The 100 best novels
written in English
No 46
Ulysses
by James Joyce
(1922)
This portrait of a day in the lives of three Dubliners remains a towering work, in its word play surpassing even Shakespeare
Robert McCrum
Monday 4 August 2014
The connection to The Odyssey is informal (Bloom is Odysseus, Stephen matches Telemachus and Molly is Penelope) and the chapters roughly correspond to episodes in Homer ("Calypso", "Nausicaa", "Oxen of the Sun", etc.). Joyce himself revered the book that had inspired his masterpiece. The theme of The Odyssey, he said in 1917, while working on his novel, was "the most beautiful, all-embracing theme… greater, more human than that of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust".
Ulysses is often said to be "difficult", but really it is not. Joyce's word-play, rivalling Shakespeare, whose teeming vocabulary he surpasses, is intoxicating, and deeply Irish. One of the best ways to encounter the novel is through any good audiobook recording. As Stephen Dedalus remarks: "Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves."
A Note on the Text
The textual history of Ulysses, first published on 2 February 1922, is every bit as complex as the novel itself, and what follows is a necessary over-simplification of an editorial cat's cradle. For instance, I have referred to the 1922 edition published by Sylvia Beach, an edition I have owned for years. To a Joyce scholar, however, that is like working on Shakespeare exclusively from the First Folio. By some calculations, there are no fewer than 18 separate editions of this book.
Yet it had all begun so modestly, in about 1907. "When I was writing Dubliners," Joyce told Georges Borach, one of his language students, "I first wished to choose the title Ulysses in Dublin, but I gave up the idea. In Rome, when I had finished about half of the Portrait, I realised that the Odyssey had to be the sequel, and I began to write Ulysses."
James Joyce (second left) with, left to right, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound and John Quinn in Paris in 1923. Quinn was a lawyer who defended the publication of Ulysses in the Little Review. |
The first appearance of pages from this astonishing new novel occurred in 1918, in The Little Review, whose foreign editor was Ezra Pound. From the first, the text ran into difficulties with the authorities on the grounds of alleged obscenity. By 1920, this first serialisation was over, and The Little Review was no longer publishing monthly instalments. Joyce, who was now living in Paris, had met Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of Shakespeare & Company, a celebrated left bank bookshop. Beach offered to publish the novel privately, avoiding censorship.
Now began the second, chaotic stage of Ulysses' progress towards full and final publication. For Joyce, his novel was always evolving; he could never quite leave his text alone. Every proof that was pulled became another invitation to yet further revision. The current draft of the novel was always a palimpsest of the author's second and third thoughts. In addition, there were numerous misprints, many of them attributable to the French typesetters' ignorance of basic English, let alone the allusive, polysyllabic stew we know as Joycean English.
James Joyce |
James Joyce David Levine |
After the Shakespeare & Company edition, Harriet Weaver of the Egoist Press also published an "English edition" in 1922. This, for some, is the first canonical text (the current OUP paperback version, for instance, adopts this edition, warts and all). But then the 1922 text was banned and the novel forced underground. In 1933, Random House successfully applied to the US courts to overturn the ban, and published its first, American edition in January 1934. This was followed, a generation later, in the 1960s, with new editions from Penguin Books, The Bodley Head and Random House in the US. To scholars and some critics, the text of Ulysses was still "corrupt" from the tortuous process of the novel's gestation. This, it was argued, should be put right with a full-blown edition representing Joyce's intentions. But how to achieve that? The answer was not obvious, which may have been Joyce's unconscious wish from the first.
Finally, in the late 1970s a German critic and scholar named Hans Walter Gabler began the task of preparing a "corrected text". This was finally published in 1984, and greeted with, first, acclaim, then doubts, and finally outrage. From a deep split in English and German textual theory, the status of the all-important "copy-text" (either the 1922 edition or Joyce's chaotic and imperfect manuscript) became the subject of a fierce scholarly debate between Gabler and his nemesis, John Kidd. The climax of this crisis occurred in June 1988 with Kidd's article in the New York Review of Books, entitled "The Scandal of Ulysses".
Since then, the row has gradually subsided, with a loose consensus forming in support of Gabler's "synoptic" text, while nevertheless acknowledging that it, too, contains some rank inconsistencies. Today, the first 1922 edition, a text of huge historical consequence, stands as the shortest route to the author's intentions, despite numerous Joycean "misses in print".
Marilyn Monroe |
Three More From James Joyce
Dubliners (1914); A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916); Finnegans Wake (1939)
THE GUARDIAN
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)
003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)
011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)
078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
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