Title: Ulysses Author: James Joyce Creation Date: 1922 Location: Paris, France
Summary
The novel follows Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, through a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904. In parallel, it tracks Stephen Dedalus, a young intellectual (the protagonist of Joyce's earlier Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), through the same day. Their paths converge late at night. Bloom's day loosely parallels the episodes of Homer's Odyssey: he is Odysseus, his unfaithful wife Molly is Penelope, and Stephen is Telemachus. But the novel's real subject is consciousness itself — each of its eighteen episodes employs a different narrative style, from stream-of-consciousness to catechistic question-and-answer to a dramatic script to a sequence of prose parodies spanning the entire history of English literature. It concludes with Molly Bloom's unpunctuated interior monologue, ending with the word "Yes."
Why This Book Matters
Ulysses redefined what the novel could be and do. By demonstrating that a single ordinary day in a single ordinary city, experienced by a single ordinary man, could contain the full scope of human experience — heroism, grief, lust, humour, tenderness, boredom, digestion — Joyce made one of the most radical democratic arguments in literary history: that Leopold Bloom's day is as worthy of epic treatment as Odysseus's ten-year voyage. The novel's formal innovations — stream of consciousness, radical stylistic experimentation, encyclopaedic scope — became a benchmark against which later ambitious fiction would repeatedly measure itself. Its influence is so pervasive that much contemporary fiction still defines itself partly by extension of, or resistance to, Joyce's project.
Historical Context
Joyce set the novel on June 16, 1904 — the day of his first date with Nora Barnacle — but wrote it between 1914 and 1921, during and after World War I, while living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Ireland in 1904 was still under British rule, and the novel is saturated with the politics of Irish nationalism, the Catholic Church's cultural dominance, and the legacy of Parnell. Joyce wrote as a self-imposed exile who both loved and rejected Dublin. The novel was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company in 1922, the same year as Eliot's Waste Land and on the cusp of the Irish Free State — making it a landmark of both literary modernism and Irish cultural identity.
Literary Significance
Every chapter of Ulysses is a formal experiment: the Aeolus episode is structured around rhetorical figures, the Oxen of the Sun episode recapitulates the entire history of English prose style from Anglo-Saxon to modern slang, the Circe episode is written as a hallucinatory play. Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique — particularly Bloom's associative, digressive, warmly human inner monologue — expanded the novel's capacity to represent thought. The novel's density of allusion, wordplay, and structural patterning has generated an academic industry, but its emotional core is accessible: Bloom's grief for his dead son, his humane curiosity about the world, his love for Molly despite her infidelity.
Research Notes
Non-negotiable for modernism. Ulysses is frequently cited as the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and while that claim is debatable, its formal influence is not. The novel's difficulty is real but overstated — the first six episodes and the final episode are immediately readable. Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated is an invaluable companion. Bloomsday (June 16) is celebrated worldwide, a testament to the novel's cultural penetration beyond academia.
The Reading
The Tower
Stately, plump — he came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. The morning was bright over the Martello tower at Sandycove and the sea lay beneath it flat as a looking glass, grey-green, snotgreen, the scrotal tightening sea. Two men lived in this tower and a third was visiting, an Englishman named Haines who collected Irish sayings and carried a rifle in his luggage. The medical student Mulligan held court at the parapet, shaving, talking, performing his booming blasphemies to the morning air, calling the other one Kinch, the knife-blade, mocking his refusal to kneel at his dying mother's bedside, offering friendship and condescension in equal portions and expecting gratitude for both.
The other one — the young man, the schoolteacher, the failed artist who had not yet made anything worth making — stood in the doorway of the tower and thought about his mother. She was dead. He had refused to pray at her bed when she asked him to and the refusal burned in him like acid, the agenbite of inwit, the old English phrase for the gnawing of conscience, and the gnawing did not stop, would not stop all day, surfacing in his thoughts as a ghost that would not lie down, her wasted face and the smell of wetted ashes and rosewood and her glazing eyes looking up from the bed asking him to do the one thing she had ever asked and him standing there refusing because his pride was larger than her death and his intellect would not bend and the guilt of that unbending was the thing he carried through every street he walked that morning, that afternoon, that night.
He taught a class in Dalkey. Pyrrhus. A pier. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. The headmaster Mr Deasy paid him and offered advice about Jews — "England is in the hands of the Jews" — and the young man took the money and left and walked along Sandymount Strand in the afternoon light, closing his eyes to test whether the visible world persisted without an observer, hearing his boots crush crackling wrack and shells, the ineluctable modality of the visible, testing and testing the limits of what thought could do without sensation to anchor it, and the strand stretched ahead of him grey and wet and the tide was going out.
The Kidney and the Cat
In a house at 7 Eccles Street a man woke and made breakfast. He fed the cat — Mkgnao! the cat said, the exact sound a cat makes rather than the sound literature had assigned to cats for centuries — and he went to the butcher Dlugacz on Dorset Street and bought a pork kidney and came home and fried it and the urine tang of the kidney faintly pleased his palate and he brought his wife her breakfast in bed and she lay there warm and large among the sheets, her brass quoits jingling as she turned, and a letter had come from their daughter Milly working as a photographer's assistant in Mullingar, and another letter had come, this one from Blazes Boylan, and the man handled it carefully and said nothing about it and Boylan's visit was arranged for four o'clock that afternoon and both of them knew what the visit was and neither spoke of it directly and the knowledge sat between them the way certain knowledge does in a marriage — present, enormous, unacknowledged, shaping every sentence that passes over it without touching it.
He was a Jewish advertising canvasser in Catholic Dublin. He walked through the city and the city moved around him and he was always, in every room he entered, slightly outside — not unwelcome exactly but unincluded, not persecuted but not belonging, occupying the particular position of a man whose religion is not the city's religion and whose temperament is not the city's temperament and whose response to hostility is curiosity rather than counter-hostility. The quality of his attention was different from the other men's — warmer, more curious, less defended, more willing to notice the cat and the kidney and the cloud passing over the sun and the particular way light fell on the lemon soap in his pocket. He had lost a son. The boy Rudy had lived eleven days and the weight of that loss defined the undertow of the man's inner life the way a current defines a river — invisible from the surface but shaping every movement of water above it. He attended a funeral that morning. Paddy Dignam buried in Glasnevin. He sat in the carriage with Simon Dedalus, the young man's father, a man who sang beautifully and drank destructively and had squandered every advantage life had given him, and the graveyard was grey and the prayers were grey and he thought of his own father's suicide and his dead son and the two griefs lay side by side in him the way the dead lay side by side beneath the ground.
The City at Afternoon
He ate lunch at Davy Byrne's moral pub — a glass of Burgundy and a Gorgonzola cheese sandwich, a meal of no significance whatsoever that would be remembered with warmth entirely disproportionate to its composition, remembered across decades and continents, remembered by people who would one day eat the same sandwich in the same pub on the same date every year. He wandered through the National Library while elsewhere in the building the young man argued about Shakespeare before the scholars and literary men of Dublin. The theory was intricate: that the ghost in Hamlet is Shakespeare himself, that the play's crisis is the crisis of a man betrayed by his wife and his brother, that the biographical wound behind the greatest play in the language is the wound of sexual betrayal, of cuckoldry — and this theory of cuckoldry advanced by a young man who would, by the end of this day, be brought home by a man whose wife had been unfaithful that very afternoon, the Shakespearean pattern acted out in a Dublin kitchen, was one of the day's deepest structural ironies. The two men passed each other in the library on separate errands. They did not yet speak.
At three in the afternoon the city revealed itself in cross-section — eighteen simultaneous scenes cutting across Dublin like a grid. Father Conmee walked through the north side streets. A one-legged sailor begged from doorsteps. Boylan bought fruit. A boy threw a crumpled paper ball into the Liffey and watched it float downstream. A carriage glimpsed at the edge of one life appeared at the centre of another. Hundreds of stories running in parallel, each as real and as complete as any other, anticipating cinema and GPS and the omniscient perspective that sees all of it simultaneously and insists that no single life contains the whole.
In the Ormond Hotel bar the language moved like a fugue. Musical fragments first, not yet sentences, then resolving into story. Simon Dedalus sang M'appari from Martha and the beauty of his voice filled the room and the man sat alone eating his dinner and listening to the song and thinking about loss and music and betrayal, hearing the beauty in the voice while knowing the singer's life had been a ruin, and managing, in the final pages, to time a fart to the sound of a passing tram. The body and the spirit. The sublime and the ridiculous. Held together without hierarchy, because this was the central proposition — that they were never separate, that the hierarchy itself was the lie.
Barney Kiernan's
In the pub a ferocious nationalist known only as the citizen held court and the afternoon turned savage. The man had come to collect a racing debt on behalf of the dead Dignam's widow and was accused instead of being a moneylender, a coward, a bad Irishman. The conversation circled around money and race and nation and exclusion, and the language inflated every small event into grandiosity, and the man stood his ground with a sentence that carried the weight of everything he believed: Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women. Insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the opposite of that that is really life. The citizen hurled an empty biscuit tin at his departing car and the parody swelled the biscuit tin into a celestial object trailing fire across the Dublin sky, because satire was the only form adequate to the scale of the absurdity, and the absurdity was the scale of men who would kill for a nation they could not define while a man who asked only to be kind was driven from the pub for the crime of being Jewish and generous and insufficiently angry.
Nighttown
At the maternity hospital on Holles Street, where Mina Purefoy laboured upstairs to deliver her child, the language itself underwent gestation — Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse shifting through Malory and Bunyan and Pepys and Swift and Sterne and Dickens and on into contemporary slang, the evolution of speech mirroring the formation of the baby being born overhead, language and body both labouring toward delivery, both arriving in the world wet and screaming and new.
The young man was drunk. The older man, sober, watchful, protective of this young man who reminded him of the son he had lost — Rudy, who would have been this age had he lived — followed the students when they left the hospital for Nighttown, the brothel district, and Nighttown exploded into expressionist theatre — hallucinatory, vast, the night's deepest descent. Unconscious material rose to the surface in phantasmagoric form. The older man was put on trial for sexual perversion, accused of every vice by witnesses both real and imaginary, crowned Lord Mayor of Dublin, transformed into a woman, flogged, collapsed. His dead son appeared briefly at the chapter's end — a small boy in an Eton suit, reading a book, saying nothing, the image lasting no longer than a held breath and carrying the full weight of eleven years of grief in its silence.
The young man saw his dead mother rising from the floor, her face wasted by cancer, her breath smelling of wetted ashes and rosewood, and she begged him to repent, and he refused — Non serviam! — and smashed a chandelier with his ashplant and ran into the street, where two British soldiers beat him unconscious for an imagined insult. The older man found him on the ground and took charge of him with the gentle authority of a father who has been waiting all day for the son he could not save to appear in a form he could help.
Cocoa
He brought the young man to a cabman's shelter near Butt Bridge for coffee and a bun. The language came tired and cliche-ridden, running on and on the way exhausted conversation runs on at one in the morning, two men sitting across from each other unable to say the things that mattered, communicating through the inadequate medium of small talk. Then home to 7 Eccles Street for cocoa. The key was forgotten. The older man climbed down into the area, entered through the basement, let the younger one in through the front door — a small domestic detail elevated by question and answer into a ritual of homecoming. Question and answer. The making of cocoa. The orbits of celestial bodies. The mathematical relationship between their ages. Their parallel positions as wandering outsiders — the Jew and the artist, the father without a son and the son without a father — everything offered in the kitchen and everything the younger man, who was young and drunk and not yet ready, could not receive. They urinated together in the garden under the stars, looking up, and the catechism asked what the older man saw and answered: The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
The young man declined the offer to stay. He walked into the darkness. The bells of St George's church rang. The older man went inside, climbed the stairs, got into bed beside his wife. He found the crumbs of Boylan's afternoon presence in the sheets, catalogued the men who had desired her, and fell asleep with his head at the foot of the bed, kissing her bottom, the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump.
Yes
And then she spoke. Alone, in the dark, to no one. Circling and returning and digressing and remembering and judging and desiring and regretting — thought without punctuation to order it, without grammar arranged for anyone's comfort, just the flow itself: From Boylan to the milkman to Gibraltar to flowers to the price of eggs to the shape of a woman's body to the question of whether God exists and if so whether God is a man. Every lover she had known and almost known. Lieutenant Mulvey who kissed her under the Moorish wall in Gibraltar when she was a girl. The afternoon just occurred. Her husband who brought her breakfast this morning and whose faults she knew as completely as any wife knows any husband's faults and whose kindness she recognised even as she catalogued his inadequacies and his strange cold feet in the bed and his way of explaining things nobody asked him to explain.
The monologue circled back as the day circled back to the afternoon on Howth Head when he proposed and she accepted and the gorse was in flower and the sun was on the sea and the rhododendrons were out and she gave him the seedcake from her mouth yes and she put her arms around him yes and drew him down so he could feel her breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes she said yes I will Yes.
The city was the other protagonist — its pubs and newspapers and churches and trams and bridges and class resentments and colonial resentments and nationalist resentments, the way a city holds all its citizens in a web of gossip and debt and history. A man left it at twenty-two and never lived there again but rebuilt it sentence by sentence from exile, from homesickness, consulting maps and street directories and his aunt's long letters, asking which way a door opened on a particular street, whether a certain tree still stood in a certain garden, until he had constructed the most fully realised city in literature. It exists more completely in these pages than in the physical streets that bear the same names, and every year on the sixteenth of June people walk those streets with the book in their hands, following the route, eating the cheese sandwich, standing on the strand — and the city has become, permanently and irrevocably, a city written into being by a man who was not there.
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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