Even people who have not read Ulysses know that James Joyce said of his novel: “it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” This year Ulysses turns 100, and the professors will be everywhere telling us what it means. I, for example, am an associate professor of literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where I have taught Ulysses many times. But I hope in my heart I will always be an amateur Ulyssean.
Despite its reputation as the final exam of literary studies, Ulysses is the great book of the autodidact. Joyce’s hero, the high-school-educated Leopold Bloom, potters his way around Dublin on 16th June 1904, knowing a little bit about everything. The other main character, Stephen Dedalus, is a self-portrait of the author at 22: an intense student with a talent for languages, who has just abandoned his curious decision to read medicine in Paris.
Joyce’s academic immortality policy was a hedged bet that his “enigmas and puzzles” would appeal to readers like Bloom too. How else to explain a whole publishing subgenre of scholarly cribs that is arguably peculiar to Ulysses? The ingenious—not to say unhelpful—way that Joyce wrote his novel necessarily envisaged a readership who would need a guide. And he cultivated the confidants who produced the earliest of these supplements, such as Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses (1930), which shows how Joyce plotted the modern-day episodes of his novel against the Greek epic of the Odyssey (“Ulysses” is the Latin name of Odysseus, establishing the theme of cultural translation).
Gilbert’s book was published by Faber and Faber, where TS Eliot was an editor. In 1923, shortly after Ulysses appeared, Eliot had defended the book’s apparent madness by coining the phrase “the mythical method.” The ideal reader Eliot and Gilbert imagined needing to know about Homer might have been the one who, picking up a first edition imported from France, found in it “no story, and no introduction which might give a key to its purpose,” but nevertheless gamely began with the last chapter, only to encounter an overflow pipe of prose “by a more or less illiterate vulgar woman” (the final chapter gives voice to the night thoughts of Bloom’s unfaithful wife, Molly).
Unfortunately, the reader in question was Archibald Bodkin, director of Public Prosecutions, and he banned this “unmitigated filth and obscenity” from being printed in Britain until 1936. It’s easy to laugh at Bodkin now, but he is one of relatively few readers to have attempted Ulysses without a safety net. It’s effectively impossible for us to experience the same shock. Joyce stripped out his original Homeric episode titles from the book, but every guide and edition since has felt it necessary to restore these handrails, plus a larger “schema” of clues and correspondences that Joyce provided to Gilbert and an Italian friend, Carlo Linati.
Nobody navigates Ulysses, therefore, without “Gilbert” or “Linati” giving directions at some point—and they will very likely be assisted by some third-party mediation too. Gazetteers for the general reader over the years have included Frank Budgen’s horse’s-mouth account, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (1934); Harry Blamires’s The Bloomsday Book (1966); Richard Ellmann’s Ulysses on the Liffey (1972); and Terence Killeen’s Ulysses Unbound: A Reader’s Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses (2004), which has just appeared in a new edition from Penguin Books.
Killeen is both a journalist and Joycean, who has written a crisp and knowledgeable summary of each episode. One consequence of the mythical method is that Ulysses is built on a foundation of deep puns: Odysseus was a sailor dependent on the winds; Bloom is a “canvasser” for local newspaper ads, who deals in “puff” pieces. To borrow the wordplay of an advert he proudly rustles up for “Alexander Keyes, tea, wine and spirit merchant,” Ulysses Unbound will unlock this “House of Key(e)s.” Yet whatever such guides solve for readers in terms of allusions and plot points—and Oxford University Press has recently weighed in with a 1,500-page set of annotations—there will always be the vast remainder of rich, dense writing that is the real reason no reader of Ulysses is ever done with it. As the often-chewing Bloom reflects of cheese, it is a food that “digests all but itself.”
Bloom’s next thought is a gourmet pun that went missing for half a century because the long-suffering printer of 1922 corrected it, possibly unaware that ageing cheese is inhabited and eaten by its own species of microorganism: “Mity [1922: ‘Mighty’] cheese.” Thus, in the lunchtime episode based on Odysseus’ encounter with the cannibalistic Lestrygonians, Bloom’s hungry mind digests itself. Eliot was wrong to claim that Joyce’s most important innovation in Ulysses was the use of myth to give “significance” to modern life—it was the internal monologue that dominates the narration by amplifying the background radiation of human consciousness. There is no thought too small (or mity) for inclusion. And the pleasure of the book is the feeling that you are following an intimate scribble. As Jacques Derrida once put it: “Ulysses, an immense postcard.”
What Joyce catches, flawlessly, is the amateurism of raw thought: its eccentricity, its errors, its haste. This may be why my preferred reading copy is not the (controversially) “corrected” text, but the Oxford Classics facsimile of the 1922 edition, with notes and commentary by Jeri Johnson. The frown lines now run deep on the spine of the paperback copy that I was given on my 18th birthday (fortunately, a revised centenary edition is forthcoming). Twenty-five years later, my strongest memory of reaching adulthood is breathing in the high-definition freshness of Ulysses’ opening scene, with its enchanted evocation of morning in Dublin Bay (“Warm sunshine merrying over the sea”) and acutely cadenced dialogue (“O, an impossible person!”).
The only introductory comment offered to the Ulysses reader of 1922 was a tactful note following the title page: “the publisher asks the reader’s indulgence for typographical errors unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances” (the publisher was Sylvia Beach, who ran the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company). The exceptional circumstances, though, are what give life to each printed page, where every thinking word seems to fidget like an ant.
As Derrida saw it, every reader “countersigns” Joyce’s postcard with their own name, confirming receipt of some deciphered meaning. But there is no doubt that Joyce signs first: the last words of the book are “Trieste-Zurich-Paris, / 1914-1921,” sketching the author’s own European odyssey after leaving Ireland in 1912. Just as no one can get very far into Ulysses without thinking about Homer, no one can leave it without thinking about Joyce.
This strange fact first struck me as a teenager on work experience at the local library. Reshelving books, I paused over a jumbo-sized paperback that claimed to be the greatest novel of the 20th century, and featured an oil painting of Joyce as its front cover. What kind of novel starred its own author?
A few summers later, dozing in the passenger lounge of the night ferry to Dublin with a fellow Ulysses enthusiast, I knew the answer. Although Joyce never returned to his native city, he used every word of his fiction, from Dubliners (1914) to Finnegans Wake (1939), to write his name all over it. Dublin eventually reciprocated. On the 50th anniversary of 16th June 1904, two Irish writers—Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien—began a tradition of celebrating Ulysses with “Bloomsday” readings, and drinks, in its real-life locations (one minute of documentary footage from the inaugural festivities survives on YouTube, complete with pissed writers pissing against walls).
One souvenir from my student pilgrimage in the late 1990s is a copy of the James Joyce Bloomsday Magazine, a publication which marries scholarship and tourism. At the back is a bustling Dublin Pub Guide (at one point Bloom muses, “Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub”). At the front is an advert for a “Global Bloomsday,” which tells of how “Bloom’s journey in 1904 will be recreated around the globe on 16th June 1998 in a new and dynamic way”—namely, “a technological link provided by the Irish Times website.”
By the end of the 20th century, Joyce had arrived on the information superhighway, having arguably anticipated it with his obsessive use of maps and newspapers to recreate the Dublin he knew.
In Ulysses Unbound, Terence Killeen—himself a Dubliner—is particularly attentive to the census-like accuracy of Joyce’s realism. Acres of further resources are available online, including UlyssesGuide.com, created by Patrick Hastings, an American schoolteacher—which has also just appeared in repackaged form as a reader’s guide from Johns Hopkins University Press. Various Googlable versions of the text sadly now render redundant one of the most heroically resourceful productions of Joyce studies: the Word Index to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1937), which was made by a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin using a quarter of a million typed cards and wooden mail sorting racks. As Jorge Luis Borges observed, Joyce was “a millionaire of words.”
There is something about the gargantuan challenge of Ulysses that seems to promote collective endeavour. Reading groups work their way through it around the world. On Bloomsday 2015, the English village of Melbourn, Cambridgeshire was rallied to an all-day re-enactment of the novel for charity, featuring readings at the local pub, library, convenience shop and cemetery. I appeared at the end of the day, in the school hall, to give an educational talk with slides.
Certain infamous scenes from the novel, such as those where Bloom goes to the toilet, masturbates and hallucinates in a brothel, were inevitably omitted from this family-friendly event—which would have pleased Ezra Pound, who encouraged Joyce to do without his “detailed treatment of the dropping feces.” But the scandal of Ulysses’ indifference to etiquette endures in other forms.
When Jeremy Corbyn, as Labour leader, revealed—to the general disbelief of British journalists—that Ulysses was his favourite book, the UCL academic John Sutherland told the Evening Standard: “as we get to know him Jeremy Corbyn becomes stranger and stranger,” explaining that it was a book “about an old man who is disappointed in life. Most of it is about sex and crapping.” Sutherland’s estimate of the pornographic and scatological content of the book’s 700-plus pages is off by some magnitude here. He also forgets that Bloom is only 38—just as in his How to Be Well Read: A Guide to 500 Great Novels (2014) he mistakenly calls him “childless” (the Blooms have two children, one dead and one alive). No doubt Corbyn could have set him straight.
A media-friendly academic features ambivalently in the only scene from Ulysses that Joyce recorded in his own voice. An indigent scholar called Professor MacHugh, who is not really a professor, is loitering around the offices of the Dublin Evening Telegraph. Here, he regales the editor and others with a recital of “the finest display of oratory I ever heard”—a performance only spoilt when his second-hand rhetoric is interrupted by a repressed burp, perfectly described in eight savoured words: “a dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech.”
Casting a wry eye on the academic pedantry it encourages, Ulysses’ forgiving humour embraces the ingenuity of the amateur (from the Latin, “one who loves”). In “Ithaca,” the penultimate episode, Leopold Bloom, like Odysseus, comes home. But Joyce’s narration transfigures the heroic action of Homer into a modern intellectual epic by adopting the scientific precision of the home encyclopaedia. Odysseus returns to his native land stealthily, wary of the suitors around his wife, to whom he reveals himself by stringing and shooting his bow (and slaughtering them). The gentler Bloom, on returning to 7 Eccles Street, Dublin, finds that he has forgotten his front door key. Rather than wake his wife, he climbs over his own railings in order to drop down “two feet and ten inches” to the scullery entrance. (Joyce wrote to an aunt in Dublin to check the exact measurements.) Inside, he opens the door by “obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and turning its wards from right to left.” Here, the punning translation of Greek warrior into Dublin householder is the symbolic prelude to Bloom’s philosophical forgiveness of his wife’s affair. When Odysseus arrives home he kisses the earth; Bloom gets into bed and kisses Molly’s bottom. The house of keys that is Ulysses is full of such homely poetry.
