James Joyce's "Ulysses": Everybody Thinks It's Wonderful, But No One Actually Reads It
Because it's unreadable. And the sex is kind of disgusting.
Today is “Bloomsday,” which means that literary enclaves around the word will be celebrating the date--June 16, 1904—on which the entire action of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses takes place, in the city of Dublin where Joyce was born. Indeed, in Dublin itself, Bloomsday, although not an official Irish holiday, seems to have outpaced St. Patrick’s Day in the intensity of Irish-identity festal observances connected with it.
Bloomsday 2023 in Dublin, for example, will actually consist of a 19-day gala of plays, musical performances, film-fests, and walking tours closely and not-so-closely linked to the 1922 novel. On June 16 itself, hordes of Dubliners and tourists alike are expected to deck themselves in Edwardian costumes, breakfast on the grilled kidneys favored by Ulysses’s cuckolded co-protagonist Leopold Bloom (although not, one hopes, with “the fine tang of faintly scented urine” that made the innards so appetizing to Bloom), drink like fish from dawn until midnight at the pubs, and make a pilgrimage to the Martello tower where Joyce’s fictional youthful alter ego in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, lived with his bumptious roommate Buck Mulligan. The tower is now a James Joyce Museum and has been furnished to be an exact replica (if there can be such a thing) of the fictional Dedalus-Mulligan living quarters.
Ulysses was banned for obscenity in the U.S. and the U.K. shortly after its initial publication, and although it was never officially banned in Ireland, Irish customs officials for decades seized any copy of the Paris-published novel they came across. But that was then, and the once-almost Jansenistically Catholic Ireland is now thoroughly secularized, with Catholic Mass attendance on Sundays in some Dublin parishes as low as 2 percent. Let the good times roll!
There is one thing, however, that few of the cosplayers and kidney-eaters will have done: actually read Ulysses itself. Sure, some of them will have made it through the first few chapters of Joyce’s 700-page doorstopper (“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan” at his shaving bowl, Dedalus walking along the Sandycove beach), although such sentence-clusters as this:
His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her moomb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayaway.
might have sent them back to the tap for another pint. They might also have dipped into adulterous-wife Molly Bloom’s famous “stream-of-consciousness” soliloquy that forms Ulysses’s last chapter. Although probably not the whole 40-page thing, which can be rough going in its stream-of-consciousness format, but certainly the orgasmic finale, memorialized for posterity in The Family of Man, the 1955 photography book that graced the coffee table of every college professor in Silent Generation America: “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.” But that’s usually about it.
The candor with which self-proclaimed Joyce enthusiasts admit they have never gotten far into Ulysses is amazing. National Geographic contributor Edmund Vallance, writing a piece timed with the 2022 centennial of the novel’s publication, called Ulysses a “modernist masterpiece” but admitted that “in my dim-witted forties, I was still struggling with ‘the ineluctable modality of the audible,’ and was less than confident about [such Joyce coinings as] ‘contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality.’” And he was someone who actually made it through the book after several false starts. The Guardian’s Sian Cain, celebrating the 75th anniversary of Joyce’s death in 2016, confessed: “I’ve opened Ulysses twice, determined to finish it, and achieved getting all the way to page 46.” He had been preceded by none other than D.H. Lawrence: “I am sorry, but I am one of the people who can’t read Ulysses.” And also Virginia Woolf: “I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first 2 or 3 chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
I am one of the few living people (besides Vallance) who managed to get through Ulysses to the bitter end. I had to—it was on the required summer reading list between junior and senior years for my college English honors program, and I had to take a test on it and other major English-language works in the fall. That summer I was also on a college trip to classical sites in Greece and Italy, so I crammed my Ulysses reading into breaks at Delphi, Pompeii, and elsewhere. I admit it: I was mostly just turning pages. I hardly could follow a word (see the above-quoted verbiage for why). And since I was relatively innocent in carnal matters (I had put on the freshman 15—or 30, let’s be honest—and could scarcely get a date), nearly all the sex went over my head. When reading the “Nausicaa” passage in Ulysses, I thought it was all about the romantic fantasy of a teen-age girl, Gerty MacDowell, that an older man—Leopold Bloom—might be admiring her from a distance, inspiring her to show off her knickers, so I failed to catch Joyce’s revelation that Bloom, well into his 40s, was masturbating behind a rock throughout the incident. But my professors had assured me that Ulysses was a great work of literature, so I ginned up some clever thoughts about it that I could incorporate into my exam answers.
There is a reason why so few people have managed to finish Ulysses: It is essentially unreadable. It is not quite the word-salad of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939), a Sargasso Sea out of which almost no one has emerged alive. But readers whose English teachers have put Ulysses up there with Hamlet and Middlemarch should be forewarned: Ulysses has no plot whatsoever. Nor does it feature any character development or even character explication. It is supposed to be a recapitulation, for modern times, of Homer’s Odyssey (hence the title, the Latin version of Odysseus’ name), with Bloom as the roaming eponymous hero, Dedalus as his son, Telemachus, who embarks on a search for his lost father, and Molly as Odysseus’ wife, Penelope. Joyce even composed a list of titles for sections of his novel that corresponded to sections of the Odyssey (“Nausicaa,” etc), although he neglected to include those titles in the published version of his book (that would have made it too easy!), leaving that task to generations of English professors.
But while the Odyssey is full of exciting adventures as Odysseus wends his way from the Trojan War to his home in Ithaca—shipwrecks, sirens, disguises, the sorceress Circe, and the flesh-eating giant Polyphemus into whose single eye Odysseus plunges a burning stake—nothing much happens in Ulysses. Bloom finishes his kidney breakfast and, although he supposedly has a job as a newspaper advertising salesman, he actually spends the day wandering around Dublin thinking about the fact that Molly, a sometime singer and full-time slattern, will be using his absence to climb into the sack with the flashy impresario Blazes Boylan. Like Bloom, Dedalus is eating breakfast at the beginning of the novel, in the company of Mulligan, a motormouth who never shuts up nattering not-very-funny parodies of the Catholic Church’s rituals and beliefs (Joyce had a problem with Catholicism). Dedalus spends the rest of the day day ambling around Dublin thinking about his recently deceased mother and wondering what to do with himself. If you’ve read Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a prelude to Ulysses, you’ll remember that it ends with Dedalus vowing to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Well, in Ulysses, he still hasn’t gotten around to that forging; instead, like Bloom, he just takes long walks.
Eventually (which means hundreds of pages later), Bloom and Dedalus encounter each other for the first time at a brothel in Dublin’s “Nighttown” red-light district (Joyce was a frequenter of brothels, so he made his two protagonists frequent them as well). Dedalus is by this time drunk as a skunk, so Bloom takes him to his home to sober up. Bloom then crawls into bed next to Molly and notices Boylan’s semen stains all over the sheets (they can’t be his, because around Molly he’s impotent). And that’s it—oh, except for that 40-page Molly soliloquy (warning to readers: except for a final period, it has no punctuation whatsoever). As you can see, Molly may be “Penelope,” but she’s not exactly the Penelope of the Odyssey, who spends 20 years warding off hordes of suitors while faithfully waiting for her husband to return from Troy. And Bloom is certainly no Odysseus, who kills every last one of those suitors when he gets home and then jumps into bed to impale his wife. Which would you rather read, the Odyssey or Ulysses?
Since Molly's soliloquy comes at the very end of Ulysses, you have to plow through many other versions of Joyce’s signature stream-of-consciousness style, although usually with more punctuation. It’s actually fake stream-of-consciousness (who actually thinks “blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayaway”?), but it had a profound and negative effect on later modernist writers, such as William Faulkner, who was infinitely more talented than Joyce and actually knew how to tell a story. Interspersed with these exercises in indecipherability are show-off-y and only mildly amusing stylistic parodies of newspaper articles, ladies’ magazine fiction (the Gerty MacDowell interlude), and the Catholic catechism, as well as a 30-page scholarly discussion of Hamlet and an entire 150-page play, complete with stage directions.
Finally, the ghastly puns, the oh-so-clever and usually obscure allusions to every book Joyce ever read in his life (more fodder for the Joyce industry in academia), and the pointlessly telescoped words: Why did Joyce have to write “strandentwining” and “navelcord”? Why wouldn’t “strand-entwining” and “navel cord” do? (Dedalus here is doing something stream-of-consciousness about knitting, midwives, his mother, Eve, the Virgin Mary—you figure it out.) The invented words and portmanteaux are supposed to open up the imagination to new layers of meaning, but in fact they circumscribe and limit it. In a famous critique of Finnegans Wake, Dorothy Sayers pointed out Joyce had designed his coined word “thunderstrok” to call to mind the Norse god Thor as well as celestial rumbling—but as she noted, plain old “thunderstroke” accomplished the same thing—and “also every verbal and visual image accrued to it through many centuries, from Jupiter Tonans to the cannon in the Valley of Death, from Job and the Psalms to the two Boanerges and the apocalyptic thunderings that proceeded out of the Throne.”
Let’s face it: Almost no one would get to the first page of Ulysses, much less write such encomia to Joyce as “He looks into nullity, and finds there a lovely nothing” (Louis Menand in 2012, adding that Ulysses may be “the greatest work of prose fiction ever written in the English language”) were it not for the novel's naughty bits. During the 1920s Ulysses was a book you heard about from an arty friend and then traveled to Paris to buy a copy of which from Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, its publisher, and smuggle it back Stateside if you could. You were daringly defying convention in the service of high culture—assured of that by such Joyce-admiring luminaries as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. And there’s sex aplenty to be had in Ulysses, with this hitch: Almost all of it is disgusting, macerated in Joyce’s fascination with stained sheets, soiled underwear, peeping through keyholes, private and public masturbation (Gerty McDowell again), and above all, toilets or their equivalent. A recent Medium article titled “Top 10 Dirtiest Parts of James Joyce’s Ulysses” gives all the details, with extensive quotations. There you can read Joyce’s loving descriptions of Bloom emptying his bowels, Bloom and Dedalus urinating together, and Bloom ruminating on women’s rumps and what comes out of them. It is fair to speculate that Joyce had a coprophiliac fetish.
It is also fair to surmise that the reason Joyce was fixated on brothels—and got to know them personally starting as a teenager—was that they featured women without sexual inhibitions who could be paid to humiliate him, which is what he desired. The most striking and, frankly, revolting scene in Ulysses—No. 1 on the Medium list—involves a hallucination in which Bella, the madam of the Nighttown fancy house, turns into a man, “Bello,” and Bloom into a woman, “Miss Ruby.” Wearing a dress but bare-bummed, Miss Ruby is forced to clean out (and drink from) chamber pots and then sold at a cattle auction and branded with a hot iron. At this point Bella/Bello—and I can’t think of any way to say it except to quote Joyce’s own words, sorry-- “bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep [sic] in Bloom’s vulva.” And this isn’t the only fantasy of this kind in Ulysses. In another scene Bloom imagines being ridden like a horse and whipped. This is, uh, a “lovely nothing”?
Which brings us to Molly’s soliloquy. Consisting of Molly’s rambling and libidinous ruminations about Bloom, Boylan, sex in general, childbirth, and menstruation, it is considered Joyce’s great fictional tour de force: the male literary artist who could bring to life the workings of the female mind. New Yorker writer Merve Emre, writing on Feb. 7, 2022, called the soliloquy “the best—the funniest, most touching, arousing, and truthful—representation of a woman anyone has written in English.” My own theory is that Joyce was simply fantasizing erotically about contemplating himself as a woman. This was classic autogynephilia, akin to the sexual masochism in the Nighttown scene, which also features cross-dressing and sex-transformation, including Bloom’s confession that he liked to dress himself in Molly’s underwear.
Critics and biographers have generally assumed that Joyce modeled Molly on his wife, Nora Barnacle; the original Bloomsday in 1904 had marked their first date. My own theory is again the reverse: Joyce took Nora, who was just 20 when they met, and made a sexual fetish-object out of her—or at least tried. On that first date Nora, then working as a chambermaid at a Dublin hotel, was famously supposed to have excited Joyce for the rest of his life by thrusting her hand into his trousers. Maybe she did, but the only record we have of that incident are letters Joyce wrote sometime later detailing the alleged hand-job. The same goes for a raft of pornographic missives supposedly written by Nora to Joyce whose existence and contents are attested to only by Joyce himself. The letters that Joyce wrote to Nora, on the other hand, have unfortunately survived, and what they mostly attest to is that Joyce got a charge whenever Nora passed gas.
My surmise is that Nora was a Catholic girl from Galway who was tired of the nuns at the convent school she had attended and wanted to have a little fun in the big city before she settled down. She was dying to get married and legalize their relationship, but Joyce, ever the free spirit and Catholic Church-antagonist, declined to tie the knot until 1931, after their two children were grown, when he finally walked her to the registrar. She hated Ulysses, which she in fact never read, and she resented Joyce’s characterization of Molly—and thus herself—as a slovenly housekeeper who lolled under dingy bedsheets most of the day and couldn’t or wouldn’t boil water. Nora considered herself a competent cook who did the best she could in the ever-changing series of decrepit apartments all over Europe where she, Joyce, and their children were obliged to live a step ahead of their creditors, since Joyce couldn’t make any money from his writing and had a tendency to squander and/or drink up whatever he had. (He had permanently exiled himself from Dublin in 1912, taking Nora and the children with him, and they lived off his earnings teaching English in Berlitz schools.) On the sexual side, Joyce importuned Nora to have extramarital affairs like Molly so he could indulge in Bloom-like vicarious frissons, but she put her foot down on that one. Later in life she even started sneaking back to church.
Joyce was clearly brilliant, if obnoxious about it, and he had some talent as a writer. His early collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), mining Irish middle-class anxieties and written before he got into expansive verbal pretentiousness, is probably his best work. Ulysses contains some lovely lines here and there (example: “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit”), and his poem Ecce Puer, written in 1932 in honor of the birth of his baby grandson, is exquisite and moving. But—and I hate to say this as a general believer in press freedom—if there ever was a book that deserved to be banned, for so many reasons, it was Ulysses. It's an ugly mess that makes an ugly mess out of sex and everything else in life that one might imbue with meaning and beauty. The most salient thing ever written about Ulysses, in my opinion, was U.S. Circuit Judge Martin Manton’s dissenting opinion in a federal appeals court’s 1934 decision that overturned the U.S. ban on the book:
Congress passed this statute against obscenity for the protection of the great mass of our people; the unusual literator can, or thinks he can, protect himself. The people do not exist for the sake of literature, to give the author fame, the publisher wealth, and the book a market. On the contrary, literature exists for the sake of the people, to refresh the weary, to console the sad, to hearten the dull and downcast, to increase man's interest in the world, his joy of living, and his sympathy in all sorts and conditions of men. Art for art's sake is heartless and soon grows artless; art for the public market is not art at all, but commerce; art for the people's service is a noble, vital, and permanent element of human life.
In other words, if you want to read Ulysses, go to Paris on a highbrow vacation and pick up a copy—but please spare the rest of us.