[References are to ‘Ulysses: The 1922 Text’, Oxford University Press; Oxford: 1993, reissued 2008.]
It’s a trouble for me to begin a discussion of the novel, Ulysses. The thing is, I know it has a simple plot, and it is for the story or the plot that I have recently read it again; so much for why it ought to be easy to discuss it. I should add immediately, that I also read it so as to share some time with the author, James Joyce, who was an interesting person, and who adequately both hid and explained himself in his books. My trouble arises because the book is so complicated on the surface, that as soon as I insist that the story has a start, middle and end, I find that the book itself is trying to hide its beginning and end from me. Still, there is a story, a start, and an end, despite the trickery. It’s a story bound up in an experimental novel. And what I intend to do is explain what I find when I read it.
You may not know the story, and so I will now tell it out. The story tells of a married couple who are going through a sort of long-term grief and mourning for a deceased child. The husband, Leopold Bloom, leads a regular life in Dublin; he is a canvasser for advertisements in one of the city’s newspapers. His wife is a professional singer who will be making a tour of parts of Ireland with others, and is rehearsing in the days leading up to it. Her group sings operatic arias and the like, accompanied by piano. The child over which they are both in their different ways grieving was born around a decade before the story begins, and he died aged only five days old. The work of mourning takes this unusual form: the husband refuses to have another child by his wife, and has done so for ten years. The wife meanwhile has doubts about whether she is too old now, or whether she is generally useless as a woman because of the child’s death and her infertility. Husband and wife are both in their mid-thirties.
It’s not clear why Bloom doesn’t want another try at a child, but that he does not want to do so is clear from indications in his behaviour. For instance, he habitually sleeps head to toe with his wife in bed; and when they make love, he does not complete the activity in the standard way, but withdraws. For her part, the wife, Marion or Molly Bloom, has made her own arrangements to compensate for her sense of inadequacy; she has resigned herself to having an affair, or affairs, with someone else; it seems to be the case that she has done this in order to prove to herself that she is still worth something, and that she still has a purpose in life. Bloom knows about her affair, and Molly knows that he knows about it. Bloom, who reveals his thoughts to himself with caution, doesn’t like to think about what is going on, and doesn’t want to face it; and therefore, the reader, who only sees what Bloom allows himself to see and feel, only catches glimpses of the dynamics of their relationship.
In fact, dealing with these basic facts in such a surgical and methodic way as I have done here, is against the spirit of the entire book, since Joyce wrote the story in such a way, that only at the very last moment does the reader find out, and the narrator tell him, what the deepest root of their respective lives, and the hidden motives for their behaviour, are. For instance, Joyce only shows us, through the inner monologue of Bloom himself, just how much the dead son and the avoidance of doing it again meant to him, in the final pages of the third-from-last chapter. That is to say, the situation I have described above, between two parents in mourning, is a story is told from the phlegmatic point of view of a type of Irish people who prefer to avoid their feelings, not think about things, and concentrate on other things, and just getting on.
The couple do have another child, Milly Bloom, who has recently turned fifteen years old at the time when the story begins, and she has just become a woman, so to speak. This daughter does not live with her parents, and has recently been sent to an art school at a distant town. There are several reasons why she has gone to this boarding school, but one of them seems to be to keep her out of the way of Dublin’s young men, and to give her a wider education. Bloom is not nearly so attached to his daughter as he might be, at one point saying that she is a kind of watered-down version of her mother. It seems as if the two parents feel that they have done their duty by the girl, and simply continue to do so.
In the evening of the day which the book describes, Bloom considers divorcing his wife for infidelity on her part, and because for his part he has made her unhappy; he considers the type of life he would like to lead in future, as a gentleman farmer, an upstanding pillar of the nation, an honoured equal of other substantial men, and living apart on his own means; but his wife does not necessarily belong to his vision of his future. We get the idea that while they understand each other, they do not need each other for any emotional reasons. So, in summary, the story provides us with a couple in a dysfunctional marriage, due to an underlying grief, specifically, the death of the last child a few days after its birth, ten years ago.
On that particular day in summer 1904 on which the book focuses, Bloom makes breakfast for his wife, and then leaves to attend the funeral of a friend of his who died, of natural causes, recently; after which he will do a day’s work. He makes no effort to arrive home again until 2am in the morning. In the meantime, Mrs Bloom has hosted the leader of the musical group she belongs to at their marriage home, and has made love to him in the bed and then on the floor. This character who comes to Bloom’s house while he is out is Boylan, a loutish handsome sort of man who earns his living as a bill sticker, and arranges the musical tours.
So much for the situation of the two main characters; now a single event occurs which brings the prospect of an end to the work of mourning the couple are individually going through. During his day out of the house, Bloom has several times recognised, and started to take a paternal interest in, the circumstances of a youth in his early twenties, Stephen Dedalus. Bloom knows the Dedalus family, and is a close friend of the father of the family. Simon, that father, is a talent tenor singer, and a man who has been reduced to poverty by irresponsible use of his time and money. Bloom also knows that mother and wife of these two men has recently died. Stephen Dedalus is therefore without a mother, and we find out, without much assistance from his father.
Simon Dedalus is what I would call a sort of ‘natural man’; he can sing, he can hate, love, and express himself; and he has survived, with many children. But he is not blessed by any intellect, and is quite simply a Catholic man. There’s no reason to despise him when he mourns for his dead wife in a simplistic way:
- Her grave is over there, Jack, Mr Dedalus said. I’ll soon be stretched beside her. Let Him take me whenever He likes.
Breaking down, he began to weep to himself quietly, stumbling a little in his walk. Mr Power took his arm.
- She’s better where she is, he said kindly.
- I suppose so, Mr Dedalus said with a weak gasp. I suppose she is in heaven if there is a heaven. (p. 101)
Stephen is the third character in the novel, and a significant part of the book, the first three chapters, are told entirely from his perspective; chapter nine, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ is also told from his perspective; other parts show his interactions with Dublin society, and his medical student friends. Dedalus, who we know from a previous novel of Joyce’s, is Jesuit-educated, and has been to the best Irish university, and intends soon to set out on a life in which he will write poetry, novels, plays, and other things, in order to forge the ‘conscience of his race’. His race being ‘Ireland’. But a mixture of factors have made him wreckless, melancholic, and aimless. When he is found alone, Stephen expresses himself to himself in a kind of depressed incoherence, with an intellectual outlook which means nothing to anyone else most of the time.
Stephen has left the family home, and his many siblings, to their poverty; he was lucky to have had a first rate education since, as the years have passed, his family has lost the means to pay for an education. As we said, his mother has recently died. Stephen suffers from a violent mixture of grief for his mother’s loss, along with regret that he did not do the Catholic and Christian things she asked of him on her deathbed; additionally, an invincible pride in himself which makes him ashamed of his mother’s religion, and angry that his friends mock him. On the day the story takes place, he is still wearing black, and we gather that this is not entirely in memory of his mother, but out of a sense of defiance to the world, too. Having tried to renounce his native religion, and insisting that ‘non serviam’, his interior world is populated by Thomist philosophy, Aristotle, metaphysical problems about vision and reality, and the like, which do not help him deal with his actual situation.
His actual situation is, that he lives temporarily at a Martello tower around ten miles from Dublin, with a medical student, who takes his money and has no consideration for him. Their principle activity when together is drinking and making scenes and rebellious harmless plots to disrupt the cultural life of Dublin. On the day in question, an English youth is staying with them who is interested in ‘Celtic’ and Irish poetry and culture, and treats Stephen as if he is sort of curiosity. To pay the rent, he earns money with part time teaching at a boys’ school, and some publishing of little poems. It appears that he usually wastes his money on drink, or on lending it to his associates.
Around midday Stephen gives an informal lecture on Shakespeare at the national library. The thesis of his lecture or debate is, that Shakespeare’s wife ruined the poet’s life. Or, that Shakespeare was terrified of his wife, and hated her – which is in part why he never visited Stratford once he had left for London, and left her his ‘second best bed’. Stephen proposes that, if Shakespeare based any character in Hamlet on himself, then that character is the old dead king, killed by his adulterous wife. Shakespeare’s wife was the model for all the bad women who are written into his plays. In this way, Hamlet’s mother, the mother of Hamlet the boy in mourning, was the one who ruined his life.
After work, and eating out for the second time, Bloom decides to go to the maternity hospital, to check up on a woman he knows, who has been in labour for three days. While there, Bloom meets Stephen and his gang of friends in the waiting area, and realising that the boy is drunk and being made a fool of by his friends, Bloom decides to stay around to make sure that Stephen, the son of his friend, will not lose all of his money and be left wandering around blind drunk that night. When the child is born, and after being told to leave, the group of medical students, and Stephen leave, heading for a late night pub; Bloom follows the group, to make sure Stephen does not get into any trouble.
Bloom loses the group at a train station, and it turns out that Stephen has lost them, too; the young man is accompanied only by someone called Lynch, who takes them to a whorehouse. As Bloom wanders into nighttown, trying to find Stephen, he makes his way to the red light district, where one of the prostitutes calls out to Bloom and asks him if he is looking for his friend. Coincidentally, the two of them, Bloom and Stephen, are both wearing black that day, which is unusual, and the woman assumes that they must have come together. Bloom goes into the brothel. There follows a few minutes of conversation with the girls, and some payment, before Stephen strikes at a lamp with his walking cane, and bolts from the premises; all of this takes place mostly in a haze of subconscious desires and fears welling up as hallucinations. Bloom suspects that Stephen’s drink has been spiked by his friends, because he is too inebriated for what he has consumed in drink. Having left after causing some minor damage to the premises, and with Mrs Cohen, the mistress shouting after him, the boy stumbles into the street where he offends young woman by saying something clever. A crowd gathers, and a couple of off-duty Red Coats or British army soldiers challenge him to a fight for what he said to the girl. He is punched and falls to the ground unconscious.
What we see in the character of Stephen is a young man who has lost his mother, and whose father is a talented man, but who can do no longer do anything for his son. But when he sees the youth lying in the street unconscious and in need of help, Bloom, in what Joyce would have called an epiphany moment, recognises the return of his lost son. Bloom had already developed a paternal concern for Stephen earlier on, and doesn’t seem to understand his own motives until this point. There have been one or two indications that Bloom regrets not having had a son to bring up, to show him how things are done, give him a hand in life.
Particularly in the fifth chapter, ‘Hades’, Bloom mentions the boy, Rudy, to himself continuously, as if he never wants to forget. This is the same child that Molly later on refers to as ‘what was neither one thing nor the other’, so newborn it was. But to Bloom, it was a substantial loss he has never got over:
“How life beings.
“Got big then. Had to refuse the Greystones concert. My son inside her. I could have helped him on in life. I could. Make him independent. Learn German too.” (p. 86)
It is only at page 565 that we see clearly to what end the novel has always been heading: Bloom’s problem with is dead son and his grief is resolved by being able to make Stephen independent, to help him on in life.
It’s something sentimental, and also something surrounded in comedy and doubt. However, I think that this resolution of Bloom’s particular problem, and the possible resolution of Stephen’s particular problem to some extent, is the satisfying reason for why this book was written, and what it is substantially about.
Bloom wakes Stephen up, and asks the local police, who have arrived, to leave the matter to him. The crowd dissipates, and Bloom leads the youth to an all-night shelter, where the two of them talk for a while, and try to drink coffee. Then, they walk to Bloom’s house, and he offers Stephen a bed for the night in the spare room, or on the living room sofa. As they talk, we discover the visions for the future which Bloom has, and how they can perhaps work out a relationship beneficial to them both and to Molly, involving singing, education, money, travel, and fame. Broadly, he knows that Stephen can sing as well as his father, Simon, and that he loves music; and so, Bloom has the idea of introducing him to his wife, and the three of them working together on a musical tour, improvement of their respective skills with language and music; he imagines getting Stephen back on the straight and narrow, and the youth becoming a famous professor, poet and singer. It is clear that Bloom has found a purpose in life for the first time in maybe ten years since the death of his son.
Stephen refuses the offer of staying the night, and it is unclear what he will do, but they agree to meet again. Bloom goes upstairs, and briefly tells his wife about what he done during the day, about Stephen, and then falls asleep.
The chapter of the book takes us inside the head of Molly Bloom, the wife. Until this point, she has only been heard of by rumour or described in the third person, as a good looking, Spanish looking woman, who men find appealing. Her monologue and internal consciousness has a unique quality and power which I will not discuss here. It is obscene, unfiltered, various, emotional, proud, vital, and unstoppable. As she approaches sleep, she is heard mulling over three things in particular. First, her purpose in life regarding children, men and other women; second, her thoughts about Stephen; and finally, the memory of her love and marriage to Bloom. It is meant to be shown, that for this night at least, Molly does not need to be unfaithful to her husband, because their mourning is over; or, perhaps, it is Bloom’s mourning which is over, so she can be set free from the curse of infertility. What the new future would actually be between the three of them is not disclosed. However, the point to be made is, that the dead child’s loss is the cause of their discord, and that if they can overcome this, as they have in the way described, then Molly may still be as in love and wedded to her husband as she was at the start of their marriage.
But it is not only Bloom who has connected his dead son with Stephen, and sees a means to the end of grief. Molly independently makes the same connection. She remembers the last time she saw Stephen Dedalus, which was ten or eleven years ago, when she herself was wearing mourning clothes.
“I saw him driving down to the Kingsbridge station with his father and mother I was in mourning thats 11 years ago now yes hed be 11 though what was the good in going into mourning for what was neither one thing nor the other of course he insisted hed go into mourning for the cat I suppose hes a man now by this time he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his lord Fauntleroy suit and curly hair like a prince on the stage” (p. 724)
Following this conjunction of memories between the last time she saw Stephen, and the time she was in morning for her son, ten or eleven years ago, she grows excited, and progressively more optimistic and clear headed about the future, and about her prospects for happiness, and for renewal in the family. She thinks of the Tarot cards she read that morning, and how she would care for their new friend, and how he, being extremely educated, would teach her. It’s almost entirely along the same lines as Bloom saw things.
I have already said, that this is a sentimental story, as artificially emotional, as expressive of deep longings and universal needs, as something written by Dickens might be. And, in my opinion, without this underlying story, I don’t think Ulysses would be worth reading many times over, as I have read it. The that art Joyce has used is, to have delayed these facts and restricted this plot, so that it only emerges very slowly at first, and then all at once at the end, in a burst of emotional truth. It is the same technique he used in his Dubliners stories.
There are several things to say about Ulysses now, which I hope may be a definitive statement of what I think the book’s value is, and what I think that value will continue to be. In 1922 when it was published, anyone reading would have found this aspect or that aspect of its surface style and texture interesting; but mere style and novelty does not reward another reading or a reading 100 years later. Innovations which Joyce made in Ulysses are not innovations any more; but the book continues to be valuable. I have said that the story is the most important thing, and that the story is what draws me back to it.
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There are a few other factors, which I will deal with briefly, which I think are important relative to Ulysses. For convenience, I should list them here, in preparation.
1. On difficult books, the difficult style; maturity of mind
2. On poetry and non-poetry, lists, reference books
3. On Ireland
4. On Joyce as an artist and man
5. On Homer’s Odyssey as the structure or scaffolding of Ulysses
6. On Catholicism and Ulysses
7. On stories and the creation of sentiment
I believe that there is a traditional reception of Ulysses, and that this traditional scholarly reading of the book does not do an injustice to the spirit in which Joyce wrote it. It was meant to be a book containing everything. It is a book’s book. So, my purpose, to give a summary of Ulysses and what it means to me alone, would be seen as silly by many. How do you entirely write down what the book of all books means to you, anyone would reasonably ask, when it means more or less everything? Ulysses is so full of awareness about its reader, and the reader’s reading habits, that it has already prevented you from adequately accounting for it, finishing it, and so on. Ulysses was one of Jacques Derrida’s favourite books for this reason. It is a work without any fixed meaning, but generates new meanings constantly, from inside its own texture.
I don’t feel that this attitude toward a book is good form, however; such an approach shows a lack of seriousness. It is true that Ulysses contains a lot of information and theory, and awareness, and as it were has a life of its own. But it is also my belief that it has a specific value to me, which I can express, and which saturates it, leaving nothing important out.
Now, whether I can express my interpretation in English depends on my skill and attitude toward thinking. I think that there probably is a level of awareness of the mind and character, which is superior to the book, and which can master a book, and exhaust its meaning. The mind can entirely capture and pin down the value of the book, so to speak. Where the self-referential problems arise is, when you then insist that the mind is linguistic, and the book is linguistic, so they cannot master each other. As for that, I simply disagree: the mind is more than linguistic. And the book is just a book.
There is also indication among those who admire Ulysses in the deconstructive and academic way of our time in literary studies, that they treat literature as an alternative to The Bible. Not being Christians, they want books which can put the Bible in its place, or shift the Bible aside in some way. This is another reason, for them, why Ulysses has an endless value, for reasons other than its plot or story. For, due to the heavy information content of Ulysses, it would be possible to devote a lifetime to its study, and take enjoyment and make a labour of aligning it more and more precisely with reality. Again, I simply find this kind of thing rather shameful. While it is appropriate to do such a thing for, let us say, the Old and New Testaments, it would be possible, but not right, to do it with a work by Joyce. Admittedly, it was acceptable to do what he was also trying to do, to produce a work from Ireland by a ‘national poet’, where at the time Shakespeare held that title.
So, to move on quickly to what Ulysses has of value for me.
1. On difficult books, the difficult style; maturity of mind. I have two copies of Ulysses, one bought in 1994, and another bought for me in 2023. I have signed them each time I read them, and I have left markings and notes on the pages, which these days indicate to me what parts I did or did not follow. I know with near absolute certainty, that although I read the book from cover to cover in 1994, aged 18, I understood almost none of it. I could not add the words together inside the sentences, nor the sentences into paragraphs, so as to derive meaning and intent; and the whole book’s point should have been a mystery to me. But I read it back then because I knew it was important, and I wanted to have at least tried the important books.
Above, I have done what some people disapprove of very angrily, namely, I have told the plot of a book; I have provided ‘spoilers’. A couple of points about why I have done this, and why it is part of the work of criticism to provide spoilers. Firstly, it would have assisted my younger self a great deal, if it had been explained to me what the plot of that book was. Ulysses only reveals the story at the end, and younger readers need to know what to look for. I think that what I suffered from as a youth, and I guess that Joyce himself did not suffer from, was a mind unused to working for long periods of time with mere language, thought, concepts, abstractions. Joyce was precocious; I was not. Similarly, I don’t expect that everyone ever does ‘mature’ or strengthen the mind, and many may not at all; so simplifying a work has value for such minds.
Ulysses is said to have had its genesis in Joyce’s imagination when he was making another of the short stories eventually collected as Dubliners. And it is possible to see his long novel as the working out of the full implications of a short story about a man out of the house all day because of an unfaithful wife and a private grief, and to align that particular man’s day with the wanderings of Odysseus. As in those short stories collected in Dubliners, only one event really occurs in each story. But that event tends to be what I have called above ‘sentimental’, and what Joyce said was an ‘epiphany’.
As an example of his method, in both the short story and the long novel, see ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’. The ‘plot’ here is, that several people come together around a fireplace, old and young, during a day of trying to get votes for a particular candidate in a local election. It is a dispiriting situation, characterised by financial poverty, petty prejudices, the presence of drink, purposeless idleness, and in the end, by one of the group having the idea that one of their number should read out a poem composed recently about Charles Stewart Parnell. The poem, obviously composed by Joyce himself for the purposes of the short story, is shown on the page. Stanzaic form, ‘literary’ language, rhymes and almost comic turns of phrase in the archaic language – these things cannot hide the emotional loyalty of this group of men to their lost leader, Parnell, which the poem expresses. The little group of hopeless Irish nationalists remember their dead former leader, who they each betrayed. It is as if Parnell has entered the realm of song and myth, rather than the world of reality, where he was betrayed by his own people, as Joyce saw it. The Irish political class are unfit to look after themselves, and deserve some pity, I think the story serves to tell us.
Perhaps the word ‘sentimental’ is too brutal; but I do mean, the stories are meant to bring about an emotional release, or a bringing together of an idea, and image, and a feeling about something important – and in most cases, about Ireland. Despite all the fuss about the complexity of Ulysses, this is what is going on in his short stories and the novel.
2. On poetry and non-poetry, lists, reference books. I want to speak about Ireland, but the subject is rather large, and Joyce dealt with it in a particular way himself. If I first examine how Joyce dealt with many themes, namely by studying and composing, then I will have narrowed my own focus likewise. When Joyce was composing Ulysses, he did a lot of ‘research’. In the two novels which he wrote about himself and Dublin, he always cast himself (I mean, as Stephen), as the oldest and only son of the family. But it is clear that this was not the case, since his brother, Stanislaus, is known to have helped him a great deal, particularly with research, as well as with money. Ulysses contains meticulously accurate street descriptions, and is almost an entire tissue of ‘found text’: it imitates all kinds of language, and this because Joyce prepared for composing the book’s parts by studying and researching in advance. There is no question that he could imitate Malory and Burke, but he did so as well as he did only after he had studied them afresh, for Ulysses. Joyce worked as an artist, a technician. He could draft a document which sounds like an English court document, and make it humorous in its context; or write up a mortgage contract, or a holiday prospectus – but this is because he had these things to hand and imitated them and manipulated them. This not to say, that the result is not entertaining, and it does not call into question the power of organisation of his mind and the book. But, this is not how poets are supposed to work. Poetry is from memory, and for memory, and from the depths of the mind alone – and not from research. But this was Joyce’s novelistic technique.
3. On Ireland. I would have liked to have said that Joyce was a passionate nationalist; such a thing would have been good in our time, to be able to write here that ‘James Joyce was a passionate Irish nationalist’, given the state of Ireland today. And Ulysses, like Dubliners, is entirely about Ireland; it’s main subject is the ‘second city of Empire’. It describes the country as a colonised place, a part of the British empire; but, sadly for us, Joyce had no interest in liberating it, nor in provoking any war on its behalf.
Here are some of the indications of what Joyce thought of Ireland, which are worth mention. Among political leaders, Parnell had the central place in Joyce’s vision of what was needed, and also why the work of such a man could not work. Parnell, a leader who rose by his own power almost from the other side, to save the Irish, was ultimately betrayed by the country’s own Church, and then also by the country’s own beloved peasant class. Joyce saw it that way, and at some point in the book, Stephen mentions that he will never do anything for Ireland itself, because Ireland will not repay him with thanks, but rather betray him as it did Parnell.
I do not think it is coincidence, either, that Bloom’s fault and his virtue in Ulysses, is that he forgives his wife for adultery: this the exact crime which Parnell was ruined over. Parnell’s name and the signs of mourning for him appear at the start of The Portrait, and in Dubliners, and in Ulysses throughout. In fact, Parnell’s brother, John, is seen from time to time walking through the town during the day, as a common citizen.
Another aspect of Joyce’s interest in Irish independence is seen when he writes obliquely about the foundation of Sinn Fein, the political party, by Arthur Griffiths. Stephen had met Kevin Egan in Paris, an old Irish nationalist, where he was committing himself to obscurity and drink; this is remembered by Stephen at length in the third chapter. Stephen also knew, as Joyce did, Arthur Griffiths, who founded Sinn Fein, and the nationalist newspaper for which Joyce himself submitted essays. In a comic twist, the fictional Bloom is mentioned by some in the novel as being the secret eastern European advisor to Griffiths, who directed him on how to set up a political party, so as to overthrow British rule in Ireland – implying that Bloom was the mastermind behind that influential party.
When Joyce refers to England, and to Ireland, he does so through his characters in enjoyably and platitudinously common ways; the British are all bishops, battleships, buggery, bulldogs, beef, beer, etc.; while Ireland and the Irish, especially in a chapter spent in a bar (Cyclops), are believed to be characterised by being part of a rich land of produce and riches. In that bar scene, the Citizen, an Irish nationalist with a vicious dog, is cast as stupid, violent, and addicted to drink. Bloom is there in the bar while trying to see a solicitor to sort out the finances for Mrs Dignam, the widow of the man buried earlier in the day.
Joyce set out to create a novel of Ireland, but not to politically liberate it, or to support its uprisings; it is worth pointing out that while his book was being written, the 1916 uprising occurred. And, that he left Ireland in the early 1900s, and never returned, living in exile in France and Switzerland for the rest of his life. Ultimately, he was happy for the British influence to continue as is. Note also, that Molly Bloom, as she frequently points out to herself, and enjoys remembering, is the daughter of a British army officer, Major Tweedy; and that she spent her youth on Gibraltar, among the Royal Navy ships, the variety of the empire, at the centre of the world; she has a familiarity with the British army’s regiments and ways, and considers herself a league above the average Irish woman. Bloom himself is not properly speaking Irish, either, but rather a second generation Jewish immigrant from eastern Europe – a characteristic of his main character which allowed Joyce to avoid and put a barrier up against the nationalism and Christianity which dominated most of his contemporaries.
4. On Joyce as an artist and man. James Joyce put his own character into Stephen Dedalus, and into Leopold Bloom. Joyce did not make things up on a large scale; rather, when he wrote fiction, he referred to actual events he had known, so that his characters in intimate details are from his own life. Bloom is a good man, and is intended to be so. When an author describes a good man in literature, it refreshes the soul, I find; it is proper that whatever Joyce’s own character, he made Bloom as rounded and good as possible.
Here is a summary of how Bloom spent his day being ‘all round and good’, as I say. After making breakfast for his wife, and feeding the cat, he goes out for some breakfast, and makes conversation with people he knows. He takes a bath in the public baths. Generally, he enjoys living in a coherent and civilised town, and does his part in Dublin as a citizen. Before the funeral of his friend begins, for some reason which I do not fully understand, he goes into a church and watches the mass, which is of no interest to him as a religious event. After attending his friend’s funeral, he is careful to ask about the welfare of the widow and the surviving children; he later applies to court officers he knows to ensure that the family will have money to survive until the insurance pays out. Throughout the day, he avoids drinking alcohol while others do so. As we have said, while his wife has her affair, he does not punish her for it, but understands that he is himself sharing in the fault. Bloom spends an hour before night falls on the beach at Sandymount, where he masturbates himself inside his pocket while watching a young woman on the rocks – which was the reason that the book was banned in the UK and US; it might be said in his favour, that he does not use prostitutes, as Molly suspects that he does. When he goes to the hospital at around 9am, it is to see Mrs Purefoy, or to give her some moral support during her long labour, and he is glad to hear that the baby is delivered safely. This is where he meets Stephen, and the rest of what was described above, when he makes sure Stephen does not give away all of his money, warns him to stay away from his malicious friends, stops Stephen from being arrested, and ensures that he has somewhere to stay, and so on.
Neither Bloom nor Stephen are Joyce. They are what the young Joyce and the older Joyce created from their experience. Stephen is no doubt the younger Joyce, and Bloom the older one, no doubt: ultra-ambitious young man with elite level education; older man interested in family, generosity of feeling, conservation of a society in peace.
5. On the Odyssey as scaffolding. I personally see no interest in aligning Ulysses with the Odyssey; it’s not intrinsic to the novel, it seems to me, but rather a means Joyce used to pad out and build a short story into a 720 page book of books. Among the scholars of Ulysses, there is rarely agreement about which parts of the two books even line up with each other. The broad outlines are fine, and they do work: Stephen is Telemachus who goes out for experience and comes home at the end; Bloom is Odysseus; Molly is Penelope. Mr Deasy is old Nestor; the barmaids are like the Sirens, and so on. To my mind, Joyce needed this scaffold in the pursuit of inventions, more than we do, in the pursuit of entertainment.
6. On Catholicism and Ulysses. In the Aelus chapter of the book, Stephen, having been encouraged by newspapermen to write a book which contained them in it, the people he knows from Dublins, replies by telling them a short story he has been working on. Two nuns spend their savings on a day out to Nelson’s pillar on what was then Sackville Street (since blown up, and the street renamed O’Connell Street); they climb the stairs, up to the top. They look out over Dublin, and point out to each other the various churches which dominate and control the city. Stephen calls his story ‘A Pisgah Sight of Palestine’, which is to say, a view of the promised land from Mount Pisgah as Moses saw it. The story ends with them dropping plum stones through the railings onto the street below. The promised land, so to speak, has been already colonised by the Catholic Church.
Stephen has renounced his faith in the Church, but not necessarily in God. Molly at the end gives the only firm affirmation of God’s reality in the book, when she says that all this world could never have been made by any one except by God – as if God is the source of the triumphant everlasting beauty of the world.
But Joyce’s problem seems to have been that he wasn’t prepared to let the Church, which had raised and educated him, keep him under its power, under its charms, its rites, and make him serve. Bloom by contrast is almost oblivious to the Church, being essentially Jewish in his nature; in his monlogues at the church yard, he imagines the dead piling up, and being dropped in the ground as if there were some kind of mere old machinery, to be eaten by rats, and nothing more. Although he has three times been christened, in various churches, in an attempt to help him fit in to Irish culture, it does not seem to have taken. And while his mourning for his Irish son is subdued and worked out painfully, his mourning for his eastern European Jew father is frequent, and relatively continuous. That father, ‘Rudloph Virag’, who changed his name to ‘Bloom’, was a hotel proprietor who committed suicide in his sixties, due to severe melancholy, and probably financial problems. He appears in a lengthy section of the late chapter of the book, ‘Circe’, where Bloom’s imagination or subconscious lets rip in extraordinary ways; his father steps forward as a cunning and unscrupulous ‘Jew’ who lusts after young Irish bodies. Incidentally, in the same section, Stephen’s father, Simon Dedalus, makes an appearance to restrain his own son, when he begins to dance and become hectic in Mrs Cohen’s brothel, with the most minimal and unhelpful of pieces of advice: “Think of your mother’s people!” (p. 538).
Both Stephen and Joyce take the view that the Irish, for whom they want a national renewal, and a local government, are currently dominated by two powerful and international agencies or institutions: the British Empire, and the Catholic Church; and to the extent that they will not see a national renewal, or independence, and that if some peaceful way were found to undo those influences, then it would be right to so undo them.
I have mentioned that Bloom goes into a church before he takes his bath; his comments on the Eucharistic ritual are comical and derogatory. Priests frequently cross his path as he wanders from place to place during the day. Stephen’s relationship to the Church is mediated by the ghost of his mother, who herself is an unwanted presence in his life. She begs him to pray for her, and her breath when she appears to him in memory and hallucination and the subconscious has smell of stale flowers, her clothes and skin showing signs of decay; it is the image of Christianity as the dying and sick mother continually making a claim on the living.
But as I have already mentioned, Joyce, as an artist, had the intention of making his own bible; and more than this, he was clearly fascinated by Christ as the perfect man, the individual, the Son of God. Joyce was telling the truth about himself when he makes Stephen recollect that, as an adolescent, he believed that he was the reborn Son of God, and thought of Christ and his Church as some kind of rival, to that extent. But the power of a Church is not in its physical embodiments, and its arbitrary and human power of one man over another, of course. The drama of religion takes place in the interior life of the various souls. Joyce consciously avoided having to go through this with Bloom, by making him a secularised Jew.
We should ask ourselves, if we are Christians, what is it that we want from this novel, exactly? Should it have been more pro-Church? Should it be avoided because it makes fun of ritual and priests with the kind of comment it makes on them? Here and there in commentary on the book, I have read strange statements to the effect that Joyce is merely playing devil’s advocate, as if he were saying to the reader: “You want a world without God? Behold a soul without God, and the horror of it!” Similarly, I think that Eliot used to believe that Joyce was the elite result of a Christian education, and that the book is the outcome of a pure Christian intellect.
What Joyce really thought about this question is a mystery, because despite his works, he never laid out his ideas in prose criticism or commentary.
7. On stories and creation of sentiment. I read Ulysses in 1994, 2001, 2008, and again this year. I am not convinced that I understood it any better the second time, when I was twenty five years old, than I did when I read it first. But in my notes there are clear signs that in 2008, aged 32, the same age as Joyce was when he began writing it, that my mind was able to follow it line by line, and over the whole work. Some things require a larger mind. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man did not give me many problems, as a youth, but Ulysses did. I think that I did not have the mind and emotions large and expansive enough to want to look properly into other people and other writing. By contrast, Joyce had taken an interest in the story of Ulysses, the stories of the people of Dublin for their own sakes, even if he imagined himself introvertedly and rather insanely, as the Son of God, as I did at the same time in my life. He had an interest in showing the lives of people and finding the pity and the meaning in them. That was something I never could do as a young man.
So, how did Joyce come to take an interest in the common everyday lives of the average people? One answer is, that it was fashionable at the time, to create domestic and civic art – which was the significance of Ibsen for him, I think. If Joyce admired the major writers of his day, and they were creating tragedies out of local political and legal problems, then Joyce could do the same, out of imitation, rather than out of native precocious genius. Even if they were only imitation at first, his short stories, the Portrait, and Ulysses, do demonstrate a sympathy and familiarity and an observation of the lives of actual people. And this is what novels should really be inspired by; the novel is made for investigating other people’s lives, and for imagining how other people live, our neighbours, in a civilisation. So that we can see what is lovable about each other, and so that we might have some mercy and tolerance of each other. This is one of the purposes of the institution of literature. In summary, Ulysses remains worth reading, for the kindness and generosity which is in the story, and the emotions of sympathy and affection it brings about in the reader, when the story is understood.
I have entirely omitted to mention the other striking characteristic of this work, from start to finish: the comic way in which it is written, the almost continuous joking, the skilful use of serious words for unserious things, and so on; the inventions and scenes which are intentionally funny and also convincing as well as being slightly tragic. One minor instance of which, hidden deep inside the book, is this: the central episode (10. Wandering Rocks), has as its central scene, the very centre of the work, Mr Bloom on the street, browsing a used books cart, looking for a romantic and erotic book to take home, because he knows his wife likes such things – which is at least, what Ulysses can be thought to be, if it is nothing else. The humorous approach to writing serious things, and this Joycean humility about what he may actually have achieved, refers us back to Dickens, maybe, who had a similar sardonic and detached view of other people and the way life turns out. It’s a certain kind of humour in which the English novel is written.
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