Two classics, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in the same year, 1922, turned out to be epochal in English literary culture. The former, speaking beyond the shores of Europe, created a poetic revolution across the globe, including in India, where it shaped the modern poetic sensibility. Joyce’s Ulysses, however, which earned more admirers than readers, didn’t have such an impact on our novelists. Nevertheless, it has continued to be on the list of classics in our curricula. Its intimidating narrative structure, which demands readers’ patience and cultural competence, makes it a difficult read.
Ulysses, which turned 100 this year, has come a long way through trial and triumph. Even English-reading countries, accustomed to the social realism of Charles Dickens, George Eliot or Thomas Hardy, found a different joy in Joycean aesthetics. As someone who has struggled to read the novel, I like to compare my experience of reading it with listening to Hindustani classical music in Dharwad — an intoxicating encounter.
The idea of developing a narrative around the protagonist Leopold Bloom was there in Joyce’s mind when he was writing a short story collection, Dubliners (1914). He started working on Ulysses in 1914, and it began to be serialised in the American literary magazine, The Little Review, in1918. The Little Review, founded by Margaret Anderson with the help of Ezra Pound, published Ulysses ininstalments until its copies were seized on the grounds of obscenity. Ulysses remained officially banned in England until the late 1930s. It was first published in book form in Paris on February 2, 1922. However, before its publication became legal, several copies had been smuggled and pirated into Europe and America.
The first gentleman
English painter and activist Frank Budgen records the genesis of Ulysses in James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ and Other Writings (1972). He says that in Ulysses, Joyce wanted to create a fully evolved character, more rounded than Faust and Hamlet, and he found that resonance in Homer’s Odysseus, whom he called “the first gentleman in Europe.”
Like Odysseus, Leopold Bloom wanders, but in the streets of Dublin, for no more than 18 hours. He avoids going home because his wife Molly, unlike the eternally faithful Penelope, is having an affair. Ulysses is a modern-day Odyssey, with every episode corresponding to an adventure of Odysseus. Yoking the epic to the modern era, it explores modernity. As Eliot put it, “In using myth in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him… It is simply a way of controlling, ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”
Mythical status
Ulysses has now attained mythical status. People dress up like the characters and read the book aloud; like pilgrims, they visit the places in Dublin mentioned in the novel; Bloomsday is observed in Ireland on June 16 every year to mark the day of Bloom’s peregrination. There is a lesson in this for contemporary writers — to write is to experiment, there is no revolution without breaking the mould of the given.
Half of the novel’s success lies in the very fact that it is a reworking of a well-known work, but what Joyce did with the European classic is fascinating. He pushed the boundaries of novel writing with innumerable experiments — in the handling of narrative time, style (each chapter has a different style) and the inventive use of language. Ulysses makes use of plays, bizarre stories, myths, musical forms — all coming together in the main characters’ stream of consciousness to create polyphony.
The meat of the matter is not in the plotting but in the descriptions of the setting and characters. Therefore, this novel’s meaning is its style. This is precisely the source of both its difficulty and pleasure. Deliberately created puzzles and intertextual allusions challenge readers, but it is exciting. The reader has to stop and think, refer back, look for meanings, thus becoming a co-author. And that’s the fun of it.
Ulysses led to further literary experiments. For instance, Jacques Derrida’s 60-page essay, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’ weaves together fragments of Ulysses and his own composition. Derrida examines the complexity and richness of Ulysses by exploring the word “yes” in the novel.
Joyce once said that he wished to write a novel that critics would continue to comment on for 100 years. Well, he has certainly succeeded.
The writer teaches English Literature at Tumkur University, Karnataka.
Published - February 19, 2022 04:00 pm IST
