In 2006, the
poet laureate Andrew Motion recommended that all schoolchildren read ‘Ulysses’ as
part of their essential grounding in English literature. One can see why. To
read ‘Ulysses’
is to realize that the whole of twentieth-century literature is little more
than a James Joyce Appreciation Society. Among the many writers who would have
been different, or even nonexistent, without ‘Ulysses’, are Samuel Beckett, Jorge
Louis Borges, Dylan Thomas, Flann O’Brien, Anthony Burgess, Salman Rushdie,
Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Philip K. Dick and Bernard Malamud --- to name but
a few. Even a writer as unlikely as George Orwell deliberately echoed the
‘Circe’ episode of ‘Ulysses’ in the play scene of ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter’. Joyce’s
hectic layering of styles, his unstoppable neologizing, his blurring of
viewpoint, his love of parody and imitation, his obscenity, his difficulty,
obscurity and outright incomprehensibility was the beginning of the high
modernist style in world literature. Andrew Motion was right in seeing ‘Ulysses’ as
fundamental, but in another way his suggestion was absurd. ‘Ulysses’ is
not a book for children. It is barely even a book for adults. The paradox of ‘Ulysses’ is
that one needs to read it to understand twentieth-century literature, but one needs
to read twentieth-century literature to build up the stamina to read ‘Ulysses’.
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| JOYCE ON IRISH STAMP |
The problem
starts with the title. Early readers of ‘Ulysses’, exhilarated and appalled
after 800 pages, were often still left thinking “Why ‘Ulysses’?” The
word ‘Ulysses’ is barely mentioned. The name is mentioned four times, twice in
passing as a proper name, Ulysses Grant
and Ulysses Browne, and twice as a
brief mention among other heroes and notables. The occurances are cited below
:---
- “What
softens
the
heart
of
a
man,
shipwrecked
in
storms
dire,
Tried,
like
another
Ulysses,
Pericles,
prince
of
Tyre?”[i]
David Lodge in ‘
The Art of Fiction’
wrote that the title, as a clue to the allegorical nature of the book, was
“the only absolutely unmissable one in the entire text”.
[v]
The solution, as we now know, after a century’s worth of scholarly
investigation and Joyce’s own prompting, is that the book is an intricate
allegory of the ‘
Odyssey’
--- the hero being latinized from Odysseus to Ulysses. ‘
Ulysses’ is
divided into eighteen parts, or ‘episodes’ as Joyce scholars call them, each
written in a different style and with a different Odyssean name, though the
names themselves are not given in the text.
Each episode is assigned, tacitly, a colour theme, a dominant organ of the
body, an hour, a setting, and other characteristics, though many of these
remain a matter of scholarly dispute. The action takes place in
Dublin on a single June
day (June 16
th 1904) and its three main characters are Leopold
Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom, who represent Ulysses, Telemachus and
Penelope, respectively. Other characters and places also have their Homeric
counterparts.
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| JOYCE ON IRISH 10 POUND NOTE |
The problem is
that one can know all of this and still be left thinking “Why ‘Ulysses’?” The
choice of the ‘Odyssey’
seems somewhat arbitrary. Why not ‘Oedipus Rex’ as a background text? That
way Bloom could be Oedipus, Molly Jocasta and Dedalus Tiresias (or someone
else). ‘Ulysses’
is not so much a novel as a symbolic system, rather like a clock or a computer
programme. Underlying the final, visible product, the time-telling or the
computer display, is a corresponding machinery, the cogs or the binary code.
Why did Joyce choose the ‘Odyssey’ for his code?
The answer is
that it could hardly have been anything else. Joyce was from an early age
deeply in love with the ‘
Odyssey’. “The character of Ulysses has fascinated me ever
since boyhood,” he wrote to Carlo Linati in 1920.
[vi]
As a schoolboy he read Charles Lamb’s ‘
Adventures of Ulysses’, an
adventure-yarn version of the story which presents, in Lamb’s words, “a brave
man struggling with adversity; by a wise use of events, and with an inimitable
presence of mind under difficulties, forcing out a way for himself through the
severest trials to which human life can be exposed; with enemies natural and
preternatural surrounding him on all sides.”
[vii]
Joyce said later that the story so gripped him that when at
Belvedere College
(he would have been between the ages of 11 and 15) he was tasked to write an
essay on ‘My Favourite Hero’, he chose Ulysses. The essay title ‘My Favourite
Hero’ actually appears in the 17
th episode of ‘
Ulysses’ :---
He later described Ulysses to
Frank Budgen, in an interview in 1934, as the only “complete all-round
character presented by any writer”.
[ix]
Unsurprisingly
therefore, this “complete man” surfaced as early as Joyce’s first major prose
work --- ‘
Dubliners’
--- of 1914. Joyce had originally planned that it would include a
short story called ‘Ulysses’, the plot of which was based on an incident which
took place in June 1904. Joyce was involved in a scuffle on St Stephen’s Green,
Dublin, after
accosting another man’s lady-companion, and was rescued and patched up by one
Alfred H. Hunter. Hunter, according to Joyce’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, was
“rumoured to be Jewish and to have an unfaithful wife”
[x]
--- in both of these respects a prototype for Leopold Bloom. In 1906, Joyce
wrote to his brother Stanislaus : “I have a new story for ‘
Dubliners’ in
my head. It deals with Mr Hunter.”
[xi]
In a letter written shortly afterwards he mentioned its title : “I thought of
beginning my story Ulysses but I have too many cares at present.”
[xii]
Three months later, on February 6
th 1907, he had abandoned the idea,
writing : “Ulysses never got any forrader than the title.”
[xiii]
The incident with Hunter was only written up later, in ‘
Ulysses’
itself, in a passage at the end of episode fifteen in which Bloom rescues
Dedalus “in orthodox Samaritan fashion” from a fight. The idea of Ulysses as
symbolic hero --- and as a title --- was therefore present as early as 1906.
Its centrality to the early plan for ‘
Dubliners’ was revealed in a
conversation with Georges Borach : “When I was writing Dubliners, I first
wished to choose the title Ulysses in
Dublin,
but gave up the idea. In
Rome,
when I had finished about half of the Portrait, I realized that the Odyssey had
to be the sequel, and I began to write Ulysses.”
[xiv]
[i] Joyce,
James; ‘Ulysses’; Project Gutenberg
edition; Scylla and Charybdis; (9327-9329)
Credits : e-book produced by Col Choat
E-Text No. : 4300
Release Date : 2003-07-01
Base Directory : http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/
Download Source : http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4300/
This e-book is based on the pre-1923 print editions.
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[ii] Joyce,
James; ‘Ulysses’; Project Gutenberg edition; Scylla and Charybdis; (10056-10057)
[iii] Ibid;
Cyclops; (16032-16033)
[iv] Ibid; Penelope;
(31404-31405)
[v] Lodge,
David; ‘The Art of Fiction : Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts’;
Penguin (Non-Classics);
London; 1994
[vi]
Ellmann, Richard; ‘Selected Letters of James Joyce’; Faber and Faber,
London; 1975
[vii]
Pindar, Ian; ‘Joyce’; Hans Publishing; 2004; (pp.10-11)
[viii]
Joyce, James; ‘Ulysses’; Project Gutenberg edition;
Ithaca; (28481-28484)
[ix] Budgen,
Frank; ‘James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses’; Indiana University Press; 1989;
(p.258)
[x] Ellmann,
Richard; ‘James Joyce’; Oxford University Press,
Oxford; 1983; (p.162)
[xi]
Ellmann, Richard; ‘Selected Letters of James Joyce’; Faber and Faber,
London; 1975
[xiii]
Ellmann, Richard; ‘James Joyce’; Oxford University Press,
Oxford; 1983; (p.230)
[xiv]
Ellmann, Richard; ‘Selected Letters of James Joyce’; Faber and Faber,
London; 1975
