Ulysses (novel)

Ulysses
Author	James Joyce
Cover artist	1922 cover
Language	English
Genre	Literary fiction
Publisher	Sylvia Beach
Publication date	1922
Publication place	Ireland
Media type	Print ( )
Pages	732-1,000, depending on edition
ISBN	ISBN Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character

Ulysses is a 1922 novel by James Joyce, first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from 1918 to 1920, and published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach in 1922, Paris.

Ulysses chronicles the passage through Dublin by its main character, Leopold Bloom, during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title alludes to the hero of Homer's Odyssey (Latinized version Ulysses), and there are many parallels, both implicit and explicit, between the two works (e.g. the correlations between Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus). June 16 is now celebrated by Joyce's fans worldwide as Bloomsday.

Ulysses is a massive novel: 267,000 words in total from a vocabulary of 30,000 words, with most editions weighing in at between 732 to 1000 pages, and divided into 18 chapters. The book has been the subject of much controversy and scrutiny, ranging from early obscenity trials to protracted textual "Joyce Wars." Today it is generally regarded as a masterwork in Modernist writing, celebrated for its groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness technique, highly experimental prose—full of puns, parodies, allusions—as well as for its rich characterizations and broad humor.

In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on a list of the 100 best novels in English of the 20th century.

Plot

Template:Spoiler Part I
Chapter I
It is the morning of 16 June 1904 (the day of Joyce's first date with Nora Barnacle). The book opens inside a Martello tower on Dublin Bay at Sandycove, where three young men, Buck Mulligan (a callous, verbally aggressive and boisterous medical student), Stephen Dedalus (a young writer first encountered in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and Haines (a nondescript Englishman from Oxford) have just woken and are preparing for the day. Stephen, brooding about the recent death of his mother, complains about Haines' hysterical nightmares. Mulligan shaves and prepares breakfast and all three then eat. Haines decides to go to the library and Mulligan suggests swimming beforehand; all three then leave the tower. Walking for a time, Stephen chats with Haines and smokes before leaving, deciding that he cannot return to the tower that evening for Mulligan has usurped his place.

Chapter 2
Stephen is at school, attempting to teach bored schoolboys history and English, though they are unappreciative of his efforts. Stephen attempts to tell a riddle which falls flat before seeing the boys out of the classroom. One stays behind so that Stephen may show him how to do a set of arithmetic exercises. Afterwards Stephen visits the school headmaster, Mr. Deasy, from whom he collects his pay and a letter to take to a newspaper office for printing.

Chapter 3
Next, Stephen finds his way to the strand and mopes around for some time, doing little more than thinking, reminiscing and walking about on the beach. He lies down among some rocks, watches a couple and a dog, writes some poetry ideas, picks his nose and possibly has a sexual experience, although he's probably just urinating.

Part II
Chapter 4
The narrative shifts abruptly. The time is again 8am, but we have moved across the city to Eccles steet and to the second protagonist of the book, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser. Bloom lives at No 7 Eccles street and is preparing breakfast at the same time as Mulligan in the tower. He walks to a butcher to purchase a kidney for his breakfast and returns to finish his cooking. He takes his wife, Molly Bloom, her breakfast and letters and reads his own letter from their daughter, Milly. The chapter closes with his plodding to the outhouse and defecating.

Chapter 5
Bloom now begins his day proper, furtively making his way to a post office (by an intentionally indirect route), where he receives a love letter from one 'Martha Clifford' addressed to his pseudonym, 'Henry Flower'. He buys a newspaper and meets an acquaintance, C. P. M'Coy; while they chat Bloom attempts to ogle a woman wearing stockings, but is prevented by a passing tram. Next, he reads the letter and tears the envelope up in an alley. Bloom makes his exit via a Catholic church service and thinks about what is going on inside it. He goes to a drugstore then meets another acquaintance, Bantam Lyons, to whom he unintentionally gives a racing tip for the horse Throwaway. Finally, Bloom ponders his naked state in water as he approaches the baths to wash for the rest of the day.

This chapter includes obvious motifs such as those of botany, religion, drugs, potions, and guilt and murder.

Chapter 6
The episode begins with Bloom entering a funeral carriage with three others, including Stephen's father Simon Dedalus. They make their way to Dignam's funeral, passing Stephen and making small talk on the way. Bloom scans his newspaper. They talk about various deaths, forms of death and the tramline before arriving and getting out. They enter the chapel into the service and subsequently leave with the coffincart. Bloom sees a mysterious anonymous man wearing a mackintosh during the burial and ponders on various subjects some more. Leaving, he points out a dent in a friend's hat.

The main motifs of this episode are death and decay.

Chapter 7
At the newspaper office, Bloom attempts to place an ad, while Stephen arrives bringing Deasy's letter about 'foot and mouth' disease. The two do not meet. The episode is broken up into short sections by newspaper-style headlines, and is characterized by its deliberate abundance of rhetorical figures and devices. Lenehan and Corley appear in this section.

Chapter 8
Bloom searches for lunch, eventually dining on a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy at Davy Byrne's pub.

Chapter 9
At the National Library, Stephen explains to various scholars his biographical theory of the works of Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, whereby they are based largely on the posited adultery of Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway. Bloom enters the library to look at some statues on exhibit, but does not encounter Stephen.

Chapter 10
In this episode, 19 short vignettes depict the wanderings of various characters, major and minor, through the streets of Dublin. It ends with an account of the cavalcade of the Lord Lieutenant, William Humble, Earl of Dudley, through the streets, where it is encountered by the various characters we have met in the episode. Neither Stephen nor Bloom sees the Viceroy's procession.

This chapter is unique in that it draws Homeric parallels to an instance that is described third hand in The Odyssey. That is to say, the Wandering Rocks are spoken about in The Odyssey, but never experienced by its protagonist, Odysseus. This is perhaps why Joyce disembodies the narrative from the three main characters.

Chapter 11
In this episode, dominated by motifs of music, Bloom has dinner with Stephen's uncle Richie Goulding at the Ormond Hotel, while Blazes Boylan proceeds to his rendezvous with Molly. While dining, Bloom watches the seductive barmaids Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy, and listens to the singing of Simon Dedalus, and others.

Chapter 12
This chapter is narrated largely by an unnamed denizen of Dublin, although his style of speech was heavily modeled on John Joyce, Joyce's father. He runs into Hynes and they enter a pub for a drink. At the pub, they meet Alf Bergan and a character referred to only as the 'citizen', who is largely modeled on Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association. Eventually, Leopold Bloom enters waiting to meet Martin Cunningham. The citizen is discovered to be a fierce Fenian and begins berating Bloom. The atmosphere quickly becomes anti-Semitic and Bloom escapes upon Cunningham's arrival. The chapter is marked by extended digressions made outside the voice of the unnamed narrator - hyperboles of legal jargon, Biblical passages, Irish mythology, etc., with lists of names often extending half a page. 'Cyclops' refers both to the narrator who is often quoted with 'says I' and the citizen who fails to see the folly of his narrow-minded thinking.

Chapter 13
Cissy Caffrey, Edy Boarman, and Gerty MacDowell start the chapter off on the strand near a church. Gerty often daydreams of finding someone to love her. Eventually, Bloom appears and they begin to flirt from a distance. The women are about to leave when the fireworks start. Cissy and Edy leave to get a better view, but Gerty remains. She shows off her legs to Bloom, who, as it turns out, is masturbating. Gerty then leaves, revealing herself to be lame, and leaving Bloom meditating on the beach. The first half of the episode is marked by an excessively sentimental style, and it is unclear how much of Gerty's monologue is actually imagined by Bloom.

Chapter 14
Bloom visits the maternity hospital where Mina Purefoy is giving birth, and finally meets Stephen, who is drinking with Buck Mulligan and his medical student friends. They continue on to a pub to continue drinking, following the successful birth of the baby. This chapter is remarkable for Joyce's wordplay, which seems to recapitulate the entire history of the English language to describe a scene in an obstetrics hospital, from the Carmen Arvale:

Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.

to something resembling alliterative Anglo-Saxon poetry:

In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland's westward welkin. Full she dread that God the Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins. Christ's rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe infare under her thatch. That man her will wotting worthful went in Horne's house.

and on through skilful parodies of Malory, the King James Bible, Bunyan, Pepys, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Sterne, Goldsmith, Junius, Gibbon, Lamb, De Quincey, Landor, Dickens, Newman, Ruskin and Carlyle, among others, before concluding in a haze of nearly incomprehensible slang. Indeed, Joyce organized this chapter as three sections divided into nine total subsections, representing the trimesters and months of gestation.

This extremely complicated chapter, structurally, can be further broken down. It consists of 60 paragraphs. The first 10 paragraphs are parodies of Latin and Anglo-Saxon language, the two major predecessors to the English language. These 10 paragraphs can be seen as intercourse and conception. The next 40 paragraphs - representing the 40 weeks of gestation in human embryonic development - begin with Middle English satires, the earliest form of English; they move chronologically forward through the various styles mentioned above. At the end of the 50th paragraph, the baby in the maternity hospital is born, and the final 10 paragaphs are the child, combining all the different forms of slang and street English that was spoken in Dublin in the early part of the century.

Chapter 15
In an extended hallucinatory sequence, Bloom and Stephen go to Bella Cohen's brothel. This episode, the longest in the novel, is written in the form of a play. Molly’s letter from Boylan and his from Martha are reworked into a series of seductive letters ending in a trial. His sexual infidelities beginning with Lotty Clarke and ending with Gerty McDowell are relived and reconciled.

Part III
Chapter 16
Bloom and Stephen go to the cabman's shelter to eat, and encounter a drunken sailor.

Chapter 17
Bloom returns home with Stephen, who refuses Bloom's offer of a place to stay for the night. The two men urinate in the backyard, Stephen goes home, and Bloom goes to bed. The episode is written in the form of a rigidly organized catechism, and was reportedly Joyce's favourite episode in the novel.

Chapter 18
The final chapter of Ulysses consists of Molly Bloom's Soliloquy: Eight enormous sentences (without punctuation) written from the viewpoint of Leopold Bloom's estranged wife, Molly (who represents Penelope). Molly accepts Leopold into her bed, frets about his health, then reminisces about their first meeting and about when she knew she was in love with him. This meditation/soliloquy takes place at the same time as they make love, the concluding words of Molly's reverie, "his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." (it should be noted with the concluding period, the only punctuation in the chapter), corresponding to Molly achieving orgasm.

Publication history

Written over a seven-year period from 1914 to 1921, the novel was serialized in the American journal The Little Review from 1918, until the publication of the Nausicaa episode led to a prosecution for obscenity. The book was first published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1922, but was banned in both the United States and United Kingdom until the 1930s. The work was blacklisted by Irish customs.

The publication history of Ulysses is disputed and obscure. There have been at least eighteen editions. To complicate matters, there are variations between different impressions of each edition. Notable editions include the first edition, published in Paris on 2 February 1922 (only 1000 copies printed); the pirated Roth edition, published in New York in 1929; the Odyssey Press edition of 1932 (including some revisions by Stuart Gilbert, and therefore sometimes considered the most accurate edition); the first official American edition of Random House, 1934; the first English edition of the Bodley Head, 1936; the revised Bodley Head Edition of 1960; the revised Random House edition of 1961 and the Gabler edition of 1984.

In 1920 after the magazine The Little Review serialized a passage of the book dealing with the main character masturbating, a group called the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who objected to the book's content, took action to attempt to keep the book out of the United States. At a trial in 1921 the magazine was declared obscene and as a result Ulysses was banned in the United States.

The publisher, Random House, decided to try to get the ban lifted. In 1933, an arrangement was made to import the French edition, and the publisher arranged to have a copy seized by customs when the ship was unloaded. A trial, United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, ensued and US District Judge John M. Woolsey issued a ruling on December 6, declaring that the book was not pornographic and therefore could not be obscene. Augustus Noble Hand ruled for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in affirming the ruling, which allowed the book to be imported into the U.S.

According to Jack Dalton (p. 102, 113), the first edition of Ulysses contained over two thousand errors but was still the most accurate edition published. As each subsequent edition attempted to correct these mistakes, it incorporated more of its own. Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 edition was an attempt to produce a corrected text, but it has received much criticism, most notably from John Kidd. Kidd's main theoretical criticism is of Gabler's choice of a patchwork of manuscripts as his copy-text (the base edition with which the editor compares each variant). This choice is problematic, in that there is no unified manuscript as such: Joyce wrote approximately 30% of the final text as marginal notes on the typescripts and proof sheets. Perhaps more confusing is the fact that for hundreds of pages the extant manuscript is merely a "fair copy" Joyce made for sale to a patron. For about half the chapters of Ulysses Joyce's final draft is lost. For these, the existing typescript is the last witness. Gabler attempted to reconstruct what he called "the continuous manuscript text", which had never physically existed, by adding together all of Joyce's accretions from the various sources. This allowed Gabler to produce a "synoptic text" indicating the stage at which each addition was inserted. Kidd and even some of Gabler's own advisers believe this method meant losing Joyce's final changes in about two thousand places. Far from being "continuous", the manuscripts seem to be opposite. Still other commentators have charged that Gabler's perhaps spurious changes were motivated by a desire to secure a fresh copyright and another seventy-five years of royalties beyond a looming expiration date.

In June 1988 John Kidd published "The Scandal of Ulysses in the New York Review of Books, charging that not only did Gabler's changes overturn Joyce's last revisions, but in another four hundred places Gabler failed to follow any manuscript whatever, making nonsense of his own premises. Kidd accused Gabler of unnecessarily changing Joyce's spelling, punctuation, use of accents, and all the small details he claimed to have been restoring. Instead, Gabler was actually following printed editions such as that of 1932, not the manuscripts. More fatally, Gabler was found to have made genuine blunders, the most famous being his changing the name of Dubliner Harry Thrift to "Shrift" and cricket hero Captain Buller to Culler. (These "corrections" were undone by Gabler in 1993.)

In December 1988, Charles Rossman's "Ulysses: The Hidden Controversy" for the New York Review revealed that Gabler's own advisers felt too many changes were being made, but that the publishers were pushing for as many alterations as possible. Then Kidd produced a 174-page review that filled an entire issue of the *Papers of the Bibiographical Society of America*, dated the same month. This Inquiry into "Ulysses": The Corrected Text was the next year published in book format and on floppy disk by the James Joyce Research Center at Boston University, which Kidd founded and led from 1988 to 2000.

In 1990 Gabler's American publisher Random House quietly brought back its 1961 version, and the Gabler version is now available from the Modern Library and Vintage International. In the United Kingdom the Bodley Head press brought back its 1960 version. In both the UK and USA, Everyman Books, too, republished the 1960 Ulysses. In 1992 Penguin dropped Gabler and reprinted the 1960 text. From one hundred percent of world paperback sales in 1986-1990, the Gabler edition has dropped to perhaps ten percent of the market. Reprints of the imperfect 1922 first edition are now widely available, suggesting that claims it was riddled with "five thousand errors" (as Gabler claimed) were hyperbolic.

Themes

Odyssey
Ulysses is divided into eighteen chapters. At first glance much of the book may appear unstructured and chaotic, but the two schemata which Stuart Gilbert and Herbert Gorman released after publication to defend Joyce from the obscenity accusations make the links to the Odyssey, and much internal structure, linkable.

Most chapters of Ulysses have an assigned theme, technique and, tellingly, correspondences between its characters and those of the Odyssey. The chapter titles and the correspondences were not included in the original text, but derive from the Linati and Gilbert schema.

The Telemachia:

Telemachus
Nestor
Proteus

The Odyssey:

Calypso
Lotus-Eaters
Hades
Aeolus
Lestrygonians
Scylla and Charybdis
The Wandering Rocks
Siren
Cyclops
Nausicaa
Oxen of the Sun
Circe

The Nostos:

Eumaeus
Ithaca
Penelope

Joyce's first acquaintance with Odysseus was via Charles Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses - an adaptation of the Odyssey for children, which seems to have established the Roman name in Joyce‘s mind. At school he wrote an essay on Ulysses as his "favourite hero" (Gorman, p. 45). He thought about calling Dubliners "Ulysses in Dublin" (Borach, p. 325), but the idea grew from a story in Dubliners in 1906, to a "short book" in 1907 (Ellmann, p. 265), to the vast novel which he began writing in 1914.

The two schemata

The 1920 Linati schema for Ulysses
The 1921 Gilbert schema for Ulysses

Religious themes
Leopold is Jewish, while Stephen is Catholic. Both characters recite liturgical snippets in Hebrew and Latin all through out the novel. Stephen, who resembles Joyce himself, voices many opinions on Catholicism, its hold over Ireland, and oppression. Bloom on the otherhand is shown to be distant from friends, his difference is shown during the funeral and is made different during the citizen episode.

Other adaptations

In 1967, a movie version of the book was produced.

More recently, a big-budget version of Ulysses called Bloom was made and released in early 2004. The film stars Stephen Rea as the lead character.

The unabridged text of Ulysses has been performed by Jim Norton, with Marcella Riordan. This recording was released by Naxos on 22 audio CDs in 2004. It follows an earlier abridged recording with the same actors.

BBC Radio broadcast a dramatisation of Ulysses read by Sinead Cusack, James Greene, Stephen Rea, Norman Rodway and others in 1993. This performance had a running time of 5 hours and 50 minutes.

In 1958, a stage adaptation of the novel, named Ulysses in Nighttown, was produced, starring Zero Mostel. The play incorporated many of the dialog-heavy parts of the novel, and much like it began at the tower in Sandycove and ended with Molly’s soliloquy. It was revived in the 70’s.

In 1974, chapter 15 was staged in the Polish Teatr Ateneum under the name of New Bloomusalem. It was staged again in 1999 in Teatr Narodowy (National Theater). Both plays were directed by Jerzy Grzegorzewski.

Influences

Aside from the obvious influence of Homer's Odyssey, Joyce deliberately allowed himself to be influenced by literally hundreds of other writers and their works during the composition of Ulysses.

Samuel Rosenberg, in his book Naked is the Best Disguise, noted similarities between the section in which Bloom tracks Dedalus and a section in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. Rosenberg also notes other references to Doyle's writings.

Legacy

The legacy and impact of Ulysses on modern literature and literary culture is sizeable; one need only note the proliferation of the celebration of Bloomsday on 16 June all over the world, with a notably large celebration in Dublin, Ireland during 2004 to commemorate the centenary of the book's events.

Joyce is often quoted as saying that one could recreate the city of Dublin, piece by piece, from Ulysses. Many scholars have noted that although this rather bold statement may have been true at or around Joyce's time, so much of the city has changed that this claim is no longer viable. Nevertheless, many of the places and landmarks featured in Ulysses may still be found in Dublin, such as the Martello tower where the novel begins (now a Joyce museum) and Davy Byrne's pub. Indeed, perambulating around the city as Bloom and Dedalus did, one can still get a sense of how the city influenced Joyce's novel.

Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy owes a heavy debt to Ulysses and Joyce, who is mentioned many times in the novels. A female monologue late in the third book is a paraphrasing of Molly's soliloquy, ending instead in "No."

Joyce's legacy has also extended to musicians such as Syd Barrett and, most notably in regards to Ulysses, Kate Bush, whose song "The Sensual World" has lyrics entirely lifted or paraphrased from Molly's soliloquy. The Libertines' debut single "What a Waster" also makes reference to the "unabridged Ulysses"

External links