The first time I ever heard about it was through an unlikely source. The television programme It Ain't 'Alf Hot Mum purported to be a comedy when it was in fact a litany of bigoted jokes about sexual preference, race and size (both breadth and height). The stuff about class was probably accurate for the time and circumstances it portrayed I guess.
One of the characters was Gunner Graham, called Mr La-Di-Da Gunner Graham by the shouty Sergeant Major because Gunner Graham was well-spoken and had a degree from Oxbridge. The SM spotted a novel in Graham's bunk in an episode.
"What's this? Useless by James Joyce."
"Actually Sergeant Major that's Ulysses."
Cue mincing impersonation of Gunner Graham by the SM.
Some would agree with Windsor Davies's character's review, however. Many have picked up Ulysses, thinking it is a worthy tome that they'd like to say they've read. Many put it down long before they reach the nine hundred and somethingth page of the paperback edition. It's dense. It's obtuse. It's wilfully disorientating. It's modernist, don'tcha know.
Don'tcha wish your novel was modernist like mine, don'tcha, don'tcha?
Initially serialised in two parts by The Little Review, an American literary journal, the final version of the novel was properly published in 1922. 1922 is a key year in terms of modernist literature. Not that TS Eliot called himself a modernist but his enigmatic poem The Waste Land debuted that year. Virginia Woolf may have called herself many things but again not necessarily a modernist yet her most experimental novel, Jacob's Room also came out that year.
Also in 22 came Rilke's poetry collection Sonnets to Orpheus, F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, the Bertolt Brecht play Trommeln in Der Nacht, The Enormous Room by ee cummings and Sodome et Gomorrhe II, the fourth part of Marcel Proust's stream of consciousness memoirs. And those are just the big guns.
Modernism's literary high watermark was 1922 all right. If you're a scholar from the forties and fifties looking back and attempting to amalgamate a disparate bunch of writers, poets and playwrights into a convenient, one-size fits all movement so that you can teach all your favourite difficult texts on one module, that is.
Most difficult of all was Ulysses. A simple tale of Leopold Bloom making a journey through Dublin on 16th June 1904. Why 1904? Because that's when Joyce began writing the novel. My favourite quote of his concerns a reader berating him for writing a novel that took that reader a very long time indeed to read: "It took me eighteen years to write, why should you be able to read it quickly?" Reader 0 Irascible Weirdo Irish Author 1.
A simple tale? Not really. Bloom's thoughts are spread across the pages like leaves scattered across an autumnal garden. At times Joyce attempts to convey Bloom's sensory responses to the things he experiences on his little odyssey across the Irish city (Odyssey, get it? No? Oh god, it's like training chimps to pour tea into their bowler hats. Homer's Odyssey is an epic Greek poem about an epic Greek hero making an epic voyage, in an epic manner, and in Greek. The Romans also liked the poem but, in accordance with their penchant for changing the names of the Greek culture they appropriated as their own, they renamed Odysseus, the eponymous hero, Ulysses. See, funny joke, eh? Please yourselves.)
Bloom's sensory experiences are rendered as half phrases, nonsensical onomatopoeic words or kooky homonyms. Educated chap, Joyce, a man who felt no compulsion whatsoever to pander to the potentially lower intellect of most of his readers. At one point he spends a hundred and fifty pages romping through the history of English literary forms by relating his tale as a third person narrative whisking from Beowulfian Old English metre through Chaucerian rhyme and crudity, Renaissance self-awareness, Reformation contraction then expansion of linguistic excess and through and through to the invention of the novel proper, finally arriving back with Bloom and a bar of soap in his pocket and a head full of worries about whether his wife, Molly, is having an affair.
To complicate matters even further, Bloom is not the only unreliable narrative source. Joyce himself plays with structure and the chronology of those forms of story-telling to such an extent that he's hardly a credible voice in the piece. And then there's Stephen Dedalus.
Dedalus is actually the focus at the beginning, before we meet Bloom. Joyce had already published a slightly more conventional, shorter novel in 1916 in which Dedalus is the central figure - A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. That novel was started in 1903 so the two books were developed alongside one another. Perhaps Ulysses was initially intended to be a sequel to Stephen's story but everything grew and transformed in Joyce's mind until Bloom became the character most capable of holding the weight of the piece? I don't know. Dig James up and ask him. Dedalus is somber, too clever for his own good, grumpy. But hey, his mum has recently died so let's be nice to him, the pompous twot.
There are possible parallels between Dedalus and a young Joyce. If so then the older Joyce considered his youthful self to be something of a brooding, self-obsessed and overly serious chap. Bloom is altogether more earthy. In his first chapter we tune into his thoughts while he's having a shit in the outside toilet. He masturbates behind a rock on the riverbank while watching young women sunbathing. He remembers past sexual exploits and hums snatches of bawdy musical hall songs to himself. He's grotesque yet much more reader-friendly than Dedalus because of his grotesqueness. Bloom is an Everyman. If every man is a pervy, boozy, paranoid, soap purchasing, advertising space-selling lump of insignificance whose wife is having it away with an impresario.
The point of the novel? There are many meanings attributed to the work but each proves as speculative as the next. It's a faithful modern reworking of The Odyssey with Bloom as Ulysses, Molly as Penelope and Dedalus as Telemachus. It's a scornful indictment of the soot-raddled social realism beloved of certain nineteenth century authors and their 20th century emulators. It's a massive literary joke intended to waste the precious time of readers and critics alike. It's an ambitious attempt to show how an ordinary day in the lives of quite ordinary people can be rendered extraordinary according to the way the day's events are relayed to the reader.
With the exception of Finnegan's Wake, also by Joyce, and Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Ulysses is the most difficult book I've ever read. Twice. Two and a half times if you count the skim revision I forced myself to do for my undergraduate exams. And yet for all its density and complexity it is a beautiful experience. While there is little beauty to be found in the characters themselves there is a sublime quality to Joyce's utter confidence with language, rhythm and narration that can keep you afloat and bobbing along even when the maelstrom of words, words, words can threaten to drown all sense and meaning from your mind.
And if you're still not sold, the last sixty pages are all about Molly in bed. According to many scholars we are privy to her random train of thought while she casually plays with herself under the sheets. No wonder it was banned in Britain but loved by the French. Go on, read it, if you dare. Don't you wish your novel was a freak like me?
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