Joyce, James. Ulysses. Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 1922. F; 1/25.

Tackling this book with its celebrated complexity I had no idea what I was getting into. The history of its publication alone is almost as tangled as some of its contents. I have read the whole thing (a “Third Edition” based on the 1939 Odyssey Press Edition) but tried hard to stay out of the vast quicksand of its scholarship, with minor exceptions. Joyce once said he was going to “keep professors busy arguing over its meaning for centuries” and sure enough many academic careers have been spent exploring (and some disappearing into) its ironic coils.

A plot summary online at a literary library and museum called Rosenbach Collection helped me keep track of what superficially was going on. There is on Wikipedia a list of dozens of characters that was useful too. The editor of my version is a Trinity University Irish modernism expert professor Sam Slote. He provides hundreds of footnotes, some helpful some not so much. I also found out that one of my favourite UBC English profs from the 1960s Elliott Gose had written a book (which I haven’t finished) on “the transformation process” in Ulysses. Experts suggest reading the Odyssey before Ulysses. I haven’t except for brief summaries, and my prior experience of the Joyce story was confined to watching the 1967 movie version many years ago.

Irony and complexity unravels through one long day in the lives of the major characters. Here’s what happens. Young classics scholar Stephen Daedalus chats with friends in the early morning, teaches a high school history class and then wanders on a beach reflecting on his life. At the same time Leopold Bloom (our Odysseus) wakes up and brings his wife Molly breakfast in bed, to discover that she will later entertain (including sex with) lothario Blazes Boylan. Leopold goes out on a nearly 24-hour-long wander around the city to avoid this. He meets various characters on his way to a funeral and discussions of death and spirituality accompany him in a carriage with others. At a newspaper office Leopold joins in on buffoonery and bullshit before going for lunch and a drink, and then runs at the library into Stephen who is theorizing about Shakespeare and Hamlet. In mid-afternoon many apparently random episodes of events on the street in Dublin are described, and then Leopold runs across Boylan flirting with girls in a bar. Leopold retires to a pub where, while a hilariously exaggerated reprobate bloviates, he is misunderstood, and heads for a beach where he masturbates having a romantic fantasy about a young girl nearby. Next around 10 pm he goes to a maternity hospital where the wife of a friend is having a difficult labour. By midnight, he and Stephen both arrive at a brothel where drunkenness and confusion create a hallucinatory pastiche with a huge but obscure potential psychological significance. After listening to embellished adventures of a mariner in a taxi drivers’ coffeehouse shelter around 2AM Bloom brings Stephen to his home and sees remains of Boylan’s visit. Stephen goes home. The last episode then plays out entirely in Molly’s imagination.

These plot events are divided into eighteen chapters, under three headings called PARTS: I: The Telemachiad (focused on Stephen Daedalus who represents Telemachus, the son of Homer’s Ulysses), II: The Odyssey (the wanderings of Ulysses) and III: Nostros (the homecoming of Ulysses). The loose association with Homer’s Odyssey is a deep irony. Bloom and the others in Dublin are mostly ordinary flawed everymen, nothing like the magnificent ancient king. The years Homer’s Odysseus (aka Ulysses) spent in his travel adventures are squeezed by Joyce into twenty-four hours in Dublin on a fictional June 16, 1904. There’s a lot of banal drifting around bars and brothels. Leopold Bloom does not slay Boylan let alone like Odysseus a bunch of suitors on his return home.

Individual episodes or chapters differ dramatically in location, tone and feeling, and style of language. Some are a lot more abstract and potentially mythical or psychological, others are hilarious cartoons, many contain passages of Joyce’s famous poetic stream of consciousness (one of them is entirely like that). But that variety of texture is part of the fascination of the whole performance: what’s coming next? not just what’s happening but what’s it going to mean?

Stephen especially explores and talks about Shakespeare (mostly Hamlet), the Catholic Church, 1904 current politics, and ancient history like young academics any time and everywhere. This is part of one of Joyce’s ironic references but also one of his ways of just playing sophisticated hide and seek. He’s got to be good-looking cause he’s so hard to see behind all his and his characters’ detail that while it may throw people who want an easy story off, it fascinates brilliant minds. And just plain dazzles ill-informed passers-by like me. I’m reminded of Moby Dick, Infinite Jest, and Book of Memories, other novels where I’ve felt goosebumps from the presence of something huge and ambiguous, when I wasn’t at times struggling just to keep going.

No question reading Ulysses is at times heavy going. Stephen in Chapter 9 (Scylla and Charybdis) at The National Library debates with another literary expert. Their fencing with quotes might be interesting for experts who’ve memorized Hamlet but gets tedious if you start tracking down the references, so I settled for just surfing the poetic music. It’s a bit like opening the King James Bible or landing in a west African city. How much of the Shakespeare is real criticism, how much irony and joke, how much just inaccurate? No idea, but I can hear the music loud and clear.

The point of view shifts in Chapter 10, (Wandering Rocks), where nineteen quick narratives give short literary videos of Dublin characters (Boylan is one of them) going about what look like unconnected personal errands and so on that all happen at the same time. The characters end up watching semi-royalty go past as a parade. 

In Chapter 12 (Cyclops) I was laughing out loud at an outrageous character with his huge dog in a pub drunkenly exaggerating. He was

(t)he figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower … a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced, sinewyarmed hero.

This guy represented for me some of my mum’s Irish uncles and my maternal grandfather, especially one old reprobate called Uncle Willy we visited as little boys in a rundown house in east Vanvouver. He gave us a double-barelled shotgun to play with. While reading about Joyce’s uncompromising old Irish scoundrel I reflected that Uncle Willy in later years had helped me to appreciate when I needed to that there are times when the passivity of diffidence is more contemptible than temerity. A lot of the cultural feeling in Ulysses has that same Irish hell-bentedness to it.

There is a sort of trick played in Chapter 14 (Oxen of the Sun) at the National Maternity Hospital where Bloom has gone to observe and pay a kindly visit to Mina Purefoy who is having her difficult labour. Once I read my Rosenbach notes on this chapter I figured out that Joyce starts with archaic almost old English, and then proceeds semi-ironically through various epochs of literary style up to the contemporary. This goes on during rapartee including Bloom with a bunch of entitled medical students and also Stephen.

Chapter 15 (Circe) takes place at a brothel after midnight and seems to be the most mythical and psychologically loaded of all the chapters. Stephen and Leopold have had a lot to drink and have hallucination-like experiences which recall their past lives, intercut with streams of consciousness that may or may not be connected to the real world. This chapter is done as drama with stage directions, and Leopold’s relationship with Stephen is shown to be fatherly and protective. Although I lost my way several times reading this I have the sense of the relationships and their shifting realities building to a climax. The two main characters leave and head for Leopold’s home.

Throughout the changing points of view and styles Joyce’s writing can be very lyrical and poetic sometimes reflecting characters’ moods and circumstances. Here are a few examples:

(After Dignan’s funeral) I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpse manure, bones, flesh, nails, charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink, decomposing. Rot quick in damp earth. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, treacle oozing out of them. Then dried up.

(Leopold watching the girl and the surf at the beach) In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling. Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats.

Ironically exhaustive lists at times go on for pages. A shorter one:

coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper canvassers, law scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers, chimney sweeps, lard refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers, Italian warehousemen, church decorators, bootjack manufacturers, undertakers, silk mercers, lapidaries, salesmasters, corkcutters, assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners, export bottlers, fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse repository hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors.

Finally, Chapter 18 (Penelope) is a fully consciousness-stream inner poem of Molly’s. The language and content is rough and Molly comes across as an attractive honest and a bit coarse woman. I found it poetic and also smart:

… much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop.

… I could feel him coming along skulking after me his eyes on my neck he had been keeping away from the house he felt it was getting too warm for him so I half turned and stopped then he pestered me to say yes till I took off my glove slowly watching him he said my openwork sleeves were too cold for the rain anything for an excuse to put his hand anear me drawers drawers the whole blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll to carry about in his waistcoat pocket O Maria Santissima he did look a big fool dreeping in the rain splendid set of teeth he had made me hungry to look at them and beseeched of me to lift the orange petticoat I had on with sunray pleats…

Her soliloquy – and the book – end with the famous (for me emotionally convincing) final crescendo:

I 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.

So who is Leopold Bloom? He’s a bit of a klutz, making comments that get misunderstood, blundering at a small-time job in advertising, and of course being a helpless cuckold. And he’s a Jew. He’s also kindly, accepted among colleagues and friends, likes comfort food, is interested in attractive girls, and protects and is paternal with Stephen. He’s for sure part of the irony poking fun at hallowed ancient literature and an emblem of early 20th century absurdity and pessimism. He’s open to representing a lot of people in a lot of things even though he’s just the archetypal average Joe, set against the Goliaths of history.

It is magnetically tempting as I paw through my notes and highlights to imagine reading this whole thing all over again. I’d forgotten how lyrical the writing can be but also how obscure and tedious.

Maybe it’s time for some mysteries and bestsellers.

(These numbers are guesses because although I can sense the scope I’m a long way from seeing the whole picture.)

9.7/9.5