Ulysses by James Joyce

Ulysses is the story of two men moving through Dublin, first separately and then coming together, on a single day: June 16, 1904. It’s much more than that, of course, but let’s start there.

The first man we meet is Stephen Dedalus, the hero of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and a man who is somewhat based on Joyce himself. Stephen is twenty-two, in Ulysses. At the end of Portrait of the Artist he determined to leave Dublin. Between the two books he did leave, then lived for a time, maybe a few years, in Paris. At the beginning of Ulysses he is back in Dublin. His mother has died. His father, Simon, is a prominent secondary character. The relationship between fathers and sons is a central theme of Ulysses. A few of Stephen’s siblings also appear briefly. Stephen is living with a friend, Buck Mulligan, in rooms inside a tower originally built as a military fortification. He supports himself by teaching. He retains his ambition to be a great poet but has yet to make a mark beyond his immediate circle of friends.

The other man in Ulysses, more central, though we meet him second, is Leopold Bloom. He is thirty-eight, married to Molly Bloom. Comfortably middle class, Bloom currently makes his living soliciting advertisements for one of Dublin’s daily papers. Bloom is a father, of Milly, a fifteen year-old girl who the family recently sent away to a professional school to study photography. Eleven years earlier Leopold and Molly had a second child, a boy named Rudy, who lived only a few days. The grief of that loss rumbles through their present relationship. They haven’t attempted procreative sex since his death. They treat each other tenderly, but distance has grown between them.

If there is any singular event that makes June 16, 1904 significant for Leopold Bloom and Molly, it is that this day Molly will consummate an affair (i.e have sex with) a man named Blazes Boylan, in the bed she usually shares with her husband: an act of adultery made possible by the tacit consent, and even a kind of passive assistance, of Leopold. That sex act, plus Bloom’s meeting with Stephen earlier in the day sparking a psuedo father-son relationship, works to heal the unresolved grief over their child’s death and by the final chapter there are signs (tentative, ambiguous) that Leopold and Molly may be able to re-establish a healthy marital relationship.

That’s the story, but Ulysses is about so much more than the story. Primarily, and this is why the novel has such a reputation for being intimidating, Ulysses is about technique: the technique, or techniques Joyce employs, of writing a novel.

First, there is the frame upon which Joyce hangs his story of Leopold and Molly and Stephen: The Odyssey of Homer. Bloom is Homer’s Ulysses, traveling around Dublin, circuitously and slowly making his way home, just as Ulysses sailed around the Mediterranean on the way home from Troy to Ithaca. Stephen is Telemachus, the son that Ulysses hardly knows and must reconcile with. And Molly is Penelope, the wife at home in Ithaca, fending off suitors who want her sex and her husband’s kingdom. But the references are not exact. Stephen is not Bloom’s son, although Stephen’s estranged relationship with his father, Simon, parallels Bloom’s broken relationship with his dead son Rudy. Molly is Penelope at the end of Ulysses, but Homer’s Penelope remains faithful to her husband. And in the earlier chapter that first introduces Molly, the same chapter where we first meet Leopold, Molly’s Odyssey referent is not to Penelope but to Calypso, a nymph with whom Ulysses spends seven years before starting his journey home. Leopold’s Dublin odyssey is from home back to home, while Ulysses only arrives home at the end (perhaps indicating that Leopold is not really at “home” in his house at the beginning of the novel, and Molly is not entirely his wife).

Many of the other Odyssey references are similarly inexact or ambiguous. When I first read Ulysses, 30 years ago, I thought that simply knowing the Odyssey would be all the key I needed to follow Joyce’s work. Instead I could barely recognize most of the references. Joyce’s Cyclops is merely an angry man with an injured eye. The Sirens sing but the singers are men. Scylla and Charybdis are not a monster and a whirlpool but merely two sides of a heated discussion. Although literary critics refer to the eighteen chapters of Ulysses by the names of corresponding episodes in the Odyssey, Joyce only gives the chapter numbers.

I enjoyed reading Ulysses 30 years ago, and recognized its greatness, but what I felt the book really needed was an annotated version, or an introduction, like the program notes you read while waiting for the concert to begin, notes that would help make sense of what you’re about to hear. Fortunately, for this reading, now, I had access to the internet. I could quickly look up any question I had, a map of Dublin, a list of characters, or a detail about an episode in Homer that I hadn’t remembered.

Additionally, this time around, alongside the novel, I read a book of literary criticism, James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays, edited by Clive Hart and David Hayman published by the University of California Press, 1974. Nothing special about this book, I just happened to see a used copy on the shelf of the bookstore when I was there. But I got lucky. The editors devote one essay for each chapter. My strategy was to read a chapter of Ulysses and then read the corresponding essay. And even better, each of the essays is contributed by a different scholar, so for this extravagantly rich novel I didn’t get merely one perspective but eighteen. That helped a lot.

It also helped to have re-read Dubliners recently, not because it increased my understanding but because it increased my enjoyment. Many of the characters from Dubliners show up in Ulysses: Lenehan from “Two Gallants”; Bob Doran from “The Boarding House”; Tom Kernan from “Grace”; characters from “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”; the grave of Mary Sinico, the woman who dies on the train tracks in “A Painful Case”; Gabriel and Gretta Conroy from “The Dead”; and still others. There’s very little crossover among the stories in Dubliners but much between those stories and Ulysses. I greeted the character’s names like old friends as I came to them, but I also was able to bring a little information forward so I knew who these people were, which filled out the scenes where they appear. The same effect came up with characters I had first met in A Portrait of the Artist: especially Simon Dedalus and, believe it or not, Mrs. Riordan from the Christmas dinner scene. Bloom’s story can be understood as kind of a monstrously inflated sister story to the 15 stories of Dubliners. In fact, it was Joyce’s original idea to write Leopold Bloom’s story as a story for Dubliners. If you removed all the technical flourishes and minor characters, the actual story of Ulysses could easily be contained in a story no longer than “The Dead.” Although Ulysses clearly became something entirely different there remains that quality from Dubliners of Bloom as one of the characters of a town peopled by folks leading small, mostly tragic, paralyzed and impotent lives.

So armed with Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, and a book of critical essays, I felt better prepared to tackle Ulysses than I had been 30 years ago.

And I knew one more thing, from having read Ulysses before. I knew that the first few chapters are written in a more-or-less straightforward manner, but that the writing gets increasingly experimental as the novel progresses. Joyce chose a different literary technique for each chapter, a deliberate choice intended to amplify or comment on the theme of that particular episode. But I also knew that the writing never leaves sense and story entirely behind. It’s a difficult read, but not impossible. So I knew to hang in there. If you’re willing to accept that Ulysses is as much or more about Joyce’s experiments with how language can be used to tell a story, as it is about telling the story itself, then reading Ulysses is a enormously enjoyable and unique experience.

Here are the 18 chapters:

1 – Telemachus
Ulysses begins with a three chapter Book I, centered on Stephen Dedalus, just as the Odyssey begins focused on Ulysses’ son Telemachus. Stephen Dedalus and his friend Buck Mulligan, plus an English friend of Buck’s named Haines have breakfast together at their rooms in the Martello Tower. It’s 8am on Thursday, June 16, 1904. After breakfast they walk to the shore. Buck goes swimming. Stephen leaves for work.

2 – Nestor
In the Odyssey, Nestor is a king that Telemachus asks for information about his father. In Ulysses, “Nestor” is Mr. Deasy, the head of the school where Stephen teaches. The chapter opens with Stephen teaching a history class. Then there’s a scene in Mr. Deasy’s office where Stephen gets paid. It’s 10 o’clock.

3 – Proteus
in the Odyssey Proteus is a sea god who can change his shape. In Ulysses this episode is a scene for Stephen meditating alone on the strand, written in unbroken stream-of-consciousness style. It’s 11 o’clock.

4 – Calypso
Leopold Bloom is introduced making breakfast in bed for his wife. We’re back to 8am again. This Chapter begins Book II of the novel. Leopold leaves to go to a shop to buy the food for breakfast: toast for his wife, a kidney for himself. On the way back he picks up the mail. There’s a letter for Molly from Blazes Boylan. Molly is a concert-singer. Blazes Boylan is an impresario who arranges her concert tours. She doesn’t share the letter with Leopold but he intuits that it is about setting up a tryst. Leopold makes and eats his own breakfast apart from her. He feeds the cat. The chapter ends with a scene of Leopold relieving himself in the outhouse behind their house.

5 – Lotus-eaters
Leopold begins his day at 10am walking through Dublin. He buys a newspaper. He stops at the post-office and picks up a letter addressed to his alias, “Henry Flower”. He’s been carrying on a chaste affair by correspondence with a woman named Martha Clifford. He stops at a church. A man asks to borrow his newspaper because he wants to look up the horse races. Bloom says he can have the paper because he was just about to throw it away. Coincidentally, there happens to be a long-shot horse called “Throwaway” racing in the Gold Cup that day so the man thinks Bloom has given him a tip – a mistake that will have consequences later. At a chemist’s, Bloom buys a bar of soap and orders a lotion to be made up for his wife planning to pick it up later. He carries the soap around all day. He never picks up the lotion. At the end of the chapter he intends to visit the public baths, which he does in the space between this chapter and the beginning of the next.

6 – Hades
Bloom attends the 11am funeral of Paddy Dignam. First there’s a carriage ride to the cemetery. Simon Dedalus and two other men share the carriage. There’s a service at the gravesite and the coffin is lowered in.

7 – Aeolus
Aeolus is the king of the winds. In Ulysses, this is represented by a scene at the newspaper office where Bloom works as an ad-seller. It’s noon. The writing is broken up with ALL CAPS summary descriptions like newspaper headlines.

8 – Lestrygonians
The Lestrygonians are man-eating giants that destroy eleven of Ulysses’ twelve ships, sparing only Ulysses’ own ship and his crew. In Ulysses, it’s Bloom and other men that do the eating, at lunch. It’s 1 pm. But the chapter begins with more wandering around Dublin. He has a long conversation with a Mrs. Breen and he learns that a Mina Purefoy has been having a difficult labor with her latest birth. Bloom will pay a visit later to the maternity hospital. He stops at one restaurant and finds it too boisterous so he tries another, Davy Byrne’s. He eats a cheese sandwich.

9 – Scylla and Charybdis
This is a scene for Stephen Dedalus in a library. It’s 2pm. In a conference room, Stephen is laying out a theory about Shakespeare for his friends and some of the other scholars at the library. Stephen’s theory is that Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, got the “second best bed” in Shakespeare’s will because he was angry with her after she had an affair with Shakespeare’s two brothers, Richard and Edmund, who he punished by using their names for villains in his plays. Hamlet is a frequent referent throughout the novel as it relates to both the father/son and adultery themes.

10 – Wandering Rocks
Ulysses doesn’t visit the Wandering Rocks in the Odyssey. He chose to risk going the way of Scylla and Charybdis instead. In Ulysses, this chapter is a kind of an entr’acte between the first and second half of the novel consisting of a series of short vignettes of mostly minor characters moving around Dublin. It’s 3pm. Bloom and Stephen appear briefly. Bloom buys a dirty book as a present for his wife, titled Sweets of Sin. Stephen runs into his sister. We see Blazes Boylan buying perfume, peaches, and pears, and arranging for them to be delivered that afternoon to Molly Bloom.

11 – Sirens
4pm. Two women work at a hotel bar, brunette and blonde, Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy. One by one men enter the room: Simon Dedalus, Lenehen, others. They gather in an adjoining room and sing for each other. Father Crowley accompanies on the piano. Eventually Bloom arrives. There’s a sort of overture paragraph at the beginning of the chapter, a list of phrases that will appear later. The staggered entrances of the men are supposed to suggest the shape of a fugue.

12 – Cyclops
5pm. Time for a drink. Men are gathered at a bar spotting each other for drinks. The conversation is dominated by a man named only as “The Citizen” who advocates for Irish home rule. Bloom enters late in the scene and gets in an argument with the man who ends up chasing him out and throwing a biscuit tin at him. The literary style for this chapter is “Gigantism” everything is over-the-top and overblown, as befitting a bunch of loudmouths in a bar.

13 – Nausicaa
This chapter begins focused on three young women on the beach, caring for a baby and two young children. Gerty MacDowell is the focus. She’s aloof from her companions, meditative, romantic. It’s the end of the day and the sky is getting dark. 8pm. Eventually Gerty moves away from her companions to sit by herself and she notices a man sitting alone farther off. That’s Bloom. Gerty lifts up her skirts hoping to catch his eye without being too brazen about it. Bloom does notice. He masturbates discretely looking up her dress. Night falls. The girls leave. The literary style is a deliberately bad Victorian romance style.

14 – Oxen of the Sun
10pm at the maternity hospital. Stephen and Bloom finally meet. Bloom has come to the hospital to check in on Mina Purefoy and wish her well. Stephen is there with Buck Mulligan and other friends because they are also friends with some of the student doctors. The scene is a sort of break room at the hospital where the men gather and carouse. Technically, this chapter is a tour de force of literary style. Joyce divides the chapter in nine seamless sections representing the nine months of a human pregnancy. Through each section Joyce traces the evolution of English literature: Old English, Elizabethean, Bunyan, DeFoe, DeQuincy, Dickens. There are many references, very deliberate and specific, but even if you can’t recognize the specific writers you still catch the gradually modernizing language. Mina Purefoy’s baby is born during the seventh section. The chapter closes with the men spilling out into the street and here, for the most contemporary section, there’s a cacophony of slang and dialect and foreign languages, like a drunken crowd shouting in a street. This is the most incomprehensible section in the entire book, but it’s only a couple of pages long. The “Oxen of the Sun”, by the way, are cattle belonging to the sun god grazing on an island where Ulysses is allowed to rest so long as his men don’t harm the cattle. Ulysses goes off to pray and the men slaughter the cattle. Zeus kills them all with a terrible lightning storm, leaving only Ulysses alive.

15 – Circe
At the beginning of this chapter Ulysses separates Stephen from the bad influence of his friends and the two of them plus Stephen’s friend Lynch enter the redlight district of Dublin called “Nighttown”. It’s midnight. The chapter is arranged like a play, with characters identified and given speeches. But there are dozens and dozens of characters, long stage directions attached to nearly every line of dialogue, and many inanimate objects also given lines, so it’s not a play you could actually produce. Stephen, Bloom, and Lynch make their way through the streets arriving eventually at a whore house. They encounter a couple of soldiers and a pair of policeman, and a prostitute named Zoe. They also encounter a host of hallucinations: Molly Bloom appears, and Gerty MacDowell, and Mrs. Breen; Bloom encounters his dead father and later his grandfather, and so on. At the whore house the madam, Bella, turns Bloom into a “pig” (as Circe does to Ulysses and his men in the Odyssey) by sexually humiliating him. Bloom, Stephen, and Lynch dance with the girls to phonograph music in the parlor of the whorehouse. Stephen has a vision of his dead mother. In terror he wields his walking stick (“Nothung!”) and breaks a chandelier. The men flee into the street where they nearly get into a fight with the pair of soldiers. They get away. Bloom has a final hallucination, this time of his dead son, Rudy, imagining him as a boy of eleven, the age he would have been then had he lived.

16 – Eumaeus
The last three chapters of Ulysses are Book III of the novel. Bloom/Ulysses’ wandering is over; he’s now home, ready to sort things out with his wife. It’s 1am. Eumaeus, in the Odyssey, is the first person Ulysses meets once back home, a old shepherd. In the shepherd’s hut Ulysses, in disguise, is reunited with Telemachus and they reveal themselves to each other. In Ulysses, the shepherd’s hut is a cabman’s shelter where the drivers can have a bite to eat and get out of the cold overnight. Stephen and Bloom sit together. Bloom’s paternal feelings toward the younger man continue to grow. Stephen’s home is too far for him to get to safely in the middle of the night. Bloom invites Stephen to come back to his house.

17 – Ithaca
2am. Back in Bloom’s home. Bloom has forgotten his key. (He’s been dressed in mourning clothes all day for Paddy Dignam’s funeral in chapter six and the key is in his other pants.) Bloom climbs over the garden wall and opens the gate. He makes cocoa for the two of them. He fantasizes about Stephen becoming a substitute son for him and Molly. Maybe Stephen can sing as well as Stephen’s father does and Stephen could go on the stage with Molly. Stephen could teach Molly the proper Italian pronunciation for her songs. Bloom invites Stephen to stay the night but Stephen declines, ending the fantasy. The two men walk out to the garden and they piss together under the stars. Stephen leaves. Bloom climbs the stairs to the bed he shares with Molly and he sees the imprint of another man, Blazes Boylan, on the sheets. As he gets into bed he kisses Molly on her rear. She wakes and she quizzes him about his day. They talk about Stephen. It’s not related here but clear in the next chapter that Bloom has asked Molly to make him breakfast in the morning, which feels like a hopeful act of restoring order to their relationship. The literary technique Joyce uses is questions and answers by two anonymous voices describing the scene. Joyce’s model was a catechism, but in its obsessive detail combined with banality it reads to me more like an attorney interrogating an expert witness on the stand.

18 – Penelope
The novel really ends with chapter 17. This chapter is a kind of coda. It’s entirely given over to an interior monologue in stream-of-consciousness style from Molly: eight very long run-on sentences. Molly lies awake for a time thinking about her life, her marriage with Leopold, her adultery just completed that day with Blazes Boylan. She gets her period and gets up to use the chamber pot, which reassures her that she won’t get pregnant by Boylan. She goes back to bed and now her thinking turns to memories of her childhood in Gibraltar (her father was in the military), her sexual awakening, and to close the chapter, and the novel, a final memory of Bloom proposing to her sixteen years ago, “and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I 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 breast all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

I love big novels. I love modernist style. And before I re-read Ulysses this time I probably would have named this as one of my favorite books. Now I’m not so sure. It’s a hard book to love. It’s easier to admire than it is to enjoy, although I did also enjoy it. Joyce’s accomplishment is impressive. But the book’s greatest achievement is in its structure, its technique, its multiple strands of symbolism and style, its encyclopedic references, its exploding of all the barriers of what it means to be a novel. The pleasure of the book is noticing what Joyce does, how he experiments and plays, but noticing the writer always leaves a distance between the reader and the novel itself. Joyce always stands between, attracting attention to his genius, reminding us of all he’s capable of and taunting us with the suspicion that we’re consistently missing half of what he’s doing. Of course, watching a master at work is its own kind of pleasure. He’s brilliant and it certainly makes him a favorite of literary critics, but do I like it? Well like is the wrong word.

It most reminds me of the similar modernist experiments in post-World War II music. Composers like Milton Babbit, Boulez, Penderecki, Stockhausen, John Cage, composers who created music by constructing complicated systems using mathematical/serialist or chance techniques. The systems by which the music was produced, once explained, were fascinating, but the music itself expressed the system, not the composer, which tended to feel a little heartless. It felt empty. A curious mechanical toy, not a living, breathing art. Reading Joyce’s chapter written in deliberately bad Victorian romance-novel style (13 – Nausicaa) I realized that for a single chapter the technique was amusing but I never would have tolerated an entire novel written like that, and the same for Joyce’s other experiments. Which made me wonder what the experiments were for? They weren’t leading to a new literature but just to themselves. More like playing a game than crafting an art you could love. So I do admire Joyce. In Ulysses he created a sui generis masterpiece. It’s certainly worth reading and even re-reading. But it requires a lot of goodwill from a reader to keep turning the pages to new chapters knowing you’ll again by confronted by a new puzzle in a new language that will continuously intrigue but seldom satisfy.