Why Ulysses?

Why read Ulysses? 

Most people do it to signal to others that they are smart. However, Joyce didn't intend his book to be read only by elite academic types. He was very open to ideas and engaged with anyone and everyone from the window cleaner to the waiter at his favorite Parisian haunts. He did want to keep the professors busy but he truly believed that this book would speak to everyone. 

The second type of people to read the book are those motivated by the transgressive nature of the work - against religion, against "decency" and "morality." Anne Enright talks about why her mother didn't want her to read it at the age of 14 - it was full of "scatology" from picking noses to making water to the unholy noises our bodies make. Not to mention the sex (mostly implied). Molly's soliloquy at the end can be read as the work of a protofeminist on women's sexual liberation or as the work of a misogynist. But these are debates held in universities where Joycean professors have mystified the work to the extent that no average person wants to read it out of the fear they will never be able to understand it.

In the last post I said it was totally worth reading Ulysses. In this one I plan to elaborate why. But before I get into that here is a quick primer

Background:

Recount the main events of The Odyssey - which at its crux is about the warrior Odysseus reuniting with his son Telemachus and his faithful wife Penelope after 20 years. He fought in Troy for 10 years and when Troy fell he starts on his return to Ithaca which takes him another 10 years. It takes that long because he is held captive by Calypso, has to deal with one-eyed Cyclops, Lestrygonians, Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, gets blown off course by Aeolus and has numerous other (mis) adventures.

Joyce took the Odyssey and made a few tweaks. Replace:

• 10 years with 1 day - June 16th 1904 - the day Joyce walked out with his future wife Nora who to put it nicely brought love into his life - the day that is celebrated all over the world as Bloomsday
  
• Greece with 1904 Dublin
• Odysseus with Leopold Bloom, a 38 year old middle-aged Jewish ad agent who is very ordinary
  
• Telemachus with Stephen Dedalus a 23 year old struggling writer who is looking for a father figure in his life (think of him as a younger Joyce)
  
• Penelope with Molly Bloom the 34 year old singer and wife of Leopold Bloom who is going to commit adultery at 4pm on June 16th

Now take the traditional novel form and dismantle it completely. Throw in a bunch of references to Shakespeare, Dante, Mozart and Verdi, Catholicism, Irish Nationalism, Colonialism etc. Use stream of consciousness to narrate the inner thoughts of the lead characters, eliminate punctuation, get rid of chapter titles, write each chapter in a new form, throw in parodies and don't hesitate to include references to scat and sex liberally - what do you have - the most modern and timeless epic written for modern times. A book that broke every barrier and liberated all writers. A book that inspired everyone from Hemingway to Scott Fitzgerald all the way to every modern Irish writer.  A book that remains so gosh darn difficult to read while at the same time has some of the most beautiful sentences in the English language and is capable of making you laugh, feel disgusted, angry but also warms your heart and teaches you a number of life lessons along the way. 

When I finished the book and tried to think of what it meant to me I realized that it moved me because it celebrates the everyday life of the average human being who is not a hero in any sense of the word and whose world is filled with ordinary events. As I near my 50 I realize I have lived an ordinary life and have achieved nothing extraordinary but have mostly tried to do my best with the cards I have which is just about what almost everyone else (except for the heroes amongst us) is trying to do too. So the book is for the bourgeois, the average people and how we deal with life. Along the way there are invaluable lessons - lessons on grief - what it means to lose a parent, a child - the effect of loss of a child on relationship, friendships, infidelity, what it means to be an outsider, a citizen, what does civic engagement look like, how do you talk to people who are unlike you, how to repair relationships, how can you be non-violent in a violent world and what it means to make and enjoy art.

Bloom has numerous problems of his own - he is an outsider whose loyalty to Ireland is constantly questioned, people are mocking him behind his back as he is a cuckold, he is not the most educated man one could meet and had never been to university. He is dealing with his father's suicide, the death of his son and the effect that had on his marital relationship. His daughter has recently moved out of his house to make her own way in the world. He has to satisfy unhappy bosses and deal with people he has loaned money to. He is weird and has a number of weird fetishes and also harbors illusions about his own talent. But despite all this he is engaged with the world - he hasn't rejected it. He still has time to check in on a friend struggling to give birth after a hard 3-day labor, worry about the financial well-being of a family that lost its main breadwinner and contribute to a fund to support that family, come up with half-baked ways to improve Dublin's transportation system, its hospitals and even its brothels. He talks to people who hate his guts because that is what we do to stay engaged in our communities. And he picks up young Stephen and shows him a way to engage with his life not with great philosophy but by just being there and offering a cup of cocoa. Stephen is angry at everyone - his so called friends, the headmaster at the school he teaches, at Ireland for not recognizing an artist like him, at the two masters who rule Ireland - England and Rome. But anger and rejection are not enough and that perhaps is the biggest lesson to take from Ulysses. 

When we think of climate change, extreme polarization, racism, sexism or our personal/ professional disappointments it is very easy to become paralyzed. Joyce's earlier work Dubliners captured this paralysis beautifully. But as Joyce matured and wrote Ulysses under terrible physical pain, mental stress and financial and legal troubles he is calling on us to affirm life - the life around us today, right now, with all its imperfections. Is it any surprise that the book ends with a resounding Yes!