Ulysses — Commentary

In brief

On Thursday 16 June 1904 an advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom fries a kidney, collects a letter from a woman he has never met, goes to a funeral, fails to place an advertisement, eats a gorgonzola sandwich, dodges a biscuit tin and comes home in the small hours, knowing that at about four o’clock his wife took a lover to their bed. That is very nearly the plot. Over it James Joyce laid the plan of Homer’s Odyssey, and through it he ran a different way of writing for almost every one of eighteen episodes.

The result is difficult, obscene, encyclopaedic and much funnier than its reputation. It is also, which nobody warns you about, a tender book. The grand apparatus exists to take one mild, curious, cuckolded man seriously, and by the end the reader knows more about Bloom than about almost anyone in fiction.

The argument

The claim of the book is that the matter of epic was never elsewhere. A walk across a city is a voyage; a funeral is a descent among the dead; a husband going home is a king returning. Joyce means the comparison in both directions. It mocks Bloom, who kills nobody and wins nothing, and it mocks the heroes, whose victories look thin beside a man who feeds the cat and remembers to buy lemon soap.

Against the heroic values the book sets a modest counter-claim, and puts it in the worst possible room. In Barney Kiernan’s pub (ep. 12) Bloom, surrounded by drunks and a bigot, says: “Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred.” Asked what is, he answers: “Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.” The narrator sneers, the room sneers, and soon Joyce’s own parody has produced “Love loves to love love”. That is why the moral survives: the book has already laughed at it harder than any reader could.

Stephen Dedalus starts from the opposite position. “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (ep. 2) is a young man’s line, clever and stuck. Readers have long wanted the meeting of Stephen and Bloom to resolve the book, a son finding a father. Joyce sets it up with enormous care and then refuses it. They share cocoa, urinate side by side under the stars and part (ep. 17). The real resolution is smaller: Bloom, going to bed, reviews his feelings about his wife’s lover, and the list ends “Envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity.” The whole day has been a journey to that last word, and the book is honest enough not to say whether it will last until morning.

The shape of the book

Ulysses is printed in three unequal parts, marked only I, II and III. Part I (eps 1–3) follows Stephen; Part II (eps 4–15) follows Bloom through the town; Part III (eps 16–18) brings him home. The proportions copy the old division of the Odyssey into Telemachy, wanderings and homecoming. Joyce used Homeric titles in his letters and in the schemata he lent to friends, but none of them is printed in the novel.

The clock comes first. Episodes 1 to 3 run from 8 to about 11 in the morning; episodes 4 to 6 begin again at 8 and cover the same hours with Bloom. A small rhyme ties them: the same cloud crosses the sun for Stephen on the tower and for Bloom walking home with his kidney, “A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly”. Two men who have not met are under one sky, and only the reader can see it. From noon the book goes on hour by hour into Friday morning, and then the time scheme gives up: Joyce’s Gilbert schema marks no hour for Molly’s monologue, and his Linati schema gives her the sign for infinity.

The episode map gives all eighteen with hour, place, technique and Homeric source, each linked to its place in the text and in Homer. The novel also has a hinge that first-time readers feel as a loss of footing. Up to episode 9 a recognisable narrator stays close to the characters’ minds. In Wandering Rocks, nineteen short scenes of Dublin at three in the afternoon, that narrator starts to behave oddly, and from Sirens onward the writing itself becomes the event.

What Homer is for

The correspondences are real and often very funny. Bloom’s Calypso is a nymph in a picture over his bed, and his Cyclops is a nationalist, “the citizen”, who hurls a biscuit tin instead of a rock. Odysseus drives a burning stake into the giant’s eye; Bloom has only what the narrator calls “his knockmedown cigar”. The Sirens are two barmaids at the Ormond, “Bronze by gold”. The claim to be Nobody survives in Ithaca as “Everyman or Noman”, the word used in Samuel Butler’s prose translation.

Joyce breaks Homer’s order freely, so this is no parallel text: Nausicaa comes late, Polyphemus after the Sirens. Nor is the mirror straight. Homer’s Penelope waits and Joyce’s does not, and the slaughter of the suitors becomes a cup of cocoa and a mental audit. Joyce told Budgen in 1920: “At first I had not thought of the slaughter of the suitors as in Ulysses’ character. Now I see it can be there too.”

Why Odysseus at all? Joyce met him as a schoolboy in Charles Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses, which seems to have fixed the Latin name, and told Frank Budgen that he thought him the only all-round character in literature. The book began as a planned story for Dubliners, about a Jewish Dubliner and supposed cuckold named Alfred Hunter. In Zürich Joyce read Victor Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, which argued for Semitic sources behind the poem; a Semitic Odysseus suited his man very well.

Critics have disputed the value of all this since 1922. Ezra Pound called it “a scaffold, a means of construction”. T. S. Eliot thought it had “the importance of a scientific discovery”, a way of giving shape to the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”. Edmund Wilson felt the episodes were sometimes turning on “the periphery of a wheel which has no hub”. Pound was closest. The parallels gave Joyce a way to write and a source of jokes; they are not what the book means. Eliot’s reading has dated worst, because nobody who has spent a day with Bloom can think of his Dublin as futility and anarchy.

The voices

In the opening episodes Joyce perfects interior monologue. Stephen’s thought is learned and self-tormenting: “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes” (ep. 3). Bloom’s is quick and practical, full of unfinished sentences and small inquiries into how things work, and he remembers his wife’s version of a hard word: “Met him pike hoses she called it”. Readers who find the book forbidding should stay close to that second voice.

Harriet Shaw Weaver was dismayed when Joyce abandoned it. He wrote to her in August 1919 that packing all the wanderings into one day needed such variation, which “is not capricious”. From then on each episode has a rule of its own:

Aeolus (ep. 7). Newspaper headlines, added late, chop up a scene in a newspaper office.
Sirens (ep. 11). Sound over sense in what Joyce called a fuga per canonem, opening with fragments that return as themes.
Cyclops (ep. 12). A nameless pub bore narrates, interrupted by inflated parodies of legal, epic and journalistic prose.
Nausicaa (ep. 13). Gerty MacDowell’s half is, in Joyce’s words, “namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy”: “The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace.” Bloom’s half deflates it.
Oxen of the Sun (ep. 14). English prose from its earliest stages to modern slang, in imitations of successive authors, while a child is being born upstairs.
Circe (ep. 15). The longest episode: a hallucinatory play script in the brothel district, where objects speak, Bloom is crowned, tried and changes sex, and Stephen’s dead mother rises to accuse him.
Eumaeus (ep. 16). Cliché-ridden prose for two exhausted men, starting “Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings”. It is a great comic performance and easy to mistake for bad writing.
Ithaca (ep. 17). Questions and answers like a catechism or a technical manual, which Joyce called “aridities” and which contains some of the most moving things in the book: “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

The stylistic adventures are the real heroic journey of the novel and also its real cost. Oxen and Eumaeus are hard going without help, and a reader may fairly resent them. But the changes make a point no argument could: any style is a set of blinkers, and a single day exceeds all of them. In the library Stephen says of Shakespeare, “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery” (ep. 9). It applies to this book and, as it happens, to the printing of it.

The people

Leopold Bloom

Bloom is thirty-eight, the son of a Hungarian Jew, Rudolph Virag, who changed his name and later poisoned himself. He has been baptised three times, practises nothing, and is treated by all Dublin as a Jew. He carries on a timid correspondence with a typist, Martha Clifford, under the name Henry Flower. His son Rudy died aged eleven days, and Ithaca gives the time since complete intercourse with Molly as “10 years, 5 months and 18 days”. He is the only man in the maternity hospital who thinks about the mother.

Molly Bloom

Marion Tweedy Bloom, a singer raised on Gibraltar, is about to go on tour with her manager and lover Hugh “Blazes” Boylan. For most of the novel she is what men say about her. When she finally speaks, she corrects nearly everything.

Stephen Dedalus

The hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is two years on, called back from Paris by his mother’s death, teaching for money, drinking his wages and guilty for refusing to pray at her bedside: “Agenbite of inwit”. Joyce treats him with a coolness that readers of the Portrait sometimes miss. Stephen gives the showiest performance in the book, the Hamlet theory in the National Library, and when asked whether he believes it, answers “No” (ep. 9).

Mulligan, Boylan and the city

Buck Mulligan, drawn from Oliver St John Gogarty, owns the first line, “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan”, and holds the key to the tower. Boylan barely appears, felt mainly through Bloom’s avoidance. Round them runs a real city, with its shops, streets and many of its people under their own names. The date honours Joyce’s first outing with Nora Barnacle.

Molly’s ending

The book closes on Molly awake in the dark (ep. 18), in eight enormous unpunctuated sentences. It opens “Yes because he never did a thing like that before” and ends “yes I said yes I will Yes.” Joyce wrote to Budgen in August 1921 that it “begins and ends with the female word yes” and “turns like the huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning”.

Resist those portentous words. She is no earth goddess but a funny, irritable, jealous, snobbish, sexually frank woman in the middle of the night, thinking about Boylan’s manners, the price of things, Gibraltar, an old flame named Mulvey and whether Bloom really asked for breakfast in bed, and at one point turning on her author: “O Jamesy let me up out of this”. Feminist critics have long disagreed about whether she is the book’s fullest human being or a man’s fantasy of what women think, and the monologue offers evidence for both.

The yes itself is less simple than its reputation. It is a memory of Bloom’s proposal on Howth Head, the day he called her “Flower of the mountain”, and it is hedged with one of the least sentimental clauses in English fiction: “and I thought well as well him as another”. Then comes the cadence: a yes to Bloom, to her past, to the whole business, from someone who knows how disappointing it has been. Joyce called it “the indispensable countersign to Bloom’s passport to eternity”. Because she has not said it to Bloom tonight, what happens at breakfast stays open, and that open door is the great stroke of the ending.

How it was made and banned

The last words of the book are its dates: “Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921”. Joyce worked through war, eye trouble and poverty, helped by Weaver’s patronage, and he kept adding: nearly a third of the text was composed on the proofs.

The Little Review, the New York magazine of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, began the serial in March 1918 with Pound as go-between. The Post Office seized the issues with Lestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis and Cyclops. Then the April 1920 issue carried Nausicaa; a lawyer whose daughter had been sent a copy took it to John Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. At the trial in February 1921 John Quinn’s defence was partly that the book was too incomprehensible to corrupt anyone. Anderson and Heap were convicted, fingerprinted and fined a hundred dollars, and the serial stopped in the middle of Oxen of the Sun.

In Paris Sylvia Beach, an American who ran the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, offered to publish it herself, with no experience of publishing. She hired Maurice Darantiere’s printing house in Dijon, whose compositors did not read English, and Joyce’s additions poured back to them proof after proof. The book appeared on 2 February 1922, his fortieth birthday: a thousand numbered copies in a cover meant to match the blue of the Greek flag. Weaver’s Egoist Press issued two thousand more that October from the same plates, with a list of 201 errata, and the Post Office reportedly burned up to five hundred. Samuel Roth pirated the book in America in 1929.

The legal end came through a stunt. Bennett Cerf of Random House arranged for a copy to be imported and seized by customs so that he could fight the seizure, and Morris Ernst argued the case before Judge John M. Woolsey, who ruled on 6 December 1933 that nowhere in the book was “the leer of the sensualist”. The effect on the reader was “somewhat emetic” but “nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac”, and any excess of sex could be excused because Joyce’s “locale was Celtic and his season Spring”, though his day falls in mid-June. The Court of Appeals affirmed 2–1 in 1934, judging the book by its dominant effect. Random House had published that January, setting its text by mistake from Roth’s piracy. The Bodley Head published in England in 1936.

Which text

No definitive Ulysses exists. The first edition is full of errors, and later printings removed some and added others. Hans Walter Gabler’s three-volume Critical and Synoptic Edition, published by Garland on Bloomsday 1984, did not correct any existing printing. Using computers, Gabler built a continuous text out of manuscripts, typescripts and proofs, and claimed about five thousand corrections. The 1986 trade edition was sold as The Corrected Text.

Some changes are wonderful. The most famous puts into the library episode a passage apparently lost to an eye-skip, answering what Stephen asks in ep. 3 and again of his dead mother: “Love, yes. Word known to all men” (ep. 9). Another restores “wholly” to the cloud in episode 1, which in 1922 lacks it, so that it matches episode 4.

John Kidd, a young American scholar, attacked in 1985, in “The Scandal of Ulysses” in The New York Review of Books (June 1988) and in a 174-page Inquiry that December. A patchwork of manuscripts, he said, was the wrong copy-text; Gabler had overturned Joyce’s final choices, and in about four hundred places followed no manuscript at all. There were plain blunders too: a real runner, Harry Thrift, had become “H. Shrift”, and a real cricketer, Captain Buller, “Captain Culler”. Gabler reversed those two in 1986, and Michael Groden and others replied that Kidd’s lists misunderstood the method. Random House went back to its 1961 text in 1990, Bodley Head to its 1960 one, and Penguin followed in 1992; Kidd’s own edition for W. W. Norton was withdrawn when the Joyce estate objected. Danis Rose’s Reader’s Edition (1997) went its own way.

The dispute amounts to this: real errors in 1922, which Joyce’s lists only partly caught; real gains in Gabler, with real overreach; later texts with less care and errors of their own. Scholars have not settled it. The reader’s choice is between a historical object and an editor’s reconstruction, and nobody will be misled by either about what happens.

Now the free text linked from this page. Project Gutenberg’s catalogue says that ebook 4300 is “based on the pre-1923 print editions”, but the file is not the 1922 text. It numbers the episodes, which among the standard editions only Gabler does; it has “Love, yes. Word known to all men”; and it has “H. Shrift” and “Captain Culler”, which are in neither 1922 nor Gabler’s revised text of 1986. Its wording appears to follow Gabler’s 1984 reading text, though nothing in the file says so. Against Wikisource’s transcription of the 1922 printing it differs in over two thousand places, a few of them slips in one transcription or the other. It reads well, but should not be quoted as Joyce’s 1922. All quotations on this page are in its wording. For the first edition use Wikisource, or in print Jeri Johnson’s Oxford World’s Classics 1922 Text (1993), with excellent notes.

Readers and critics

Eliot called the novel “the most important expression which the present age has found”. Virginia Woolf wrote in 1923 that it was “a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster”. At the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress Karl Radek called it “a heap of dung, crawling with worms”. Nabokov called it “a divine work of art” that would outlive those who make it “a collection of symbols or Greek myths”.

Joyce claimed to have put in enough puzzles to “keep the professors busy for centuries”, and they obliged. Stuart Gilbert’s 1930 study printed the schema; Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (1934) shows the book being written; Richard Ellmann’s biography (1959) is one of the great literary lives. The industry’s danger is to make the book a code to be broken. It is better taken as a very long joke with a broken heart at its centre.

Afterlives

Bloomsday began on the fiftieth anniversary in 1954, when John Ryan and Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien), with Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, Joyce’s cousin Tom Joyce and A. J. Leventhal, set out to retrace the route in horse-drawn cabs. Ulysses in Nighttown staged Circe off-Broadway in 1958 with Zero Mostel. Joseph Strick’s 1967 film, with Milo O’Shea, drew an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay, and Bloom (2003) has Stephen Rea and Angeline Ball. The best adaptation keeps the prose: RTÉ’s unabridged radio production, broadcast on Bloomsday 1982, ran for 29 hours and 45 minutes.

How to read it

Know the plan, then forget it. Glance at the schema once, then read for Bloom and not for parallels.
Do not stop at Proteus. Episode 3 is among the hardest and comes very early. Bloom arrives on the next page.
Use help as help. Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated and Harry Blamires’s The New Bloomsday Book are the standard companions, and the free Joyce Project annotates the text online.
Read aloud. Sirens, Cyclops and Penelope were made for the voice. Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan’s unabridged Naxos recording is the one to get.
Finish. The last two episodes change everything before them, and Penelope is easier than its reputation.

Homer, The Odyssey (c. 700 BC). The commentary here gives the free Butler text and the best modern versions.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The making of Stephen, whom Ulysses sets about unmaking.
James Joyce, Dubliners (1914). The same streets and many of the same people, in a scrupulous plainness.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925). One day in London, written against Ulysses as much as in its wake.
Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). Irish comedy after Joyce, by one of the founders of Bloomsday.
Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport (2019). A woman’s unstoppable sentence, Molly’s form carried across a thousand pages of American anxiety.