Reading Ulysses through this pandemic, I learnt that it found its first readers during the previous one. The Spanish flu began spreading through the world in February 1918 and had run its deathly course by the spring of 1920. The Little Review began serializing Ulysses in March 1918 till it was forced to stop in 1920, midway through the novel, because of a prosecution for obscenity. The thirteenth episode was the unlucky instalment; the prosecution was brought because it contained descriptions of characters masturbating.
I haven’t got to that chapter yet. I’ve been stuck on the tenth chapter for a week now, the one that begins with a Jesuit priest giving a schoolboy a letter to post. Having read just under a third of the novel in the course of a month, I can truthfully say that it has been the oddest reading experience of my life. Joyce claimed he had stuffed the text with enough allusions to keep professors busy for generations so I imagine I’m reading the novel as he would have liked me to, with explanatory apparatus. This is, as any sane reader knows, ridiculous for fiction. Reading Ulysses is like reading a densely footnoted book... with the footnotes left out.
Like many people who want bragging rights to this Everest of the fictional world, I’ve tried to scale Ulysses before and never got past base camp, otherwise known as the first chapter. The main character in that chapter is a young, impoverished, would-be poet who doesn’t like bathing called Stephen Dedalus so I assumed for years that he was the novel’s central protagonist. It shames me to admit that I’ve only just discovered that Ulysses’s Ulysses is Leopold Bloom.
How did people read Ulysses before the internet? My method is to first read a chapter in the paper book in a state of general bafflement. I then re-read it in an online version, clicking through the hyperlinked annotations embedded in it to understand the maddening range of references. Finally, I wear my earphones and listen to the audiobook, where the chapter is dramatized by animated Irish voices, complete with street sounds, lapping waves and noises off, which bring the novel to life like an old-fashioned radio play. It’s this last ‘reading’, where I give myself up to the soundtrack of a story that I already know, that makes it all worthwhile.
I know, life’s too short, but Covid has slowed it down enough to make reading Ulysses seem possible. Not, of course, to read it as Joyce’s contemporaries read it; they were real mountaineers, climbing Everest without oxygen or mapped routes to the summit. No, my storming of Ulysses is done with teams of online Sherpas and gigabytes of digital explanation. That said, it is a magnificent novel.
The thing that surprises me most about it is that it is a young(ish) colonial’s novel. It was published in 1922, the year southern Ireland went from being a colony to becoming the Irish Free State, a self-governing dominion of the British Empire. Ulysses’s colonial setting is familiar to the Indian reader: there are viceroys and colonial policemen and patronizing Englishmen, and rude names for those Englishmen: Sassenach, Saxon, ‘stranger’, also ‘paleface’.
The very first chapter lets you know that the Irish are used to subjection, that Ireland is an old, very tightly held, colonial possession. The novel begins with Stephen Dedalus living with a friend on Dublin’s seashore, in a fortified gun tower built by William Pitt (the Younger) to defend Britain against France’s naval gunships during the Napoleonic Wars. The mad, allusive ambition of the novel seems part of the colonial’s determination to inhale Western high culture whole, from the Bible to Hamlet, from Homer to Shakespeare, from Aristotle to Aquinas, and make it do his bidding, and, what’s more, to do this better than any writer from the imperial metropolis could.
Apart from being an eccentric guide to the Western canon, Ulysses is also a Dublin street-finder. It is the greatest pedestrian novel ever written; its main characters literally walk the reader through their stories. It is also English literature’s great municipal novel, naming and inhabiting Dublin’s offices, its pubs, its butcher’s shops, its tobacconists, its newspaper offices, its cemeteries and churches and lanes as if they were durable wonders of the ancient world. It works the city’s transient notables into its story as if they were household-name immortals.
This is remarkable given that the Dublin Joyce writes about is not one of the great cultural capitals of the Western world. It isn’t London or Paris or Berlin or New York. The cohort of great Irish writers who would make the city a name to reckon with were, for the most part, Joyce’s contemporaries. And yet he writes of Dublin as if it were the navel of the world. It is this matter-of-fact memorialization of Dublin, the way he makes the reader live this geography through the helter-skelter consciousness of its characters, that pulls you in. It is commonplace to speak of being immersed in a novel; with Ulysses, it’s more like drowning in it.
I feel I know more about Molly Bloom’s adulterous life (her assignations, her underclothes, the tan shoes of her lover), about her cuckolded husband and latter-day Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, about Stephen Dedalus’s awful bathing habits and the geography of Dublin at the turn of the 20th century, than I have known of any set of characters in any place, at any time. I know that the feeling will fade, that it is, in part, a function of how hard I’ve worked at reading the novel, but it is a singular business, this sense of being wholly possessed by a foreign place in another time.
The most remarkable achievement of Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, the Jewish man at the heart of its story. By some definitions, Bloom isn’t, strictly speaking, a Jew. His mother was an Irish Catholic and Bloom was formally baptized. It was his father, a lapsed Jew, who taught him the rudiments of his abandoned faith. As Joyce walks Bloom through Dublin, his pedestrian Odysseus becomes the Wandering Jew.
For a turn-of-the-century Irish writer raised by Jesuits to cast his Everyman in the image of a kind, cuckolded Jew was an act of visionary empathy and daring. In that time of Irish nationalism and anti-Semitic bigotry, Joyce turned Homer’s travelling hero into a Jew. In a stroke of synthesizing genius, he fused the Hellenic and the Hebraic, the two source cultures of the modern West, into a single body.
Hitler tore them apart less than twenty years later. Joyce’s great Modernist peers — Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence — were either racist or anti-Semitic or both at once. Joyce was exceptional. We should read Ulysses to remind ourselves that genius can come from goodness. We should read it, as all novels should be read (even great ones), for pleasure. And given the abyss that opened soon after its publication, we should read it with foreboding. 02/02/2022 will be the hundredth anniversary of Ulysses’s publication as a finished novel. Even at the rate at which I’m going, I should be done by then.
