Notes on James Joyce's Ulysses
Ulysses might be one of the most challenging novels ever written. James Joyce’s modernist, stream-of-conscousness epic contains an almost maddening mix of styles, words so obscure that even serious readers find themselves frequently consulting their dictionaries, paragraphs that seem designed to mystify, and a density of allusions that makes the idea of giving the book a “quick read” mission impossible. Yet, despite all this (and to some degree because of all this) Ulysses has been called the greatest novel ever written.
Pulitizer-Prize-winning author Michael Chabon, a big fan of Ulysses, offered this description of what he called Joyce's "flamboyant modernism" in his essay, The Dirtiest, Most Indecent Thing Ever Written: "Encyclopedic in its use of detail and allusion, orchestral in its multiplicity of voices and rhetorical strategies, virtuosic in its technique, Ulysses was a thoroughly modernist production, exhibiting—sometimes within a single chapter or a single paragraph—the vandalistic glee of Futurism, the decentered subjectivity of Cubism, the absurdist blasphemies and pranks of Dadaism, and Surrealism’s penchant for finding the mythic in the ordinary and the primitive in the low dives and nighttowns of the City."
Joyce took delight in his novel’s complexity, suggesting that it could give his book a sort of immortality. Joyce said he had "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant." It's been one century and counting, so he's probably right.
Ulysses has also been called obscene. Joyce’s frank description of sexual and excretory acts pushed far beyond the accepted limits of the day. The battles to publish Ulysses, fought on two continents for over a decade, ultimately changed the way courts analyzed obscenity cases and resulted in expanded free speech protection for authors.
The story told in Ulysses unfolds in a single, rather ordinary day in Dublin: June 16, 1904. (Fans of Joyce’s novel continue to celebrate June the 16th as “Bloomsday”). Joyce principally describes the thoughts and actions of two main protagonists, Leopold Bloom, a 38-year-old Jewish advertising salesman, and Stephen Dedalus, a young, self-conscious and tortured writer and teacher. The emphasis here should be placed more on “thoughts” than “actions,” as before Ulysses there had never been a novel in which thinking played so great a role. The action, such as it is, revolves mainly around the minor incidents in the lives of Bloom and Dedalus as they travel the city, encounter fellow Dubliners, keep appointments, and engage in daily routines.
Joyce intended a structural correspondence between the characters of his novel and that of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey. Leopold’s experiences parallel the actions of Odysseus, the protagonist of the Odyssey. The experiences of his wife Molly, an opera singer of some accomplishment, parallel those of Odysseus’s wife, Penelope. And Stephen Dedalus finds comparison with Homer’s character Telemachus. The name Ulysses is the Latin form of the name of Odysseus. But Homer could hardly accuse Joyce of copyright violation. Ulysses contains no monsters, shipwrecks, giants, lashing storms, or goddesses—Joyce sets his novel in a very different sort of world and time.
Plot in Brief
The novel is divided into 18 “episodes,” each with a theme and distinct form of correspondence between its characters and those of the Odyssey. The first three episodes follow Dedalus from morning tension with his roommate in his apartment tower to a walk along a shore, to his teaching in a classroom, to a discussion with his headmaster about Irish history.
Then the novel turns in episode 4 and begins to follow Leopold Bloom as he moves around Dublin, buying pork kidneys, fixing breakfast, brooding about his wife’s affair with a concert manager, and defecating in an outhouse. In subsequent episodes, Bloom visits a post office, wanders into a Catholic church service, attends a funeral while thinking of his own dead son and father, heads off with Dedalus to a pub, muses about his troubled marriage, and wonders about the behavior and anatomy of Greek gods and goddesses.
Then it’s back to Dedalus who offers theories on Shakespeare characters to scholars at the National Library. Episode 10, called “Wandering Rocks,” consists of nineteen short vignettes describing the actions of various characters, some playing only the most minor of roles in the novel.
The focus goes back to Bloom in the next episode, with music as its theme. While Leopold is having dinner at a hotel, Molly enjoys a lovemaking session with Blazes Boylan, her concert arranger.
Episode 12, “Cyclops,” is narrated by a character in a pub who encounters a fierce anti-Semite. Leopold enters the pub and is verbally attacked by the anti-Semite and, upon leaving, is the target of a biscuit thrown at his head. The chapter also includes a confusing stream of mythological references, Biblical passages, and legal jargon.
Bloom moves on to a shoreline setting in the next episode, where he observes an attractive young woman named Gerty MacDowell seated on rocks. As Gerty teases Bloom, who she notices is watching her, Bloom masturbates and fireworks sound in a local bazaar. Or maybe nothing takes place between them—it is all in Bloom’s imagination. With Joyce, it can sometimes be hard to tell. (Unsurprisingly, given the time, this masturbation scene attracts the attention of American protectors of decency and becomes the focus of the first Ulysses obscenity trial.)
In the following episode, Bloom visits a maternity ward, meets up with Dedalus, thinks about the births of his own children, and drinks some more in a pub. He finds his thoughts and actions interrupted by an author intent on summarizing the history of the English language and parodying writers from Defoe to Dickens.
Then it’s on to a scripted play, complete with stage directions. The plot that moves in fits and starts thanks to interruptions consisting of “hallucinations” or nightmares experienced by Bloom and Dedalus.
After a chapter focusing on the confusion and exhaustion of the book’s two main characters, Bloom and Dedalus return home, share cups of cocoa, and discuss their different personal histories. Dedalus turns down Bloom’s offer to stay the night and Bloom heads up to bed, where Molly is already sleeping. His arrival in the bedroom wakens Molly, and husband and wife talk briefly about the day.
“Penelope,” the 18th and final episode of Ulysses, is also its most controversial. Often called “Molly’s Soliloquy,” the episode is written in stream-of-consciousness style, largely devoid of punctuation. Full of frank sexual and excretory imagery, Molly's Soliloquy is detailed more fully on another page on this website. Because of its ground-breaking and candid discussion of matters sexual, this final episode becomes the major focus of the 1933 obscenity trial, United States of America v. One Book Called Ulysses.