Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986 (First published 1922) ISBN 0140084274
Ulysses.... that monument of twentieth-century literature in English; a monument that has spawned hundreds of books, many academic careers, and no doubt sold many copies that have sat in bookshelves as unread signifiers of the owners intelligence. Which in many ways is a shame, because it is just a book, a novel: yes, a difficult and at times obscure novel, but also a funny, moving, and exciting one.
This is the second time I have read this book, and on the whole, I have enjoyed it more the second time around, reading just for pleasure, and not study. This time around I have registered much more the sheer enjoyment Joyce has in language itself and telling stories. In Leopold Bloom Joyce tried to create the everyman for the twentieth-century, and to a large extent he succeeded. Bloom is trying very hard to be the modern man, with his adherence to science, order, and proper behaviour. However, owing to his Jewishness he will never be accepted as truly Irish, tolerated rather than a part of the brotherhood (his freemasonry also setting him apart from most in Catholic Ireland). We see clearly during the passage of 16 June 1904 how his own situation makes Bloom sensitive to the trials of others who are not in the mainstream of society: his response to the slings and arrows he receives is to emphasize the importance of love -
"But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
— What? says Alf.
— Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred"
And Bloom symbolises that throughout the book, especially when saving Stephen from himself at the end of the night. Of course Bloom is not a perfect man. He is unfaithful to his wife (who is also unfaithful to him), he is a failure at the "business" of life, not a success in his work, and unable to make a mark in any other way on society. Yet he is truly the hero of Ulysses, and the reader warms to him in all his goodness, foibles and follies.
Even though many of the references Joyce makes to Dublin and Irish history may go over the modern reader's head without a guide, one can still get the sense that Joyce is both reminiscing with love on his home town and also making fun of much of what the Irish see as important in themselves. Like all colonized peoples they labour under a foreign yoke, which in Ireland's case is masked with culture. Stephen is more cultured than the English he despises, yet he also despises much that Ireland has given him as well. Joyce it would seem has as little time for the Fenians as he does for the English. Bloom is in fact a man of the world, although he is quick to declaim his Irishness.
The way Joyce structured the novel was indeed revolutionary at the time, and has had a huge effect on the nature of writing since then. While he had already tried a stream-of-consciousness approach in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he takes it much further in this work, trying to capture every fleeting thought as it flies past the brain. It is of course impossible to really do so, but both the first episode and the last are wonderful attempts at it. In between Joyce toys with every literary trope, from newspaper articles to Irish sagas to romance novels.
And to do so while describing the peregrinations of a nobody through his day - it opens up the epic in the everyday, the hero in the humble. That someone like Leopold Bloom can be the centre of such a poem gives hope to us all.
The result is a fascinating melange: like many great novels, there are for every reader I'm sure, moments of boredom. The beauty of Ulysses is that, for every reader I'm sure, those moments are counterbalanced by others of amazing, brilliant, and breathtaking writing. A true masterpiece, raising the most ordinary of men to the status of hero, counterpointed with the heroine of Molly Bloom, it is not a book that should be just left on the shelf unread. I'll write no more, as brains more powerful than mine have said more profound things about this book: I would just add - read and enjoy!
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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