Ulysses
by James Joyce
1922
The Seductions of “Ulysses”
February 7, 2022
The Twitter account UlyssesReader is what programmers call a “corpus-fed bot.” The corpus on which it feeds is James Joyce’s modernist epic, “Ulysses,” which was published a hundred years ago this month. For nine years, UlyssesReader has consumed the novel’s inner parts with relish, only to spit them out at a rate of one tweet every ten minutes. The novel’s eighteen episodes, each contrived according to an elaborate scheme of correspondences—Homeric parallels, hours of the day, organs of the body—are torn asunder. Characters are dismembered into bellies, breasts, and bottoms. When UlyssesReader reaches the end, it presents the novel’s historic signature, “Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921,” intact, like a bone fished out of the throat. Then it begins again, arranging, in its mechanical way, the tale of a young Dubliner named Stephen Dedalus and an older one named Leopold Bloom, brought together in a hospital, a brothel, a cabmen’s shelter, and, finally, the kitchen of Bloom’s home—on June 16, 1904, “an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of accidents.”
My relationship with UlyssesReader is intense and, I suspect, typical. Waking up, sleepy and displeased, I roll over to see what it has been up to during the night. Sometimes it greets me with a sentence whose origin and significance I know with the same certainty that I know my name. The beginning of the novel, say:
Placing these sentences is simple. It is eight in the morning at the Martello tower in Sandycove. The tower, an obsolete British defense fortress, overlooks the “snotgreen,” “scrotumtightening” Irish Sea—“a great sweet mother,” Buck Mulligan intones, playing the roles of both priest and jester before an unamused Stephen Dedalus, who is grieving the death of his mother. Grasping whose point of view these sentences issue from is trickier, but key to the novel’s technical ambitions. The passage is marked by Buck’s rhetorical bombast—“stately,” “bearing a bowl”—but deflated by the gently ironizing description of him as “plump.” It was on the back of this observation that the critic Leo Bersani claimed that “Ulysses” brought to modern literature its most refined technique: a narrative perspective that was “at once seduced” by its characters’ distinctive thoughts and “coolly observant of their person.”
From these two sentences, a whole history of literature beckons—a sudden blooming of forms and genres, authors and periods, languages and nations. Why is “dressinggown,” like “scrotumtightening,” a single retracting word, as if English were steadying itself to transform into German? (A triviality, you might protest, but the trustees of the Joyce estate once sued the editor of a “reader friendly” edition of “Ulysses” that severed it into “dressing gown.”) Is the yellow gown an afterimage of Homer’s Dawn, flinging off her golden robe? What to make of that peculiar word “ungirdled”? The cords of the ungirdled gown draw my mind to the ungirdled tunics of the warriors in the Iliad; to Shakespeare’s fairy Puck, who boasts that he can “put a girdle round about the earth / in forty minutes”; to the plump, ungirdled Romans in “The Last Days of Pompeii,” by the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. How many novels encourage such wanderings?
“Ulysses” is all about wandering, of course, and about the loneliness that attends it. While running errands that same morning, Leopold Bloom summons a memory of his wife, Molly, thrusting into his mouth a crushed seedcake on the day he proposed to her: “I lay, full lips open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: Joy.” Yet the sweetness of his memory is soured by a sudden recollection. This is the day, he suspects, that Molly is going to have sex with the businessman Blazes Boylan, the “worst man in Dublin.” Bloom is adrift from his wife, adrift from his past self, and alone with his memory—just as readers, devouring the novel with pleasure, look up to realize that they are alone and adrift on its thrashing sea of references. “The anxiety which ‘Ulysses’ massively, encyclopedically struggles to transcend,” Bersani writes, “is that of disconnectedness”—the “traumatic seductions” of desiring to read all one would have to read to master those references. How many people have read not just Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Sterne, Fielding, Blake, Goethe, Wilde, and Yeats but also Irish, Indian, and Jewish folklore? How many are proficient in French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin? Whom do you share these connections with?
Seduced and abandoned, the reader makes one connection after another, but they affirm nothing more than Joyce’s appetite for knowledge, a cultural literacy presented as godlike in its extent. “Ulysses,” Bersani concludes, is “modernism’s most impressive tribute to the West’s long and varied tribute to the authority of the Father.” The Father’s most dutiful offspring are known as Joyceans, and the churn of the “Joyce industry” has spawned a vast apparatus of commentary that even they have deemed oppressive. “Those of us who love Joyce must also hate both him and the industrialized critical tradition that now trails in his wake,” the scholar Sean Latham has written, attempting to shake Joyce’s hold on his acolytes. But everyone knows that hating a father only strengthens his power over you.
What about those mornings when I wake up and the bot’s nocturnal emissions are unplaceable? “Desire’s wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In woman’s womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh.” What? I could fetch a rumpled copy of Don Gifford’s “Ulysses Annotated” and find an allusion lurking beneath the brambles. Or I could reach for Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian, and John Turner’s forthcoming “Annotations to James Joyce’s Ulysses” (Oxford), which, with some twelve thousand entries, is more than twice the length of the novel. But I like the idea of a hole in my knowledge of literature’s history. And I like the idea that someone, in some other fleshwarmed bed, is making connections I cannot. This is the pleasure of surrender and passivity. Or, as Bloom thinks, when he returns home that night to a bed bearing “the imprint of a human form, male, not his,” it is the pleasure of feeling “more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity.” This surrender is love. If desire is the pain of ignorance, then love, as the scholar Sam See proclaimed in a stirring response to Bersani, “is the pleasure of ignorance: the pleasure of renouncing our desire to fill the hole of knowledge, to make knowledge whole, to master those to whom we bear relation.” To relinquish mastery is to sing, as Molly does, “love’s old sweet song.”
Knowledge and ignorance, desire and love, control and submission—these are the straits that “Ulysses” asks its readers to navigate. There are more technologies of navigation available today than when Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop in Paris, first published the novel. There are studies, among which Anthony Burgess’s “Re Joyce” (1965) and Richard Ellmann’s “Ulysses on the Liffey” (1972) remain the most unapologetically joyous. There are the audio and visual recordings: the thrill of hearing Pegg Monahan’s low, husky voice merge with Molly’s consciousness in the 1982 Irish-public-radio production; the wonder of watching a windswept Rob Doyle atop Dalkey’s Martello tower during the Thornwillow Centennial Reading. There are the illustrations, from Matisse’s comically irrelevant ones—having never bothered to read “Ulysses,” he just drew scenes from the Odyssey—to Eduardo Arroyo’s enchanting Surrealist cartoons for “Ulysses: An Illustrated Edition” (Other Press) and John Morgan’s beautiful, fragile “Usylessly,” which replicates the physical form of the first edition but erases all the text. If all these projects make new ways of taking in “Ulysses” desirable, then they also retrieve the pleasure of loving it from the maw of the machine.
***
“Ulysses” is often described as an encyclopedic novel. “Encyclopedia in the form of farce,” Ezra Pound pronounced, comparing it to Gustave Flaubert’s “Bouvard and Pécuchet,” whose zany title characters fail to complete their delightfully stupid quest to master all knowledge. “Ulysses” does not depict anyone stringing together entries, yet the novel’s repetition of certain terms and phrases is hard to miss. They rise from the page like “wavewhite wedded words shimmering,” gaining in intensity and significance.
“Desire” is one of these words. If there were entries for it in “Ulysses,” sexual desire would attach to Bloom—who receives flirtatious letters, reads erotica, masturbates on the beach, and scrutinizes the mirabilis anus of nearly every female he encounters—while literary desire would attach to Stephen, the aspiring writer. “All desire to see you bring forth the work you meditate, to acclaim you Stephaneforos,” his fair-weather friend Vincent Lenehan jeers in the fourteenth episode, while they are sitting in the Holles Street Maternity Hospital, waiting for a baby to be born. Childbirth and writing, the essence of creation myths, emerge as twinned rituals in “Ulysses.”
It is tempting to think that the desire to create, whether a life or a novel, demands mastery—the exercise of control over the materials of one’s mind and body. Stephen is pricked by both this desire to master and a melancholy revolt against the artifice of knowledge. The novel’s first three chapters extend the largely autobiographical arc of the Künstlerroman project that Joyce began with the publication, in 1916, of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Then Stephen was merely youthful and dilettantish. Now he is young, unwashed, grieving, too clever by half, and incapable of writing. “He is going to write something in ten years,” Buck Mulligan laughs. “Will write fully tomorrow,” Stephen slurs, extremely drunk, toward the end of “Ulysses.” “I am a most finished artist.”
Only a stranded writer would make such a conceited claim. Stephen’s frustrated desire is a creative longing in search of a subject. The desire is spurred by the absence of Stephen’s own creator: his mother, who has died between the end of “Portrait” and the beginning of “Ulysses,” while he was living in gloomy, penurious self-exile in Paris. “Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive,” Stephen thinks. The double meaning of the Latin—a mother’s love and love for a mother—doubles his sense of loss. He can neither possess nor be possessed by his creator, and he can find no pleasure yet in this unknowing, can recover nothing but pain from the wake of death. “Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart,” the narrator observes. Lines of Yeats that Stephen set to song at his mother’s deathbed chime through his head: “And no more turn aside and brood / Upon love’s bitter mystery.”
Stephen ignores this advice. How could a grieving child help but brood? Like Hamlet, he spends the day lost in rumination, unable to master his thoughts, and incapable of using his knowledge to create something that will fill the hole opened by death. The next episode, “Nestor,” finds him teaching history in a classroom. The children must memorize and repeat names, dates, and places of battle. Their performance of knowledge breeds cruelty; their laughter when a classmate answers incorrectly is “mirthless but with meaning.” “Yes,” Stephen thinks. “They knew: had never learned nor ever been innocent.” His mind flashes to a library he frequented in Paris, where students seemed like “fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers.” In this vision, both readers and books are irradiated, dissected, and bled dry.
“To learn one must be humble,” Stephen’s employer, Mr. Deasy, declares. “But life is the great teacher.” Deasy, though pompous, is not incorrect. Life, in “Ulysses,” is the experience of the body, from tip to toe, as it wanders through the world. It is sensation mediated by language, and language refined by sensation. This is what the lovely and challenging beginning of the next episode, “Proteus,” tries hard to seize. It opens with Stephen walking along the beach, looking around:
Joyce’s telescoped words—seaspawn, seawrack, snotgreen, bluesilver—create the illusion of descriptive precision. But the illusion dims when it comes time to fix definitions or concepts to them. What is seawrack? What is the essence of bluesilver? The reader can knock her sconce against these questions, but her head will crack in half before the words do. She can contemplate them only as an aesthetic experience—an invitation to rub up against the sound-images, vowels and consonants dilating luxuriously over time. Lest we become too complacent in our aestheticism, Joyce pushes his word-painting to the point of absurdity, with a “fourworded Wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos.” Reading the sound of the sea is no match for riding seaward on the waves.
The most evocative allegory for contemplation in “Proteus” is provided by Tatters, a dog whom Stephen watches sniff the carcass of another dog that has washed up dead on the beach: “He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell.” The sight is grotesque in its physical closeness and touching in its metaphysical distance. The fear, of course, is that Tatters will start to eat his brother, consuming the dog’s body just as the feeding brains in the library consume books. But Tatters is playful, curious, and tender. The way he approaches his brother—a light touch from his wet nose—answers Stephen’s silent plea toward the end of “Proteus”: “I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is the word known to all men?”
“Love, yes. Word known to all men,” Stephen says later, answering his own question. This is in the novel’s ninth episode, “Scylla and Charybdis,” which takes place in the library. Here Stephen feeds the brains of his friends with his theory of how Shakespeare, cuckolded by his wife, projected his dispossession onto “Hamlet,” splitting his psyche between Hamlet and the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Proudly self-conscious of his mastery of storytelling, Stephen unfurls his schema of Shakespeare’s creative spirit as both “bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion.” The chapter provides a handy gloss on “Ulysses” itself. Bloom’s marital dilemma echoes Stephen’s theory; words and images from previous chapters are dragged into his boastful speech.
A librarian, unimpressed, asks, “Do you believe your own theory?” “No,” Stephen responds. Love remains a word known to all in theory but an ethic unknown to these young men. Like the most pedantic readers, they remain stuck in preening performance of their knowingness. Getting us to believe in love requires Joyce to put his older, more experienced character into action.
***
The entry for “love” in the “Ulysses” encyclopedia would be naughtier and more allusive than the entry for “desire.” It would begin with the portmanteaus: lovekin, lovelock, lovelorn, lovephiltres, loveshivery, lovesoft, lovesome, and lovewords. Then the characters: the Reverend Hugh C. Love, who reveals “his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is stuck”; James Lovebirch, the author of “Fair Tyrants” and other sadomasochistic erotica. They are followed by the books (“The Beaufoy books of love”), the songs (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”), and the epigrams (“Love laughs at locksmiths,” “Plain and loved, loved for ever they say,” “Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name”). The entry, to borrow Stephen’s phrase, “dallies between conjugal love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures”—the limbo where “Ulysses” lets its readers dally, with Bloom as their guide.
Love, soppy as it may seem, is the novel’s great subject. But it is not great in the way imagined by romantic young Gerty MacDowell, who, in “Nausicaa,” rapturously exposes her bottom to Bloom as he masturbates. “Her every effort would be to share his thoughts,” Gerty thinks, weaving a thick shroud of fantasy around this stranger. “For love was the master guide.” But these are a young girl’s ideals, and grownup love in “Ulysses” does not strain for perfect and possessive communion. Gerty’s clenching fantasy of Bloom evokes the schlocky story printed on the newspaper with which he wipes his ass in the fourth episode, “Calypso.” He has just delivered a note to his wife from Blazes Boylan, who Bloom knows will come to the house that afternoon.
Love is also the answer to a narrative problem: What do you do on the day you suspect, but do not want to confirm, that your wife is getting “fucked yes and damn well fucked too”? Run some errands, perhaps. Receive a flirty letter from a woman named Martha. Attend a funeral. Go to a museum. Do some work. Eat lunch. Bloom will not, as Stephen claims Shakespeare did in response to his cuckolding, write “Hamlet.” But “Ulysses” will amass a great deal of its antic, thrilling language through Bloom’s attempt to not think about and to not know about his wife’s transgression. In the eighth episode, “Lestrygonians,” Bloom, as he eats lunch, will conjure a stammering memory of the night Boylan first took Molly’s hand: “Glowworm’s la-amp is gleaming, love. Touch. Fingers. Asking. Answer. Yes. Stop. Stop.” And later: “Today. Today. Not think.” Choosing dispossession requires distraction. It makes Bloom hypervigilant toward his surroundings, opening his consciousness to the sensual gratification of words—“glowworm’s la-amp,” “touch”—that are borrowed from the novel’s idiom, gyring into Bloom’s mind. They fill the hole in his knowledge.
Bloom becomes an increasingly passive character as the day progresses, his voice and consciousness drowned out by the city and its inhabitants. In the eleventh episode, “Sirens,” he sits in a tavern and tries to respond to Martha’s letter, but the suspicion of Boylan’s imminent arrival mingles with some music he hears, shattering the privacy of his thoughts: “Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup.” This, the novel proffers, is the “language of love,” and its insistence (tup, tup, tup) makes it, as Bloom responds, “utterl imposs. Underline imposs. To write today.” Nearly every one of Joyce’s narrative techniques is pressed into the service of deriving pleasure—for Bloom and for the reader—from Bloom’s pain.
The climax of his passivity comes in the twelfth episode, “Cyclops,” which takes place in a pub at the same hour Boylan is at Bloom’s house. An anonymous first-person narrator watches as the belligerent, drunken anti-Semites of Dublin, led by an Irish nationalist known as “the citizen,” goad Bloom for being half Jewish. This is the only moment in the day when he loses his composure, lashing out:
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
Everything that “Ulysses” is said to be “about”—colonial politics, capitalist exploitation, animal ecologies, men and women, marriage and sex—is bound up in Bloom’s affirmation of love and the virtues of turning the other cheek, or a blind eye. He is, at this juncture, being plundered by Boylan and insulted by his fellow-citizens. But he asserts himself by pulling out from a fight, “as limp as a wet rag.” His Christian heroics are at once absurd and courageous.
The metaphorical cheek becomes a literal one in “Circe,” the hallucinatory fifteenth episode, set in a brothel, where the passivity of love metamorphoses into a furious masochistic desire. Bloom has spent the day indulging his love of bottoms—spying the “white button under the butt” of his cat’s tail, ogling the “mesial groove” of a Venus statue in the museum—but in “Circe” he becomes everybody’s bottom. The brothel turns into a courtroom, and the novel into a play with stage directions and an invisible director. Bloom is tried and convicted for his lewdness; whipped and spanked; ridden like a horse, before blooming a vagina and giving birth to eight children; and then forced to drink piss. It is both painful and pleasurable not to know what happens where—whether the carnivalesque action of “Circe” lives in the story’s reality or its dreamworld, in its characters’ conscious or unconscious minds; who is in control and who has submitted; who acts and who is acted on.
The brothel is where the man with the theory of love and the man manifesting it finally come together, with Bloom helping Stephen after he has been knocked out in a brawl. It is common to see Bloom as a father in search of a son—his son, Rudy, who appears at the end of “Circe,” died years ago, eleven days after he was born—and Stephen as a son in search of a proper father. But if “Ulysses” teaches us anything it is that nobody is ever only a father or a son, and the musk of the brothel still clings to both men when they arrive at the cab shelter to have a cup of coffee. In “Circe,” Bloom offers to serve as Molly’s “business menagerer”—an offer that he later appears to pursue when he presents a seductive picture of Molly to Stephen: “Ah, yes! My wife, he intimated, plunging in medias res, would have the greatest pleasure in making your acquaintance.” The beauty of the intimation is that it is impossible for the reader to know with certainty whether it is an innocent or an illicit proposition.
***
It is probably a betrayal of the feminist literary tradition to pronounce the final episode of “Ulysses,” “Penelope,” the best—the funniest, most touching, arousing, and truthful—representation of a woman anyone has written in English. But it is, and the eight long, unpunctuated, and outrageous sentences of Molly Bloom’s silent monologue make much of the feminist canon look like a sewing circle for virgins and prudes. In what is often described as a gush of thought, she thinks of her husband, her past lovers, Boylan, her childhood, her children—of every experience of life.
If the earliest feminist critics of “Ulysses” were, for better or worse, struck by Molly’s eroticism, then today I am struck, and moved, by how her sexual frankness and fluidity circle around her fear of pregnancy and, nested within that fear, the death of her baby boy. Molly and Bloom share a certain horror at reproduction. “Fifteen children he had,” Bloom thinks of Stephen’s “philoprogenitive” father—the blind rutting with which people bring children into a world that cannot provide for them. In Molly’s mind, reproduction is tied to the one and only memory she actively refuses to brood upon: “I suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same since O Im not going to think myself into the glooms about that any more.”
“Could never like it again after Rudy,” Bloom thinks of his wife. It is common for critics to say that Molly and Bloom have not had sex since their son’s death, but this assertion only shows how limited the sexual imaginations of critics can be. He came on her bottom only two weeks ago and regularly kisses the “plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump”; judging by his attention to her “mellow yellow furrow,” he would welcome Molly’s invitation to “drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part.” The hole she does not want filled is the one that reproduces—the hole that produces direct connections. “Theyre all mad to get in there where they come out of youd think they could never go far enough,” she thinks, relieved that Boylan, despite his size, “hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull out.”Unlike the rest of “Ulysses,” in which characters’ thoughts are regularly interrupted—by other people, the city, the narrator—Molly’s consciousness largely retains its privacy and integrity. The monologue has no time stamp, no constraints of pace or length imposed by the rest of the novel. The interruptions come from her body—she pisses, farts, and starts having her period—and the whistle of a distant train, “frseeeeeeeefronnnng.” No one seems to get far into her interiority. The connections she creates between past and present, mind and body, belong only to her. Yet she shares memories with her husband—the passing of the seedcake, for instance—without knowing that they share them. These experiences are elemental to each one’s sense of self, connecting them on an ineffable plane, deeper than knowing.
But if the event of the memory is the same, its presentation is not. Whereas Bloom’s recollection of the day he proposed is stupidly sensual (“Yum”), Molly’s is framed by her mastery of his desire. “I got him to propose to me,” she remembers. “I gave him all the pleasure I could lead him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first.” She withholds her yes, and, as the episode rushes to its famous ending, an older series of memories, which Bloom does not share, nestles into the space of her withholding.
How many novels end with a woman coming? And where is she coming? In bed next to her husband, who does not know what she is doing, or in her memory, where he does not know what she is thinking? In these unknowabilities, “Ulysses” ends on a cry of loving pleasure.
“What else were we given all those desires for Id like to know,” Molly thinks. This is, if not the oldest question in the book, certainly the one that has been asked with the most ardor and angst since the rise of both the novel and conjugal marriage. How do we put these desires—maternal, paternal, filial, marital, and illicit—into action without force, injustice, insult, or hate? When do we yield, with love, to the pleasure of ignorance? These are the questions which keep a reader coming back to “Ulysses,” as Molly keeps coming to the love letters she remembers receiving, sometimes “4 or 5 times” a day. Or 9 or 10, depending on the reader’s appetite.
Published in the print edition of the February 14 & 21, 2022, issue, with the headline “Getting to Yes.”
THE NEW YORKER
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