Finishing Ulysses
‘James, what’s wrong?’ the friend asked. ‘Is it the work?’
Joyce indicated assent without even raising his head to look at the friend. Of course it was the work; isn’t it always?
‘How many words did you get today?’ the friend pursued.
Joyce (still in despair, still sprawled facedown on his desk): “Seven.”
‘Seven? But James… that’s good, at least for you!’
‘Yes,’ Joyce said, finally looking up. ‘I suppose it is… but I don’t know what order they go in!’
— Stephen King, On Writing
I’ve done it, everyone. I’ve finally plunged headfirst and done it. After failing at least 3x to get past the first three chapters, I’ve finally completed the entirety of Ulysses by James Joyce. You’ve all heard of it: first published in its entirety in 1922, this novel is the titan of modernist fiction, the topper of greatest-books-of-all-time-lists, the daunting paper brick that adorns literary shelves and is never finished. Well, now you know someone who fucking has! Id est, yours truly, me.
The premise of Ulysses is one of the most famous in English literature. Taking place over a single day on the 16th of June 1904, in Edwardian-era Dublin, this 900+ page text follows the intimate thoughts and actions of a man named Leopold Bloom, with lengthy detours to explore the inner lives of his wife Molly and his friend/acquaintance Stephen Dedalus. The novel is a swirling galaxy of meticulous domestic details, jocular wordplay, intertextual references, and Irish witticisms.
Getting from cover to cover wasn’t easy, mind you. I had completed Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey earlier last year, which gave me some appreciation of the basic symbolic structure of the novel (Leopold = Odysseus, Stephen = Telemachus, Molly = Penelope, etc.) and having a cursory understanding of Irish history (Home Rule, Charles Stewart Parnell, etc.) helped too.
But the actual tool that enabled me to unlock and knock off Ulysses was RTÉ Radio’s epic 30-hour adaptation of the book. By reading along to this wonderful radio broadcast and its classy Irish voice cast, I was able to differentiate dialogue from prose from internal monologue, lucidly process its stream-of-consciousness sections, better appreciate how various Joycean neologisms are meant to sound, and other such details in a humungous text that is notoriously scrimp on clear punctuation.
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Does it still hold up? There’s no straightforward answer. Ulysses is sometimes funny, occasionally obscene, and very often just baffling. Most of the chapters have their own unique ‘experimental gimmick’ (for lack of a better term), some of which work and some of which don’t for the contemporary reader. There are chapters in the book – such as the grizzled first-person pub narration in CYCLOPS, the dazzlingly hallucinatory brothel sequences in CIRCE, and the beautifully erotic bedroom soliloquies in PENELOPE – that are thrilling to read. Other chunks of the book, such as the infamous hospital chapter OXEN OF THE SUN (which features lengthy parodies of writers that no one alive today has even heard of, let alone read), are borderline incomprehensible.
Its influence on huge swathes of contemporary fiction is undeniable, though that is a rather academic point. But what remains perennially fascinating is the novel’s choice of protagonist. While Stephen (the brooding young poet and author-insert) is an unbearable, pretentious mope and Molly (a brilliant tour de force of female sexuality) appears only fully variegated in the final chapter, Leopold Bloom dominates Ulysses as its lead protagonist. He is a sensual, middle-aged son of a Hungarian immigrant. He is effeminate. He is vaguely Jewish. He is a pacifist. And he is cuckolded by his unfaithful wife. By making Bloom his ‘great Irish hero’, Joyce speaks volumes on his views of national identity, the future of literary characters, and the nature of the modern man.
Ulysses is also a slice of history, providing us with a colourful vision of long-ago Dublin. In a recent interview, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Kremer remarked that Joyce’s stories were really about development economics. And he has a point. The novel’s setting is fundamentally a colonial economy and it is one where the local populace lives under harsh constraints. Sizeable portions of the book explore questions of economic growth and self-betterment, and a variety of perspectives are forwarded by the characters. “England is in the hands of the jews… And they are the signs of a nation’s decay” warns one Dubliner, effectively urging that Ireland must never let them in. Indeed, the theme of anti-Semitism lurks throughout much of the book. So much so that Ulysses seems to foreshadow the catastrophe that would befall continental Europe two decades after its release. While it is very much a book of its time, it also has one eye ominously gazing into the future.
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When it’s at its best, Ulysses leaves a mark. Its deepest moments of sadness can be genuinely touching. Its most concentrated observations on everyday beauty can be authentically tender. And its smuttiest dick jokes can be really fucking smutty. And, even after hundreds and hundreds of pages, there are lines that stick. Who, after finishing the book, can’t help but think of “Kingstown pier” as “a disappointed bridge”? Or wonder why the answer to Dedalus’s riddle was “the fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush”? Or spell the noise a cat makes as “Mkgnao”?
And who can deny that Ulysses ends with one of the greatest orgasms ever described in literature?
…and then he asked me would I say yes to 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 all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
By now you should know that if you want to tackle this monumental work of literature, you must come prepared. And if you are still willing to do it, all I can say is godspeed and good luck. Unfurl the sails! You can make it! To quote Joyce himself:
Come on, you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage!
By reading this book, you’ll voyage to the ends of the earth, into the caverns of the human condition, and end up absolutely nowhere of import whatsoever. Just as how, at the end of an ordinary day in Dublin, Leopold Bloom crawls into his bed, kisses his wife’s buttocks, and falls asleep. “He rests. He has travelled.” And you too can do the same.
[Christchurch–Canberra–Melbourne, 2008–2021]