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Ulysses: James Joyce
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Ulysses, by James Joyce, is a challenge to understand. It is at once a masterpiece and an anomaly, a novel that stretches the form and content of the genre of which it is a part. At the same time that Ulysses [U]ses Homer’s Odyssey as a major literary referent, the work heralds the end of the nineteenth-century novel as it was commonly understood. It takes readers into the inner realms of human consciousness using the interior monologue style that came to be called stream of consciousness. In addition to this psychological characteristic, it gives a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people living in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904. First published in its entirety in France in 1922, the novel was the subject of a famous obscenity trial in 1933, but was found by a U.S. district court in New York to be a work of art.
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Ulysses (1922) is a novel by James Joyce, written in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris (1914-1921). It tells in great detail many incidents of the life of Leopold Bloom and those around him on the single day of 16 June 1904. This commemorated the date Joyce first went out with Nora Barnacle, whom he had met a few days before, and which has since become celebrated in Ireland and elsewhere as Bloomsday.
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The first three episodes of Ulysses focus on Stephen Dedalus, a problematically autobiographical character first introduced in Joyce’s published work through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Chapter One, Stephen, Mulligan, and Haines prepare for the day. In Chapter Two, Stephen is teaching in a boys’ school. While the class recites Milton’s Lycidas, he broods about his life so far, his ambitions to be a great writer, and his doubts. In Chapter Three, Stephen walks along the seafront and reflects upon the things he sees—midwives, cockle-pickers, boulders, a dog, the body of a dog, “seaspawn and seawrack.”
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The original edition of Ulysses published in 1922 had many, many errors –which wasn’t all that surprising. After all, the damn thing was enormous, the language and typography were offbeat, it had already been serialized in various magazines, and Joyce was an extensive reviser, spreading revisions over numerous drafts, fair-copies and typescripts. Although Joyce partially oversaw attempts to correct subsequent editions, it wasn’t until 1961 that a “corrected and reset” text was made. This edition stood for over a decade, until a team of researchers headed by German scholar Hans Walter Gabler decided to produce an improved and more accurate edition. Returning to the original sources –reams of papers, scripts, drafts, early editions, etc. –the team worked from 1974-1984 to produce a “Critical and Synoptic Edition.” This was eventually published with great fanfare in 1986 as “The Corrected Text.” This edition was intended to replace all previous versions, which were removed from publication.
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The plot and theme of James Joyce's Ulysses center on life as a journey. Joyce based the framework of his novel on the structure of one of the greatest and most influential works in world literature, The Odyssey, by Homer. In this epic poem of ancient Greece, Homer presented the journey of life as a heroic adventure. The protagonist of this epic tale, Odysseus (Roman name, Ulysses), encounters manyperils–including giants, angry gods, and monsters–during his voyage home to Ithaca, Greece, after the Trojan War. In Joyce's 20th Century novel, the author ... depicts life as a journey, in imitation of Homer. But Joyce presents this journey as humdrum, dreary, and uneventful.
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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 H. G. Wells was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives... 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.
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James Joyce