James Joyce invented "stream of consciousness" with this novel.
Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision,
Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene
to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James
Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to
the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both
Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in
a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung
up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal
vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing
to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the
English language.
Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is:
What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of
literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin,
Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen
Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of
indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case)
masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere
stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions,
and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian
folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word
in realism.
Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--
that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats
Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful
sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown
corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged
survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars,
family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible
to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody
really?" --James Marcus
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