Ulysses By James Joyce (1922)
LIKE A THIEF in the night, James Joyce, the consummate self exile, ingeniously exploded all notions of traditional fiction with his playful, earthy, rampagingly human, urban epic.
Intended to keep the critics busy, it has done exactly that, filling libraries and supporting a body of international scholarship that amounts to an industry, much of it preoccupied by the novel's complex textual history.
Allusive in its classical, literary, historical, political and popular cultural cross references as well as Joyce's personal jokes, Ulysses is also a stylistic and linguistic tour de force which makes inspired use of interior monologue as a way of juxtaposing the richness of the imaginative life with the meanness of social intercourse.
Set in a sultry Dublin, on June 16th, 1904, it is an odyssey of the ordinary. Joyce created a world by capturing the body and soul of a colonial city he mapped with all the precision of a military surveyor - and immortalised it.
Joyce's Dublin has defied time and the developers. Ulysses also debunks the myth of the heroic by taking as its central figure a mild, if opinionated, pacifist - Leopold Bloom, advertising canvasser, cuckolded husband and definitive Everyman. He is an outsider, a Dublin Jew relegated to the margins by the culturally racist nationalism that Joyce was determined to expose. He waged war on preening national vanity. Ulysses is a comic, often vicious, at times moving and always inspired parody.
Above all, in Bloom, Joyce has presented a man possessed of a sense of justice. Though living in a misogynistic society Bloom, despite his lascivious musings, is sympathetic to women. Here is an Edwardian male who having done the shopping, serves his wife breakfast in bed, and laments the lack of public toilets available to ladies "caught short."
Bloom is opposed to war and all forms of violence. For him, true heroism is the act of childbirth. His sexual life is confined to fantasy and speculative glances, and the pathos of him watching young Gerty MacDowell's flirtatious performance, itself based on her doubts and fantasies.
The chapters, moving through a sequence of city locations, reflect the episodes of Homer's Odyssey from which Joyce has taken themes as well as a structure of sorts. Ulysses has been seen as both plotless and over-plotted. In either case, it has a central theme - that of wandering.
Bloom, Odysseus, wanders through a day during which he at all times is moving closer and closer to an encounter with Stephen Dedalus, the self absorbed artist and Telemachus figure, and also symbolic son to Bloom who is the bereaved father of little Rudy. And then there is Molly, Penelope, a fading popular soprano who lingers in bed, thinks her confused thoughts and is involved with her caddish manager, Blazes Boylan.
Bloom's morning begins in Eccles Street preparing breakfast, defecating and tending the cat. Simultaneously, across the city, in a tower by the sea, the disgruntled Stephen has been party to Buck Mulligan's ceremonial shaving, a task that parodies church ritual.
Stephen sets off to his lowly teaching job. Having dealt with his pupils, he then collects his earnings from Mr Deasy who advises him on the virtue of saving. Their banter culminates in Deasy, who requests some help in having a letter published, remarking to Stephen "You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am wrong."
Stephen's reply is interesting, "a learner rather."
For all his conceit and artistic frustration, Stephen also has his doubts, a fact Joyce makes clear. Meanwhile Bloom checks for the post he receives under the name of "Henry Flower, Esq. c/o a P.O. Westland Row, City." which gives him a boost. While purchasing Molly's beauty aids at the chemist, he buys himself a cake of lemon soap. Unintentionally a hot tip for the Ascot Gold Cup is exchanged.
Joyce then eases his characters into one of the finest of many immortal set pieces; the carriage trip to poor Paddy Dignam's funeral and the brilliant dialogue exchanged by the mourners. Vivid characters, images, headlines, gossip and heated arguments are tossed in the air, apparently casually but deadly deliberate, and are invariably retrieved. Joyce remembers every detail.
The hours pass; Bloom and Stephen come closer and closer. The narrative moves from realism to fantasy. Night town explodes into surreal virtuosity, before yielding to the domestic.
The greatest novel of the 20th century? Not quite. Yet Ulysses with its cynicism, invention, wit and humanity lives and breathes; scratches, sings and sighs through Joyce's singular, eloquent celebration of the commonplace.
This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon