A young man emerging into the world and undertaking the burdens and trials of his looming adulthood undergoes two phases of linguistic development, of earnest cognitive growth. The first is adolescence and his early university years, when philosophy and literature—a fair bit of heavy reading—begin to interest him, filling his mind with torrid fancies and grandiose visions. The second is when he first reads Ulysses, wading through its demanding excesses and finding himself stumped, overfed with words, and jaded. This magnum opus on which its author labored for seven years is an undeniable torrent with a gamut of techniques ranging from interior monologue to unreliable rotating narration to a tour-de-force display of prose styles (culminating in the fourteenth episode, “Oxen of the Sun,” a sampler of the English language as its historical development).
But it is more than a torrent whose richness and overabundance have long overwhelmed skeptical and inexperienced readers; Ulysses is a trove of minute treasures illuminating the quotidian and everyday, evoking the depth and humanity of what appear to be even the most trifling moments. By illuminating the everyday, Ulysses upholds the notion that the common is uncommon, that human life is more than it appears to be, that life can be affirmed with that great Nietzschean “Yes” with which Molly Bloom ends her final monologue.
Joyce celebrates and often exalts the minutiae of his Dublin, where on the day of June 16th, 1904, the action of the novel’s 643 pages (as of the Gabler Edition) takes place. This temporal compression suits the richness and subtlety of the novel, but its richness nonetheless trounces many novitiates approaching Ulysses and trying to sound its depths. After reading thirteen episodes and stopping before “Oxen of the Sun,” I reflected that I had invested a desultory series of months reading, digesting the contents during nightly hours, setting the book aside for weeks at a time, and often puzzling over the myriad minutiae that are also arcana and period Irish trivia. This novel frustrates many readers, and it frustrated me—still frustrates me, because many of its components remain obscure and surfeiting, not only rich but overrich except in the smallest quantities.
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured.
Although no scholarly reader of Ulysses, I realized while reading the novel that because it is encyclopedic, it should be approached with gentleness and patience. This patience is not the ordinary patience of those reading the latest Dan Brown novel, whose payoff rewards anticipation and eagerness, but a languid devil-may-care dallying that eschews anticipation altogether and expects nothing but the passing of a moment—as of a lark through a sunlit field of flowers. This kind of patience is requisite to a leisurely reading of Ulysses, a reading that sidesteps avoidable masochism and reader’s derring-do. Anthony Burgess, writing in his wonderful companion to the oeuvre of Joyce, Re Joyce, advises the reader of this “book for the bedside”: “Ulysses, then, is a labyrinth which we can enter at any point, once we have satisfied ourselves as to its general plan and purpose. It is one of the very few books in existence that can be picked up at any time, enriching any odd moment and—rather than a tome we have to engage strenuously at a library table—it is a book for the bedside.”[1]
So the reader should set about comprehending the “general plan and purpose” of Ulysses, proceeding with the book in the meantime and knowing that the end will come in its own time. Having been read, devoured, cajoled, overlooked, the novel remains renewable as a wellspring of language, fancy, lore, mythology, history, and culture, all of which substantiate Anthony Burgess’ writing without any exaggeration, “to say that one has to live with it is not to utter a prejudiced, partisan claim but to state quite objectively that there is enough meat in it to last a lifetime.”[2] And a lifetime it will be.
Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Describing how Joyce conceived Ulysses in his authoritative biography James Joyce, Richard Ellmann writes that “the principal task in the book was to find a pagan hero whom he could set loose in a Catholic city, to make Ulysses a Dubliner,” going on to write that “Stephen Dedalus could not take this role, for he was Joyce’s immature persona; as a mature persona Joyce chose Leopold Bloom. Stephen and Bloom came from opposite ends of his mind and life, but there were necessarily many resemblances, which Joyce emphasized and justified by making the older man like a father to Stephen.”[3] This mature Joyce persona of Leopold Bloom as the father consubstantial with the son, Stephen Dedalus, is the imperishable Dublin dyad, with all their peculiarities and compulsions, fears and desires, as they begin June 16th apart and gradually converge toward the climax of “Circe”.
Vladimir Nabokov posited a useful breakdown of the three primary characters of Ulysses—Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom, the wife of the latter—by intellectual temperament, Stephen being highbrow, Leopold middlebrow, and Molly lowbrow. While Stephen dances on verbal tightropes, musing on the mysteries of eternity underlying the ordinariness of material objects, Poldy revels in the squalid beauties of the body, relishes a kidney bean, and communes with himself in the Turkish baths:
He foresaw his pale body reclined in at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.
This reveling in the body spills over into a litany of sexual perversions that are amusing, extraordinary, and disturbing, appearing in various internal monologues of Joycean genius. Nabokov offers valid criticism of this aspect of Bloom’s character when he says that “Bloom is supposed to be a rather ordinary citizen. Now it is not true that the mind of an ordinary citizen continuously dwells on physiological things. I object to the continuously, not to the disgusting. All this very special pathological stuff seems artificial and unnecessary in this particular context.”[4]
Neither pathological nor “subnormal,” these sexual perversions are character idiosyncrasies that Joyce seems to relish, including them as an inseparable aspect of the complex subconscious of Bloom and, for that matter, of Molly. Nabokov has a point in that they can be gratuitous; but they also furnish sprightly moments of irony and cutting contrast, one instance of which is the nonphysical clandestine dalliance between Bloom and Gerty MacDowell, occurring on the strand in “Nausicaa”. Of Gerty the undependable narrator states:
No prince charming is her beau ideal to lay a rare and wondrous love at her feet but rather a manly man with a strong quiet face who had not found his ideal, perhaps his hair slightly flecked with grey, and who would understand, take her in his sheltering arms, strain her to him in all the strength of his deep passionate nature and comfort her with a long kiss. It would be like heaven. For such a one she yearns this balmy summer eve. With all the heart of her she longs to be his only, his affianced bride for riches for poor, in sickness in health, till death us two part, from this to this day forward.
But these staid romantic longings give way to sexual activity, bodies writhe, a girdle is revealed (a dalliance at a distance), and Bloom ejaculates, after which one reads his internal monologue synthesizing his many thoughts:
O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed met him pike hoses frillies for Raoul de perfume your wife black hair heave under embon señorita young eyes Mulvey plump bubs me breadvan Winkle red slippers she rusty sleep wander years of dreams return tail end Agendath swoony lovey showed me her next year in drawers return next in her next her next.
Leopold Bloom is a curious creature, a Dubliner that is ostensibly an “ordinary” citizen, but he exhibits these perversions that make him more (or perhaps less) than ordinary. Richard Ellmann illuminates the precedent of this character by examining the psychology of his creator, James Joyce, of whom he writes, “he was attracted, particularly, by the image of himself as a weak child cherished by a strong woman, which seems closely connected with the images of himself as victim, whether as a deer pursued by hunters, as a passive man surrounded by burly extroverts, as a Parnell or a Jesus among traitors. His favorite characters are those who in one way or another retreat before masculinity, yet are loved regardless by motherly women.”[5] This oedipal fascination has obvious parallels in the character of Bloom, an effeminate man with peculiar tastes, an advertising canvasser roaming the city and enjoying its many splendors.
But is Leopold Bloom a self-indulgent milquetoast, a cuckold, an Irishman of foreign extraction, or the hero of this Odyssey updated to a latter-day Ireland? He embodies all of these as an uncommon commoner, a result of “the desire Joyce has that Bloom be respected,” which “encourages him to give Bloom the power that he has himself, to infuse common things with uncommonness”[6] He is thus extraordinary as an amalgam of perversion and ordinariness, a fitting beacon of the common man and the community of humankind (wherein Dublin functions as a fulfilled, coherent microcosm).
The emphasis on community is inseparable from the exalted characters. Possessing deep Irish roots, Joyce created Ulysses long after exiling himself from the country whose religious hegemony and political divisions had made it inhospitable to the liberal Joycean artistry of a genius who wanted only to be free; but he could never do away with those roots entirely, and spent his career as a writer exploring his homeland: “having stomped angrily out of the house, he circled back to peer in the window. He could not exist without close ties, no matter in what part of Europe he resided; and if he came to terms with absence, it was by bringing Ireland with him, in his memories, and in the persons of his wife, his brother, his sister.”[7]
On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.
The spirit of his cherishing close ties, a spirit of the community as he experienced it in Ireland during the first twenty years of his life, pervades Ulysses and exalts Dublin as a microcosm of the grand human community, of which Anthony Burgess writes, “to Joyce, a community is men meeting, drinking, arguing, recognising each other in the streets, and one of his peculiar miracles is to make a real historical Dublin (the Dublin that flourished in summer, 1904) an eternal pattern of human society. All men gain strength and even a certain nobility from belonging to it, and Bloom and Stephen are equally citizens of a blessed imperfect city, despite their intermittent sense of inner exile. They are Dubliners first and all else after.”[8]
The community of Dublin depicted in Ulysses, ennobling its citizens as they partake of something far greater than they, is inimitable and deathless, replenishing the spirits of those reading any of its components scattered throughout the novel. For Ulysses is ultimately a celebration of life, an affirmation of humankind, making itself felt as through pores of a universal human body (symbolism also on full display in the novel).
A stirring, joyous, eternal affirmation ends Molly Bloom’s final monologue, her thoughts cascading in a narration containing no punctuation and only some breaks between paragraphs. Her lyricism swells to an acme ending on the final word, Yes, which has a capital letter that drives home the yessing to life embodied by Ulysses, a sublime and unfathomable journey through human life. Reading that internal monologue, unique and salacious and glorious, vindicates the trying bogs besetting the reader in earlier portions of the book, providing a payoff greater than the ordinary slickness of a thriller. It is the slow culmination and the bursting of roman candles, the final word on whether the reading of Ulysses, a behemoth that distresses and upsets and entrances, was ever in its countless hours worthwhile.
O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.[9]
I am inclined to agree with Anthony Burgess, that “there is nothing in all literature more joyous.”[10]
Trying to compile a list of Joyce resources, I settled on the items below. Please note that the list is incomplete, and partial to what I have used as a reader of James Joyce’s oeuvre. It should at least serve as an introduction to the mental landscape of his books. Following is the rough order in which I introduced myself to Joyce:
James Joyce, by Richard Ellmann
Dubliners, by James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
Stephen Hero, by James Joyce
My Brother’s Keeper, by Stanislaus Joyce
Re Joyce, by Anthony Burgess
Ulysses, by James Joyce
The Joyce Project (in lieu of book-length annotations)
And for the adventurous or the curious…
Joyce: Selected Letters, edited by Richard Ellmann
Will I be reading Finnegans Wake? Not in this lifetime–but that may be a matter for another post…
- Burgess, Anthony. Re Joyce. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1965. ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1959. ↑
- Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. ↑
- Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- Burgess, Anthony. Re Joyce. ↑
- Joyce, James. Ulysses. Random House, Inc. 1986. ↑
- Burgess, Anthony. Re Joyce. ↑
