Title: Ulysses Author: James Joyce Creation Date: 1922 Location: Paris, France
Summary
Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom — a Jewish advertising canvasser — through a single day in Dublin on 16 June 1904, a date now celebrated worldwide as Bloomsday. Running alongside him is Stephen Dedalus, the young intellectual first encountered in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, whose path and Bloom's converge late at night in the city's red-light district. The novel's eighteen episodes map, loosely but deliberately, onto the structure of Homer's Odyssey: Bloom is Odysseus, Molly Bloom his unfaithful Penelope, and Stephen the wandering Telemachus. Each episode adopts a radically different narrative style — stream of consciousness, catechistic question and answer, hallucinatory drama, prose parody spanning the full arc of English literature. The novel closes with Molly's long, unpunctuated interior monologue: a torrent of memory, desire, and assent that ends on the word "Yes."
Why This Book Matters
Ulysses redefined what the novel could do. Joyce's central argument is democratic and radical: that a single ordinary day, in a single ordinary city, lived by a single ordinary man, contains the full scope of human experience — heroism, grief, lust, humour, tenderness, boredom, and the basic facts of digestion. Leopold Bloom's 16 June is as worthy of epic treatment as Odysseus's ten-year voyage. That claim, once proven on the page, could not be undismissed. The novel's formal innovations — stream of consciousness, encyclopaedic allusion, episode-by-episode stylistic reinvention — became the benchmark against which every subsequent ambitious fiction was measured. Its influence is so pervasive that much contemporary literature still defines itself in relation to Joyce's project, whether extending it, resisting it, or quietly borrowing from it.
Historical Context
Joyce set the novel on 16 June 1904 — the day of his first outing with Nora Barnacle — but wrote it between 1914 and 1921, in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, while the world was at war. Ireland in 1904 was still under British rule; the novel is saturated with Irish nationalism, the cultural authority of the Catholic Church, and the long shadow of Parnell's fall. Joyce was a voluntary exile who both revered and resented Dublin, and that tension runs through every page. The book was first published in Paris on 2 February 1922 by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company — the same year as Eliot's The Waste Land, and weeks before the Irish Free State came into being. In Britain and America it remained banned for years; Judge Woolsey lifted the US obscenity prohibition in 1933 in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses.
Literary Significance
Every episode of Ulysses is a formal experiment. The Aeolus episode is structured around classical rhetorical figures; Oxen of the Sun recapitulates the entire history of English prose from Anglo-Saxon kennings to modern slang; Circe unfolds as a hallucinatory expressionist play. The eighteen episodes together map — with deliberate looseness — onto Homer's Odyssey, a structural scaffold Joyce exploited to comic, tragic, and ironic effect. His stream-of-consciousness technique, especially Bloom's associative and digressive inner monologue, permanently expanded the novel's capacity to render thought in motion. The scholarly apparatus surrounding the book — the Rosenbach manuscript, the 1922 first edition, Hans Walter Gabler's controversial 1984 critical edition — is vast. Yet the emotional core remains accessible: Bloom's grief for his infant son Rudy, his tolerant love for Molly, his dogged, humane curiosity about the world he moves through.
Research Notes
Non-negotiable for modernism — and for any honest account of what the novel, as a form, can do. Ulysses appears on virtually every list of the greatest novels of the twentieth century; the formal claim is not in dispute even when the ranking is. The book's reputation for difficulty is real but overstated: the first six episodes read with comparative ease, and the final episode — Molly's monologue — requires no annotation whatsoever. The textual history is genuinely complex: scholars distinguish between the Rosenbach manuscript, the serialised Little Review text (1918–1920), Sylvia Beach's 1922 first edition (Shakespeare and Company, Paris), and Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 synoptic critical edition, which remains controversial. Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated is the standard companion for readers wanting to follow the allusions. Bloomsday — 16 June — is celebrated in Dublin and dozens of cities worldwide, a measure of the novel's reach beyond the academy.
The Reading
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. Eight o'clock in the morning, the sixteenth of June, 1904, and below the Martello tower at Sandycove the water lay flat as a looking glass: the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea. Three men were living in the tower that week. Mulligan, a medical student with a voice built for pulpits. An Englishman called Haines, down from Oxford, collecting Irish sayings in a notebook. And Stephen Dedalus, twenty-two, a schoolteacher who had meant to be an artist and had not yet made anything worth the name.
Mulligan shaved at the parapet and blasphemed at the morning air and called Stephen Kinch, the knifeblade, and told him he had behaved badly: his mother dying, asking him to kneel and pray at the bed, and he standing there refusing. The aunt thinks you killed your mother, Mulligan said, and went down to the fire and the fried eggs. Haines had woken the house in the night raving about shooting a black panther. Where is his guncase? Stephen asked, and got no answer worth having. When they went down to bathe, Mulligan took the key of the tower and twopence for a pint. Usurper, Stephen thought, and walked off along the road.
She was dead a year. He had refused her at the bed, and the refusal stayed in him and gnawed — agenbite of inwit, the old phrase for it, the again-biting of conscience — and it went with him through every street he walked that day. Her wasted face. The smell of wetted ashes and rosewood. Her glazing eyes looking up out of the sheets and asking him for the one thing she had ever asked, and his pride bigger than her dying.
He taught the morning's history at Mr Deasy's school in Dalkey. Pyrrhus at Asculum, another such victory and we are undone. A pier, sir. A disappointed bridge. A boy named Sargent stayed behind over his sums, ugly and futile, and Stephen thought that somebody had loved him once, had carried him and kept him from being trampled underfoot. Afterwards the headmaster paid his salary in sovereigns and shillings, lectured him on saving, gave him a letter about foot-and-mouth disease to place with the newspapers, and offered without being asked that England is in the hands of the jews, and that Ireland had never persecuted them because she never let them in. History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Before noon he was walking on Sandymount Strand with the tide going out. Ineluctable modality of the visible: shut your eyes and see. He shut them and heard his boots crush crackling wrack and shells and thought, if I open them again and it is all still there, then the world does not need me to hold it up. He opened them. There it was. Seaspawn and seawrack, a dog nosing at a carcass, two women coming down the steps with a midwife's bag, and the tide going out over the flats.
At that same hour, on the north side, in the house at 7 Eccles Street, Leopold Bloom set the kettle on the coals and thought about breakfast. Thirty-eight years old, an advertisement canvasser for the Freeman's Journal, a Jewish man in a Catholic city, baptised twice and belonging nowhere in particular. The cat came round his legs. Mkgnao! she said — not miaow, which is what cats had been given to say for four hundred years, but the actual noise the actual animal made in the actual kitchen. He poured her milk. Cruel her tongue, he thought. Wonder is it true if you clip them they can't mouse.
He walked up to Dlugacz the pork butcher's in Dorset Street for a kidney, reading the shopgirl's hips ahead of him in the queue and losing her at the corner. Home. Two letters on the hall floor and a card. One for him from Milly, fifteen, gone to Mullingar to learn the photography trade. The other addressed to Mrs Marion Bloom in a bold hand, which he carried up to the bedroom without a word about it, and Molly put it under the pillow. Boylan. Blazes Boylan, arranging her concert programme, coming at four to go through it with her.
She asked him what metempsychosis meant, out of a book she was reading. The transmigration of souls, he said, and then said it again in plainer words for her. Downstairs the kidney was burning. He ate it with a fine tang of faintly scented urine on his palate and read Milly's letter twice and thought about her growing up and about the fifteen years since, and about the eleven days.
That was Rudy. Born and dead in eleven days, and the boy would have been eleven years old this year, and after him there had been no more, nothing between him and Molly in that way in ten years and more. It sat under everything, the way the current sits under the surface of a river and moves all the water above it without ever showing.
The day took him about the city. A letter collected under the name Henry Flower from a woman named Martha Clifford, whom he had never met and did not intend to meet. A cake of lemon soap in his hip pocket. At eleven he rode out to Glasnevin in the funeral carriage for Paddy Dignam, dead of drink, leaving a widow and children and no money, and the carriage held Martin Cunningham and Jack Power and Simon Dedalus, who sang beautifully and drank ruinously and had spent every advantage he ever had. They passed Boylan on the street and the others saluted him and Bloom looked at his fingernails. In the cemetery he stood a little apart. Nice soft tumble I'd like that. Then the gravediggers, and the rat sliding under the plinth, and his father in Ennis with the prussic acid and the note for him, and the small coffin of eleven days, and the two griefs lying alongside each other in him the way the dead lay alongside each other under the ground.
Afternoon. A young man from the Y.M.C.A. put a throwaway into his hand on the street — Elijah is coming. Bloom read it, folded it, dropped it over the parapet of O'Connell Bridge and watched the gulls come down after it. It rode on the tide, past the Customhouse, past the ferry slips, a crumpled skiff on the Liffey going down towards the sea, and it would still be riding an hour later while half the city crossed its path without looking.
He was hungry and could not stomach the Burton, men eating with their hats shoved back, swallowing gobfuls. Out. Davy Byrne's. Moral pub. He had a glass of burgundy and a gorgonzola sandwich with mustard, and the wine ran warm through him and he thought of the day on Howth with Molly among the rhododendrons, seedcake warm and chewed from her mouth to his. Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.
At two, in the National Library, Stephen was expounding Hamlet to the librarians and the literary men — that the ghost on the battlements is the man who wrote him, that the wound behind the play is a wife's betrayal and a brother's, that a man may father himself out of his own dishonour. Mulligan arrived and jeered. Nobody was convinced, and Stephen had not convinced himself. On the way out the two of them stepped aside to let a courteous, dark-clothed man pass between them at the door. Neither spoke to him. He was hunting an old copy of the Kilkenny People for an advertisement.
At three the city ran all at once. Father Conmee walking north with his breviary and his smooth watch. A onelegged sailor growling for coppers in Eccles Street and a bare arm flinging him a coin out of an upper window. Boylan at Thornton's choosing a basket of fruit and a bottle to be sent ahead, taking a red carnation for his teeth. Stephen's sisters at home boiling shirts in a kitchen with nothing in it. Dilly buying a French primer with a penny of the money their father would want back. Nineteen small windows opened one after another and shut, and the viceregal cavalcade rode through the last of them, saluted and unsaluted, from Parkgate down to the Mirus bazaar; and somewhere in the middle of it the crumpled throwaway went on down the river, past the Customhouse, past the timber yards, Elijah is coming, nobody's business, still afloat.
At four the Ormond bar was bronze and gold — two barmaids at the window watching the cavalcade go by — and the language of the room came apart into sound before it came together into sentences. Simon Dedalus sang M'appari out of Martha and the beauty of it filled the bar, and Bloom sat over his liver and bacon in the dining room next door listening, hearing a ruined man make that sound. Jingle. That was Boylan's car going up Bachelor's Walk to Eccles Street, and the clock over the bar going four, and Bloom sitting still. He wrote a reply to Martha Clifford under the name Henry and thought about the tuning fork the blind piano tuner had left behind, and, walking out past a whore in a doorway, he read Robert Emmet's last words in a print-shop window and timed his own wind to a passing tram.
At five he was outside Barney Kiernan's public house, waiting on Martin Cunningham. There was a life policy of Dignam's, signed over against a loan, and something might yet be got out of it for the widow and the children if the right man saw the right solicitor. Inside, a nationalist known only as the citizen sat with a mangy dog at his feet and held forth on Ireland and the Irish and the strangers in the house. The drink went round. Bloom did not buy one, and word had got about that he had backed Throwaway for the Gold Cup at twenty to one — he had not, he had never laid a penny on it, a man had simply misheard him that morning — and now he was a moneylender who had won on a horse and would not stand a round. They came at him about his religion and his nation and his manhood.
What is your nation, says the citizen.
Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.
And then, standing there with the whole bar against him:
Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
Love, he said, when they asked him what he meant. I mean the opposite of hatred. And he told them their God had been a jew, that Christ was a jew like himself, and went out to the car with Cunningham, and the citizen came roaring after him and flung an empty biscuit tin down the street, which missed; and the telling of it swelled the tin into a comet crossing the sky and levelled the four courts to rubble, because nothing smaller would do for the size of the row.
At eight he was down on the strand at Sandymount again, tired, watching three girls minding babies on the rocks in the last of the light. One of them, Gerty MacDowell, sat apart and let herself be looked at, and leaned back further and further to follow the Mirus bazaar fireworks going up over the trees, and a Roman candle burst, and O! and O! and it was all over. Then she got up and walked away, and she was lame, and he had not seen it. Poor girl. He wrote three letters in the sand with a stick — I. AM. A. — and rubbed them out and let the tide have the rest. A bat went by. The cuckoo clock in the priest's house called out the hour to nobody.
At ten he went to the maternity hospital in Holles Street to ask after Mrs Purefoy, three days in labour, and found Stephen there drinking with the medical students in the common room, and the talk going from Latin to alliterative English to Bunyan to Pepys to Sterne to Dickens to gutter slang, generation by generation, while overhead a boy was born. The students decamped to a pub and then to Nighttown, and Bloom, sober and uneasy, went after Stephen the way a man goes after something he has been left to mind.
Nighttown came up out of the ground. Bloom on trial for indecency before witnesses real and invented, ladies in furs giving evidence against him; Bloom crowned Lord Mayor of Dublin and hailed by multitudes; Bloom made a woman, made a servant, made to grovel by Bella Cohen the brothel keeper, who was Bello now, riding him. And Stephen at the piano saw his mother rise up through the floor in her grave clothes with her breath of wetted ashes, begging him to repent, and he cried Non serviam! and swung the ashplant into the chandelier and ran out into the street, where Private Carr, who had heard something about the King that Stephen had not said, knocked him flat.
Bloom talked the soldiers away and the crowd away and stood over him in the dark. Then he saw, standing on the pavement, a boy of eleven in an Eton suit with a lamb in his pocket, reading a book from right to left, smiling, saying nothing. Rudy. The image lasted no longer than a held breath.
He got Stephen up and walked him to the cabman's shelter near Butt Bridge for coffee and a bun, and the talk between them ran on and on the way talk runs at one in the morning, tired, secondhand, full of a sailor's lies about Peru and knife-throwing, neither man saying any of the things that might have mattered. Then home. The key was in his other trousers. He climbed the area railings and dropped down and let himself in by the scullery and opened the front door from the inside, and made cocoa for the two of them and gave Stephen the better cup.
They talked about music and languages and Ireland and the Jews, and their ages were compared, and the water in the tap was traced back to the reservoir at Roundwood, and neither of them said the one thing offered and the one thing declined: stay. Stephen would not stay. They went out into the garden to piss under the stars, and what did they see, and the answer given: The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. The bells of Saint George's rang. Stephen walked off into the dark and was not seen again.
Bloom went in, barked his head on the walnut sideboard which had been moved during the day, put out the light, and got into bed. There were crumbs in the sheets and the imprint of a body not his own. He listed to himself every man who had ever wanted her and might have had her, and felt envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity. Then he kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, and lay down the wrong way about with his head at the foot of the bed, and told her a shortened account of his day, and slept.
And she lay awake in the dark and thought. Him and his four o'clock and the state of the sheets. The milkman, the doctor, the price of eggs, whether there was a God and if there was whether he was a man, the way men are and the way women have to be. Gibraltar and the sun on the wall and Lieutenant Mulvey kissing her under the Moorish wall when she was a girl. Her husband, whose faults she knew the whole length of, who explained things nobody had asked him to explain, who had cold feet in the bed and had brought her her breakfast this morning and was the only one who had ever known what a woman is.
And the thinking went round and came back to Howth, and the day among the rhododendrons and the sun on the sea, and the seedcake she gave him warm out of her own mouth, and she thought well as well him as another, and asked him with her eyes to ask again, and yes she put her arms around him yes and drew him down to her so he could feel her breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes she said yes I will Yes.
This post is part of Books They Tried to Destroy, a series on the Banned, Burned & Dangerous canon — works that frightened states and survived them.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
The recommended edition is the corrected text edited by Hans Walter Gabler (Vintage International, 1986), which restores approximately five thousand textual errors from earlier editions. Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated (University of California Press, 1989) is the essential companion for first-time readers.
By James Joyce. The definitive corrected text — the edition to read.
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