woful lunatic, Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?

— I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don’t know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I’m not a hero, however. It he stays on here I am off.

Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razor blade. He hopped down from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.

— Scutter, he cried thickly.

He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen’s upper pocket, said:

— Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.

Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly. Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said:

— The bard’s noserag. A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can’t you?

He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair stirring slightly.

— God, he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it : a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstown.

— Our mighty mother, Buck Mulligan said.

He turned abruptly his great searching eyes from the sea to Stephen’s face.

— The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That’s why she won’t let me have anything to do with you.

— Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.

— You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I’m hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you...

He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips.

— But a lovely mummer, he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all.

He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coatsleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.

— Ah, poor dogsbody, he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?

— They fit well enough, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.

— The mockery of it, he said contentedly, secondleg they should be. God knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair stripe, grey. You’ll look spiffing in them. I’m not joking, Kinch. You look damn well when you’re dressed.

— Thanks, Stephen said. I can’t wear them if they are grey.

— He can’t wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers.

He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the smooth skin.

Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its smokeblue mobile eyes.

— That fellow I was with in the Ship last night, said Buck Mulligan says you have g. p. i. He’s up in Dottyville with Conolly Norman. Genera paralysis of the insane.

He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk.

— Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard.

Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack, hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.

— I pinched it out of the skivvy’s room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.

Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen’s peering eyes.

— The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you.

Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness :

— It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.

Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them.

— It’s not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly. God knows you have more spirit than any of them.

Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steel pen.

— Cracked lookingglass of a servant. Tell that to the oxy chap downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He’s stinking with money and thinks you’re not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it.

Cranly’s arm. His arm.

— And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I’m the only one that knows what you are. Why don’t you trust me more? What have you up your nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here I’ll bring down Seymour and we’ll give him a ragging worse than they gave Clive Kempthorpe.

Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe’s rooms. Palefaces: they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another, 0, I shall expire! Break the news to her gently, Aubrey! I shall die! With slit ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the table, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the tailor’s shears. A scared calf’s face gilded with marmalade. I don’t want to be debagged! Don’t you play the giddy ox with me!

Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold’s face, pushes his mower on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.

To ourselves... new paganism... omphalos.

— Let him stay, Stephen said. There’s nothing wrong with him except at night.

— Then what is it? Buck Mulligan asked impatiently. Cough it up. I’m quite frank with you. What have you against me now?

They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly.

— Do you wish me to tell you? he asked.

— Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don’t remember anything.

He looked in Stephen’s face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow, fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his eyes.

Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said:

— Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother’s death?

Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:

— What? Where? I can’t remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?

— You were making tea, Stephen said, and I went across the landing to get more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the drawing room. She asked you who was in your room.

— Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget.

— You said, Stephen answered, 0, it’s only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead.

A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck Mulligan’s cheek.

— Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that?

He shook his constraint from him nervously.

— And what is death, he asked, your mother’s or yours or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissecting room. It’s a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t kneel down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why? Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way. To me it’s all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning. She calls the doctor Sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it’s over. You crossed her last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don’t whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette’s. Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I didn’t mean to offend the memory of your mother.

He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly :

— I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.

— Of what, then? Buck Mulligan asked.

— Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.

— 0, an impossible person! he exclaimed.

He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post, gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grew dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt the fever of his cheeks.

A voice within the tower called loudly:

— Are you up there, Mulligan?

— I’m coming. Buck Mulligan answered.

He turned towards Stephen and said:

— Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola, Kinch, and come on down. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers.

His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level with the roof :

— Don’t mope over it all day, he said. I ’m inconsequent. Give up the moody brooding.

His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out or the stairhead :

And no more turn aside and brood

Upon love’s bitter mystery

For Fergus rules the brazen cars.

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus’ song: I sang it above in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen : love’s bitter mystery.

Where now?

Her secrets: old feather fans, tassled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the pantomine of Turko the terrible and laughed with others when he sang:

I am the boy

That can enjoy

Invisibility.

Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.

And no more turn aside and brood.

Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children’s shirts.

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.

Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!

No, mother. Let me be and let me live.

— Kinch ahoy!

Buck Mulligan’s voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul’s cry, heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words.

— Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is apologising for waking us last night. It’s all right.

— I’m coming, Stephen said, turning.

— Do, for Jesus’ sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our sakes.

His head disappeared and reappeared.

— I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it’s very clever. Touch him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.

— I get paid this morning, Stephen said.

— The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one.

— If you want it, Stephen said.

— Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We’ll have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent sovereigns.

He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of tune with a Cockney accent:

O, won’t we have a merry time,

Drinking whisky, beer and wine,

On coronation

Coronation day?

O, won’t we have a merry time

On coronation day?

Warm sunshine merrying over the sea. The nickel shavingbowl shone, forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there all day, forgotten friendship?

He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness, smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck. So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and yet the same. A servant too. A server of a servant.

In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan’s gowned form moved briskly about the hearth to and fro, hiding and revealing its yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor from the high barbacans : and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease ffoated, turning.

— We’ll be choked, Buck Mulligan said. Haines, open that door, will you?

Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open the inner doors.

- Have you the key? a voice asked.

— Dedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey Mack, I’m choked.

He howled without looking up from the fire:

— Kinch!

— It’s in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward.

The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the doorway, looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside him. Then he carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set them down heavily and sighed with relief.

— I’m melting, he said, as the candle remarked when... But hush. Not a word more on that subject. Kinch, wake up. Bread, butter, honey. Haines, come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts. Where’s the sugar? O, jay, there’s no milk.

Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet.

— What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come after eight.

— We can drink it black, Stephen said. There’s a lemon in the locker.

— 0, damn you and your Paris fads, Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove milk.

Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly:

— That woman is coming up with the milk.

— The blessings of God on you, Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his chair. Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here, I can’t go fumbling at the damned eggs. He hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three plates, saying:

— In nomine Pairis et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.

Haines sat down to pour out the tea.

— I’m giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do make strong tea, don’t you?

Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf said in an old woman’s wheedling voice:

— When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.

— By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.

Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling:

— So I do, Mars Cahill, says she. Begob, ma’am, says Mrs Cahill, God send you don’t make them in the one pot.

He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled on his knife.

— That’s folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.

He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his brows :

— Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan’s tea and water pot spoken of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?

— I doubt it, said Stephen gravely.

— Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray?

— I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the Mabinogion, Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann.

Buck Mulligan’s face smiled with delight.

— Charming, he said in a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming.

Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf :

— For old Mary Ann

She doesn’t care a damn.

But, hising up her petticoats...

The doorway was darkened by an entering form.

— The milk, sir.

— Come in, ma’am, Mulligan said, Kinch, get the jug.

An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen’s elbow.

— That’s a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God.

— To whom? Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ah, to be sure.

Stephen reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.

The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of the collector of prepuces.

— How much, sir? asked the old woman.

— A quart, Stephen said.

He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour.

— It is indeed, ma’am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups.

— Taste it, sir, she said.

He drank at her bidding.

— If we could only live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn’t have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust. horsedung and consumptives’ spits.

— Are you a medical student, sir? the old woman asked.

— I am, ma’am, Buck Mulligan answered.

Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman : me she slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there is of her but her woman’s unclean loins, of man’s flesh made not in God’s likeness the serpent’s prey. And to the loud voice that now bids her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes.

— Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.

— Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.

Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.

— Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?

— I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from west, sir?

— I am an Englishman, Haines answered.

— He’s English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak Irish in Ireland.

— Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I’m ashamed I don’t speak the language myself. I’m told it’s a grand language by them that knows.

— Grand is no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Wonderful entirely. Fill us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, ma’am?

— No, thank you, sir, the old woman said, slipping the ring of the milkcan on her forearm and about to go.

Haines said to her:

— Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn’t we?

Stephen filled again the three cups.

— Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it’s seven mornings a pint at two pence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.

Buck Mulligan sighed and having filled his mouth with a crust thickly buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his trouser pockets.

— Pay up and look pleasant, Haines said to him smiling.

Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the thick rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in his fingers and cried:

— A miracle!

He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying:

— Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you I give.

Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand.

— We’ll owe twopence, he said.

Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good morning, sir.

She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan’s tender chant:

— Heart of my heart, where it more,

More would be laid at your feet.

He turned to Stephen and said:

— Seriously, Dedalus. I’m stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty.

— That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your national library today.

— Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.

He turned to Stephen and asked blandly:

— Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?

Then he said to Haines:

— The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.

— All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream, Stephen said as he let honey trickle over a slice of the loaf.

Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke:

— I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.

Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit. Conscience. Yet here’s a spot.

— That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol of Irish art is deuced good.

Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen’s foot under the table and said with warmth of tone:

— Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines.

— Well, I mean it, Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just thinking of it when that poor old creature came in.

— Would I make money by it? Stephen asked.

Haines laughed and, as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of the hammock, said:

— I don’t know, I’m sure.

He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen and said with coarse vigour :

— You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?

— Well? Stephen said. The problem is to get money. From whom? From the milkwoman or from him. It’s a toss up, I think.

— I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.

— I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him.

Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen’s arm.

— From me, Kinch, he said.

In a suddenly changed tone he added:

— To tell you the God’s truth I think you’re right. Damn all else they are good for. Why don’t you play them as I do? To hell with them all. Let us get out of the kip.

He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying resignedly:

— Mulligan is stripped of his garments.

He emptied his pockets on to the table.

— There’s your snotrag, he said.

And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie, he spoke to them, chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. Agenbite of inwit. God, we’ll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and green boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of his talking hands.

— And there’s your Latin quarter hat, he said.

Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the doorway:

— Are you coming, you fellows?

— I’m ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out, Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out with grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow:

— And going forth he met Butterly.

Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket.

At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked:

— Did you bring the key?

— I have it, Stephen said, preceding them.

He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.

— Down, sir. How dare you, sir.

Haines asked:

— Do you pay rent for this tower?

— Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said.

— To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder.

They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last:

— Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?

— Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on the sea. But ours is the omphalos.

— What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen.

— No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I’m not equal to Thomas Aquinas and the fiftyfive reasons he has made to prop it up. Wait till I have a few pints in me first.

He turned to Stephen, saying as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his primrose waistcoat:

— You couldn’t manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you?

— It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.

— You pique my curiosity, Haines said aimiably. Is it some paradox?

— Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes. It’s quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.

— What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?

Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending in loose laughter, said to Stephen’s ear:

— 0, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father!

— We’re always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is rather long to tell.

Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.

— The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said.

— I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. That beetles o’er his base into the sea, isn’t it?

Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant towards Stephen but did not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires.

— It’s a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.

Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent. The seas’ ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the smokeplume of the mailboat, vague on the bright skyline, and a sail tacking by the Muglins.

— I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused. The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.

Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had suddenly withrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved a doll’s head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:

— I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.

My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird.

With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree,

So here’s to disciples and Calvary.

He held up a forefinger of warning.

— If anyone thinks that I amn’t divine

He’ll get no free drinks when I’m making the wine

But have to drink water and wish it were plain

That I make when the wine becomes water again.

He tugged swiftly at Stephen’s ashplant in farewell and, running forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted:

— Goodbye, now, goodbye. Write down all I said

And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.

What’s bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly

And Olivet’s breezy... Goodbye, now, goodbye.

He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury’s hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief birdlike cries.

Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and said:

— We oughtn’t to laugh, I suppose. He’s rather blasphemous. I’m not a believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it somehow, doesn’t it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?

— The ballad of Joking Jesus, Stephen answered.

— O, Haines said,

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?

[tommi180744 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Inside the cover of this Second Hand copy a previous owner has written "June 2013, Got to page 12 Only". In some way it is the ultimate literary critique.I first read Joyce's book as a callow youth in my first year at Uni: Couldn't get into it - a way too intellectual, too self-indulgently, unleashing that 'stream of consciousness' prose style for my patience & understanding in that era of my life.Bought & read a copy in my thirties (decades ago) - it made much more sense, but there were still whole passages of Joyce's lyrical gallivanting with the English language that still had me perplexed & irritated.So, here am I (retired, time to take an in-depth, considered view on the alleged masterpiece) and read its 680 pages: Verdict - it's a damn clever piece of writing that really stretches the boundaries of word-play and its visionary erudition challenges almost every concept of what constitutes a literary novel - Joyce is extremely talented & this tome about one day bristles with extraneous vivid idiosyncratic bouts of words in scenes that need the most intense concentration to make sense of them: Is all that effort worthwhile? Is it genius at work?I'm not clever enough to make a judgement: I do know it figures in the top25 of most 'great' literature lists - BUT, for me it doesn't make my personal top50 'great reads' & there I suppose is something of the difference between the literary critics and the much wider, less intellectual readership of novels - if a reader struggles to make head or tail with many of the passages then that is NOT a 'great' read and nor is it necessarily an important literary read.James Joyce's Ulysses can be judged, I suspect, as TOO CLEVER BY HALF for many of us!

[savvyescapades · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It has taken something like a month, but Ulysses is finally done. I have conquered one of the Literary Behemoths (with Moby Dick and Middlemarch often considered as the other 2 of the Great Big Scary 3).Many aspects of this book are very, very challenging, and in my opinion you may want a little exposure to Joyce (like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) before you attempt this book. The other thing I strongly suggest is the new book Ulysses and Us by Declan Kiberd. Kiberd is essentially THE Joycean and spells out important literary concepts for each chapter of Ulysses.There are so many things the book brings up, but my personal favorite discussion has been the balance between art and obscenity within the eyes of the law.I remember touring NYU when I was between junior and senior year of high school. Right there, in the middle of the Art Department main office, was a black and white photograph of a woman sitting on the toilet. I was shocked. She had a faraway look in her eyes, and she was clearly thinking about something else-- the grocery list, all the things she had to do, something overwhelming. I was... confused but mentally intrigued. I had never seen anyone on the toilet before, and it's not something I actively think about other people doing. Ulysses is a lot like that. Almost as soon as Leopold Bloom, the main character, is introduced, we see him on the toilet. It's not particularly gross or graphic, but it's a private moment and there the reader is-- hovering. The book spans the course of one day, June 16th, and we see Leopold do pretty much everything. He eats, farts, has lustful thoughts... sure, some of the lustful thoughts might be creepy out of context, but in the 700 pages of context given, the reader becomes aware that this persistent lust is mostly due to the fact that he and his wife don't get down to the hanky-panky very much since their infant son died ten years ago.Joyce shows every aspect of life in such away that the reader realizes exactly what it it to be a human, full of conflict, obsessive thoughts and bodily needs (that goes back to the eating and farting). Just be prepared, because you have to find that beauty among a load of experimental styles and prose that can get very heavy at times.

[jvioland_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This is one of the most famous frauds in publishing history. I can only assume Joyce wrote this work to hoodwink the gullible. It has only brief flashes of brilliance amidst an inky morass of words.

[fuzzy_patters · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Did I like Ulysses? I tagged it "brilliant" and "amazing", so yes I liked it. At times it felt like slow torture until I slowly found myself becoming immersed in Joyce's mind, and I began to love it. I'm not sure where to begin about what it was about this novel that made it so wonderful. Was it the many layers of Stephen as Telemachus and Leopold as Odysseus while Stephen is also Hamlet and Leopold is almost a Hungarian-Irish-Jewish Christ. Was it the witty puns such as, "Where man hath a will, Anne hath-a-way," when Stephen explains his theory on Shakespeare? Was it the brilliance of the writing when the narrator gives birth to the English language at the same time as Mrs. Purefoy gives birth to her child? In the end, what I will take away from this novel is how Joyce made me love Leopold, laugh at Stephen, and even pity Molly a bit. The underlying novel and characterization beneath all of the brilliant writing is what will stick with me long after finishing the novel. I just finished it five minutes ago and can already say that I love this novel.

[jgrann_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An impressive multifaceted novel that left be underwhelmed and often confused. The novel touches on many universal human conditions (parenthood, love, loyalty, marriage, friendship, society, group membership), but often in an oblique and obscure manner that requires much reflection and integration. If reading, definitely use a guide to reveal some of the novel's depth. I enjoyed listening to the Superstar Teacher's Ulysses lectures after each chapter more than reading the novel itself.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

But why, when almost everyone who has heard of this book and many others who have read Ulysses, would so many say it is "difficult"? Perhaps it is a difficulty that is an inescapable aspect of the human condition and as such, when presented as literature, is accessible to humans. Perhaps it is a difficulty that may be overcome by simply reading the text, enjoying the story, and waiting for the moments, christened "Eureka" moments by Claudia Traudt (Instructor in the Basic Program of Liberal Education at The University of Chicago), where the text will become more understandable, part of your soul, if not less difficult. It reminds me of my own experience reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, another notoriously difficult book. After at least three readings and countless partial attempts one summer I found myself finally "in the zone" with the text suddenly alive and the voices of the characters, their streaming consciousnesses, clearer than ever before. Eureka!This takes work and both serious reading of and listening to the text. It is a text that echoes and reechoes Homer's Odyssey. One example of this jumped out at me when references to the sea from Ulysses brought to my mind the image of Odysseus sitting on the shore of Calypso's island pining for his home. The result of reading and rereading this great text is that its fundamental humaneness comes to the fore and you can celebrate the greatness that is Joyce's Ulysses.

[eadieb-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have been listening to Ulysses off and on for 6 months and I must say that I did enjoy it very much. I may not have understood most of what I was reading but I did enjoy the poetry, the music, the monologues and the characters. It was funny, sad, lyrical, crude, sensitive and blunt. It is a novel that should be read many times and hopefully when I read it again, it will make a little more sense to me. If you haven't read it yet, I suggest you give it a try.

[matthew.ducmanas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Humbling. Exhausting. Sometimes exhilarating. Often beautiful. This is a novel that puts you in your place. It tries your patience and requires you accept that you'll go large stretches without understanding what's happening. Eyes will glaze over. Attention will wander. But it will reward the reader. There will be points at which the reader will marvel at how deftly Joyce twists and turns the English language. The humanity that busts out of this thing is impressive. The second to last 'chapter' alone is an incredibly powerful piece of writing. Perhaps a bit too erudite for its own good, Ulysses still manages to captivate as often as it obfuscates.

[yvonne.sevignykaiser · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Read this to work my way through 100 Greatest Novels List. Most interesting walk through the streets of Dublin.

[cecrow · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Thoughts made narrative; Odyssey-reflecting themes, coupled with a different narrative style for every episode and a boatload of rhetorical devices (did Joyce leave out any?); reversions to historical literary styles; obscure references to Catholic and Irish and Jewish tradition, Irish politics and history, and a wide scattering of other things ... 700 pages of this, and still we cover no more than eighteen hours of a rather ordinary day in Dublin: June 16th, 1904. An absolutely brilliant novel, but I needed help to understand it. I relied on the Wikipedia outline and Sparknotes chapter summaries, two among many references available. Much of this novel is written in the language of the daydreamer, not restricted to interior thoughts that move a plot forward but open to capturing every thought that might pass through the consciousness of these characters as they go about their day. The sheer volume and range of this delivery turns a nothing-special morning and afternoon into an epic. Joyce is lambasted for writing over most people's heads, but he isn't doing it in a bullying or non-inclusive way - else why are there enough body function references to entertain a toddler? Some of his characters' thoughts, particularly Stephen's, can be learned in the extreme but are interspersed with the most casual, mundane passing fancies. Everything and nothing is important. All people are capable of every kind of thought up and down the scale of decorum, and all of us are riding that scale on a daily basis. These are the most realistic characters ever put to paper, and I'm ready to believe nobody will ever do it better.What I don't believe is that Ulysses is worthwhile reading for anyone who doesn't come to it of their own volition. Forget the critics, the professors who are paid to help you appreciate it. It's only good reading if you think it is. Approach Joyce via Dubliners and Portrait first to see if you can enjoy him at all, and catch up on Homer's epics. If those are a hassle or boring (and whether you understand them is beside the point), don't trouble yourself any further because all you're going to miss here is an exercise in frustration with his madness (exactly why I'm not going to read the Wake). But if you liked all of that and what Joyce can do, his prior work pales next to the technical feats he pulled off with Ulysses.

[pointsman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It’s getting harder and harder to defend this book. Every Bloomsday, I open a newspaper here in Ireland and it’s an all round consensus from the hacks that Ulysses is overblown, pseudo-intellectual garbage. And here’s another fact that makes this “consensus” harder to stomach: these aren’t the tabloids. In a country as small as Ireland, where some of the great writers have been born, raised and educated, disparaging their works is something of an inane national pastime. It is, of course, blatantly unfair and juvenile anti-intellectual rhetoric, but it goes without criticism from the vast majority of Irish people because, like most affluent and technologically up to date citizens in the West, reading and other serious intellectual pursuits are deign to the margins of culture, simply because they require an effort of the mind.It’s not uncommon to hear people say when Ulysses is mentioned (and I’ve heard many people say this) that no one has actually read Ulysses and everyone who says they have is just a poser, an intellectual wannabe. It’s insane, but then again, trying to defend a book like Ulysses is, to some people, like trying to show that a lunatic is sane. Having read Ulysses multiple times (because that’s how you get the most out of it, as it so happens), I’m pretty sure I didn’t spend all those hours admiring the typography of my particular edition. Reading Ulysses is a joy. I don’t hesitate to say that. My first reading of the book was enjoyable, but it didn’t compare to my constant revisits to it. A joke or a passage that I wasn’t able to appreciate the first time round is rediscovered and Ulysses grew on me even more. And humour does abound in this book such as this typically Joycean digression:“The fashionable international world attended en masse this afternoon at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash, Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Clyde Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa San, Miss Rachel Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall, Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis graced the ceremony by their presence.”As you’ve probably noticed from most of the negative reviews below, Ulysses is an easy target. Too easy, I should think. In an age of culture illiteracy and a shrinking reading population in most Western countries, a book like Ulysses becomes the cultural pariah of the age. Like the concept of the Wandering Jew it examines so passionately, Ulysses finds it self as an artefact wandering the cultural waste land, periodically receiving kindness from its admirers, but mostly suffering at the hands of philistines, knaves and ignoramuses. An elitist jibe? You could consider it that, I don’t doubt that one would, but you could also consider something else on my side of the argument. What can a written review of this book give that you would probably not be able to receive from the opinion of the man on the street? The answer: Quotes. That’s right, quotes; the simple act of previewing the text of the book in question to the reader makes a review more valuable than what you might hear word-of-mouth. But perusing the negative reviews of Ulysses from various sites, most ultimately end up resembling the word-of-mouth about this book. And here another problem lurksMisinformation swarms around this book. The usually rigmarole that reviewers of this book have to go through is the description, more often than not, boiled down to couple of misleading bullet points. First: Ulysses is written in the stream-of-consciousness technique. This is a very misleading description. Only the first half of the Nausicaa chapter and the Penelope chapter, with Gerty MacDowell and Molly Bloom featuring respectively, are written in the stream-of consciousness technique. What most readers refer to as the stream-of consciousness sections of the book are in fact Interior monologues. These are typically Leopold Bloom’s thoughts (others are heard throughout the rest of the book) and are made up of short, choppy staccato sentences representing those thoughts, finished or unfinished:“By lorries along sir John Rogerson's quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill lane, Leask's the linseed crusher, the postal telegraph office. Could have given that address too. And past the sailors' home. He turned from the morning noises of the quayside and walked through Lime street. By Brady's cottages a boy for the skins lolled, his bucket of offal linked, smoking a chewed fagbutt. A smaller girl with scars of eczema on her forehead eyed him, listlessly holding her battered caskhoop. Tell him if he smokes he won't grow. O let him! His life isn't such a bed of roses. Waiting outside pubs to bring da home. Come home to ma, da. Slack hour: won't be many there. He crossed Townsend street, passed the frowning face of Bethel. El, yes: house of: Aleph, Beth. And past Nichols' the undertaker. At eleven it is. Time enough. Daresay Corny Kelleher bagged the job for O'Neill's. Singing with his eyes shut. Corny. Met her once in the park. In the dark. What a lark. Police tout. Her name and address she then told with my tooraloom tooraloom tay. O, surely he bagged it. Bury him cheap in a whatyoumaycall. With my tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom.”It should also be made absolutely clear: Ulysses is written in a vast array of styles ranging from phases of prose poetry to minute realism to precisely rendered scenes of dialogue, and everything in between, including a humorously erudite question-and-answer section:“The visible signs of antesatisfaction?An approximate erection: a solicitous adversion: a gradual elevation: a tentative revelation: a silent contemplation.Then?He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on eachplump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.”Second: Ulysses is a rehash of Homer’s Odyssey. Eh, yes and no. Ulysses is obviously a rework of Homer’s masterpiece, but it diverts greatly from it and stretches far wider right into the depths of European literature and back:“--If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre?”After writing an essay called “The Literature of Exhaustion”, the author John Barth was accused of claiming the ‘Death’ of the novel, basically, stating that everything that could be said and done with the novel as a form had been done. Barth in fact believed the opposite. In follow up to that essay, Barth wrote “The Literature of Replenishment” which pointed out a very satisfying fact: Don Quixote, a book considered the one of the first properly definable novels of Western civilisation, is itself a rehash, a parody and a homage to the chivalric prose works that came before it. In essence, literature finds its replenishment from that which precedes it and points towards the future. Don Quixote is replenishment literature and so too is Ulysses.To read Ulysses does not require a knowledge of the entirety of Western literature, as many of the people who have read and enjoyed Ulysses will testify to. What it does require, though, is an appreciation of the breathtaking capacity of the English language. From there -- Enjoy.

[hashford_2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I read a lot of British classics in my teens and twenties, but am ashamed to say that, somehow, I missed James Joyce’s books. So I requested this audio adaptation with the intention of redressing the balance, and also hoping that I would find the “dramatised reading” more accessible / easier to digest than reading the novel in book format.This BBC Radio 4 production is described as a “dramatised reading”; neither the Amazon product description, nor the CD box say whether it is abridged or not, but going by the fact that there are only 8 CDs and the book is over 700 pages long, I have to assume it is.Seamus Heaney’s enthusiastic introduction whetted my appetite, and I eagerly started listening. However, I struggled with the lack of any apparent plot and the convoluted randomness of the prose. It wasn’t so much the “stream of consciousness” style that got to me, but that I would find myself thinking “why am I listening to this?” & “how does it relate to the last bit?”. I didn’t expect it to come easy (everyone knows Ulysses is a challenge), and audio isn’t always the easiest medium, so I listened to every section several times. That did give me a sense of being there – Joyce can certainly paint wonderful word pictures – but I have to admit, that sadly, I gave up half way through when I realised that I was avoiding picking up my ipod!I don’t think I would criticise the BBC Radio 4 production – which was superbly professional (as you would expect from the BBC) – or the reading. And this is why I have given it 2*s rather than one. What I will say, however, is that I don’t think this is the easiest way for someone who hasn’t read Joyce at all (and who isn’t particularly familiar with Homer’s Odyssey either) to approach this book. But, as one of the other reviewers has said, I think this audio presentation will make a brilliant companion to the book.

[the7ken7petersen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Some people use audio books more than the printed version. I find, in general, that I prefer to read a book myself. There are few incidents of books that are improved by another person's voice in my brain: this, however, is one such.I first read Ulysses many moons ago at the age of eighteen. It was one of those books which I desperately wanted to like but, I didn't get it. I knew that there was greatness here, I could sense it but, it was illusive. The more I looked, the less that I could see it. Over the years, I have, occasionally, picked up the book and tried again, always without success; then, I heard this wonderful reading and everything dropped into place. The book may be laid out like a novel, but it is really a long poem. Every word is necessary for the rhythm of the piece and the gentle Irish burr makes the work sing. I get it! I can now truly appreciate the genius of Joyce and, the ultimate compliment to any book, is that this has encouraged me to look out copies of Joyce's other works and that, now the scales have dropped from my eyes, I can drink in his writing with the joy that I so wanted to feel when I first came across them. Where was this audio book when I needed it for my street cred?

[tapefreak · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Ulysses is the most overrated book in history. I've tried reading it maybe three times, mostly at the behest of some poet or writer friend. Each attempt ends with me tossing the book across the room. Perhaps the fact that it has drawn such a strong reaction from me makes the book "great art" but this one's gonna have to wait in a long, long line before I ever get to it again.

[aethercowboy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ulysses by James Joyce is one of those books that English majors have been arguing about since it was first published. “What’s it really about?” they ask as they conject.Many agree, though, that it’s more or less about a day (June 16) in the life of one Leopold Bloom, with obvious allegories to the Odyssey as well as to Hamlet.But is it good? Well, I suppose that depends on who you ask. And I suppose since you’ve made it this far, you’re asking me. So I’ll tell you: It’s good.While not necessarily as readable as, say, most novels out these days, Ulysses, like other works by Joyce, present the reader with a field of varying terrain, and within that field are hidden several Easter eggs (and within those eggs are hidden further Easter eggs). So, while you could read it on the surface and get a rather confusing story, you could drill deeper to find text hidden in the flesh and bone of this piece, and further to find text in the flesh and bone of that text.I don’t recommend Ulysses for everybody. In fact, most people can probably live full, enriched lives without even reading anything beyond the title and byline. I do recommend Ulysses, though, if you want to be challenged to the point of frustration while reading a book. Much like in running or lifting weights, Ulysses gives you that “good kinda pain” for your brain.

[jayne_charles_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This was such a tough read, I had only the flimsiest sense of what the author was trying to say. His use of language may be groundbreaking and highly original, but if the story gets lost can it really be said to be better than a book that tells a good story in an entertaining way tht everyone can understand?

[chriswildman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Be warned: the hero of this book is the reader! Strictly for the adventurous. But what adventures: especially into language itself, in all its musical glory!Thanks Phollando for your comparative analysis. You're right of course but can we expect another James Joyce any more than another Shakespeare? Joyce is possibly unsurpassable in the novel.

[vivalaerin · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I can definitely respect Joyce as an author, but I just LOATHE the stream-of-conscious technique! And Leopold Bloom makes a great character, but Stephen Dedalus is such a whiny mess. I always knew I wanted to read this to say that I have, but it was like a punishment. Modernism is easily my LEAST favorite movement. James Joyce is amazingly talented and I can appreciate his impact on literature, but this book just doesn't do it for me.(Sidenote: I much prefer Dubliners.)

[phoebereading · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Uneven.At first I considered leaving my review at that. Joyce would get the humor, I figured. But I feel obligated to write something of substance since I just completed a book of such bulk & infamy. So I'll say it again: Ulysses is uneven.There's a point in humor where repetition itself, usually one iteration past the point of reasonableness, is funny. Repeat yourself once more and it's hilarious. Repeat yourself for another eighty pages and it becomes tiresome and self-indulgent. Almost every chapter of Ulysses is like this. A few of Joyce's jokes are pretty hilarious. He obviously takes great joy in wordplay. But they can't all be gems, especially when there's so many of them. Some of the humor falls flat because we can only read it out of its cultural context now--I'm thinking specifically of Chapter 14 (the "Oxen in the Sun" chapter if you give a damn about the various scholarly schemata; I really don't), whose joke hinges on our being educated just like Joyce was. Explanations of why it's supposed to be hilarious don't really help--explaining jokes really only ever deflates them.As a novel, and I'm a bit loathe to call an autobiographical work without a single truly fictional character a novel, it's all right. The plot isn't exactly riveting and Joyce often loses his reader. The brightest spot in the experience of reading Ulysses was in the exploration of Leopold Bloom (ironically the most fictional character here, and even that's debatable), who is one of the most sympathetic and well-rendered characters I've ever encountered. I think it's impossible to slog through Joyce's book without feeling some tenderness towards his Odysseus. On the other hand, his Telemachus, Stephen Dedalus, is unbearable, immature, facile, and unsympathetic. It's commonly accepted that Stephen is Joyce; because of this, it can be difficult to tell whether we're supposed to view Stephen as a self-parody or as a sympathetic character. If the aim was for the reader to feel some empathy for Stephen, Joyce failed there, at least in my case. Maybe if I was a pretentious boy I'd understand.A note on the "hardness" of Ulysses: like any work that includes stream of consciousness passages, it's best read carefully but quickly. I didn't find it particularly difficult to understand, but then I've done fine with other supposedly incomprehensible, fairly poetically styled novels (Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski comes to mind). As I said, Joyce often takes his stylistic jokes too far, and some of the chapters feel interminable and exceedingly boring, not necessarily because of the style but because of the content, or the lack of interesting content. Four hundred some odd pages in, I was the most engaged during the fifteenth chapter, when stream of consciousness was abandoned for a play format, and even that went on entirely too long. Did Joyce have an editor other than himself? He could have used one. Anyway, I had a Ulysses guidebook (The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires) and eventually gave up on it--rather than focusing on plot, it dawdled on symbolism and those damned schematas. My feeling is that if a book requires supplementary material for it to be understandable on a basic level, than it's somehow failed; the truth is that Ulysses doesn't require this unless you believe that every word is fraught with overwrought symbolism and meaning. I don't. Read Ulysses carefully and methodically (two chapters a week is manageable) and you'll do fine.So, anyway, yeah. Uneven.

[endersreads · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Begad!, what a novel to have to write a review for! Robert Anton Wilson got me interested in James Joyce. Throughout "Ulysses" I had little notion as to the linear sequence of events, though as I progressed, I did become somewhat acclimated to the setting, characters, and their stories. I was more fascinated by the seemingly subjective soliloquies; the potently magical meter; Joyce's amaranthine repertoire of words. Like hallucinogens, truffles, and moon bathing, the experience of "Ulysses" is quite hard to put into words. I argue that the story of Bloomsday—that so many annotations, critiques, study guides, etcetera, elaborate on—is not the most important thing to understand. It is the way in which the story is told that is important to experience, and that in itself is widely varied and extremely 'novel'.During much of the novel I experienced a great number of synchronicities in waking life. This is likely, in part, due to the immense number of subjects divulged upon in "Ulysses". "Ulysses" could easily be a novel in which one could study... quite a very long time. If you are one of such mind, I suggest picking up several foreign language dictionaries to aide you in your reading of "Ulysses". As I mentioned, there is a plethora of books to go along with "Ulysses". I own a few and may even read one one day, should I get bored.In the end, I feel a bit saddened. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, consumed by their intellects, plagued by their desires. Molly, consumed by her desires and too stupid to be plagued by anything but hemorrhoids and old age...Life is tragic. James Joyce died of a perforated ulcer, lapsing into a coma after surgery, to wake, and die at 2 a.m. on 13 January 1941. Why are we here? To evolve intellectually, sexually, spiritually? Yes.Read this novel and be affected greatly in a mysterious way and an obvious way.

[lindenstein · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Though this book has received some relatively low ratings, I feel the need to defend the book after having spent 6 weeks reading it.Ulysses isn't a book to recommend to someone who isn't a "reader;" it's a difficult book, and it would be extremely difficult to follow what is happening if you didn't have some background (we used the Ulysses Annotated to guide us, a book that is just as big as Ulysses itself).What Ulysses IS, however, is a book which recasts one of the most famous heroes of all mythology as the prototypical everyman. The story of the Odyssey, of Ulysses, Odysseus and Penelope, is recast, and Joyce attempts to Hellenize Ireland. That is only half of his project, however. The other half of the project is his attempt to "write a book that professors will be discussing for 200 years." It's nearing the 100 year mark (it will be in 2022) and I think it's safe to say that Joyce accomplished what he set out to do: when the time is taken to really understand what the book is saying, not to just read through it in an attempt to cross it off of some list, it becomes clear why this book is on the top of lists, and why it's so important, even if it is extremely frustrating at times.

[rosietypewriter · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant book but very difficult to begin with, it's like Joyce is taunting you with an almost-story but witholds information so you're never quite sure who's speaking or why etc. I ended up reading each chapter as if it were a short story, then finding links between different chapters. This seemed to work better for me than trying to read it as a linear narrative because. Definitely a keeper, will be re-reading it again in a while.

[lady_lazarus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Yes, Ulysses is all that has been said about it, great piece of literature and just difficult enough for the reader is required at least some effort to get something out of it - getting it all would be impossible, so do not bother too much. Maybe it was too difficult or maybe I didn't try hard enough, but although I got the "greatness", Ulysses didn't touch me as anything else than part of the history of humankind. But I'm willing to try again, maybe after twenty years.(I just have to add that I read the Finnish translation and although Ulysses is considered "impossible to translate", Pentti Saarikoski's translation was beautiful and he was in his element playing with the vocabulary and language, and I got the feeling that translating Ulysses wasn't even difficult for him, he simply enjoyed it too much to let the difficulties bother him.)

[buffalogr · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A jumble of words that make no sense at all. Did not communicate with me.

[enriquefreeque · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I loathe Ulysses the way that most sensible folks loathe the very existence of Bernie Madoff. It's an all encompassing and consuming loathing leaving no room for mercy. In fact, if I were The Blob or a Killer Tomato on the attack, I'd consume every volume of Ulysses extant (and Bernie Madoff) with my acidic, dissolving loathing. I wish the book were still banned and my access to it summarily and arbitrarily denied by Big Brother, so that I wouldn't have wasted my precious, irreplaceable time and energy reading it, is how deep my Ulysses loathing goes. Yes, it's true, reading Ulysses (even just half of this poo poo) feels like being disemboweled (or at least like having bad, painful gas; and that's bad, painful gas when you're stuck inside somewhere with other people and it would be too impolite - even as painful as it is holding it in - to let it rip. Oh yeah?! You think that's tacky and tasteless? Well if the "genius," Joyce, can make fart jokes in Ulysses left and right, why can't anybody else do the same in describing his flatulent, nauseating tome?Worse, reading Ulysses leaves one feeling like they've been had, scammed, rused, abused, conned, pawned, cheated, excreted, duped, nuked, swindled, swizzled, diddled, belittled, hustled, hoaxed, stiffed, tricked, taken to the cleaners or taken for a ride, ripped off royally of everything you've worked hard for your whole life and hold dear. How you like that list, Joyce, you MOTHERF%$#!R?Less painful indeed, having your wisdom teeth extracted with pliers by an orang-utang...and without novocaine, than trying to read Ulysses first page to last.I hated it.

[ashryan_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I hated Ulysses...and not just because it's practically unreadable. I actually did manage to more or less read it all the way through, in one long twelve hour night, which I can never have back now. And I don't know about all the nuances and subtleties that it supposedly contains, but the basic thrust of it was clear enough.Ulysses is basically an unbridled attack on the very ideas of heroism, romantic love and sexual fulfillment, and objective literary expression. This is made especially clear by the title's reference to The Odyssey of Homer (Ulysses being the Latin name for the Greek Odysseus)---and the unmistakably unbridgeable contrast between the two books, both in terms of the content of the stories, and their modes of expression.Odysseus is a great man, King of Crete, husband of Penelope, father of Telemachus, and a hero of the Trojan war. The Odyssey chronicles his heroic ten-year voyage to return home from the war to his wife and son. Ulysses, on the other hand, is about an ordinary day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a bumbling buffoon, impotent both in life and in bed. In Homer's view, man is a heroic, even God-like, being---and woman is more than a match for him. In Joyce's, man is metaphysically ridiculous, especially in matters of sex, and woman is his equal in patheticalness.And then there is the literary style Joyce employs to spew forth this sewage. While Homer's epic poem takes the form of strictly-metered verse, Joyce switches literary mode, from straight prose to dialogue to stream of consciousness (among other things), almost at random throughout the work, though it seems to degenerate more and more toward the end.If the point of Ulysses were to break free of outmoded and arbitrary restrictions of classicism, it would be admirable. But that's not what Joyce is doing. He doesn't offer a positive alternative to replace the Homeric values (which I think are genuine values) upon which he's pissing. He's pissing on them just to piss on them. It's pure nihilism, and it's disgusting.Ulysses is obscene, not because of any language it uses or its obsession with sex, but because of its thematic content---the ideas it conveys. The book expresses nothing less than an all-consuming hatred of man and any positive values to which he aspires. And that is why I think Ulysses is one of the most vile and evil books ever written.