![]() ![]() It certainly helps to grasp that Homer’s main characters include the impulsive adventurer Odysseus, otherwise known as Ulysses, who is represented here by Bloom (and perhaps by the reader, too). Do you need to be familiar with Homer before you can fathom Joyce’s tribute? Should you tool up with a scholarly guide? And what about The Odyssey?Ī further source of anxiety for many new Ulysses readers is the fact that it is modelled on Homer’s Odyssey. ![]() She kissed me” with Stephen’s arcane lyricism or Molly’s ecstatic “and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes”. We might compare Bloom’s vividly condensed reminiscence “Hot I tongued her. Joyce therefore invokes a vast range of idiom. Most are talky, and even objects are eloquent. Ulysses is a densely sociable novel, peopled with the citizens of Dublin, some of them nonentities and others monstrous or ghostly. When acclimatising to a new episode, it pays to read the text aloud or listen to it being performed – and feel Joyce stretching language to see how much it can contain. No sooner do you adjust to a particular tone and technique than you’re expected to start what seems like a different book.įor many readers, making the jump has a dizzying effect. The novel is full of other voices and moods, and for each of its 18 episodes Joyce adopts a distinct style: one is like a hallucinatory piece of theatre, another is a parody of journalism. Making sense of the structure and narrative If the opening leaves you cold, it’s worth skipping ahead to episode four, where Joyce introduces Leopold Bloom. Some readers fall for Stephen’s sour hauteur and quotability (“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”). This would usually mean starting at the beginning, but here it needn’t Ulysses is a wandering novel and rewards the wandering reader.Īlthough the first sentence acquaints us with Buck Mulligan, a medical student, the dominant presence in the early episodes is his housemate Stephen, an intellectual exhibitionist who’s thin-skinned and painfully self-conscious. There’s a lot to be said for jumping right into that subterranean zone. ![]() No novelist before Joyce had captured with such intimacy and integrity the little nuances of the everyday or what he called the ‘subterranean complexities’ of the mind. As they do so, we taste their thoughts and sensations unfiltered. Instead of making these quests feel Herculean, the novel depicts the characters going about their ordinary business: preparing breakfast, feeding the cat, reading the newspaper, running errands, arguing about politics. Stephen and Bloom, who don’t know each other at the outset, are both on a symbolic quest: Stephen, who is effectively an orphan, seeks a father, and the childless Bloom is looking for a son. The others are Leopold Bloom, a 38-year-old advertising salesman, and his 33-year-old wife Molly, a singer. Of the three main characters, the first we see is 22-year-old aspiring author Stephen Dedalus, who is Joyce’s unflatteringly drawn alter-ego. The date, 16 June 1904, is of no obvious historical significance in real life it was the occasion of his first romantic rendezvous with his future wife, Nora. Joyce devotes 265,000 words to the events of a single day. Think, then, of Ulysses as a particularly unsentimental, raw and earthy sort of love letter to Dublin – written by Joyce in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. The truth, though, is that the world of the novel is domestic. It takes place in Dublin, Joyce’s birthplace, which he left in 1904, aged 22, and to which he never returned after 1912. The settingįor readers seduced by the promise of pungent humour, the sheer dimensions of Ulysses remain intimidating. Even the onomatopoeia is gleefully irreverent: a cat goes "Mrkgnao", lumpen piano music is ‘lugugugubrious’, a man’s behind emits a "Pprrpffrrppfff". A good route into the novel is to savour Joyce’s wit and whimsy, rather than worry about unpacking the significance of every sentence. He especially likes to toy with clichés, either piling them up till they assume farcical proportions or giving them a wry twist – "Absence makes the heart grow younger". An aura of intense seriousness clings to Joyce, but he can be prankish, as when he remixes one of Jesus’s miracles – “Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.” To those who share its author’s delight in playing with words, peerlessly so. Sure enough, most first-timers give up on it, tormented by the mysterious allusions and verbal experiments, persuaded that this is a book to study rather than devour.īut for all its intricacies and erudition, Ulysses is winningly funny. Ulysses has a reputation for being hard work – at once enigmatic and chaotic. ![]()
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