By Maurice Fitzpatrick
Many people associate the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses a hundred years ago with an iconic picture of the author when it was published in Paris in 1922. Joyce’s glaucoma required multiple surgeries and, in the photograph, he has a patch over his right eye. He is seated beside Sylvia Beech. Beech was the American publisher who (more than anyone) was responsible for bringing Joyce’s great fiction into the world.
The public responded to the publication by turns with amazement at its brilliance, bewilderment at its complexity and rage at the perceived offences in it.
In the photograph, above Joyce there is a poster with text that reads ‘The Scandal of Ulysses’. The text is appropriate enough given how much of the debate about Ulysses over the past century has centred on its explicit language and themes.
“If Ulysses is not fit to be read, then life is not fit to live”
Despite that controversy, the book sits at the top of most lists of ‘Novel of the Century’. The plaudits heaped upon the novel may have more satisfied Joyce’s inexhaustible appetite for mockery than his vanity: even as solemn adjudicators of literature proclaim it as a classic, they avert their gaze from the scurrilous and obscene parts in the book.
Never one for modesty, Joyce claimed that ‘If Ulysses is not fit to be read, then life is not fit to live’. Yet Joyce was making a serious point. An authentic rendering of the inner lives of human beings is not capable of sanitisation. Ulysses, aside from being widely accepted as the greatest novel of the 20th century, is a nuclear blast against censorship.
In our time when careers are ended over the alleged misuse of a pronoun and more and more words are rooted out of acceptable discourse, the ‘classic’ status of Ulysses enables it to transcend censorship — despite its use of words that, in another context, would be vilified today. Even a century after its publication, it would be easy to publish reams of Ulysses out of context that would elicit complaints about the ‘filth’. That is, partly, what James Joyce’s foremost biographer, Richard Ellmann, meant when he wrote: ‘We are still learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries, to understand our interpreter’.
The book is a famously difficult read and it is surely the classic most often ‘left aside for later’. Yet its complexity belies a simplicity that is humane and tender. Set on a day in Dublin, June 16th 1904, it follows inner thoughts of a series of characters, in particular a married couple, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly Bloom, as well as an artist/teacher, Stephen Dedalus, who appeared in a previous fiction by Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as an autobiographical character. The couple have been riven by the loss of their son and pronounced differences in their characters; they serially betray each other.
Through these characters the world of Dublin opens up. We encounter salesmen, drunks, journalists, scholars, doctors, impresarios, romantics, nationalists, teachers, sailors, priests, singers, paupers, lovers, liars, bullies, madames, prostitutes, saviors, no-hopers, humanitarians, policemen, gamblers — I could go on.
“Yet its complexity belies a simplicity that is humane and tender.”
Joyce presents the thoughts, stories, hopes and desperation of these characters in, by turns, a sensuous, uproarious, intellectual and passionate affirmation of language and life itself. Throughout the novel his artistic gifts transform mundane observations and occurrences into something beautiful: ‘The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit’.
Joyce also deploys a dazzling variety of styles to achieve this aim, above all using parallels with Homer’s Odyssey to structure the novel. The result is a book that has a contemporary feel, even a century later. It is so full of conundrums, ambiguities and provocations that both for the general public and scholars remain hooked.
Joyce claimed, plausibly enough, that none of his characters were worth more than a hundred pounds. Out of that poverty came desperation and failure. In one encounter in the book, a younger sister of Stephen Dedalus, Dilly, shows an interest in learning French, which was apparently incongruous with the poverty of the family.
Yet Joyce was also steeped in middle-class Ireland; even as his father kept losing money, he somehow wrangled a place for his eldest son in the ‘best’ Irish schools as well as a university education (partly in Paris).
Joyce acknowledged, grudgingly, late in life, that his work was ‘middle class’ and there are tensions between the subject-matter of his work and the point of vantage from which he wrote.
The finale of Ulysses is Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in which Joyce pushes the stream of consciousness technique he deployed in the novel — an attempt to freely run through his characters’ thought processes — to its limit. The result is what the famous psychologist Carl Jung called ‘a string of veritable psychological peaches’. Jung wrote to Joyce in 1920, wondering if anyone else knew as much about female psychology and readily admitted that he, Jung, did not.
“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit”
Decades later, Jung was called upon to comment on Joyce in a professional capacity. By that stage, Joyce had died and his beloved daughter, Lucia, had been committed to a psychiatric hospital where she was to remain for the rest of her days. Jung related Joyce’s ‘obstinate reluctance to have her certified’ to Joyce’s own ‘unconscious psyche [which] was so solidly identified with her that to have her certified would have been as much as an admission that he himself had a latent psychosis’. Jung maintained that Joyce, by contrast, channelled his own schizophrenia into his art and that saved him from going ‘over the border’.
Whether it was the madness of Ireland or a latent psychosis in his own mind, we can be grateful that Joyce found that way to use it in his art. In Ulysses, Joyce produced an imperishable masterpiece that, now at the centenary of its publication, still richly deserves to be read.
Maurice Fitzpatrick is Visiting Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is the 2020 Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University. He is director & producer of John Hume in America and author of John Hume in America: From Derry to DC.