[published in LITKIT: an electronic magazine, January 1999]  

The Book of Our Century: James Joyce's Ulysses

By Robert H. Bell

Lists are irresistible and controversial. Nobody would care a hoot if US News and World Report annually presented the hundred best liberal arts colleges in reverse alphabetical order, beginning with Williams and ending with Amherst. But ranking schools is sure to excite publicity. The millenium is an ideal time for lists. Last summer the American Film Institute designated the hundred best American films. The Sporting News ranked the hundred best baseball players. And to even more fanfare, The Modern Library compiled the hundred greatest English and American novels in the twentieth century. There are a lot of problems with this list. You'll find very few women writers, comic novels, or books written after 1950. Admirers of Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkein, Kingsley Amis, Thomas Pynchon, and John Updike protest vehemently and compellingly. There seem to be a lot of political novels, not all of them first-rate literature, and a suspicious number that have become movies. We could debate choices and omissions until the cows come home.

But one thing we haven't heard amid the media hoopla is much serious dissent about the number one novel of our century, James Joyce's Ulysses.

This happens to be my favorite book of the twentieth century. Except of course for Winnie the Pooh and Charlotte's Web. I teach Ulysses as often as I can, always with astonishment and joy. An undeniably great book, Ulysses remains famously daunting, perplexing, and itself controversial. This essay is an introduction to Joyce's Ulysses, which highlights some of its glories and challenges.

Ulysses dramatizes one specific day--June 16, 1904-- in the lives of three primary characters. Leopold Bloom is a 38 year old ad man, a sort of Wandering Jew in modern Dublin, to all appearances an unremarkable person. He has been married for 16 years to Molly Bloom, a professional singer; the Blooms have a teenage daughter and they lost a son in infancy. The third main character in Joyce's trinity is 22-year-old Stephen Dedalus, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's autobiographical protaganist.

The plot of Ulysses is not unusual. The action is mundane. Stephen gets up, teaches a class, wanders on the beach, daydreams, drinks, thinks, visits a brothel, carouses, gets into a fight, is rescued by Bloom, has coffee with him, visits his home, and leaves. Bloom's day is also mainly uneventful: he goes about his business, observes everyone and everything, thinks, wonders, remembers and feels a lot, stays out late, assists Stephen, and finally joins his wife in bed. The one exceptional element in Bloom's day is that his wife Molly, home in bed nearly all day, spent part of it with her lover, Blazes Boylan.

The stuff of the novel is traditional: the experiences of ordinary people in a recognizably realistic world. Like many great novels, Ulysses provides intriguing characterization and a richly realized social world. These qualities--depth of characterization and social realism--are the first two of the several elements I will stress. The others are: symbolism, correspondences or multi-layering; variety of voices, tones, and styles; linguistic brilliance; and humor.

So, first: depth of characterization. We come to know Joyce's characters better than we can know almost anyone. Joyce's most important technique for presenting and revealing character is interior monologue or stream of consciousness. Each subjective angle of vision, the interior consciousness of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom, is subtly, elaborately dramatized. And each individual character is illuminated in a variety of larger contexts, the most important of which is a realistic, objective perspective. That's my second category, commonly termed, social realism. Joyce excels at rendering character in emotional and psychological depth, and in delineating a vivid, lifelike, social world.

Ulysses has an extraordinary setting. It takes place in a fully imagined world. If Dublin, God forbid, had been annihilated by a nuclear holocaust in 1945, we could virtually reconstruct it, street by street, almost building by building, as it was on June 16, 1904. Writing the book in voluntary exile in Europe, Joyce wrote letters to his aunt, asking her to count the steps down to the Sandymount Strand, or to measure the wall outside 7 Eccles Street: would a man, 5'9" tall weighing 160 pounds be able to scale that fence? Ulysses looks and sounds like life itself, down to tiny details and minuscule inflections. Which horses actually competed in the Gold Cup race that day. If you dropped a flier, one that was really distributed in Dublin that morning, advertising a revivalist preacher's appearance, if you dropped that leaflet into the River Liffey from the bridge at 10:52 AM, it would carry about to where Bloom notices it from another spot 3 hours and 24 minutes later.

Joyce's genius for characterizing interior consciousness and for depicting the external social world, are qualities of great novels in the Realistic tradition. Like Shakespeare, Joyce amazes generations of readers, unto the crack of Bloom, with photo realism, or verisimilitude: this is the way people are, and feel, and suffer, and dream. Ulysses is amazingly "Realistic" in its portrayal of the human heart, mind, and soul.

Here is an example of Joyce probing character and delineating a world. Bloom is attending the funeral of an acquaintance.

Mr Bloom nodded gravely looking in the quick bloodshot eyes. Secret eyes, secretsearching. Mason, I think: not sure. Beside him again. We are the last. In the same boat. Hope he'll say something else.

Mr Kernan added:

--The service of the Irish church used in Mount Jerome is simpler, more impressive I must say.

Mr Bloom gave prudent assent. The language of course was another thing.

Mr Kernan said with solemnity:

--I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's inmost heart.

--It does, Mr Bloom said.

Notice that we move from an exterior perspective to an interior point-of-view, inside Bloom's head. The movement from external to internal is plainly demarcated. Though it's not always this clearly indicated, here we're confident we can understand the character and his world. At a Catholic funeral, Bloom feels estranged, and senses a connection with Mr Kernan: they are "in the same boat" as non-Catholics in the predominantly Catholic Ireland. But much more than Kernan, Bloom is out of it. He is regarded by his peers as a bit odd: a Jew in Dublin, an unimposing man, incapable of the casual banter enjoyed by the others, especially over drinks. He has little to say and what he says is rarely notable.

But his thoughts, his reflections, are unusual. While his life is dull, bland, ordinary, his perceptions are vivid, robust, intriguing. Here he outwardly agrees with Kernan but inwardly . . . much more takes place. It's typical of Joyce and modern artists to stress the vast discrepancy between prosaic reality and vital interiority.

Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day!

Bloom's inner life abounds with vibrancy. He's perceptive, wide-ranging, curious, and often amusing. Earlier at the funeral he had tried unsuccessfully to tell an anecdote. Here on the stage of his own mind he's commanding, fluent, and funny. Bloom's character and values emerge: he views the world with keen attention, sharp skepticism, and persistent interest. The world he inhabits may be dull, bland, boring but his consciousness is bright, engaging, vital. Not always happy by any means, but always fascinating.

Now, Ulysses isn't always this straight-forward. When I first read the book in the summer after my sophomore year in college, I didn't get much further than this, which is about as Ulysses earlier novels: with attention to characters, dialogue, action, and setting, time and place. By this point, chapter 6 out of 18 but only a fraction of the way into the whole book, we have begun to know Bloom and the other main character, Stephen Dedalus. The first three episodes, devoted to Stephen Dedlus, offer numerous parallels and contrasts to the second three episodes, focused on Leopold Bloom. In a sense the novel is most generally about the two of them, their connections, differences, attitudes, experiences, and fates: Characters in a world. For a while at least it doesn't seem farfetched to expect the kinds of clarifications and insights we find in great nineteenth-century fiction like Middlemarch or War and Peace.

Yet there are numerous indications, from the very beginning of Ulysses, that readers of the book are on an even more demanding odyssey. We encounter many things that don't fit comfortably into our expectations of what a novel is or should be. For example, in this passage, we might well wonder how seriously we should regard Bloom's Biblical allusions. The novel bristles with references to religion and spirituality. So much so that we can't help wondering or worrying that Bloom is the Wandering Jew. He's often associated with Moses, and with Christ. The Biblical and spiritual allusions prevalent throughout the text suggest symbolic or metaphoric meanings. Ordinary people in mundane circumstances are constantly compared to extraordinary figures in larger contexts. For all its social and psychological realism, Ulysses invites symbolic interpretation, like the Hebrew Bible, The New Testament, or Dante's Divine Comedy.

Spiritual symbolism is only one of many different kinds of Joycean connections or links or networks. Ulysses is full of "correspondences," so that the story of Bloom and Stephen can and must be regarded "on several levels." Stephen is a kind of prodigal son, and Bloom, missing a son and heir, cares for Stephen; perhaps he, Bloom, will be a surrogate father, or a mentor, with something to teach the young man. Bloom is certainly a good man, and a source of values in dreary Dublin. He may be secular and skeptical, as we saw at the funeral, but he's also kind, solicitous, charitable, in many ways, the best Christian in Dublin.

What delights English profs, challenges readers, and inspires re-readers is the book's extraordinary density, richness, layered texture and intricate linkage. Like Shakespeare and the Bible, Joyce rewards repeated and continual consideration. Here is God's plenty!

As a rule of thumb, everything in Ulysses counts or matters or does some thing, usually several things. Joyce worked 7 years with incredible dedication and intensity on this book. He knew he was writing a masterpiece, relished the idea of professors spending all their days and nights piecing out the puzzles, and believed that he should be able to respond to the basic question any reader might ask of any passage. "Eh, what's this here, Guv'nor?" One source of pleasure in living with Ulysses is discovering how many details come to make sense, to fall into place like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Let's look at an apparently trivial scene, to see how a mundane moment implies symbolic or metaphoric possibilities.

Better leave him the paper and get shut of him.

--You can keep it, Mr Bloom said.

--Ascot. Gold cup. Wait, Bantam Lyons muttered. Half a mo. Maximum the second.

--I was just going to throw it away, Mr Bloom said.

Bantam Lyons raised his eyes suddenly and leered weakly.

--What's that? his sharp voice said.

--I say you can keep it, Mr Bloom answered. I was going to throw it away that moment.

Bantam Lyons doubted an instant, leering: then thrust the outspread sheets back on Mr Bloom's arms.

--I'll risk it, he said. Here, thanks.

Bantam Lyons, checking the day's horse races in Bloom's newspaper, misunderstands Bloom's offer to give him the paper, which Bloom was about to throw away, because, we later learn, one horse running that afternoon is Throwaway, a long shot at 20-1. Bantam Lyons thinks Bloom is giving him a hot tip. And guess what? That afternoon, Throwaway comes home a winner, which has ramifications in the story: because Bantam Lyons has told everybody that Bloom made a killing on the race. When Bloom, who has no idea what's happening, leaves a pub without standing drinks, everybody sneers at the cheap Jew who won't celebrate or share the wealth.

While that's what happens literally, it's only the beginning of the ways the Throwaway motif suggests meanings in Ulysses. Joyce develops the throwaway into a theme. For Bloom himself is an underdog, an average, put-upon, patronized man, rarely respected, widely mocked, and on this day cuckolded in his own bed. Yet Throwaway at 20-1 wins the day. Someplace else we've heard that "the last shall be first," that "even these the least of our brethren" may enter the kingdom of God. And of course someone else was mocked and reviled, only to rise in triumph. Do these sublime associations bode well for our trivial hero or say anything important about Bloom?

There are other implications or connotations to that Throwaway. The Throwaway doesn't have to be regarded as a symbol. Sometimes, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar. But throwaways represent a Joycean technique. Not only is Bloom's consciousness a kind of junk shop for all manner of stuff, from the sublime to the ridiculous, so too is Joyce's book a great encyclopedia of everything in God's creation, all things great and small. Including tons of stuff we might ordinarily consider too ordinary for artistic consideration. This too is a distinctly modern emphasis, making of the moment, including intrinsically insignificant details, something permanent, suggestive, rich and strange. How Joyce does this, tells the day in a life of an average bloke, and makes it not ordinary but extraordinary, not prosaic but lyrical, is perhaps the key to his greatness as a creative artist.

The key to his greatness. The novel encourages me to use that old metaphor. Lots of keys in Ulysses, prominently displayed. For readers, there are dozens of keys to Ulysses but no one master key. Not the Throwaway, nor Stephen's quest for a father-figure, nor Bloom's role as prophet or savior. Readers, and of course critics, try valiantly to find the key that will unlock the treasures of Ulysses. We're invited to do so.

For instance, Joyce's title Ulysses certainly suggests another key. Indeed, Joyce systematically provides another level of linkage, connecting his all-too-human figures in our modern world with Homer's larger-than-life heroes and Gods in epic antiquity. Bloom is like Odysseus or Ulysses in his multiple relationships (father, son, husband, traveler), in some traits, and in aspects of his experience. The passage we first looked at is from Joyce's "Hades" episode. It parallels the descent of Odysseus into the underworld with Bloom's visit at the gloomy cemetery, where both heroes contemplate individual identity and universal mortality. But Bloom is unequipped with heroic grandeur, and deprived of spiritual faith. Generally, it's a long way, in most ways down, from Homer's hero to Joyce's hapless protagonist. Perhaps even a bigger discrepancy between faithful Penelope and Molly Bloom.

Notice that besides providing Joyce with another layer or level of correspondences, Homer suggests ways to evaluate and interpret contemporary life. This doesn't work all one way (past good, now bad). And there are many other complicated and competing paradigms. Other significant motifs, correspondences, or organizing principles include: Religion I've mentioned already. Other organizing principles are Shakespeare, music; Ireland--Irish history, legend, and lore. I'd say that Ulysses is a great book not only because it includes so very much but because it lends itself to so many kinds of analyses and interpretations. Great books provoke us to understand more comprehensively and to feel more variously. Ulysses, like the palace of art, has many rooms.

I assign my Joyce seminar students weekly journals in addition to exams and formal papers; the first week's journal asks for a brief intellectual autobiography. One student may have written a term paper in high school on A Portrait of the Artist; another might have an Irish grandfather who quotes and touts Joyce; I might discover that my seminar includes a student trained by Jesuit schools, or brought up Jewish. If I'm lucky I'll have somebody who knows Latin, maybe even Greek. Someone might be a singer, someone else an actor, someone else fascinated by literary theory and the philosophy of language. They are all instant experts in the endless, fascinating process of contemplating Ulysses. I draw on their specialties in our seminar, and I try to tailor the term paper assignments to their particular concerns. Though best of all is when a student is inspired to pursue a new line of inquiry: the Southern Baptist who traced Joyce's Jewish themes, or the student inspired by Molly Bloom's charismatic, exasperating character to explore a feminist critique. Let a hundred gardens bloom near the palace of art.

Like Shakespeare, Joyce is a many-minded writer, providing, requiring, rewarding multiple perspectives. Multiplicity, or the variety of viewpoints, is a hallmark of modern literature (and Shakespearean drama) which Joyce takes to new heights. Ulysses dramatizes an incredible range of voices, styles, and attitudes. Initially Joyce sticks to the viewpoint of Stephen and Bloom, contrasting them very thoroughly, and moving from their minds to the world outside. But that's only the initial technique. Just as we become comfortable with Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, and with Joycean movements inside and outside of Bloom at the funeral, say, Joyce stirs the pot to enrich the stew. He doesn't just dramatize a lot of different characters. He changes the narrators surprisingly and constantly. After the funeral chapter, almost all of the remaining 12 episodes have distinct, unexpected, often strange narrators. Naturally we are often confused: who is speaking? where are we? We don't face these problems in Dickens or Jane Austen.

Joyce is deliberately complicated. Basic questions persist. Is a drunk at a bar, who has a lot to say about Bloom, reliable? What do we do when the author abandons us and leaves the narration to a series of wacky performers: a demented maestro who renders a scene as if language were music, an Irish bard reciting an epic or maybe a mock-epic, the author of a catechism, and one narrator who at a particularly climactic point in the story speaks in the most hackneyed clichés?

Instead of becoming clearer, Ulysses becomes more elusive and problematic. Having constructed an intimate, comprehensive, detailed world inhabited by richly abundant characters, Joyce proceeds to call into question much of what we thought we knew about Stephen and Bloom and Molly. Even apparently simple facts are questioned. Is Bloom Jewish, as he is usually regarded? Is Molly committing adultery today for the first time, or is she, as several Dubliners confidently imply, famously promiscuous? Not to mention the ambiguity of more general, speculative issues: Is Stephen a real artist, or likely to become one? What is the nature of the Blooms' marriage and what is the future of their relationship? The most realistic book ever written is also infinitely mysterious.

The trivial may be sublime. The commonplace may be spectacular. Here Bloom remembers the first time he made love with his wife.

Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.

Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Bergundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth. Below us baysleeping sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple . . . . Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her; eyes, her lips, her stretched neck, beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

Me. And me now.

Stuck, the flies buzzed.

Well, it's a amazing sequence, one we could discuss for a whole class at least. Some of its most important elements are: the fecundity of Bloom's memory and of his consciousness generally; the tenderness and passion of his connection with his wife; the gap between his current alienation and their former intimacy. "Me. And me now." Along with Prufrock's "I do not think that they will sing to me," Bloom's four words must be one of the most forlorn utterances in modern literature. Yet we also feel animated by the ebullient excitement of this whole passage. It's full of paradoxes. The memory is prompted by, of all ridiculous things, two flies copulating. It couldn't be more realistic, in fact mundane, even trivial. It is immersed in lower bodily element, without shame or embarrassment. Unblinkingly realistic, the vision is triggered by flies mating, including goats crapping. Yet it soars into a lyrical, gorgeous drama. Joyce the garbage man outdoes the lyrical Lawrence in his rendition of passionate love. (And you ain't seen nuthin' yet). This is a piece of prose only James Joyce could have written, and one which students of Ulysses would recognize if they found it under a rock on the moon.

If we had to specify one quality of greatness which lifts Ulysses above most novels, it must be Joyce's language. "The true hero of Ulysses is language," as the great Joycean Fritz Senn says. Not Bloom, not Stephen, nor Molly, but language reigns. Words themselves. If Ulysses has an encyclopedic scope, it has a dictionary's range. There are 33,000 words, 16,000 used only once. If range of vision is a reasonable criterion for literary greatness, Ulysses stands high and looks far, as widely as any great work of literature, especially in its verbal resourcefulness and invention. It is truly a virtuoso performance.

Episodes differ so radically in style, tone, narrative point of view that each chapter almost seems to begin a new book. One chapter recapitulates the entire history of language from its primitive utterances, through Latin prose, medieval Romances, down through Shakespeare and Swift and Dickens-- down and down or on and on to contemporary slang and babble. How and why Joyce does this, other than to show off his virtuoso skill, is a real issue and a fair question. That epsode, an encyclopedia of literary history, is characteristic of Joyce's complexity. Impatient and over-burdened readers may feel Joyce is willfully, gratuitously complicated. Ulysses is a notoriously difficult text which we are still learning how to read, comprehend, and appreciate.

And enjoy! Reading Ulysses is a joy. Another radiant Joycean quality, for me a principle source of its greatness, is its humor. The blend of comedy and seriousness, its incessant turns from high to low, low to high, is very close to the heart of Ulysses. Joyce coins a word for this unique and persistent mixture of laughter and solemnity: Jocoserious. Joyce's humor begins with overflowing exuberance, what Robert Frost calls "sheer morning gladness at the brim." Ulysses revels in the felicities and possibilities of language. It overflows with Jocoserious energy. For example, Joyce loves lists. He'd be pleased by The Modern Library for more than the honor, for he puts lists everywhere in his modern, comic encyclopedia. That maniacal Irish bard enumerates members of a delegation, like Homer's catalog of heroes in the Iliad. Only this list includes

"Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitépatant, the Grandjoker Vladinmire Pokethankertscheff, the Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler, Countess Marha Viraga Kisaszony Putrapesti," et al.

Joyce delights in his goofy puns on "pockethanderchief" and naughty double-entendres (kiss-ass-ony). You begin to suspect that the majestic author putting all this together is himself a "Grandjoker" or "Archjoker," and is especially eager to bring together the sublime and the ridiculous. Pierrepaul Petitepatant does so literally: TRANSLATE. In Ulysses the spotlight is often on clowns, fools, tumlers, performers, jesters, wise guys, raconteurs, archjokers, grandjokers, con men, tricksters, false prophets and garbage collectors. Sometimes the book seems to be a vast stage for a Carnival or vaudeville show. Here is the evangelist Elijah, not the prophet but a snake oil salesman. This phoney Elijah delivers an incredible, ridiculous spiel:

Join on right here. Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? . . . it's up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that somethng within, the higher self . . . Are you all in this vibration? I say you are . . . You got me? It's a lifebrightener, sure! . . . It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores, It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and getting down to bedrock . . .

It's bull, wonderfully inspired Irish Bull. First, it's a good impersonation of a carnival huckster. Joyce has listened to con artists and takes them seriously. He finds them funny and puts them in his book. But he also requires these clowns to do some work, because in Ulysses from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. Elijah's glorious nonsense is strangely pertinent to our experience of reading Ulysses. Joyce, wearing the clown's mask, speaks about what is most important to him, his book and our experience of his book. "Book through to eternity junction," I'll take you from the trivial to the transcendental, from the ridiculous to the sublime. If your patience is wearing thin, hang in there: "Just one word more." Have you got the right stuff to stay with me? "Are you a god or a doggone clod?" You see how many moments, how many individual words, like God and Dog, run into each other, how quickly and easily they change places in Joyce's Sacred Funhouse. This fool, like so many of those holy fools and wise fools in Shakespeare, is also a prophet, exhorting us to open our eyes to strange and wondrous visions. After all, "it's up to you to sense that cosmic force." To do so, you have to be many-minded and multiple and incessantly curious: "Be a prism!" And if you stick with it, carefully, patiently, lovingly, seriously, the rewards are infinite, for this book, "It's a life-brightener, sure!"

Ulysses is a masterpiece, one of our great bright books of life. It will continue to attract us and to speak to us as beautifully and irresistibly as Molly, whose soliloquy ends and celebrates this never-ending book of life. Like her husband, Molly has her memories of that first time, and they are joyous too: Passage 8. It's the very end of Ulysses--and it's a life-brightener, sure! It's no accident that the novel ends with this hymn to nature, song of sex, and affirmation of life: "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 all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."