Ulysses

Ulysses is the masterpiece of James Joyce and the most celebrated, and most notorious, novel of the twentieth century. It follows three Dubliners through a single ordinary day, Thursday 16 June 1904, from eight in the morning to the small hours of the next night: Stephen Dedalus, the proud, brooding young artist of Joyce’s Portrait, now twenty-two, back from Paris, haunted by guilt over his mother’s death; Leopold Bloom, thirty-eight, a mild, curious, humane advertising canvasser of Hungarian-Jewish descent, an outsider in Catholic Dublin, who knows that his wife will be unfaithful to him that afternoon; and Molly Bloom, his wife, a sensual concert singer, whose midnight monologue ends the book. Joyce built the novel on a parallel with Homer’s Odyssey: Bloom is Ulysses (Odysseus) wandering through Dublin’s streets, pubs, newspaper offices, cemetery, library, beach, maternity hospital and brothel; Stephen is Telemachus seeking a father; Molly is Penelope, though hardly faithful. Each of its eighteen episodes is written in a different style.

First published in Paris in 1922, banned for obscenity in Britain and America, it was hailed and reviled: T. S. Eliot called it “the most important expression which the present age has found”; Virginia Woolf at first thought it “the book of a self-taught working man… underbred”; the Sporting Times called it “the Scandal of Ulysses”. It is now regularly ranked the greatest novel in English of the century.

At a glance

Written	1914–1921, in Trieste, Zurich and Paris
Published	Serialised in part in The Little Review (1918–20); in book form 2 February 1922 by Shakespeare and Company, Paris
Banned	In the US until Judge John Woolsey’s 1933 ruling that it was not obscene; in Britain until 1936
Setting	Dublin, 16–17 June 1904
Homeric chapter titles	Joyce used them privately (Telemachus, Nestor, Proteus, Calypso… Penelope) but removed them from the published book

The day

At eight in the morning, on the roof of the Martello tower at Sandycove on Dublin Bay, where he lodges, Stephen Dedalus is mocked by his flatmate Buck Mulligan, a plump, irreverent medical student, who begins the book: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” Mulligan parodies the Mass with his shaving bowl, calls the sea “the snotgreen sea… the scrotumtightening sea”, and reproaches Stephen for refusing to kneel and pray at his mother’s deathbed. Stephen remembers his mother appearing to him in a dream, “her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood”. An English visitor, Haines, is staying; Stephen, who pays the rent, realises that Mulligan, the “usurper”, will take the key. He resolves not to return.

At ten, Stephen teaches a history lesson at a boys’ school in Dalkey and is paid by the headmaster, Mr Deasy, a pompous Ulster Protestant who lectures him on thrift and blames the Jews for England’s decline. “History,” Stephen says, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” At eleven, he walks alone on Sandymount Strand, thinking in a dense, allusive interior monologue about perception, philosophy, his family and the sea: “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.”

Then the novel goes back to eight o’clock and to a different man. “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” In his kitchen at 7 Eccles Street, he makes breakfast for his wife, talks to his cat (“Mkgnao!”), goes out to buy a pork kidney from a Jewish butcher, and brings Molly her tea and toast in bed. A letter has come for her from Blazes Boylan, a flashy concert promoter who is organising her concert tour — and who will visit that afternoon at four; Bloom knows they will become lovers, and spends the day avoiding thinking about it, and avoiding going home. Molly asks him what “metempsychosis” means. He eats the kidney, burns it, goes to the outdoor privy and reads a prize story in a magazine. Bloom’s day is also shadowed by the anniversary of his father’s suicide and the memory of his son Rudy, who died eleven days old eleven years earlier.

At ten, Bloom walks through the city, collects a letter at the post office under a false name, “Henry Flower” — a coy correspondence with a typist, Martha Clifford — goes into a church, buys lemon soap at a chemist’s, and prepares for a bath at a Turkish bath, imagining his body floating “the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.”

At eleven, he rides in a carriage with Stephen’s father, Simon Dedalus, and others to the funeral of Paddy Dignam at Glasnevin cemetery, observing everything with wry, morbid curiosity — the coffin, the rats, the dead “all the same”, the man in the macintosh (a mysterious figure who recurs through the day). At noon he visits the offices of the Freeman’s Journal newspaper to arrange an advertisement, while the narrative is broken up by mock newspaper headlines; Stephen arrives with Mr Deasy’s letter about foot-and-mouth disease and leads the journalists to a pub. The two men pass without meeting.

At one, Bloom, hungry, walks through the city thinking about food, sex, his past with Molly, and the ruthless digestive life of the city; he is disgusted by the men “wolfing” food at the Burton restaurant, and has a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy at Davy Byrne’s “moral pub”, recalling his first kiss with Molly on Howth Head, when she passed seedcake from her mouth into his. At two, in the National Library, Stephen expounds to a group of literary men a brilliant, perverse theory of Hamlet — that Shakespeare is the ghost, the father, and that his wife Anne Hathaway betrayed him — while Bloom slips in and out. At three, the narrative breaks into nineteen short sections following many Dubliners across the city, from a Jesuit priest to the viceroy’s procession.

At four — the hour of Boylan’s assignation — Bloom is in the bar of the Ormond Hotel, where two barmaids, Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, flirt and Simon Dedalus sings, in a chapter written like a musical fugue. Bloom hears Boylan’s carriage jingle away toward Eccles Street. At five, in Barney Kiernan’s pub, an anonymous, hard-drinking narrator describes a fierce nationalist known only as the Citizen, with his mangy dog, who attacks the English and the Jews; Bloom, defending tolerance and love — “Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred… it’s the very opposite of that that is really life… Love” — is mocked; when the Citizen sneers at him, Bloom answers that Christ was a Jew, “Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me”, and the Citizen hurls a biscuit tin at his departing carriage. The chapter is interrupted by huge parodic catalogues mocking epic and legal style.

At eight, on Sandymount Strand at sunset, a young woman, Gerty MacDowell, sits on the rocks, thinking in the sugary language of women’s magazines about love; she notices a dark gentleman watching her and leans back to show her legs while fireworks burst overhead; Bloom masturbates. As she walks away he sees that she is lame. His thoughts drift through the evening.

At ten, Bloom visits the National Maternity Hospital, where Mrs Purefoy has been in labour for three days, and finds Stephen drinking with medical students; the episode is written in a sequence of parodies of English prose styles from Anglo-Saxon and Malory through Bunyan, Defoe, Swift, Sterne, Gibbon, Dickens and Carlyle to modern slang — mirroring the growth of an embryo. Concerned for Stephen, who is drunk and has spent his money, Bloom follows him.

At midnight, in Nighttown, Dublin’s red-light district, the novel becomes a vast hallucinatory play script in which fantasies, guilts and memories take on life: Bloom is tried, crowned emperor, transformed into a woman, humiliated by the brothel madam Bella Cohen (who becomes Bello), and confronted by his father, his grandfather and his former lovers. Stephen, drunk, sees his mother’s ghost rise before him, and in a frenzy smashes the lamp with his ash-plant: “Nothung!” Out in the street, he is knocked down by a British soldier. Bloom tends him, and sees a vision of his dead son Rudy, aged eleven, reading a book.

After one in the morning, Bloom takes Stephen to a cabman’s shelter for coffee, in a chapter written in tired, cliché-ridden prose, and then home to Eccles Street. In a chapter written as a catechism of questions and answers in scientific, impersonal language, the two men drink cocoa in the kitchen, compare their lives, look at the stars, and urinate together in the garden. Bloom offers Stephen a bed for the night; Stephen declines and walks off into the night. Bloom goes to bed, noting the impressions of Boylan’s body in the sheets, and lies head to foot beside Molly, kissing “the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump”, and tells her about his day, leaving out what he chooses. He asks her to bring him breakfast in bed in the morning — a small reversal.

The last chapter is Molly’s monologue: forty-odd pages in eight enormous unpunctuated “sentences”, as she lies awake thinking — of Boylan and their afternoon (“he must have come 3 or 4 times”), of Bloom and his oddities, of her girlhood in Gibraltar, of her lovers real and imagined, of Stephen, of her body, her period, her concert, of men and women, of God and flowers. It ends with her memory of Bloom’s proposal on Howth Head, among the rhododendrons, sixteen years ago:

…and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Themes

The heroic and the ordinary. Joyce’s parallel with the Odyssey — Bloom’s day as Odysseus’s ten-year voyage — does two things at once: it ironically shrinks the heroic to the mundane, and it ennobles the mundane, suggesting that an ordinary man’s day contains all the trials, temptations, monsters and homecomings of epic. Bloom, kind, curious, tolerant, cuckolded, mocked, is Joyce’s answer to the warrior hero: “the complete man”, Joyce said.

Fathers and sons. Stephen has rejected his father Simon and his “fatherland” and church; Bloom has lost his son. Their brief meeting at night is a symbolic encounter of spiritual father and son, though it leads to no lasting bond.

Love and the body. Ulysses gives the body — eating, excretion, sex, menstruation, death — a place in literature it had never had, which led to its banning. Bloom’s and Molly’s marriage, wounded since Rudy’s death, is portrayed with frank tenderness.

Ireland. The novel is saturated in Irish history, politics and culture — Parnell, the Catholic Church, British rule, nationalism, the Irish Literary Revival (mocked in the library). Bloom, the Jew, is an outsider, and the Citizen episode attacks narrow nationalism.

Style. Each episode has its own technique: interior monologue, newspaper headlines, musical fugue, parodies of English prose history, a play, a catechism, Molly’s unpunctuated flow. The novel is an encyclopedia of styles, questioning the very idea of a single “right” way to tell a story.

Reception and afterlife

Published by Sylvia Beach on Joyce’s fortieth birthday, Ulysses was smuggled into the US and Britain; copies were burned by customs. In 1933 Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses that it was not obscene: “whilst in many places the effect… on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” It changed the course of the novel and influenced writers from Woolf and Faulkner to Beckett, Nabokov, Pynchon and Rushdie. Bloomsday celebrations began in 1954 and are held every 16 June in Dublin and worldwide.

In conversation

• “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” — Stephen’s revolt against the past.
• “Yes I said yes I will Yes” — the great affirmation of life.
• Bloomsday — 16 June; the celebration of an ordinary day made epic.