Ulysses, by James Joyce

 

Ulysses

James Joyce spent seven years writing Ulysses and spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life watching other people try to figure out what to do with it. The novel is simultaneously the most intimidating and the most hospitable book in the English language — intimidating because of its reputation, hospitable because of what it is actually doing, which is paying extraordinary attention to what it is like to be a person moving through a single day.

That person, primarily, is Leopold Bloom: advertising canvasser, devoted husband to an unfaithful wife, amateur philosopher, lover of offal and kidneys, thinker of thousands of small precise thoughts about the world he moves through on June 16, 1904. Bloom is one of fiction's most fully inhabited human beings, not because he is exceptional but because Joyce is willing to follow his consciousness with complete, nonjudgmental attention. Every observation, every irrelevance, every memory that surfaces unbidden — it all gets recorded.

Stephen Dedalus, younger and more literary, moves through the same Dublin from a different angle. His mind runs toward aesthetics and theology and resentment and ambition. His chapters are harder than Bloom's, more opaque, more insistent on their own difficulty. The contrast between the two — between Bloom's ordinary richness and Stephen's intellectual hunger — is the novel's central human dynamic, and their eventual meeting is one of the most anticlimactic and emotionally resonant encounters in all of fiction.

The structure — each episode modeled on a chapter of Homer's Odyssey, each with its own narrative style, organ, color, and technique — is not an obstacle but a frame that creates meaning rather than constraining it. The 'Sirens' episode mimics musical form. 'Cyclops' gives you an unreliable pub narrator alongside interpolated parodies. 'Penelope,' Molly Bloom's final monologue, unpunctuated and oceanic, is the human unconscious given direct access to the page.

What Joyce understood was that the interior of a day, examined with sufficient care, contains everything — memory, history, desire, the echoes of a civilization, the specifically textured reality of being alive in a particular body in a particular city. Dublin in 1904 is rendered with the specificity of a city map and the generality of myth.

Ulysses is not a book you finish so much as a book you enter. Some of it will always exceed your current capacity for it, and that part will be there when you return.

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