James Joyce’s Ulysses is said by many to be the greatest novel ever written. Having just now read it, I can easily say it is the most complicated. Extremely controversial and influential for its time, it is clearly the work of one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century.
It could be argued—and it has, actually—that Ulysses has no plot. It’s a re-telling of The Odyssey but only in some small areas, such as some parallels and character correspondences. The novel—despite being over 600 pages in length—chronicles a day in the life of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, from 8 am of June 16 to 2 am at the beginning of the final chapter the next day. The detail it goes into in terms of how the minds of these two characters—as well as a host of others, most notably Molly Bloom—is truly remarkable and is yet to be duplicated. It’s very difficult to discuss single moments of this novel without discussing the novel as a whole. That’s mostly because not much happens in terms of plot, though the novel is filled with moments of symbolic meaning throughout.
Ulysses certainly has a style all its own. It’s been documented as stream-of-consciousness, of which James Joyce was the master of, though it really goes a lot further than that. The novel has dozens of narrators—many of which are implied to be average Dubliners—who are not identified. What I love about this novel and what makes it such a joy to read and to study is that virtually every word is an enigma. Many of it does not make a lot of sense and if you are to read it—particularly without supplemental study sources—you will be thoroughly confused. But the genius of Joyce is that everything has meaning. Why does Stephen Dedalus claim God is a shout in the street? What is the significance of the Dignam funeral? Why do Bloom and Dedalus have hallucinations in the red-light district and what do they mean? I’m not certain these questions can be objectively answered but there is virtually meaning behind everything.
The novel opens with Stephen and his roommate Buck Mulligan. The latter is symbolically making a mockery of the Catholic mass. Religion is a very important and prevalent symbol in Ulysses and it makes sense that it is. Joyce was raised Irish-Catholic but as a teenager left the Church but by most people’s reports, still had Christian faith. Viewing his work from both a Catholic and non-Catholic perspective is really a unique experience. My favorite instance of this was in “The Sisters,” the first short story in his book Dubliners. The ending is left somewhat open-ended, though the Catholic perspective shows Father Flynn to have “lost it” but a non-Catholic perspective may show Father Flynn to have gained enlightenment or at the very least understanding. That’s Joyce’s unique style of not spelling out anything to his readers and he does perhaps a better job of that than any other writer except perhaps Shakespeare or Hemingway. Joyce never tells you that Ulysses is important. In fact, based on what happens in the novel, he almost tells you otherwise. But through the words and the symbolism and hidden deeper meanings in the language, you know that it means everything.
The complexity of this novel is downright incredible. It literally covers every theme it possibly can. It delves into infidelity, the (im)morality of suicide, racism and discrimination against both Jews and the Irish, differences between Christianity and Catholicism, sex, love, art versus science, and the list goes on and on. Joyce pulls pieces from just about everything—reinforcing my art history professor’s claim that God is the only original creator and all other creations are copies—including Shakespeare (primarily Hamlet but a few parallels can be made between Leopold Bloom and Shylock of The Merchant of Venice), Milton, Irish history and folklore (with many references to Parnell and Irish songs and poems), the Bible, Thomas Aquinas, and of course Homer, among others. Joyce adds to the complexity of his narrative by using virtually every single literary device in the books. Sentences range from one word to 4,391 words, with only two marks of punctuation in the final chapter. It also contains the longest palindrome in the dictionary. Thoughts are free and often times seemingly not connected. New words are invented, old words combined into one. A purist of the English language might so much as scream if they were to read a single episode.
Joyce may very well have reinvented literature with his writing Ulysses, just as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare had before him. No longer would the rationality of thought or rules of language constrain the writer. With Ulysses nonconformity became the norm—or at least acceptable.
Ulysses introduces the reader to a chorus of memorably eccentric Dubliners, simultaneously both developed and underdeveloped. While the narrative certainly does not follow characters like Buck Mulligan and Simon Dedalus, they do add a lot of depth to the novel.
Though it may hardly be worth talking about, my favorite scene of the novel is when Stephen is beaten by a policeman in the street for insulting the British King. It is a great moment because as always it shows Dedalus’s superior intelligence and wisdom in just the way it speaks, but it also serves as a microcosm for the macrocosm that is British rule over Ireland. Though Ireland is now a free country in itself, for centuries it was ruled over by England, oftentimes unjustly and even tyrannically. That’s also what makes Leopold Bloom so interesting as a character. He is an Irishman, so he is automatically looked down upon by the English, but he is also a Jew, and thus he is discriminated against by even the Irish.
Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus may be the greatest characters ever created in literature. They literally feel like real people because as they narrate, the narrative seems to follow real thoughts, however idiosyncratic they may be For instance, when Bloom gets hungry, the narrative starts taking imagery of all sorts of different foods, though Joyce never explicitly tells the reader that Bloom wants to eat.
I once read somewhere that Leopold Bloom may be the most detailed character in the history of literature. With Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique, the reader can follow all his thoughts. Bloom is far from a perfect protagonist. In fact, as the novel progresses, it is revealed that he is incredibly unfaithful to his wife, sometimes to an exaggerated degree. Another one of my favorite scenes is when Bloom hallucinates that he is on trial with all the women he has had sex with and given false promises to. This scene is also written completely as a play which makes it very unique. It is revealed that he is a very slimy man, to again an exaggerated degree. I interpreted this as not to be taken literally (it is a hallucination after all, or at least partly a hallucination) but as his guilty conscience. His guilt builds and builds and builds to a point that things end up erupting once Stephen becomes involved and breaks the chandelier and gets punched by the police officer. However the irony is that Bloom does not end up apologizing because he is distracted during the climax of this scene.
Stephen is an intellectual, certainly a genius. This isn’t the first work Dedalus appears in; he is the protagonist of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and many modern critics consider him to be the persona narrating the first three short stories of Dubliners. Critics also say—and I do not see how this is not the truth—that Dedalus is a young version of James Joyce, early in his twenties in this novel. He thinks in such abstract terms—in multiple languages, actually; he seems to know a good deal of Latin and French—and analyzes everything to a point that the reader may become very confused if not annoyed. He is a parallel to both Prince Hamlet and Telemachus of The Odyssey and when he finally meets up with Bloom, it does not disappoint. Joyce teases the reader a few different times by having them almost meet, though they do not officially meet until about 500 pages in. And when they do meet, in some of the most unique and extraordinary writing I’ve ever read, they virtually—with almost no dialogue—are compared and contrasted to a point in which their characters are completely fleshed out.
The last main character is Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife. She is not introduced until about 600 pages into the novel, though much of the novel revolves around her. For those that say Ulysses has a plot, I suppose the main plot would be that Bloom is trying to get back to his wife, whom he knows is having an affair. She is certainly the focus of the last part of the novel, which contains the trial scene and just about all of Leopold’s infidelity as well as her epic soliloquy in the final chapter. Like Bloom, she is far from perfect. Though the reader may have sympathy for her because of how disgusting her husband apparently is, the reader also sees that she completely involves herself in the physicality of the earth. She desires more money to buy more expensive and better looking clothes and it’s clear in her soliloquy that she is obsessed with sex and physical attractions, which may or may not be a result of her ten-year celibacy while in her marriage. She looks back at all the relationships she had in the past in both a nostalgic and longing value, wondering what would have happened with her singing career and her personal relationships had she not married Leopold. The last thought of her soliloquy—and thus the finale of the novel—is her remembering her acceptance of Bloom’s proposal, implying that she has the desire to fix the problems of her marriage, though there are many. This is a very endearing statement on love, in my opinion. Though they are no longer young like they were when they were first married, they (Molly, anyways) wants to go back to the way things used to be, the way things should be. But at the same time, there isn’t hope for them. Because love is a two-way street and it is not completely certain to the reader that Leopold wants to make any efforts. Though it’s clear he feels guilty about a great deal he’s done, he has not resolved to change his ways. In fact, a thought he had (though far prior to his King Lear-like trial) made it appear that he no longer cares for Molly. And using the mystery that Joyce is so great with, it isn’t clear if this is just self-deception because Bloom is aware that Molly is having an affair. It could be either. Many say that the novel never ends, and that Molly and Leopold Bloom sleep on into eternity. Though it’s a very strange way to look at it, I do understand why people would think this. There appears to be no resolve in this relationship because there are such polarizing feelings by the two spouses. What is meant by the ending or what actually happens is largely unknown. Just as what Bloom was going to write in the sand, what the word known to all men is (which I would say is “death” but I believe Joyce implies is either “love” or “life”), and perhaps most mysterious of all, what “U.p. up” means, which makes the strangest motif I’ve ever seen.
Ulysses truly needs to be read to be appreciated. It may not even be understood but the great thing is that it leaves so many questions that are perfect for discussion with other intelligent people. And if nothing else, the beauty of the language alone makes it worth reading.
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