June 18, 2021
Wednesday, June 16, was Bloomsday. The events of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, whose protagonist is Leopold Bloom, transpire in Dublin during the twenty-four hours of June 16, 1904. Joyce chose the date to honor his first outing with Nora Barnacle, who later became his wife. Bloomsday is celebrated every June 16, not only in Dublin but around the world. I am doing you the service of advance notification, so that you can order your pub reservations early for next year, because 2022 will be the centenary of the publication of Ulysses in 1922.
This Bloomsday I did my share by going to an Irish pub (in Medina, Ohio, of all places) with a friend and former student, Heather. The Irish do not need much pretext to celebrate, but what about the rest of us?—after all, Heather and I are not Irish.
Actually, I do not need much excuse for celebrating either, especially after a long pandemic lockdown, but the real question is about the reputation of Ulysses. Over twenty years ago, the Modern Library assembled a panel of eminent judges to choose the 100 greatest novels in English of the twentieth century, and Ulysses came in number one. Such rankings mean fairly little, but the Modern Library is not alone in its opinion of Ulysses, and the question is why the widespread judgment of its greatness, especially since, if you have heard of it, you have probably also heard that it is one of the most difficult novels ever written. I think its difficulty is exaggerated: Ulysses is routinely taught to undergraduates, and I fell in love with it as a sophomore in college. But, again, if Ulysses is rewarding enough to warrant the admittedly considerable mental energy it takes to read it, what is it that so many people find so rewarding?
Those of you who have been listening to the Expanding Eyes podcast (hint!) exploring Dante’s Divine Comedy (on the 700th anniversary of its completion—more commemorative dates) may recall that Dante claimed his poem is polysemous, that is, has more than one possible level of meaning. In other words, he was adapting to his poem the Catholic technique of reading Scripture on four possible levels: the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic or mystical. Ulysses, one of the few works that could be said to rival The Divine Comedy, can be read on the same four levels, updated in certain ways and keeping in mind that Joyce was a Catholic heretic (or heresiarch, as he liked to say).
The first level is the literal, which in terms of modern literature means realism. Joyce began in the tradition of the realistic novel, but in Ulysses expands its boundaries to capture wider realms of external and internal experience. The realistic novel of the nineteenth century was restricted by middle class conventionality, with its strict ideas about decorum. Joyce caused an uproar simply by including life experiences that were not supposed to be talked about by respectable people—and in doing so got his novel banned in many countries. Northrop Frye had to have his copy smuggled to him across the Canadian border.
Joyce shows Leopold Bloom sitting on the toilet and later masturbating in his pocket while looking up the skirts of a young woman in the park (she is aware of it and more or less encourages it). The novel’s other protagonist, Stephen Dedalus (based to some extent on Joyce himself), picks his nose and lays the snot on a seaside rock, and later gets drunk in a whorehouse. Bloom, who protectively follows him, is caught up in masochistic fantasies with the madam as dominatrix. Bloom’s wife Molly, who is having an affair, remembers a couple of explicit sexual details about how she spent the afternoon, and is aware when her period begins in the night. These details about the common physical basis of our humanity horrified even people who should have known better: C.G. Jung called Ulysses a gigantic tapeworm.
Joyce was also one of the pioneers of the technique of internal realism known as stream of consciousness, the attempt to capture what William James called the blooming (no pun intended), buzzing confusion that really goes on in our minds, rather than the orderly and selective account given by conventional works of fiction.
Ulysses is not allegorical, in the sense of attaching conceptual labels to its characters and events. Instead of an intellectual ordering, the narrative of Ulysses is patterned by the patterns of its language, and it is sometimes said that Joyce’s gift for language is rivalled only by Shakespeare’s. The realistic tradition speaks of window-pane prose: language become transparent so that we can see the external world through it. But the twentieth-century revolution we call Modernism is aware that, as Marshall McLuhan put it, the medium is the message. That is, language is not a mere vehicle but recreates its subject matter, perhaps even constitutes it. Every one of Joyce’s chapters is in a different style, and we may ask about the purpose of some of them. Why a chapter in which language mimics the techniques of music? Why a chapter in the impersonal style of scientific analysis? Why a chapter whose prose evolves through every historical phase of the English language from its beginnings? Joyce may have overdone it: these stylistic metamorphoses account for a lot of the work’s difficulty. It is not for nothing that one chapter is titled “Proteus.” But you cannot read Ulysses to “get through it,” as we say, and find out how it turns out. You have to stop, on each page, in the immediate now and appreciate the sheer exuberant play of language. We learn from Joyce how to love language not only for what it says but for what it is. This is what the post-structuralists call writerly rather than readerly. This is language enraptured by what Schiller called the play spirit or instinct.
The third polysemous level is the moral. It was a pathetic failure of criticism that Joyce was at first called a nihilist. In fact, Joyce was one of the few writers who avoided many of the reactionary ideological failures of Modernism. Leopold Bloom is Jewish: in one episode, he confronts a jingoistic blowhard called the Citizen, who in an Americanized update would be wearing a MAGA hat, who spouts anti-Semitic, “patriotic” insults at Bloom and even throws something at him. It is the Citizen who is the real nihilist. How refreshing compared to T.S. Eliot’s declaration that the presence of any number of freethinking Jews is undesirable, Ezra Pound’s support for Mussolini, Yeats’s flirtation with the Irish fascists. Both Bloom and Stephen are lower middle class, and Stephen’s family is anything but respectable. This is not the refined world of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury or Yeats’s Irish aristocracy. Even aesthetically, Joyce is not elitist: he had a shameless love of old-fashioned Irish sentimental songs. Leopold Bloom is a decent man, capable of an empathy beyond all those who surround him and look down on him. Lacking Stephen’s intellectual sophistication, yet he has a constant intellectual curiosity: any professor would love to have him as a student.
What of the fourth level, the anagogic or mystical. Joyce once said he aspired to be a combination of Defoe and William Blake, of realist and visionary. Why spend seven years writing a novel about one ordinary day in the ordinary life of ordinary characters? T.S. Eliot wrote an essay on Ulysses in which he spoke of Joyce’s use of the “mythical method” to give meaning to the chaos of modern life. There is plenty of what Wallace Stevens called the “rage for order” in Joyce: compiled an enormous chart, now published, of the many categories by which Ulysses is ordered: each chapter has a symbolic color, for example.
But that can be misleading. Joyce did not labor for seven years, while going blind and enduring family tragedy, on a mere intellectual construct. Blake spoke of the imagination’s capacity to see the world in a grain of sand, and eternity in an hour. What Joyce created was not just a construct but a world, attempting to rival the endless, exuberant creativity of the Creator himself. As I note in The Productions of Time, it is a question that has been seriously asked: why did God bother? Why create a world? We are close here to the roots of the imaginative impulse. Tolkien is only the most widely familiar example of the love of fantasists for what they call world building. As readers, why adopt a world as our own, as readers do with Tolkien, with Harry Potter, even with the Marvel Universe? I had a student once who had been building a fantasy realm in her head since she was a little girl. She brought in a poster-sized map to show me, and showed me how it was for her virtually a memory theatre: for each land, she had plots in her head of works she aspired to write.
Insofar as literary criticism is an art, it too may attempt to create a world.I tried to do so in The Productions of Time.But who will read it?Dylan Thomas has a poem called “In my craft or sullen art” in which he says he writes for the one group that he knows won’t read him:the common lovers, who lie abed “with all their griefs in their arms.”Readers wander through the world of Joyce’s Ulysses more or less aware that they are missing a great deal of hidden pattern and significance.But so what?We wander through the “real world” aware that we are missing most of it too, from the motion of subatomic particles to the world of hidden life between the blades of grass to the lovers’ griefs that are hidden all around us.When we break out of habit and routine, we are aware of the inexhaustible wonder of reality, and it is that birth of wonder that impelled Joyce to end his creation, which took a symbolic seven years, with an ecstatic “yes.”