Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable.
In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it
an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to
allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf
was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these
adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this
day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes
both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is
funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way)
suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up
in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book.
Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated
with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted,
tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer
command of the English language.
Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first
question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses,
the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's
sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it
in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its
utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom,
go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of
indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets,
argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's
stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream
but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their
thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety
of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single
day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very
last word in realism.
Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of
Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician,
who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats
Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a
Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is
something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of
a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality
and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by
saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone
hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands.
More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living.
Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James
Marcus