Abstract
On 16 June 2004 in the city of Dublin, Ireland, thousands of people will congregate for a day-long celebration. They will eat fried offal – mostly kidneys – for breakfast, walk around the Martello Tower and along Sandycove Beach, cross the squares and streets of central Dublin, drink large volumes of Irish beer and whiskey and have public readings of the novel they come to celebrate. For this is the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, the day in June 1904 in which James Joyce's epic novel Ulysses is set.
Bloomsday is an international event with celebrations and readings held in cities as diverse as Sydney, Toronto, Sacramento and Zurich. Like that other quintessentially Irish event, St Patrick's Day, it is in danger of becoming commercialized, attracting people who have little or no knowledge of Joyce's works, let alone read Ulysses.
Why should psychiatrists read – or write – about a book depicting fictional events a century ago? Partly because, in its pages, Joyce provided a fresh perspective regarding mental phenomena and the workings of the mind. Ulysses defined the new 20th century, in parallel with events such as the Wright brothers' flight, Einstein's discovery of relativity and Freud's revelation of the unconscious. Modernist geniuses Picasso and Joyce followed similar paths in their respective media to show that human perceptions could no longer be described from a fixed external stand-point. 1 Joyce used the stream-of-consciousness technique to show the conscious mind as a palimpsest of swirling thoughts that do not necessarily follow logical or grammatical patterns. No other novel has ever done this.
Joyce wanted to create an account of a modern hero for the dawning 20th century and he wanted it based in a city. 2 Ulysses is based on Homer's Odyssey, the epic account of the 18 year wanderings of the hero of Troy, who was finally reunited with his wife Penelope and their son Telemachus.
Joyce was determined to break the shackles of the past, both literary and colonial, and write the literary masterpiece of the 20th century. In doing so, ‘He destroyed the nineteenth century’, T S Elliot told a disgusted
Virginia Woolf and literature would never be the same.
Ulysses has a logical place in the development of the intensely autobiographical Joyce's work. By 1904, the young writer's life was in a trough. He had been called back from Paris by his father's telegram: mother dying come home father. Her death from cancer left him racked with guilt, his drunken father allowed the family to go to rack and ruin. Dependent for money and handouts on a patronizing friend, the medical student Buck Mulligan, he is suffocated by Dublin's oppressiveness and yearns to escape. 3
On 10 June, walking past Finn's Hotel with a friend, his eye fell on a striking young woman with an erect carriage, deep blue eyes and auburn hair. An uneducated girl from Galway, she worked as a chamber maid at the hotel. They struck up a conversation and arranged to meet. From his nautical cap and canvas shoes, she thought he must be a sailor. However, she did not turn up for the meeting, leaving Joyce to write her an anguished letter.
They went out together on 16 June, taking a walk in the deserted Ringsend area. 4 Intimacy took place and she gave Joyce manual sexual relief, the first sex he had not paid for. He was immediately smitten, as was she. The conversation they started that day only ended with Joyce's death in 1940. The young woman's name was Nora Barnacle and Joyce immortalized their first meeting as the date on which Ulysses is set.
Now that he had found his muse, Joyce was free to escape ‘the dead centre of paralysis’ to Europe: I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning. James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Viking, 1964.
The Joyce clan gathered at the docks to farewell the young artist, Nora staying hidden to maintain propriety. 5 John Joyce was not fooled, saying prophetically ‘She'll stick to him for the rest of her life.’ The couple ended up in Trieste, where Joyce eked out a living teaching at a Berlioz school. Until 1920, when they settled in Paris, they led something of an Odyssean life, living in Rome and Pola, as well as several years in neutral Zurich.
By 1914, Joyce was coming into his own. Despite difficulties with publication, A Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners were complete, he was making a name as a writer of promise and attracting sponsors to relieve his chronic penury.
The Dead, the peerless coda in Dubliners, is a prelude to Ulysses. At the end of the night, Gabrielle Conroy, shocked by the discovery that his wife had been in love with a young man who died of pneumonia after singing outside her window, stares out the window at the falling snow. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. James Joyce. Dubliners. New York: Viking, 1968.
In three masterful paragraphs, Joyce takes the reader from the darkened hotel room to a universal plane in time and space where the distinction between the living and the dead is merely one of impermeability.
He started work on Ulysses, completed in 1921. The cosmopolitan polylingual atmosphere of Trieste, where he mixed with Italians, Austrians, Jews, Greeks and Slavs, had a significant influence, as did his flirtation with Amalia Popper (whose Jewish father was named Leopoldo). 6
The idea for Ulysses went back to Dublin days. After a drunken collapse in the street, Joyce was assisted up and dusted off ‘in orthodox Samaritan fashion’ by a Mr Hunter, a Jewish dentist reputed to have an unfaithful wife. Joyce originally intended it as a story in Dubliners, but held it over for the novel.
Dublin, his ideal location, is a city filled with characters (not least of which was his father, 7 Simon Dedalus in the book); it is small enough to be manageable and left to slumber on the south-western margin of Europe, rather than be overshadowed by grand historical events.
Ulysses is about one day in the lives of three Dublin characters: Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and his wife, Marian or Molly Bloom. The two male characters cross paths during the day but have no contact until the night, when Mr Bloom rescues a drunken Stephen Dedalus in a brothel and takes him home. What was Stephen's auditive sensation? He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation of the past. What was Bloom's visual sensation? He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future. James Joyce. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Stephen declines the offer to stay and goes out into the night, leaving Mr Bloom to be interrogated by his wife in bed.
Acutely aware of the classical role in defining 19th century consciousness, Joyce wanted to show that the epic and the heroic is in our lives every day. Taking from Homer, Renan's ‘Life of Jesus’ and Hamlet (to mention but a few), he chose as his modern hero a deracinated Hungarian Jew, truly marginal in a city where Catholic and Protestant antagonism simmered.
Leopold Bloom (his father changed his name from Virag) sells newspaper advertising. He is cuckolded by his wife and they have not had sex together for 11 years since his son Rudi died 11 days after birth. He fears that their 15-year-old daughter Milly will go the way of her mother.
Mr Bloom is kind, tolerant, thoughtful and believes there is a scientific explanation for everything. Most of all, he survives by his wits in a hostile environment, embodying the Odyssean virtues of silence, exile and cunning. He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He's not one of your common or garden … you know … There's a touch of the artist about old Bloom. James Joyce. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
We see the final appearance of the character Stephen Dedalus, first featured in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Viking, 1964.
An artist in the making, Stephen is adrift. The death of his mother left him bereft, he is surrounded by usurpers, has not known love and must find his father to set him free …
Bloom and Dedalus experience a mundane series of events: a funeral, teaching a class, a newspaper office meeting, drinking in pubs, a birth, a visit to a brothel. In addition, there is the rumour that Mr Bloom had inside information on the winner of a horse race; the attempt to find the body of a drowned man; Stephen's fear that he is surrounded by traitors and cannot stay at the Martello Tower; Mr Bloom's voyeuristic encounter with a young girl on a swing; the mystery of the identity of the man in the raincoat at the funeral; and a thousand brief encounters with minor characters who fill the pages.
After a cameo appearance in the morning, Molly Bloom is absent until the final Penelope chapter, having the stage to herself as she lies in bed. During the day, she is not inactive. She is seldom far from Mr Bloom's thoughts and he is all too well aware that she is planning a liaison in the afternoon with Blazes Boylan, the latest in a long line of lovers.
Earthy, lascivious, passionate, Molly Bloom is Gea-Tellus, the Earth Mother. Surrounded by would-be and past lovers, she is ultimately cynical of men. Comparing them to Leopold Bloom, the memories of past encounters tumbling over her thoughts, she sees in him the qualities she desires. In her postcoital preslumber reiterations, Mr Bloom slays Penelope's suitors not by violence but with a moral victory: well as well him as another … James Joyce. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Joyce combined two literary styles, symbolism and naturalism, using the stream-of-consciousness technique in a unique manner. 8 The reader is both in the detached hands of the writer and the mind of the character depicted. Thoughts tumble, twist, slide and flow. We inhabit their minds in a way that has never been done before in literature.
Nothing was left to chance in Ulysses; Joyce filled 12 volumes of notes for the novel. He liked to say that in centuries to come it would be possible to reconstruct the Dublin of 1904 from the book and, aside from the closure of some pubs, this promise is largely true.
No word, sentence or paragraph is unintended; there are no coincidences. We see the ship masts on the horizon in the early morning, the boat has docked by afternoon and the skipper encounters Stephen and Bloom in the Cabman's shelter late that night. The contrast with Proust, whose vague reminiscences float in time, is significant.
Looking at the ‘white breast of the dim sea’ from the Martello Tower gunrest, Stephen's thoughts drift to memories of his dying mother, who constantly comes back to haunt him from the grave, the liliata a background threnody: Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes. James Joyce. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Joyce gives one of the great literary descriptions of grief.
The symbolism is pervasive, multifaceted and precisely derived. Each chapter in the book corresponds with the Homeric equivalent, albeit to a varying extent. The ‘Cyclops’ character is the bigoted ultranationalistic Citizen, one-eyed in his fanaticism, who chases Mr Bloom out of the pub hurling biscuits, instead of rocks. The ‘Circe’ episode (where men are drugged and turned into swine) takes place in night-town, the brothel area of Dublin.
But there is more, much more, to Ulysses than stunning literary feats. It is not just the thoughts and feelings of the characters but the sights, smells, sounds and music of a city. Joyce combined great psychological insight with acute observational skills. There are vivid descriptions of sex acts, reflecting Joyce's determination to show every aspect of human life without restraint. Bodily functions are described in detail. Sitting on a rock at Sandymount Beach, Stephen picks his nose while trying to parse lines of
poetry. Mr Bloom reads the paper on the toilet and struggles to control a fart after eating a cheese sandwich with a glass of burgundy. Immersed in the warm water of a Turkish bath, he stares down at his bush, ‘the languid floating father of thousands’. Lying in bed, Molly Bloom starts menstruating and has to use the chamber pot.
Joyce, an extraordinary polylinguist, wrote each chapter in a different style. The ‘Oxen of the sun’ episode (Mr Bloom sits in on a drunken medical students' party at the lying-in hospital while a baby is being born), starts with early Anglo-Saxon, the language following the development of English to parallel the growth of the fetus in the womb. ‘Circe’, written in dramatic form, has a dreamy hallucinatory style to represent the lateness of the hour and Stephen's drunken state.
‘The Sirens’, admittedly one of the most difficult chapters to read, is an elaborate attempt to imitate musical forms with words.
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There are two siren barmaids, a blind piano tuner and much song. The elaborate musical devices resemble an orchestral overture: At each slow satiny heaving bosom's wave [her heaving embon] red rose rose slowly, sank red rose. Heartbeats: her breath: breath that is life. and all the tiny fernfoils of maidenhair. Bronze by gold heard ironsteel. James Joyce. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
‘Penelope’ is written entirely in stream-of-consciousness style. To reveal Molly's thoughts, Joyce virtually scraps punctuation. There are only eight long sentences, ending in the eternal affirmation: yes.
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.
James Joyce. Ulysses.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
After Ulysses was published to critical acclaim, Joyce achieved fame, becoming a leading light in between-the-wars Paris, but he knew little happiness. Nora did not take kindly to her depiction as Molly Bloom, complaining that she was fat and ugly. To Joyce's distress, she never read the book, either because it was too long or she suspected (rightly) that there were accurate depictions of their sex life. His daughter Lucia was eventually institutionalized with schizo-phrenia, the relationship with Nora became more distant and his health crumbled. 10 Joyce devoted the next 17 years to writing Finnegans Wake, the dream book of the night that left readers – those who could complete it – bewildered and critics dismissive. Time will tell.
Ulysses is a rich literary feast, apt to deter the beginner but mastered with some persistence and guidance beforehand. Dense, polymorphic, at times infuriating and littered with obscure references, Ulysses remains unique, perhaps the ultimate novel. Although it is easy to get caught up in the stylistic pyrotechnics, it is ultimately an intensely human tale of universal significance. 11
Almost everything Joyce wrote is considered a masterpiece, yet it is Ulysses we commemorate every Bloomsday. It provides a fictional anchor for a turbulent century in which it is all too easy to lose sight of the classical past. On Bloomsday we celebrate not only the genius of a writer who was the literary equivalent of Picasso but also the certainty that it is times that change, not humanity.