Title: Ulysses Author: James Joyce Creation Date: 1922 Location: Paris, France Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
Ulysses is a novel that maps a single day — Thursday, 16 June 1904 — in Dublin onto the structure of Homer's Odyssey, following three people across eighteen episodes, each written in a different style. Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, plays Odysseus. Stephen Dedalus, a young schoolteacher and failed artist, plays Telemachus. Molly Bloom, Leopold's wife, sings and sleeps and closes the book with her forty-five-page interior monologue.
The novel was serialised in the American journal The Little Review between 1918 and 1921, then published in full by Sylvia Beach's Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company on 2 February 1922 — Joyce's fortieth birthday. It was immediately banned in the United States and the United Kingdom on obscenity grounds, where it remained for a decade and longer. The 1933 Woolsey decision in the US ruled it a work of literary merit and set a precedent that reshaped the law.
What Joyce does formally is unprecedented and has barely been replicated. Each episode borrows a different organ of the human body, a different art, a different colour, a different literary technique. The "Aeolus" episode is structured as a newspaper, complete with headline interruptions. The "Oxen of the Sun" episode is a history of English prose style from Anglo-Saxon to contemporary slang, following the gestation of a child. The "Circe" episode is written as a hallucinatory play. The "Penelope" episode — Molly's monologue — is eight unpunctuated sentences running across forty-five pages.
Beneath the technical fireworks is a surprisingly warm and melancholy story: a man who has lost a son, a marriage that has drifted into estrangement, a young man who has not yet found what he needs, and an afternoon and evening in which all of them move slightly closer to something they cannot name.
The National Voice
Joyce captures Dublin — and through Dublin, Ireland — with a specificity that has no equivalent in world literature. The novel is set on a single day, in a single city, and it renders that city with an exactitude so complete that scholars have reconstructed Bloom's route through Dublin street by street, verified the business addresses, checked the tram schedules, and found them accurate. This is not pedantic realism; it is an act of total recall applied to a city that Joyce had left and would never live in again — an act of possession through language that is simultaneously an act of love and an act of exile's revenge.
The Dublin of Ulysses is the Dublin of 1904 — a colonial city, the second city of the British Empire's oldest colony, administered from Dublin Castle by a Lord Lieutenant and his apparatus, garrisoned by British soldiers, governed by laws made in Westminster, and populated by people whose relationship to this arrangement ranged from collaboration to indifference to active resistance. Joyce's Dublin is not primarily the Dublin of the nationalist movement — though nationalism is present, in the citizen's pub rhetoric, in the Sinn Féin newspapers, in the background conversation about Parnell and Home Rule — but the Dublin of everyday life under colonialism: the pubs, the churches, the newspaper offices, the maternity hospitals, the brothels, the domestic kitchens where people eat and argue and make love and die under conditions they did not choose and cannot entirely see.
Bloom is the novel's great embodiment of Irishness-as-outsiderness: a Hungarian-Jewish Irishman, a man who is not quite Irish enough for the nationalists and not quite Christian enough for the churchmen and not quite masculine enough for the men in the pub, who moves through Dublin with a quality of sympathetic attention that the city's more firmly positioned inhabitants cannot match. He is the novel's argument: that the most fully Irish character is the one who does not fit. Ireland recognises itself in him — sometimes uncomfortably — because Ireland has always been more like Bloom than like the citizen.
The Historical Ground
Dublin in 1904 was a city at a specific moment of colonial and national transition. The long campaign for Irish Home Rule — self-governance within the British Empire — had been the dominant issue in Irish politics since Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill of 1886, and the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891, brought down by the scandal of his affair with Katharine O'Shea and the resulting split in the Irish Parliamentary Party, had created a political vacuum that the novel references repeatedly. Stephen thinks about Parnell; the men in Barney Kiernan's pub argue about nationalism; the ghost of the betrayed leader haunts the novel's political consciousness.
The Gaelic Revival — the cultural movement that sought to restore the Irish language, Irish sports, and Irish literary traditions as the basis of a distinct national identity — was at its height in 1904. The Gaelic League, founded in 1893 by Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill, had made the Irish language a central marker of authentic Irishness, and the Abbey Theatre, founded by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in the same year the novel is set, was about to transform Irish drama. Joyce's relationship to the Revival was sceptical bordering on hostile: he saw in it a provincialism, a narrowing of Irish identity to Catholic, Gaelic, and rural categories that excluded not only people like Bloom but people like Joyce himself — cosmopolitan, European-oriented, unwilling to accept that authentic Irishness required the rejection of everything that was not Irish.
The economic conditions of Dublin in 1904 were those of a colonial city in decline. Dublin's tenements housed some of the worst urban poverty in Europe — the lockout of 1913 and the subsequent labour agitation were still a decade away, but the conditions that produced them were already visible. The city's industries were modest, its commercial life was dominated by British and Anglo-Irish firms, and the Catholic middle class — of which Bloom, despite his Jewishness, is nominally a member — occupied an uncertain position between the Anglo-Irish Protestant establishment and the Catholic working class. The 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, and the partition of Ireland were all still in the future when the novel is set, but the historical pressures that would produce them are already visible in every conversation.
The Literary Landscape
Irish literature in English is one of the richest literary traditions in the world, disproportionate to the country's small size and shaped by the particular conditions of colonial bilingualism — the loss of the Irish language and the adoption of English, which gave Irish writers a complex, productive, and often adversarial relationship to the language they wrote in. The tradition stretches from Jonathan Swift through Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw to the Literary Revival generation of Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory, and then through Joyce and Beckett to the contemporary tradition of Seamus Heaney, Edna O'Brien, and Colm Tóibín.
Joyce's position in this tradition is central and disruptive. He rejected the Literary Revival's programme of cultural nationalism — its idealisation of the Irish peasant, its cultivation of the Irish language, its construction of a national mythology from Celtic sources — and positioned himself instead as a European modernist whose subject happened to be Ireland. Ulysses draws on Homer rather than on the Táin Bó Cúailnge; its formal innovations are continuous with Flaubert, Ibsen, and Dujardin rather than with the Irish literary tradition; and its hero is a Hungarian Jew rather than a Gaelic warrior or a western peasant. The novel's implicit argument is that Ireland does not need a separate literary tradition — it needs the full resources of world literature applied to the Irish situation with total honesty.
The strongest alternative candidates are numerous and serious. Yeats's poetry — particularly the late poems, from The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933) — is among the greatest in the English language, and Yeats is arguably the more representative Irish writer: more engaged with Irish history, more embedded in the Irish landscape, more responsive to the political upheavals that shaped modern Ireland. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953) and the prose trilogy represent the other pole of Irish literary modernism — the stripped-down, post-linguistic extreme that Joyce's maximalism made possible. Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) is the great comic Irish novel and the work most directly influenced by Ulysses. But Ulysses is the work that changed what the novel could do, and Ireland is the country it made.
This post is part of the One Book Per Country series — 195 countries, one defining book each, working through the literary map of the world.
Vintage International paperback of the 1922 text — the cheap, portable edition through which most English-speaking readers carry Bloom's day around Dublin and into their own.
Vintage International paperback of the 1922 text — the cheap, portable edition through which most English-speaking readers carry Bloom's day around Dublin and into their own.
