Simply Joyce

Margot Norris

• Publisher: Simply Charly
• ISBN:
  9781943657056
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Generally considered one of the greatest modern writers, James Joyce (1882–1941) grew up in Dublin, Ireland, but spent his adult life in the European cities of Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Yet, while he left his native country behind, he never stopped writing about it. He published his well-known short story collection, Dubliners, in 1914 and the coming-of-age novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man two years later. In 1922 came Ulysses, the book that would make Joyce famous and infamous at the same time: extremely controversial in its time, Ulysses was banned in the U.K. and the U.S. and led to a landmark obscenity case in 1933.

In Simply Joyce, author Margot Norris strips the mystery from Joyce's ground-breaking books by offering a clear introduction to why and how they were produced. Along the way, she offers insights into Joyce's life and creative inspirations by exploring his stories and novels in depth. Beginning with the more accessible early works and proceeding through Ulysses and the even more challenging Finnegans Wake —Joyce's final work that was published two years before his death—Norris provides a clear and easily understandable overview of this seminal writer.

Both Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist are included on almost every list of the greatest novels of all time. Simply Joyce shows why this is so and, for those who have never had the pleasure of discovering Joyce's works, it will serve as a riveting introduction and a jumping-off point into theextraordinary linguistic world of one of the most influential writers of the previous century.

4

Ulysses

Joyce apparently thought of writing a work based on Homer’s Odyssey as early as 1906 or 1907. Joyce scholar Michael Groden suggests he might first have thought of producing it as a story, like the ones in Dubliners, or as a short book (‘Ulysses’ in Progress 5).

Serious work on Ulysses did not begin until 1914 and 1915, however, and its earliest production came in the form of episodes published in the magazine the Little Review, whose European editor was Ezra Pound, and in the Egoist, edited by Harriet Shaw Weaver. Joyce, who had already encountered censorship issues with the seemingly innocuous stories of Dubliners, inevitably incurred them with these early chapters of Ulysses as well, and in 1921 Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the U.S. editors of the Little Review, were convicted of publishing obscenity in the United States in relation to the sexual innuendoes in the book’s “Nausicaa” episode. These censorship problems made it clear that the completed Ulysses could not reasonably be published in English-speaking countries, and as a result, Sylvia Beach, the owner of a Parisian bookstore called Shakespeare and Company, offered to have her business publish Ulysses in France. Joyce gratefully accepted.

Beach found a printer in Dijon who managed to send two copies of the printed book to Paris by train on the morning of February 2, 1922, Joyce’s 40th birthday. Beach met the train at the station, was handed the copies of Ulysses by the conductor, rushed to Joyce’s flat in a taxi, and gave him his first copy of his book. The other copy she displayed in her bookstore, where people crowded in all day to see it.

Ulysses became a sensation among intellectuals, including Americans who brought it back to their country, spurring publishers like Bennett Cerf of Random House to want to publish it in the U.S. This required another obscenity trial, but over a decade later the social climate in the country had changed sufficiently that Ulysses was declared not to be obscene in a famous ruling by Judge John Woolsey in 1933. In spite of its success, Ulysses was not immune to criticism, for, in addition to its possible lewdness, readers were also daunted, and occasionally bored, by its length, its difficulty, and the strangeness and inconsistency of its prose. “More than one reviewer compared Ulysses to a telephone directory,” Joyce critic Joseph Brooker reported (“Reception History,” The Cambridge Companion to ‘Ulysses’ 24).

In response to readers’ confusion, Joyce eventually created schema delineating aspects of the book for his Italian translator, Carlo Linati, and the French writer Valery Larbaud, that included such critical information as Homeric titles for the episodes, times when they occur, their characters, scene or place, and more evocative aspects such as art, technique, and even colors that might be thought to define the various episodes. Linati received his schema in 1920, before the book’s publication, but it has since become indispensable for understanding its relationship to Homer’s Odyssey, and for giving us the titles by which we now identify the chapters in Ulysses. None of this information is given overtly in the book itself, which signals only that it is divided into three sections and 18 chapters, none of which have titles or names. Yet, it is now almost impossible to imagine how one could discuss the work if we could not instantly signal its content without such titles as “Telemachus,” “Wandering Rocks,” “Circe,” or “Penelope.”

Given its title, a preliminary discussion of Ulysses invariably requires discussion of its relationship to its mythical intertext, Homer’s Odyssey. This work details the many daunting challenges and obstacles encountered by Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, on his 10-year journey home after the end of the Trojan War.

Odysseus battles monsters and one-eyed giants, becomes detained by enthralled women or lured by Sirens, is obliged to visit the underworld, and struggles with wandering rocks and violent winds at sea. In his absence, his wife Penelope faces her own challenges back home in Ithaca. As the decade goes by, Odysseus is presumed dead and suitors put increasing pressure on Penelope to choose one of them as his successor, prompting her son Telemachus to search for, and eventually find, his lost father and bring him home. Together, father and son return to the palace where Odysseus manages to defeat the suitors in a game devised by Penelope, and kill them. After convincing his wife that he is indeed her husband by revealing that he knows the secret of their marriage bed, built out of a living tree, both the rule of his kingdom and the unity of his family are restored.

In Ulysses, it is Stephen Dedalus, previously encountered in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who takes on the role of Telemachus, struggling as the son of a father who neglects his forsaken children after his wife’s death. As we first meet Stephen, he is living in the Martello Tower with a roommate and visitor. On this morning he embarks on a journey to earn a living, to establish a reputation as a writer and poet, and to come to terms with guilt because he refused to pray at his mother’s deathbed. He is not consciously aware that he is searching for a father, but in the fourth chapter of Ulysses, we encounter his Odysseus (or Ulysses)—a Jewish man named Leopold Bloom who is in the opposite situation. Having lost a newborn son 11 years before, he subconsciously longs for a son.

In the course of his day in Dublin, Bloom has experiences mirroring those of Odysseus. He attends a funeral where he encounters the dead as Odysseus does in Hades, and he experiences metaphoric squalls and winds while visiting the newspaper office where he works as an advertising canvasser. Later in the day, he is erotically excited by a young woman lifting her skirts on the beach, and encounters a drunken bigot in a bar whose one-sided view of nationality and race reminds us of the Odyssey’s one-eyed Cyclops. Eventually, he encounters Stephen Dedalus, his Telemachus, in the lounge of a maternity hospital, and follows him on a sojourn to the red-light district of Dublin. There, Bloom is transformed into a metaphorical animal of sorts when his encounter with the brothel’s Madam stimulates masochistic fantasies—a transformation evocative of Homer’s Circe who turns men into swine. When Stephen gets into a fight with a soldier there, Bloom takes him to his house where they drink a cup of cocoa and appear to find some peace before Stephen goes off into the night.

What about those suitors Odysseus has to fight and kill on his return to Ithaca? It turns out that the loss of the infant son has interfered with the Blooms’ sex life, leaving his wife Molly with little sexual satisfaction, and prompting her to begin an affair with the man who will be taking her on a concert tour. After Bloom gets into bed and goes to sleep, his Penelope will sort through her own complex feelings about her husband and her new lover, and slay the suitor, as it were, in her own way by going to sleep with highly romantic and loving memories of Leopold.

These are the Odyssean contours of Ulysses, although one important difference between the works must be noted. While the Odyssey encompasses a period of 10 years and covers a large geographical territory, Ulysses takes place on a single day—June 16, 1904—spent by the characters entirely in the city of Dublin. This is another example of Joyce’s Classicism, as he adopts the structural principle of unity of time, place, and action mandated by classical literary construction.

Book I

1. Telemachus

I will now explore the three books of Ulysses in some detail. Each one is of different length, with Book I encompassing only three chapters, Book II covering 12 chapters, and Book III, three. The middle section of my discussion will therefore be much longer than the others.

The first chapter of Book I is titled “Telemachus,” and introduces us to Stephen Dedalus on the morning of the day in question, Thursday, June 16, 1904. We meet him at what will turn out to be the flat top of a seaside tower whose “gunrest” indicates that it is a fortress built by the British to protect the Irish coast from a French invasion during the 19th century French Revolutionary wars. It is morning and a young fellow named Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan is shaving and making allusions to the Catholic mass. Stephen is described as “displeased and sleepy” (Ulysses 3), a situation caused by a nightmare triggered by the British visitor named Haines, whose “guncase” made Stephen extremely nervous, and presumably caused him to lose sleep: “Out here in the dark with a man I don’t know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther” (4).

The presence of Haines will not be Stephen’s only source of conflict with his roommate, however. As Mulligan looks at the sea and tropes it as a “mother,” he blurts out “The aunt thinks you killed your mother,” (5) triggering Stephen’s own worst guilt over the possible impact of his refusal to pray at her deathbed. Three conflicts have been laid out here in just the first pages of the work: Stephen’s conflict over, and later with, Haines; his conflict with Mulligan’s insensitive nature; and his conflict with religion which produced a familial conflict with his mother.

Stephen’s conflict with Haines does not erupt until after breakfast when Haines begins to ask Stephen about his faith, and Stephen responds that he is a servant of two masters, “an English and an Italian,” that is, the “Roman catholic and apostolic church,” and the “imperial British state” (17). Presumably, Stephen refers obliquely to the ironic situation that allows the British Oxford student to study and speak Gaelic, while Irish men and women like Stephen and the milk-woman who brings them their morning milk (“I’m ashamed I don’t speak the language myself. I’m told it’s a grand language by them that knows” [13]) have been historically deprived of their native tongue by British rule. This situation has implications for Stephen’s ambitions as an artist because it will oblige him to write in English, his conqueror’s language.

2. Nestor

The political situation confronting young Irishmen like Stephen will emerge again in the next chapter when he goes off to his day job as a teacher in a private school for boys in Dalkey. This second chapter is titled “Nestor” in reference to Telemachus’s journey, which leads him to visit the “master charioteer” Nestor on the Greek mainland in search of his father. Stephen first teaches his class ancient history and then goes on to the topic of literature, which on this morning focuses on John Milton’s elegy “Lycidas.”

Neither history nor literature taught at this Irish school addresses anything pertaining to Ireland on this day. Stephen helps a student who had to rework an assignment, and then is called to the study of the headmaster Mr. Deasy to receive his pay. Like the Homeric Nestor, Mr. Deasy tries to function as a mentor or surrogate father to Stephen, giving him advice about saving money, something his biological father has certainly failed to do. But the discussion is full of hidden conflict with little benefit to Stephen. Mr. Deasy is clearly pro-British, and his citation of “the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth” is highly ironic: “I paid my way” (25). It does prompt Stephen to enumerate his own copious debts in his mind, but of course, England at that time exploited numerous colonies throughout the world to pay its way.

As Deasy goes on to promote the politics of Irish Protestantism and chides Stephen by saying “You fenians forget some things,” Stephen silently recounts historical moments of oppression that counter Deasy’s claims: “The lodge of Diamond in Armagh the splendid behung with corpses of papishes. Hoarse, masked and armed, the planters’ covenant” (26). We see here the important role that Joyce’s use of “stream of consciousness” or “interior monologue” plays at a moment like this in Ulysses, because while Stephen cannot openly argue with the headmaster, he is free to think what he likes, and we are given his resistance and opposition by being privy to his thoughts.

Mr. Deasy clearly serves as neither a worthy mentor nor an inspiring father figure for Stephen, although his most insulting slur will point prophetically in the direction in which he will find such a model. After typing a letter on hoof and mouth disease in cattle that he asks Stephen to deliver to local newspapers, Deasy runs after Stephen to impart a last political axiom. “Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why?” Deasy’s answer is: “Because she never let them in” (30).

What began as a possibly humane historical observation has turned out to be a nasty joke that cracks Deasy up, making him laugh so hard that he coughs up phlegm. Fortunately, the joke’s premise is not true, because the Irish took in a reasonably sizeable Jewish population, and it is in that particular pool that the novel’s Telemachus will find a worthy father figure for Stephen in the person of the Jewish Leopold Bloom.

3. Proteus

The third chapter of Book I, called “Proteus” after a shape-shifting figure in the Odyssey, begins with a line that must come from Stephen’s thoughts, and thereby puts the technique of “stream of consciousness” or “interior monologue” at the forefront of the chapter. “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes” (31). Only the “my” indicates that this is not a third-person narration, and the thoughts that follow make it clear that this is not a conversation but an interior rumination.

The third-person voice does enter in the next paragraph to identify the thinker as Stephen, and so we are launched into a chapter with effectively no dialogue, as Stephen walks alone along Sandymount strand, thinking about this and that, watching two cockle-pickers and their dog approach, and, at one point, sitting down to write a brief poem on a scrap of paper torn from Mr. Deasy’s letter. How does Joyce manage to make an entire chapter grounded in just the thoughts of a single person with few actions and events (many of them trivial, like Stephen picking his nose or urinating) interesting? The answer is in the variety of topics and issues Stephen contemplates, and in the diversity of styles, his thoughts assume as he entertains them. As he thinks about the problem of vision, and the “modality of the visible,” he will open and close his eyes as he walks. When he sees two women coming down to the beach, he invents names, addresses, and occupations for them.

He recounts memories of visits to his uncle’s home, complete with lively conversations, and pokes fun at himself for his youthful pretensions, which have all come to naught. “Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were awfully holy, weren’t you?” (34), the narrative tells us as his consciousness engages in conversation with himself. He had thought of visiting his aunt Sara, but passes the house and goes on, remembering his time in Paris and his friendship with a fellow named Kevin Egan, recalling Egan’s words, “I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell you. I’ll show you my likeness one day” (36). The bloated carcass of a dog on the sand attracts a lively dog who comes bounding toward him, and here we see the narrative’s prose turn protean, using tropes to produce shape-shifting images of the dog as bounding like a “hare,” trotting its “shanks” with its “forehoofs,” panting with a “wolf’s tongue,” and loping off at a “calf’s gallop” (38-9). The dog has been transformed into many animals, suitable for the name by which its owner calls him, “Tatters! Outofthat, you mongrel!” (39).

While remembering a dream he had of being on a “[s]treet of harlots”(39), and thinking of women, Stephen begins to compose a poem that, while perhaps not following the tradition of the Irish writer Bram Stoker, conjures up a vampire. “He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss” (40). Thinking of his own teeth, he wonders if he should use the money he just earned to see a dentist, and the chapter ends, as he looks over his shoulder, to see “a silent ship” (42).

Book II

4. Calypso

The fourth chapter of Ulysses, the first of Book II, begins with a name we have not encountered before: “Mr Leopold Bloom” (45). The three young men in Book I were never referred to as Mr Dedalus, or Mr Haines, so we can infer that this gentleman belongs to the category of Mr Deasy, although the first thing we learn about him is not his occupation but his appetite and taste for food, “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” The narration takes us right into his gut, as it were, and this will be true in more ways than one as the chapter develops.

The setting is a kitchen, where he is preparing breakfast, which explains why he may be thinking of food and why the narration gives us a preview of his upcomin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Praise for Simply Joyce
• Other Great Lives
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: Life and Career
• Dubliners
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Ulysses
• Finnegans Wake
• Joyce’s Legacy
• Suggested Reading
• About the Author
• A Word from the Publisher