Ulysses

James Joyce

(1888 — 1941)

(1922)

Joyce exercised a considerable influence upon English and American literature.

Ulysses was the first of Joyce's books to bring him both fame and notoriety. Its unprecedented frankness in treating the physiological aspects of human existence was the reason it was banned for obscenity; on the other hand, it was proclaimed an entirely original work, the beginning of a new era in the history of letters. The novel is an exhaustive, 700 pages long, description of a certain day in the life of twoDubliners. The day is June 16th 1904; the men are LeopoldBloom, an advertizing agent, and Stephen Dedalus, a philologist, poet and teacher. Bloom is the embodiment of the common, the less than average, the man in the street, stripped to the skin and presented in the naked ugliness of his longings and appetites. Dedalus, on the contrary, is supposed to be refined, sensitive, cultivated and artistic. And yet both are equally frustrated, equally lost in a world inimical to them both. Their story is an allegory: in his loathing for modern civilization Joyce ironically compares Bloom and his day's wanderings in the city of Dublin to Ulysses's voyage. The book is a travesty of the heroic epic, a sneer at and a damnation of the unheroic modernity.

The day in their life that Joyce records is perfectly uneventful, "the dailiest day possible", as one of Joyce's fellow writers puts it: it consists of a dreary enumeration of utterly insignificant actions, words and thoughts, set down in a seemingly objective manner. But at the back of this manner is despair at man’s degradation and a cynical disbelief in whatever is fine and noble, in whatever makes life worth living. "History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

A disciple of the Austrian scientist Sigmund Freud, who considered man’s conscious mind of less importance than his subconscious mind, Joyce reproduces the innermost workings of the latter for the reader’s benefit, revealing the barrenness of his heroes, their futility, their obsession with sex, their petty individualism. The book has been most appositely called an epic of decay and frustration.

The form of the novel is accordingly suggestive of decay too. Ulysses is shapeless. It is a continuous flow of undifferentiated experience. The book is chaotic, obscure, being an attempt to find an adequate form for expressing the author's conception of life as a crazy and hideous nothingness: Joyce sought for relief in an art that shelved the most vital social problems of his time and was more preoccupied with manner than with matter. He never realized that this kind of preoccupation spelt ruin to artistic form and to art itself.

In the excerpt given below Stephen is gazing at the sea and brooding.

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