Happy Birthday, James Joyce and Ulysses!

February 2, 2023 marked the 101st anniversary of the publication in book form of James Joyce’s magnum opus Ulysses. (It had been serialized previously in a journal called The Little Review starting in 1918.) Joyce contrived to have his modern re-telling of Homer’s Odyssey published on February 2 because it was his 40th birthday. Joyce’s birthday is not the only date of personal significance to him that played a role in the saga of the writing of Ulysses: An even more salient date had a part. (More on that below). 

It’s difficult to think of a 20th-century literary novel more influential than Ulysses. Some, doubtless, are more popular, have sold better over the years; but aficionados of Ulysses tend to be borderline-fanatical about their beloved epic. Every year, on June16, the day in 1904 on which the events in Ulysses take place (and which Joyce encouraged his acolytes to call “Bloomsday”, a challenge legions of readers of Ulysses accepted and embraced), there are public readings of it around the world; people go on pilgrimages to Dublin to visit the many Ulysses-related sites; amateur actors dress up as Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom and perform parts of Ulysses in the streets of Dublin; and there are, naturally, Ulysses-themed pub crawls1.

Ulysses is famous—or, depending on your perspective, infamous—for a number of reasons, but perhaps chief among them is Joyce’s use of the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, a challenging approach for readers which puts them inside the minds of his characters. (And Ulysses has a lot of characters.) Joyce’s version of the technique, which he preferred to call “interior monologue”, is particularly daunting because he makes no effort to tidy up his characters’ thoughts by rendering them in complete phrases or sentences. Joyce, in an attempt to keep these thoughts as unmediated as possible, instead gives readers the raw material of his characters’ thoughts, without any author-added connective tissue2. 

People tend to think in a disjointed, nonlinear manner; the smallest of prompts may bring to mind complex memories, idiosyncratic concepts, and Byzantine associations. Thus, as Stephen Dedalus walks along the beach in episode3 III of Ulysses, Joyce tasks readers with parsing this snapshot of Stephen’s thoughts:

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Readers are left on their own to figure out that Stephen is thinking about, among other things, certain ideas in the philosophical writings of Aristotle (Stephen obliquely identifies Aristotle as his subject when he thinks of Dante’s phrase in the Divine Comedy regarding Aristotle: “maestro di color che sanno”—”the master of those who know”—and he also references the traditional Mediaeval belief that Aristotle was bald and rich) having to do with how we perceive reality, specifically through sight (“Ineluctable modality of the visible…[which is] thought through my eyes”); which leads him to close his eyes and experiment with how he will perceive the world without the benefit of sight (“Shut your eyes and see”). Stephen’s thoughts do not get any easier to understand as the chapter progresses; Ulysses is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an easy read.

Joyce’s earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is a künstlerroman featuring the same Stephen Dedalus we encounter in the opening chapters of Ulysses. Stephen is an important character in Ulysses but he is not its hero. Readers don't meet the true protagonist of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, until Episode IV. Bloom’s thoughts are far easier to follow than Stephen’s because Bloom, while intelligent, is not an intellectual artist-manqué, like Stephen. His thoughts are more down-to-earth, practical, direct—pedestrian, even. And yet, as one of the other characters in the novel remarks: “There’s a touch of the artist about Bloom.”

Indeed there is, and that’s not by accident. There’s a touch of just about everything about Bloom: In the course of the novel we learn he is father and son; Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic; cuckolded husband but also unfaithful himself, in that he is carrying on his own epistolary affair; lover of art and music; sadist and masochist (Joyce named him after the author of the S&M classic Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sachor-Masoch, whose name became an eponym for the fetish of deriving sexual gratification from pain and humiliation); coward and vanquisher of monsters (he defeats a modern day cyclops); and he even switches genders at one point (long story; suffice to say some really weird stuff goes down in the phantasmagoric Circe episode).

Stephen Dedalus is a stand-in for the artist-author Joyce—true in Ulysses but especially so in Portrait. Yet Portrait is about the artist as a young man. Ulysses, in a sense, is Joyce completing that portrait by filling in the characteristics Stephen needs to become a complete man so that he can become a mature artist. Leopold Bloom embodies these missing qualities and much of Ulysses consists of missed meetings between Stephen and Bloom, who are, it seems, fated to meet, to effect this artistic synthesis; there are a number oftimes when they nearly run into each other but don’t quite. They don’t meet until the last quarter of the novel. And even then, the event is seemingly anti-climactic. (There’s a lot of seeming in Ulysses; but don’t be fooled.) Yet it is clear, to put it in the crudest terms, that Bloom is what Stephen needs in order to become Joyce. Ulysses contains multitudes, but it is also, paradoxically, solipsistic: It is about Ireland; it is about the modern world; it is about a latter-day heroic quest; but it is also about James Joyce.

As night begins to fall, Bloom follows Stephen and, at the end of the Circe episode, rescues him after Stephen has been assaulted by a soldier in Dublin’s red light district. In a very affecting scene, a physically exhausted Bloom stands over Stephen’s unconscious body and has a vision of his own son, Rudy, who died in infancy. Bloom sees him as he would be now: 

(Silent, thoughtful, alert, he [Bloom] stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)

BLOOM (Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly.) Rudy!

RUDY (Gazes unseeing into Bloom's eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauveface. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet howknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)

Bloom, bereft father, finds a son; Stephen, young man in search of a replacement for the “consubstantial” father he has grown estranged from, is adopted by his spiritual father.

Stephen is an incomplete man. We see him, at 22, essentially at war with the physical world. He has not eaten solid food in days, is wasting away, and views the material world as a realm of impermanence and corruption. As we see from his interior monologue in the third episode4, he is all intellect, all thought. Joyce, in correspondence with friends, assigned certain meanings and symbols to each of the episodes of Ulysses: Each is, for example, associated with a bodily organ...with the significant exception of the first three, the episodes that focus on Stephen. Joyce presents Stephen as not yet fully-formed; he is, in a sense, not part of the corporeal world, the world of meat and organs and blood and sinew and, yes, death. He is still haunted by the death of his mother, who recently passed away from cancer. We learn early on in Ulysses—a couple of pages into Episode I, in fact—of the circumstances of her death:

—The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he [i.e., Buck Mulligan, Stephen’s roommate] said. That’s why she won’t let me have anything to do with you.

—Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.

—You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. ... But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you …

Refusing to kneel, Stephen coldly values his own sense of integrity over his mother’s dying wish. The “spirit of reconciliation”—with the physical world, with family, with the inevitability of aging and death—that Stephen so admires in the later plays of Shakespeare (as we learn in the Scylla and Charybdis episode, when Stephen regales his audience with his Shakespeare theory) has not yet taken hold in Stephen himself. To become capable of using his genius to reflect and illuminate the world through his art, Stephen must first embrace that world fully, “corrupt” though it be.

Compare the above with the first lines of Episode IV (“Calypso”, which Joyce associates with the kidney), in which we first meet Leopold Bloom:

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

These are not the tastes of a man who has failed to reconcile himself to the somatic realities of the physical world. They are, instead, those of a man who revels in them. Bloom’s view of the world is almost mechanistic at times, as he demonstrates in the Hades episode when he ruminates about the purpose and meanings of the human heart:

Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here [Bloom is in a cemetery, attending the burial of an acquaintance who has died of a heart attack]: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps.

But unlike Stephen, Bloom is not troubled by the ultimate frailty of the physical world. He takes comfort in its reliability. He acknowledges death as a reality and a finality but it does not haunt him or intimidate him. (He even jokes about the possibility of life after death: The allegedly resurrected “Lazarus...came fifth and lost the job.”) Bloom is the embodiment, the very soul of reconciliation and acceptance.

Bloom, we learn through the course of the day, is a man of compassion, outgoing, an appreciator of the arts, highly intelligent, and libidinous—but not excessively so. At the time of the initial publication of Ulysses, much was made of its sexual content, its alleged “obscenity”. In fact, the novel could not legally be published in the United States until after a celebrated 1933 court case (United States v. One Book Called Ulysses) in which the judge ruled that “whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac”—meaning, Ulysses may occasionally make you want to vomit, but it won’t titillate you, so it is not obscene. This was an important decision, for Joyce intends Bloom to be an example of l’homme moyens sensuel: the average sensual man. Yes, Bloom thinks about sex—maybe even a lot (however you choose to define “a lot”); but no more than the average man. Sexuality is a necessary part of a complete man, and Bloom is Joyce’s attempt to give an accounting of the average man’s sexuality. Portraying Bloom in the fullness of his humanity requires Joyce to depict him in just about every imaginable circumstance, not just vis-à-vis his sexuality. Joyce shies away from nothing, which led a squeamish H.G. Wells, in his largely positive review of Portrait, to accuse Joyce (and the Irish, in general) of a “cloacal obsession”: “He would bring back into the general picture of life aspects which modern drainage and modern decorum have taken out of ordinary intercourse and conversation.” Indeed he would; and if you thought Portrait was cloaca-obsessed, H.G., just wait till you get a load of Ulysses! In the latter work, Joyce leans still further into this “cloacal obsession”,going so far as to co-opt the phrase in one episode, saying (with Wells obviously in mind) that a preoccupation with “water closets” is a peculiarly English obsession.

Joyce is making something in Ulysses and, in a sense, the thing he is making is...James Joyce himself. Stephen Dedalus, the uncompromising, self-obsessed, intellectually-gifted, literary pretender of Joyce’s Portrait, meets with the literary manifestation of the more mature qualities that the 40-year-old Joyce knows are needed to become an actual producer of worthwhile modern literary art. Leopold Bloom, the Everyman, the complete man, the man who gives tangible form to the spirit of reconciliation that Stephen clearly lacks, epitomizes these qualities.

Joyce solemnifies—or perhaps mock-solemnifies—the convergence of the two personalities in a faux-Eucharistic ritual at Bloom’s home, where Bloom, having failed earlier to get Stephen to eat solid food, prepares for them both some powdered cocoa, a “decocted beverage [...] allowing for subsolid residual sediment of a mechanical mixture”. That is, when mixed with water, powdered cocoa doesn’t stay mixed: Bloom, by getting Stephen to consume “the creature cocoa”, feeds him his first solid food in days without Bloom’s (or Stephen’s) even realizing he’s done so, in a secular communion that has a suggestion of immanence about it, as Stephen, the creature of thought/spirit, takes a small symbolic step toward becoming whole and “of the flesh”.

June 16, 1904 is the day on which Joyce had his first date with Nora Barnacle, the woman who would become his life-long companion, the mother of his children and, eventually, his wife. It is the day that the 22-year-old James Joyce took his first small step toward becoming a more complete man, and therefore a better artist.

It is also, as we have seen, the day on which the events of Ulysses are set. Joyce could offer Nora no greater honor than this admission that it was her presence in his life, her love, that made him a true artist and a complete man. 

Selected Resources

Joyce, James. Ulysses

Bloom, Harold, ed. James Joyce’s Ulysses

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. The definitive biography, a 1983 update of the 1959 publication.

Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study

- by Tom., Hopewell Branch