If it's mid-June, it must be Bloomsday, turning up like a bad penny or a piece of lemon soap inside your trousers pocket. People are dressed in boaters and stripey blazers, and David Norris is on the radio. But the perennial question remains; is this much vaunted book really a masterpiece? Or is it more like Leopold's breakfast, only good in parts.
I first read Ulysses in UCD in 1982, under the stimulating tuition of Prof Declan Kiberd. But, even then, the book was a smorgasbord from which we sampled bits, usually the funny or famous bits. Having read the whole thing again recently, I did not feel I had consumed a work of genius, the way one would, for example, after Dostoyevsky's The Idiot or Flaubert's Sentimental Education, a novel comparable in its capture of another city - 19th century Paris - but far more engrossing, with vivid and lasting characters. Indeed, if you didn't live in Dublin, you'd wonder what the appeal was.
For me, Ulysses falls short of the basic qualities you expect of a masterpiece. To the end, the characters remain unsympathetic; Bloom is a dreamy ad-seller unconvincingly married to a much more vivacious woman and Stephen remains the arrogant Jesuit boy, still drearily familiar from the Dublin pubs, talking coldly about modernism and student grants. I'm sorry, but I was not moved.
The book has no narrative drive, unless you consider it imperative to discover what happens to that lemon soap. But there are other more fundamental problems. Most of the characters sound the same and, in the Holles Street and newspaper office scenes, their voices are indistinguishable. Mostly male, learned and pedantic, they all talk in that recondite, oracular manner so beloved of Irish raconteurs and bar flies. OK, this was Joyce's point, dispensing with realism. But, instead, all the voices are so obviously his own, just as the book's trivia is that of he and his family. Ironic, for someone who suggested that the artist should be removed from his work, like "God in the clouds, paring his fingernails".
Interesting how few novelists have followed Joyce in his modernist breakthrough: Burroughs, perhaps, or Beckett. In recent years, with the demise of Marxism and structuralism, the traditional novel has reasserted itself. Readers want plot, character and dialogue. Not whole chunks of interior verbiage, or elegantly crafted pastiche, be it of newspaper headlines, olde English, or gossipy shop talk.
Which brings me to the other problem with Ulysses; its pointless difficulty. For true works of genius, like Milton's Paradise Lost or Yeats's later poems, the reader's effort in unravelling the obscurities and paradoxes is rewarded by profundities, philosophical insights, or moments of artistic beauty. With Joyce, we are rewarded with knowing that a butcher's name spelt backwards is actually a Bulgarian opera singer, as well as the Latin name for the Dog Star. Joyce slagged Yeats for his aspirations, but he has some nerve. By comparison with the heartbreaking serenity of Yeats's final poems, Ulysses is a series of low-key musings, with large dollops of Dublin sentiment.
Ok, we get the point. The profound is also in the advertising jingle, the tram ticket, the silly pun. But so what? After a while, this seems patronising and even pretentious. And if you, the reader, look for meaning, the joke's on you. Ha, ha. Great fun. And so every profundity is quickly punctured, jettisoned by a joke, as if Joyce was afraid of his own seriousness. And what jokes. Almost the entire history of Dublin jokes is here; the man whose head is so big he has to use a shoehorn to get his hat on. Boom-boom. Or the hooker whose name is Bird in the Hand. I mean, really. Forget Berlitz, Joyce could have got a job gag-writing for the Carry On team.
The endless sexual banter becomes tiresome. As soon as a female character is introduced, the ribald humour begins; quite at odds, incidentally, with Joyce's reputation as some sort of feminist. (What are Molly and Gertie, after all, but male fantasy figures?) And then there are the puns, so many puns, and all that padding, a half page of women named after plants and trees: Miss Larch Conifer, Miss Priscilla Elderflower. Why, I was nearly splitting my sycamores.
There is also the contrived, mechanical reappearance of earlier images: Parnell's brother, that bar of soap. Far from seeming natural, it seems a striving for artificial realism. On the beach, Joyce even has Bloom doing a quick rehash of his day, just to remind us. Nor is he short of literary tricks. He has a funeral going from Sandymount to Glasnevin, by way of Ringsend! This man could also have got a job as a Dublin taxi-driver, showing American tourists their embassy on the way in from the airport.
This brings me to what I think is the real subject of the book - masturbation. Ulysses concludes with Molly "visualising" in bed while, for Bloom, the key scene is on Sandymount Strand, getting sticky over Gertie McDowell. But the entire text is laden with unfulfilled obsession about sex, especially about female body parts but, in particular, their lingerie and underwear. Some of the detailed, rapturous descriptions of stockings and knickers are worthy of those "Hose and Heel" magazines in the US. There is effectively no penetrative sex in the book, and even in Nighttown, Bloom is more content to watch.
This could be a metaphor for the lack of action in Ulysses and, what for me, is its must interesting feature, the deep frustration of a capital, and country, yearning for self-government. The arid, political banter in the pubs reflects the self-loathing of a people who know they are "talking it" and not "doing it". The Freudians would tell you that, in time, that bar of soap got replaced with a stiff revolver. But, in the meantime, the theorising and longing can be great fun, if it doesn't make you as blind as Joyce himself became. As for works of genius, I think I'd be more content to pull out Dubliners, a stunning, resonant and exquisite piece of work after which Joyce could have happily put away his pen. And everything else.
Eamon Delaney is a novelist