Ulysses by James Joyce

 Source of book: I own this.

 

Well, I did it. I finished Ulysses, which was something I wanted to accomplish. Having done so, I have to say that it is a book unlike anything else I have read, and also the most difficult work of fiction I have attempted. And that is saying something since I read Henry James for fun, and have read The Brother Karamazov, which previously held that “most difficult” title.

 

Even trying to describe the book is a daunting task. It is written in a multiplicity of styles and techniques. It is a book about very little, yet about everything. The plot could practically be summarized as “Leopold Bloom walks through Dublin and has a series of mundane adventures that correspond to Homer’s Odyssey, before returning home early the next morning, after his wife has cheated on him.” But it is also about the whole world, in a different sense. Everything finds its way into the book, including a literal kitchen sink. There are current events, the history of the Irish independence movement to that point, theories about the meaning of Shakespeare’s plays, a parody of English writing styles from the Middle Ages onward, and more excrement than just about any book I have ever read. And those are just a handful of things that come immediately to mind. 

 

Joyce’s command of the language is amazing, and there are so many brilliant passages. And that includes the Eumaeus episode that he deliberately writes poorly, probably as an example of what Bloom would create if he got around to writing his own autobiography. It isn’t easy to write such consistently subpar stuff - subpar in a very specific way, with very specific flaws tied specifically to Bloom and his inner dialogue. To be fair, there are also places in the book that dragged a bit, and felt tedious to read. 

 

I had been intending to read Ulysses for years, but hadn’t actually made it happen until this year. A few factors pushed me over the edge. First, I obtained my own copy, courtesy of a legal colleague who was downsizing  - a hardback that contains the original American release, plus an excellent forward by Morris Ernst, and - best of all - the decision in the seminal court case on obscenity which struck down the laws forbidding the publication and sale of the book. Since I owned a copy, it was free to take my time with it, because it isn’t one of those books that is easy to just sit down and read in a sitting. 

 

Second, a friend of mine from our book club loves this book, and has read it multiple times (which is quite the accomplishment), agreed to re-read and discuss it this year. We decided on a schedule, which I mostly kept - except for the Circe episode, which is nearly 200 pages. I devoted a month to that one alone, which meant reading the final episode, Penelope, in October rather than September. 

 

In essence, this meant I finished it just after Banned Books Week. 

 

We also formed a facebook group with the hope of attracting others to read along with us, but nobody stuck with it, alas. I posted regularly some quick thoughts about each section as I went, so I will be using those, along with the quotes I wrote down in my notes as I read. 

 

Because of the nine-month reading span, I probably will not succeed in trying to put together a fully coherent picture of my experience. I also know for sure that I missed a large percentage of the references - this is the sort of book you could spend a lifetime studying and still not see everything. I did my best to look up words I didn’t know (there are a surprising number - Joyce either had a crazy-huge vocabulary, or he was showing off his skill with a thesaurus), I spent time with the Ulysses Guide after reading each episode, and re-read stuff I wanted to understand better. As you can tell, in a lot of ways, this book dominated my reading time for 2023. 

 

A bit about the episodes: In the text itself, the book is divided into three sections, but does not have official chapters. There is a brief pause, so it is obvious when a new episode begins, but trying to find the beginning and end of an episode takes a bit of time. My understanding is that Joyce gave the episodes their names, but that he chose not to put the names in the book itself - they have been pieced together from his correspondence (as well as the corresponding sections of The Odyssey.) 

 

So, with that preliminary stuff out of the way, here are my rather random thoughts as I read the book. I could easily have chosen ten times as many quotes, and I am equally sure I had thoughts that I didn’t remember to write down. 

 

Telemachus

 

We get to start out with Stephen Dedalus, the character from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man who is kinda-sorta Joyce himself. In this book, he plays the role of Telemachus, with Leopold Bloom standing in for Odysseus. 

 

The book starts out fairly conventionally, with Dedalus getting out of bed and starting his day. Before the end of this first section of the book, however, Joyce gives us a taste of his stream-of-consciousness writing, which will be one of the main features of a number of sections of the book, including the last episode with its 44 pages and only 8 sentences. Joyce gives us the first two episodes to get acclimated, before the third, which is the first true stream-of-consciousness writing.

 

Almost from the beginning, I found I was writing down great lines, starting with what ended up as my favorite word picture. 

 

God, he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. 

 

The snotgreen sea. That’s perfect for a particular sea experience, around a city with pollution, to be sure. An unforgettable picture. 

 

I also wrote down a line that turned out to be a portent of many passages that show the characters’ discomfort with female bodies. (This is turned on its head in the last section, from the perspective of Molly Bloom, where she revels in her female flesh.) There are a lot of references to prostitutes and venereal disease - one of the reasons the book was banned, of course. The milkwoman comes in, and consults with Buck Mulligan (a medical student and general boor.) 

 

Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman; me she slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there is of her but her woman’s unclean loins, of man’s flesh made not in God’s likeness, the serpent’s prey. And to the loud voice that now bids her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes.

 

Yeah, a lot of poisonous patriarchal ideas in that, from a woman’s inherent uncleanness to the belief that only males are made in God’s image, to the blaming of sin on women. Not particularly pleasant, but that is one of the key characteristics of Ulysses: everyone is kind of gross in some way or another. Joyce focuses on the worst of people, it seems, not the best, which is one way a novel can speak truth. 

 

Nestor

 

After a short first episode, the scene shifts to Stephen’s job teaching boys at a private school. There is so much that is hilarious in this section, honestly. Joyce pokes fun at education, classics, and stuffy professors, among other things. For example, this blithering by the anti-semitic Mr. Deasy, the headmaster. (And a counterpart to the helpless King Nestor in The Odyssey.)

 

May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of laissez faire which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme. European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue. 

 

There is an argument in there….somewhere. 

 

Mark my words, Mr. Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation’s decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation’s vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As sure as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction. Old England is dying. 

 

Yeesh. This was written before Hitler, of course, but the same crap is still being spewed by a lot on the American (and worldwide) Right. Don’t mistake this for Joyce’s opinion, though. Bloom is jewish, and a recurring theme in the book is the casual and cruel antisemitism he endures despite his being Irish in every sense except ethnicity. 

 

Stephen, too, defends Jewish people as being no different from anyone else, but Deasy ignores him. It is clear that Stephen is finding Deasy a complete disappointment - very much as Telemachus finds Nestor to be a bumbling and senile old fool. 

 

There is also a hint of Stephen’s, um, interesting theories about Shakespeare, which will be detailed later in the book. 

 

Proteus

 

Okay, here we go. Stephen wandering by the ocean, everything in a stream from his brain. It’s good writing, and not the most difficult part of the book, actually. I rather enjoyed it. 

 

But I didn’t write down any lines, interestingly. Part of the problem is that stream-of-consciousness has no real beginning or end to any thought. It all connects, so finding a small bit to quote fails to give the flow. 

 

The title refers to the shape-shifting god, and the narrative itself shifts shape as it progresses. We have what Stephen is actually doing - walking along the beach - what he is thinking - unable to envision his future - and a whole lot of random stuff that is rattling around in his head. 

 

There is also more of the same gross stuff that pervades the book (and made a lot of people uncomfortable.) Stephen picks his nose. There is a dead dog on the beach. Another dog pees. One might say that these are the details that most books from earlier times tended to ignore, assuming they weren’t relevant. But they are part of a full experience of a scene, and by leaving them in, Joyce gives us a pointed reminder that they were there all along. 

 

So far, these three episodes have taken up only 50 pages out of 768 in the book. Clearly, there are some longer chapters ahead. 

 

Calypso

 

And now, finally, we get to meet Leopold Bloom. The first three episodes form the first section of the book, and correspond to the opening “Telemachus” story in The Odyssey. The second section is the longest, containing the next twelve episodes. It corresponds to the adventures of Odysseus after the end of the Trojan War, until he finally sets foot on Icatha again. The final three episodes form the third section of the book, and correspond to the efforts of Odysseus and Telemachus to expel the suitors. 

 

I didn’t notice them when I read this section initially, but after finishing the book, I saw that Joyce is deliberately creating parallels with the final chapter. Here, Leopold serves Molly breakfast in bed - in the final chapter, she will return the favor. There are various presentiments of Molly’s affair with Blazes Boylan as well. And also a cat. Which is rather nice. 

 

She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. 

 

There is more, too. Joyce lovingly dwells on the cat, and Bloom’s reaction to her. 

 

Breakfast for Leopold is, as one might expect from the book by this point, a bit gross. 

 

Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidney which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. 

 

Ah, that’s Joyce for you. I like a steak and kidney pie well enough, but that’s not the part of the flavor I would have emphasized. Kidneys and urine will be recurring thematic elements throughout the book as well. 

 

Lotos-Eaters

 

Having had a rather satisfying shit, Bloom begins his perambulations around Dublin in this episode. There is a combination of narrative and stream-of-consciousness in this section of the story, and a lot of details. I particularly loved the herd of cattle being driven through the streets. 

 

Thursday of course. Tomorrow is killing day. Springers. Cuffe sold them about twentyseven quid each. For Liverpool probably. Roast beef for old England. They buy up all the juicy ones. And then the fifth quarter is lost: all that raw stuff, hide, hair, horns.

 

A bit of politics there. The Irish famine that drove so many to the US was not merely due to the potato blight (as our history books made it seem) but by the colonization by the English that forced Irish farmers off their own lands, made them into tenants, and forced them to send the best of their produce to England. Beef for old England indeed. Joyce has plenty of pointed remarks that must indeed have offended many of the English. 

 

There is also a good bit of Joyce’s questioning of religion - neither Stephen nor Leopold are true believers, although for different reasons. 

 

Also of interest here are two items that will play a role later - the lemon soap Leopold buys for Molly, and the pork kidney that will be fed to a dog later on. 

 

Oh, and Leopold inadvertently says something that is interpreted as a betting tip for a horserace - this too will return in unexpected ways throughout the rest of the book. 

 

Hades

 

Ah yes, Odysseus in the underworld. Bloom spends part of his morning at the funeral of Paddy Dignam, a late friend. We learn about Bloom’s son, who died in infancy, as well as his father’s suicide. Yeesh, Bloom has had some heavy-duty trauma in his life. Oh, and on the carriage ride to the funeral, he endures more antisemitism. 

 

A good bit of philosophizing as well. I didn’t write down any lines here, but I did comment in the group as follows:

 

“Episode Six, with that endless small talk, is such a perfect capture of what it is like overhearing people you don't know talking about people you don't know and about incidents and such that you lack all the context of and thus have to try to fill in the details. Fascinating writing.”

 

I think this was one of my favorite passages, because it was so unique in perfectly capturing that feeling of overhearing conversations. Moments like that showcase Joyce’s incredible writing ability as well as his keen eye and ear for detail. 

 

Aeolus

 

Okay, now the book starts getting really out there in terms of form. This episode is written like a newspaper, with big headlines and sections that read like hackneyed copy. It is blithering hot air, from political speeches to advertising puffery. It’s brilliant. 

 

The title refers to the bag of winds that Odysseus was given. His men, of course, let them out, and he is driven everywhere he doesn’t want to go, and then he no longer has the gift. Minions. Sigh. 

 

Anyway, this episode has a lot of references to breath, lungs, wind, direction, and other connected ideas. The newspaper format also made me think of a whole news stand blown over by the wind, with the various headlines all muddled up and strewn across a street. It’s a big mixed-up mess. 

 

My favorite line from this episode is this one, from professor McHugh:

 

What was their civilization? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: "It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah." The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: "It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset."

 

That’s outstanding. Of course, sewers are arguably the most important invention of modern humans. Much suffering has been alleviated by keeping the shit out of the drinking water. Ulysses has its own cloacal obsession, to put it mildly. 

 

It is in this episode that we learn a good bit about Bloom’s employment as an advertising salesman. 

 

Lestrygonians

 

The island of the cannibals in The Odyssey turns into an episode largely about food - lunchtime in Bloom’s long day. 

 

Again, in this chapter, I didn’t end up writing down any lines, but I did note that Joyce was spot on when he has Bloom read an Evangelical flyer and realize that proselytizing is just advertising and salesmanship for a different profit-driven enterprise. (Hey, I wrote about that this year!) 

 

And, of course, oh GOD Joyce is fascinated with the grossness of human bodily functions. I mean, he makes eating seem as gross and disgusting as shitting. And he looks at industrial food production too. 

 

The seagull scene is hilarious. (They don’t bite on the flyer, but hold out for some real food, which Bloom - being a total softie for animals - gets for them.) 

 

We also get a lot more internal dialogue from Bloom about his unhappy feelings about Molly’s impending affair (which not only he but the whole town seems to know about.) Apparently, her difficult birth of their son and his subsequent death have led to a breakdown of their sex life, in no small part because she doesn’t want to get pregnant again. 

 

Scylla and Charybdis 

 

This episode has a reputation for being difficult, but I actually enjoyed reading it quite a bit. The reputation comes from its dense web of allusions to literature, primarily Shakespeare, but also Plato and Aristotle. Which, well, I love that sort of thing. 

 

It is also written with a lot of stream-of-consciousness, without a lot of clarity when it switches points of view. You do have to stay with it, and not try to understand everything at once. 

 

The scene is the library, and Stephen is delivering his lecture on his theories about Shakespeare. Which are, to put it mildly, a bit out there. In particular, he argues that the supposed (and unproven) adultery by Anne Hathaway was a main driver of Shakespeare’s ideas, particularly in Hamlet. Okay then. 

 

I think the Ulysses Guide does a great job of summing up the pairs of twin monsters that Stephen is trying to navigate between throughout the lecture. 

 

“As Stephen delivers his lecture, he is navigating between various pairs of powerful forces: the ideas of Aristotle and Plato, the impulses of youth and maturity, the relationship between the artist and his/her art, and the disciplines of dogmatic scholasticism and spiritual mysticism.”

 

 And at the end, Leopold visits the library and passes between Stephen and Mulligan, which has to be a symbol of something, but I am not at all sure what. 

 

I did write down one line from this section, just because it was interesting. 

 

“Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering.”

 

It is a bit of a truism, but I think there is deep meaning to it as well. 

 

At this point, nine of the eighteen episodes are done, but we are only 213 pages into the book. There are clearly some heavy-duty episodes coming up. 

 

Wandering Rocks

 

This section is…quite something. It is divided into 18 mini-episodes (corresponding to the 18 full episodes of the book), it is internally and externally referential, commenting on the stuff we have already read, and a lot of things that happen later in the book, that we will not yet know. The narrative jumps around in time and place - the wandering rocks, so to speak. 

 

The sections also are from the point of view of different characters, many of them minor and even appearing only in this episode. 

 

I will admit, this was probably the most difficult section for me, as there was too much to keep track of, too many jumps, and too many forward references. I suspect it will make more sense to me on a re-read, if I ever do that. However, it was also a positive experience, because of the way Joyce uses language and technique to create the disorientation of the rocks - the turbulent sea amid rocks that are never where you think they are. Joyce also mirrors the underlying mythology, where many attempt, but only Odysseus succeeds. (Jason avoids the place altogether.) 

 

There were several lines in this section that stood out to me. First is this musing from Father Conmee, in the opening section. 

 

Father Conmee thought of the souls of black and brown and yellow men and of his sermon of saint Peter S. J. and the African mission and of the propagation of the faith and of the millions of black and brown and yellow souls that had not received the baptism of water when their last our came like a thief in the night. That book by the Belgian jesuit, Le Nombre des Elus, seemed to Father Conmee a reasonable plea. Those were millions of human souls created by God in His Own Likeness to whom the faith had not (D. V.) been brought. But they were God’s souls created by God. It seemed to Father Conmee a pity that they should all be lost, a waste, if one might say.

 

This is something that has bothered me since childhood. As I have grown older, I have come more and more to believe that there is a fundamental error at the root of the teaching of Hell and Salvation, that is only reconcilable by an embrace of ethnic supremacy. Which is why Evangelical doctrine has inevitably led to an embrace of white supremacy. (Catholicism has its own problems - not least of which is that their global vision stems largely from successful imperialism. In both cases, the belief system has easily justified conquest and forced conversions.) 

 

The next comes when Bloom reads, then purchases The Sweets of Sin, an erotic book, that he decides Molly would enjoy. (Yep, likely one of the reasons this book was banned was its frank acknowledgement of female sexual pleasure. Joyce wasn’t a feminist by any stretch, but he wasn’t a prude.) Bloom’s reaction is fascinating and a little icky. 

 

Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amid rumpled clothes. Whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (for him! For Raoul!) Armpits’ oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint!) Feel! Press! Crushed! Sulfur dung of lions!

 

Yeah, that got weird really fast. 

 

Finally (for this section) is the discussion between Buck Mulligan and Haines about Stephen’s Shakespeare lecture. Haines opines:

 

“Shakespeare is the happyhuntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.”

 

Hey now!

 

This section can be disorienting, but nothing like the next one, which is….insane. 

 

Sirens

 

Hoo boy, this one is tough. Joyce attempts to make words function like music throughout this section. He starts it off with 62 lines that have seemingly no connection. Some writers have likened this to an orchestral overture, but I find it more convincing that this is the cacophony of the orchestra warming up prior to the concert. It is all over the place. 

 

From there, we find ourselves at dinner at the Ormond Hotel. Bloom listens to Stephen and others play the piano and sing. 

 

My comments immediately after reading the section:

 

“Finished Sirens last night. It really helped to go back afterward and look at the guide to figure out all the jumps in location. A bit of a slog. That said, the way Joyce turns the language into music in the second half of the section is pretty incredible.”

 

References to music and sound abound in the narrative. Multiple threads take place at the same time in different locations, presumably a form of counterpoint. It really does start to seem like music somewhere around the halfway point, when the rhythms get in your head. Here is a bit:

 

What do they think when they hear music? Way to catch rattlesnakes. Night Michael Gunn gave us the box. Tuning up. Shah of Persia liked that best. Remind him of home sweet home. Wiped his nose in curtain too. Custom his country perhaps. That’s music too. Not as bad as it sounds. Tootling. Brasses braying asses through uptrunks. Doublebasses, helpless, gashes in their sides. Woodwinds mooing cows. Semigrand open crocodile music hath jaws. Woodwind like Goodwin’s name. 

 

That comparison of the open grand piano to a crocodile is unforgettable. You can’t unsee it. 

 

By the end of the section, many of the words are just onomatopoeia, sounds that describe the experience, rather than a narrative of events. 

 

Cyclops

 

Here we are, through eleven sections, but not near halfway done with the book. The big episodes lie ahead. 

 

For this section, the perspective is an unnamed debt collector who hurls antisemitic abuse at Bloom. He is the cyclops in this version of Odesseus’ adventures. Although it is over 50 pages long, this section is a welcome relief from the difficulty of the previous episodes. Here is my comment upon finishing it:

 

“I read all 54 pages of Cyclops this afternoon. Fortunately, although long, it isn't as difficult as some the others - it makes sense as a narrative, although the unnamed narrator is clearly unreliable as hell. My favorite lines are the malaprop, "Don't cast your nasturtiums on my character," and the diss of Edward VII ("the peacemaker"), "There's a bloody sight more pox than pax about that boyo."”

 

Yeah, Edward VII was a philandering piece of work. Although one could also argue that the royal family hasn’t been much fun since he died - it’s harder to enjoy mocking George V or Elizabeth II. (Hey, I’m an American - poking fun at royalty is kind of our origin story, right?) 

 

I’ll add one more: the guys at the bar calling beer “the wine of the country.” Rodgers and Hammerstein were not the first to use the term, apparently. 

 

Nausicaa

 

In The Odyssey, the episode of Nausicaa opens the second section. Odysseus washes ashore, naked and exhausted, after his entire crew has perished. He is rescued by the princess Nausicaa, to whom he recounts his entire adventure. After this, he is entertained, given treasure, and sent off back to Ithaca in a new ship. Pretty dang generous. 

 

Anyway, this timeline in Ulysses differs from that of The Odyssey. We haven’t gotten to Circe or Calypso and all that yet, but we have a Nausicaa episode kind of in the middle of Odysseus’ other adventures. 

 

This episode is also one of the most controversial sections of the book, with its frank depiction of masturbation, flashing, and general icky sex talk. 

 

There is also the much-debated question as to whether all of this is taking place in Bloom’s mind. Does Gerty really exist? Does she flash her underwear at Bloom? Or does she just exist as a male fantasy - perhaps the patriarchal idea of the virgin/whore melded into one? 

 

In my opinion, the best part of this episode is the first, where the expectations placed on women are portrayed in language that seems to be dime-store romance novel at times, and at others, clearly ad copy for beauty products. It is delightfully tawdry and commercialized - everything is being sold, which fits with Bloom’s profession. 

 

Passages like this one are why it is so difficult to pin down what exactly Joyce thought about women, and what he is trying to say. On the one hand, he is really good at repeating various misogynistic ideas and phrases that permeate society then and now. But on the other, he seems to be constantly subverting them, insisting on female sexuality in a way that makes men uncomfortable. I have the impression that part of his pushing back at Victorian values was in stripping the mask off - refusing to see women as divine angels on a pedestal, responsible for male misbehavior. They assert themselves sexually, they choose their own trajectories (as much as they can within the systems they are in), and they refuse to be domesticated. 

 

The debate rages, I suppose. There is a lot to be uncomfortable about in this episode, and it is one of the main reasons the book was banned in English-speaking countries. 

 

Oxen of the Sun

 

This episode was one of my favorites, not for anything that takes place, but because of the writing. Bloom checks in at the maternity hospital, where a friend, Mina Purefoy, has been in labor for a couple of days. Did men actually do this in Ireland at the time? It seems weird to me, but whatever. 

 

But the writing…wow. Joyce writes 32 parodies of different writing styles, from a “pre-literate pagan invocation” at the beginning, through to modernism. Supposedly, he was intending to show a gestation from embryo to birth, but simply the idea of parodying various writing styles is enough to showcase Joyce’s skill here. 

 

Any lover of English literature will laugh at the parodies of Milton, Swift, and Dickens. And the churchy-latin devotional style, Gothic novels, Chaucer, and more. It’s truly hilarious. 

 

And then there is this blither, in a pompous purple prose style:

 

The debaters were the keenest in the land, the theme they were engaged on the loftiest and most vital. The high hall of Horne’s house had never beheld an assembly so representative and so varied nor had the rafters of that establishment ever listened to a language so encyclopediac. A gallant scene in truth it made. Crothers was there at the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing from the briney airs of the Mull of Galloway. There too, opposite to him was Lynch, whose countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity and premature wisdom. 

 

And on and on and on it goes…

 

The language and technique make this section fascinating, and somewhat make up for the disturbing scene of men discussing women and their supposed role in society as breeders. If one were to point to the most misogynistic passage in the book, I would go with this one. In no small part because I recognize every single vicious and nasty argument from my Patriarchy Cult days. I mean, they too would literally argue about whether the mother or the infant should be saved if you had to choose - with most coming down on the side of “let the woman die, save the baby.” Which is, if you think about it, coming back around with the abortion prohibitions being enacted in Red states. 

 

Comment I made after finishing it:

 

“Hard to decide which is more misogynistic: the gross discussion of pregnancy and paternity by the drunken men (which is Odysseus' men eating the Cattle of the Sun) or the weird glorification of the female role in reproduction that Joyce centers in this episode. He seems a bit too close to Augustine in the reduction of sex to reproduction, at least for females. I did find the revelation that Bloom's first sexual experience was with a sex worker interesting - that was the norm back in the day.”

 

Circe

 

Well, this is the big one. 175 pages long. Written in the form of a play. With a mix of reality and fantasy, the lines separating them not being particularly clearly defined. This episode recaps a lot of what has happened, foreshadows what will happen, and pretty much drags every character from everywhere else in the book into this chapter. Literally. Joyce made a list and checked the names off. 

 

The theme is essentially that of transformation - Circe’s sorcery. Everything and everyone changes, constantly, until we really cannot tell reality from fantasy, past from future, and forget about keeping track of who becomes what and back again. 

 

There are seven major fantasies in this chapter, and they actually take up most of the text. Reality is relatively unimportant. 

 

Oh, and did I mention that the “real” portions of this episode take place in Dublin’s red light district? It’s all about the brothels at this point. (And no, nothing in this book will ever make you want to hook up with a hooker. Yuck.) 

 

This episode is also where Leopold and Stephen, who have come close but never truly met, end up connecting. Stephen, in his cups a bit too much, gets into a fight with a British soldier, and has to be rescued and walked back…well, he can’t go home, so to Bloom’s house. 

 

After running to catch up to Stephen (he can see disaster in the making), the fantasies start. He sees his dead father, who lectures him, followed by Molly, who does likewise. Then, Gertie (who may be there in real life? Not sure…) is accosted by her ex-boyfriend, who lectures her on being in the brothel district. And then we get a really racist minstrel show (gee, thanks, Joyce…) and an advertising man, and…okay at that point, I can’t even really figure out what was going on. 

 

Bloom feeds his kidney (remember that?) to a dog, who seems to be randomly changing breeds throughout this episode. 

 

This leads to another fantasy where Bloom imagines himself a dentist, then the scene morphs into a macabre trial with a bunch of witnesses against Bloom for stuff he has done in the past. Bloom is condemned to death, but then Paddy Dignam is back from the dead and…well then he is back in reality and finds Stephen. 

 

The next fantasy is Bloom as a social reformer and eventual mayor of Dublin, but this too goes sour with curses and denigrations by disgruntled people from Bloom’s past, he becomes a pregnant woman, and…okay, I think I have all that right? As I said, it’s confusing. He performs miracles, he becomes a martyr, and then he is, in real life (I think?) propositioned by one of the prostitutes. 

 

And then Bloom’s grandfather appears, offering opinions on the merits of the three hookers. There is a masochistic episode, and a LOT more guilt on the part of Bloom. In fact, one could easily read all of the fantasy sequences as being about Bloom’s psyche and working out of his various guilty feelings. 

 

Eventually, reality asserts itself more forcefully, and Stephen gets himself in trouble. Bloom has to call on all his powers to extricate Stephen (and himself) without further damage, arrest, or injury. 

 

To even try beyond this to describe the chapter is beyond my ability. I did note a few lines, though. 

 

All the windows are thronged with sightseers, chiefly ladies. Along the route the regiments of the royal Dublin Fusiliers, the King’s own Scottish Borderers, the Cameron Highlanders and the Welsh Fusiliers, standing to attention, to keep back the crowd. Boys from High school are perched on the lampposts, telegraph poles, windowsills, cornices, gutters, chimneypots, railings, rainspouts, whistling and cheering. A pillar of the cloud appears. A fife and drum band is heard in the distance playing the Kol Nidre. 

 

Crazy fantasy going on there. And this one:

 

(Bloom explains to those near him his schemes for social regeneration. All agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare Street Museum appears, dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.)

 

Those new nine muses are hilarious. 

 

And then there are the really dirty ditties:

 

If you see kay

Tell him he may

See you in tea

Tell him from me.

 

As I noted at the time, I am sure I missed most of the allusions here. There are just too many to see, and it might take a lifetime to find them all. Fascinating to read, totally surreal. But also a bit overwhelming, even for me. 

 

That concludes the second part of the book, and takes us to page 595. The end is in sight, with three quarters of the book done. 

 

Eumaeus

 

Honestly, this episode very nearly lost me. Good god, the writing is terrible. And that is intentional. Joyce describes it as “narrative(old)” - it is certainly old fashioned and stuffy. But it is also just plain BAD. The descriptions fall flat, often using a word that is close, but not quite right. It is the kind of writing you expect from….well, that may well be it. 

 

Joyce didn’t say so, but subsequent readers have wondered if the episode is intended to be the way that Bloom would write his own story. He has, after all, expressed a desire to do so. If that is the key to this episode, it would make sense. Bloom, for all his other skills, is not a good writer. (Stephen probably would be.) Just like playing a violin badly takes skill, writing this badly shows how great Joyce is as a writer. He gets the sound of bad writing exactly right. 

 

In any event, Leopold has to get Stephen sobered up and back to civilization again. In a correspondence to the shack of the shepherd Eumaeus, the two go to a pub for some water and food, so Stephen can function again. There are a lot of parallels with The Odyssey in this episode, if you know your Homer well. I won’t detail all of them. At least they make it worth slogging through the terrible prose. 

 

The one passage I noted in here is when Bloom gets the satisfaction of informing an antisemite that his God was literally a Jew. 

 

At the same time he inwardly chuckled over his repartee to the blood and ouns champion about his God being a jew. People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them up was a bite from a sheep. The most vulnerable point too of tender Achilles, your God was a jew, because mostly they appeared to imagine he came from Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhere about the county Sligo.

 

Yeah, we Americans tend to do the same thing, right? 

 

Ithaca

 

Finally, Odysseus and Bloom return home. In this penultimate episode, Bloom finds his door locked and his key somehow lost during the day's adventure. So he climbs over the wall, lets Stephen in, and they finish off the last of the cocoa. Later, Bloom crawls into bed with Molly, and falls asleep. 

 

For this chapter, Joyce uses a question-and-answer form that mirrors that of the Catechism. I didn’t grow up in that religious tradition - Evangelicals have the Roman Road instead, I would say - but I am at least familiar with it. The questions are often absurd and seem to have nothing to do with the rest of the story, leading the episode in all kinds of weird directions. I wrote down several of these, because they were amusing or enlightening or both. 

 

Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?

Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, women, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen’s collapse.

 

Okay then, I guess that about covers it? 

 

Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions to experience?

Both were sensitive to artistic impressions musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance professed by their disbelief in many orthodox religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admitted the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual magnetism. 

 

So, if you ever thought that the use of “trans” and “cis” was a modern affectation…nope. They have been around a long time, but not used as commonly in everyday speech. 

 

What did Bloom do?

He extinguished the candle by a sharp expiration of breath upon its flame, drew two spoonseat deal chairs to the hearthstone, one for Stephen with its back to the area window, the other for himself when necessary, knelt on one knee, composed in the grate a pyre of crosslaid resintipped sticks and various coloured papers and irregular polygons of best Abram coal at twentyone shillings a ton from the yard of Messrs Flower and M’Donald of 14 D’Olier street, kindled it at three projecting points of payer with one ignited lucifer match, thereby releasing the potential entry contained in the fuel by allowing its carbon and hydrogen elements to enter into free union with the oxygen of the air. 

 

Such weird attention to detail. But that is a feature of the book. I also made a note of the mention of Brian Boru - I know that name because my brother plays in an Irish band, and they perform the march named after that man. 

 

There is also a bizarre answer where it compares the ages of Stephen and Leopold, then calculates their ages tens of thousands of years into the future and past. And this weird followup question and answer:

 

What events might nullify these calculations?

The cessation of existence of both or either, the inauguration of a new era or calendar, the annihilation of the world and consequent extermination of the human species, inevitable but unpredictable. 

 

That’s pretty funny, actually. And also this unexpected answer:

 

Accepting the analogy implied in his guest’s parable which examples of postexilic eminence did he adduce?

Three seekers of the pure truth, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, author of More Neubkim (Guide of the Perplexed) and Moses Mendelssohn of such eminence that from Moses (of Egypt) to Moses (Mendelssohn) there arose none like Moses (Maimonides).

 

For those unfamiliar, Moses Mendelssohn was an Enlightenment era Jewish philosopher, a true luminary of his time and hugely influential on later Jewish thinkers. And he was also the grandfather of composer Felix Mendelssohn. 

 

I could have quoted a lot more here too. The chapter is notable for the hint of a potential developing friendship between Leopold and Stephen, although we are never told if it came to fruition. The book ends the next morning, with Molly’s perspective. The whole thing has taken at most 24 hours.

 

Penelope

 

This episode consists of 44 pages, but only 8 “sentences.” Which is a stretch, considering there are very, very few capital letters (on words like “I” and “O”) and no punctuation until after the last word, “Yes.” It is an ongoing stream-of-consciousness even more stream-y than the previous examples. I read it in a single day, although not in a single sitting. That really is the way you should do it. 

 

The episode consists of Molly’s perspective, and has a lot of retrospectives on her life, focusing on her childhood, her adolescence in Gibraltar, and her early love affairs. Molly is earthy, crude, overtly sexual, and yet weirdly compelling and enticing. It is hard to know what exactly to make of her, but it is pretty clear that there is a reason Leopold Bloom stays with her, despite their difficult sex life, her affairs, and the tragedy of their son’s death. 

 

While not the easiest read, I thought this episode was outstanding. It is puzzling that Joyce can seem so misogynistic at times, yet he brings out some profoundly feminist points in this narrative: he understands the way that men are often unconcerned with female pleasure, how they take women for granted. He is unafraid to portray Molly’s desire for experience, love, sex, pleasure and so on as perfectly normal and understandable. One could even say he writes her like other writers of dirty books write men. (Horrors!) 

 

So I am curious how Joyce could be both so perceptive and self-aware, and yet also so horrifyingly misogynistic at other times. 

 

I noted a couple of passages worth highlighting, although with the caveat that there is no good way to begin or end any quote. The context is at minimum the sentence (around 5 pages each) and more broadly the entire episode. 

 

imagine Im him think of him can you feel him trying to make a whore of me what he never will he ought to give it up now at this age of his life simply ruination for any woman and no satisfaction in it pretending to like it till he comes and then finish it off myself anyway and it makes your lips pale anyhow its done now once and for all with all the talk of the world about it people make its only the first time after that its just the ordinary do it and think no more about it why cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes love so wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help yourself I wish some may or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you

 

Just let that wash over you. Poor Molly. And poor women everywhere who lack a good lover. 

 

And then there is the ending of the book, which is just fantastic. 

 

O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

 

The repetition of yes is just overwhelming. Perhaps part of the question raised in this novel can be contained in that “yes.” For patriarchists, one reason they struggle to clearly oppose rape and abuse in the context of marriage is that the right to say “no” also implies a right to say “yes.” And that sexual self-determination on the part of women is terrifying. 

 

For Molly, a reason she is controversial, scandalous, obscene, is that she says yes. Sometimes yes to Bloom. But to others as well, from her first lover to Boylan. 

 

So that is all I have to say in this post about the book. Ulysses is like nothing else I have ever read, and there is a lot to like about it. There are also appalling passages, gross passages, and yes, even tedious passages. Whatever else it is, it is - as the courts eventually recognized - a work of artistic merit, with plenty to say to us then and now. 

 

My immense thanks to Vincente for encouraging me to read this book, and for his insights along the way. It’s been a journey! 

 

***

 

I wanted to say a bit about the Forward and the court case as well. The forward introduces the text of the case and gives a brief explanation of its significance. Reading it now, 90 years later, it has incredible resonance in our own era of book-banning and moral panics. 

 

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Judge Woolsey’s decision. For decades the censors have fought to emasculate literature. They have tried to set up the sensibilities of the prudery-ridden as a criterion for society, have sought to reduce the reading matter of adults to the level of adolescents and subnormal persons, and have nurtured evasions and sanctimonies. 

 

The Ulysses case marks a turning point. It is a body-blow for the censors. The necessity for hypocrisy and circumlocution in literature has been eliminated. Writers need no longer seek refuge in euphemisms. They may now describe basic human functions without fear of the law.

 

Heck yes. Most Americans do not support book bans, and do not wish to “protect” children from knowledge that sex is a normal human behavior, LGBTQ+ people exist, and that systemic racism still infects every part of American society and government. We do not wish to be ruled by the “sensibilities of the prudery-ridden.” And likewise, the idea that basic biological functions need to be hidden behind euphemism is absurd. (And also uniquely Victorian - even the Puritans made shit jokes.) 

 

Justice Woolsey’s opinion is so great, I recommend everyone read it. Not just us lawyers and law students. You can read it here. 

 

One reason Woolsey was able to write such a cogent argument in favor of Ulysses is that he actually read it. All the way through. And the dirty parts multiple times. (Snicker.) He admits it is not an easy book to read or understand. 

 

I also love his explanation that “dirty” words do not automatically make a work obscene. 

 

The words which are criticized as dirty are old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I would venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe. In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring. 

 

I think Woolsey is correct that there is more than a whiff of classism here. The old Saxon words (the “nine Saxon physiological monosyllables” as Sinclair Lewis calls them) would have been used by the commoners after the Norman Conquest, while the French and Latin terms we now consider “polite” would have been used by the nobility. To set up a certain cultural preference based on class, and then make laws about it, is deeply problematic in a supposedly free society. 

 

At the end of the opinion, Woolsey makes perhaps the most pithy summary of the controversial features of the book ever. 

 

I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes, “Ulysses” is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of “Ulysses” on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.

 

I’ll end with one final note. Joyce had difficulty in getting the book published, as he explains in an included letter to Random House, who eventually agreed to publish the book and (inevitably) defend itself in court. Joyce gives special praise to Shakespeare and Co. - a delightful Paris bookstore that my wife and I visited when we were there - for their key role in the very first publication of the book.