Now 100 years old, James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses” is widely considered by literary scholars the greatest novel of the 20th Century.
The masterpiece was first published in Paris on Feb. 2, 1922. It was banned in the United States until a landmark 1933 district-court decision that ruled the novel was not “obscene” but rather a work of great literary merit.
In 1965 in my high-school library, I tried to check out “Ulysses.” I say “tried” because the prim and proper librarian at first wouldn’t give it to me. I learned it had been taken off the shelves and hustled off to hide in shame in a back room.
“Why do you want to read THAT book?” she asked me.
“Because I’ve heard it’s a great novel.”
“Well, I’ll have you know it’s smutty,” she sputtered.
“I don’t care; I want to read it so hand it over.”
Reluctantly she did.
Back home, I opened it and began to read it, or I should say TRIED to read it. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it and tossed it across the room.
“How could such gibberish be hailed as great?” I scoffed.
Some months later, in a book store, I happened upon a paperback entitled “Re-Joyce” by famed British writer Anthony Burgess. It was a “guide” on how to read “Ulysses.” I bought it.
Through the next weeks, with Burgess as guide, “Ulysses” all of a sudden made sense. I was stunned by Joyce’s ingenious kaleidoscopic way of evoking all the characters and the bits and pieces of one day and night in Dublin, Ireland – June 16, 1904.
The book details the perambulations in Dublin of Leopold Bloom, a newspaper ad salesman; his wife Molly, a singer; and Stephen Dedalus, a restless, questing young intellectual – plus a large cast of earthy, colorful characters as their paths cross in the city streets and in buildings that day: several pubs, a post office, a library, a brothel, Bloom’s home, a newspaper office, a maternity hospital, a cabman’s shelter.
Much of the book is written in “stream of consciousness,” a technique that mimics the characters’ shards of thoughts, as if they are thinking out loud.
At one point, Stephen thinks this: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Other storytelling methods include a surrealistic nightmare section written as a play with stage directions and characters acting, speaking; a parody of English language styles evolving through history that coincides with a baby being born; newspaper headlines; a question-answer section that mimics the Catholic catechism; a 50-page, unpunctuated meandering river of words as Molly, drowsing in bed, ruminates upon her past. The book is, in a way, a gigantic, sprawling puzzle that readers must “solve.” No wonder few read it.
“Ulysses” is so entitled because its storyline parallels the ancient Greek epic poem “The Odyssey” by Homer, whose hero Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) wanders for years after the Trojan War, trying to get back home to his wife, Penelope. In Joyce’s book, Bloom is a mock-heroic version of Ulysses; wife Molly echoes Penelope.
Yes, “Ulysses” is a complex book crammed with puns, allusions, parodies, homages, swarms of details, philosophical wonderings and word acrobatics. It’s as if Joyce, like a grand magician, had conjured into being a bustling universe of life, death, joy, sorrow and comedy – all in one Dublin day.
I’ve read Ulysses six or seven times. Each re-reading brought new meanings, new treasures.
Born and raised in Ireland, Joyce spent most of his life in a kind of self-imposed exile, mostly in Paris.
Here’s the great lyrical ending, as Molly lies remembering of her long-ago awakening love for Leopold Bloom:
“ . . . and then he asked me would I 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 yes all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
