Ulysses (novel)

• 1. Introduction

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  Ulysses, the novel James Joyce published on the 2nd of February 1922, tracks a single ordinary day in Dublin. The date chosen was the 16th of June 1904. Three people move through the city: a young writer, a middle-aged advertising canvasser, and his wife, lying awake in bed. By nightfall, the book will have conjured a pub brawl, a funeral, a brothel full of hallucinations, and one of the longest unpunctuated sentences in the history of the English language.

  The writer Djuna Barnes quoted Joyce directly on what he was attempting. "In Ulysses", he said, "I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious." That ambition had never been attempted at such scale. According to the writer Declan Kiberd, before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking.

  What turned a fairly compact idea about an unremarkable Dubliner into a work spanning hundreds of pages? How did a novel that was publicly burned by the United States Post Office come to be ranked the greatest novel of the twentieth century by outlets as varied as Time Magazine and CounterPunch? And what does it mean to spend seven years writing a book you later admitted you may have over-systematised? Those are the questions the rest of this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Idea and Its Origins

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  Joyce first encountered the figure of Odysseus as a child, through Charles Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses, a version of Homer's epic adapted for young readers. That childhood encounter seems to have fixed the Latin name Ulysses firmly in his imagination. At school he wrote an essay on the character, which he titled "My Favourite Hero".

  Years later, Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen that he considered Ulysses the only all-round character in all of literature. The ambition that followed from that conviction was methodical. He first considered writing a short story for his collection Dubliners, to be titled "Ulysses" and based on a real Jewish Dubliner named Alfred H. Hunter, a man he described as a putative cuckold. That modest germ grew from a story in 1906, to something Joyce called "a short book" in 1907, to the vast novel he formally began writing in 1914.

  The book he eventually produced is divided into three parts and eighteen episodes. The episodes have no chapter headings in the novel itself; the familiar Homeric titles readers use today originate from two private schemata Joyce sent to Carlo Linati and to the scholar Stuart Gilbert. Joyce himself referred to the episodes by their Homeric titles in his personal letters while writing the book, even as he chose to leave them off the page entirely. The three parts mirror Homer's Odyssey, which is divided into twenty-four books arranged in a tripartite structure; Joyce's own division into three parts of three, twelve, and three episodes was shaped by that ancient template.

• 3. Dublin as a Character

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  Leopold Bloom's home at 7 Eccles Street anchors the novel geographically. It is the setting of three separate episodes: "Calypso", "Ithaca", and "Penelope". From that address the book radiates outward across the whole city.

  The action opens at the Sandycove Martello tower to the south of Dublin Bay and closes on Howth Head to the north. Between those poles, named Dublin locations carry their own narrative weight. Sweny's Pharmacy on Lincoln Place is where Bloom purchases soap. The Freeman's Journal on Prince's Street North is where he attempts to place an advertising order. Davy Byrne's pub on Duke Street is where he eats a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy, and sits musing on how his marriage has changed. Bella Cohen's brothel on 82 Tyrone Street Lower is where the novel's most surreal episode unfolds. A cabman's shelter near Butt Bridge is where the night finally winds down.

  Joyce moved away from Ireland and spent years of his adult life in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. It was in Zurich, while writing the novel, that he discovered Victor Berard's Les Pheniciens et l'Odyssee, a scholarly argument that the Odyssey had Semitic roots. For Joyce that theory was immediately useful. Berard's reading aligned with his decision to make his Odysseus figure not a Greek hero but Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertisement canvasser navigating a city that is both intensely local and, in the book's design, a microcosm of the world.

• 4. Homer and Shakespeare

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  Ezra Pound, one of the novel's earliest champions, described the Homeric architecture as "a scaffold, a means of construction, justified by the result, and justifiable by it only." T. S. Eliot went further. For him, Joyce's method of running a continuous parallel between the modern and the ancient had "the importance of a scientific discovery". Eliot wrote that Joyce was "pursuing a method which others must pursue after him."

  Not everyone agreed. Edmund Wilson, who admired the novel deeply, nonetheless argued that Joyce made a mistake in letting the structure of the Odyssey govern the shape of his story rather than the natural demands of the situation itself. He wrote that the brilliant succession of episodes sometimes felt like they were "taking place on the periphery of a wheel which has no hub." Joyce eventually came to a similar view. In the late 1930s he told Samuel Beckett, "I may have over-systematized Ulysses." Around 1937, in conversation with Vladimir Nabokov, he called his collaboration with Stuart Gilbert on the published schema "a terrible mistake... an advertisement for the book. I regret it very much."

  The second great literary framework running through the novel is William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Stephen Dedalus delivers a theory of the play in the Library episode, drawing on twelve lectures Joyce himself had given in Trieste in 1912, which are now lost. Stephen's argument is that Shakespeare has a double presence in Hamlet: the ghost of the dead king is the mature Shakespeare; Prince Hamlet is Shakespeare as a young man. That doubling is a mirror for Joyce's own presence in the book. Bloom is the mature Joyce; Stephen is Joyce as a young man. Other parallels extend the pattern: Gertrude maps onto Molly Bloom, Claudius onto both Buck Mulligan and Molly's lover Blazes Boylan.

• 5. Obscenity, Censorship, and the Law

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  The novel was serialised in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and the trouble started well before the book was complete. Three early chapters were suppressed by the United States Post Office. Then the publication of the "Nausicaa" episode, in which Bloom masturbates on a beach while watching a young woman, triggered a prosecution under the Comstock Act of 1873, a law that made it illegal to circulate obscene material through the US mail.

  The legal case was brought in 1921 by John S. Sumner, Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The magazine was found obscene and Ulysses was effectively banned in the United States. Legal historian Edward de Grazia has argued that the masturbation in the episode was sufficiently disguised by metaphoric language that few readers would have registered it clearly. Irene Gammel has extended that argument further, suggesting that the prosecution was influenced partly by the more explicit poetry of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, which had been printed alongside the serialised Ulysses.

  Throughout the 1920s, the United States Post Office continued burning copies of the novel. The ban held until 1932, when Random House and the lawyer Morris Ernst arranged to import a French edition and have a copy seized by Customs as a deliberate legal gambit. In United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey ruled the book was not pornographic. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that ruling in 1934. Stuart Gilbert called Woolsey's decision "epoch-making". The United States thereby became the first English-speaking country where Ulysses could be freely sold.

  In the United Kingdom the novel remained banned until 1936. Ireland's Censorship of Publications Board never formally banned it, but a customs loophole kept the book out until the 1960s. Joyce had resolved that the complete book would be published on his fortieth birthday, and Sylvia Beach, his publisher in Paris, received the first three copies from the printer on the morning of the 2nd of February 1922.

• 6. How Critics Received It

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  Ezra Pound wrote in 1922 that all men should unite to give praise to Ulysses, and that those who would not might content themselves with a place in the lower intellectual orders. He claimed that with this "super-novel" Joyce had surpassed Gustave Flaubert, Miguel de Cervantes, Henry James, and Marcel Proust.

  The British novelist Arnold Bennett disagreed. Writing in The Outlook in 1922, he said Joyce "apparently thinks there is something truly artistic and high minded in playing the lout to the innocent and defenseless reader." He calculated that given Joyce's method, one could write over seven thousand pages about twenty hours of a life, if one had sufficient time, paper, childish caprice, and obstinacy.

  John Middleton Murry, writing in The Nation and Athenaeum in April 1922, called Joyce "a genius of the very highest order, strictly comparable to Goethe or Dostoevsky", while also calling him "the man with the bomb who would blow what remains of Europe into the sky." The following month James Douglas, a newspaper editor, writing in the Sunday Express, called Ulysses "the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature."

  Virginia Woolf, in 1923, called it "a memorable catastrophe - immense in daring, terrific in disaster." T. S. Eliot, in The Dial that same year, held it to be "the most important expression which the present age has found." Karl Radek, addressing the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, called it "a heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema camera through a microscope."

  Decades later, in a 1965 interview, Vladimir Nabokov named it the greatest masterpiece of twentieth-century prose. He called it "a divine work of art" that would "live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths." The American author Michael Chabon wrote that Ulysses struck him above all as "a book of life", in which every sentence had been calibrated to assert the singularity and worth of even the most humdrum of human days.

• 7. The Publication Wars

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  The first edition, printed in Paris by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company on the 2nd of February 1922, consisted of one thousand numbered copies. One hundred were signed copies on Dutch handmade paper, priced at 350 francs each. One hundred and fifty copies on vergé d'Arches paper sold for 250 francs. Seven hundred and fifty copies on handmade paper sold for 150 francs, with an additional twenty unnumbered copies reserved for libraries and press.

  According to Joyce scholar Jack Dalton, that first edition contained over two thousand errors. The effort to correct those errors across subsequent editions became an ongoing source of new mistakes, complicated by the near-impossible task of distinguishing genuine printing errors from Joyce's own deliberate puzzles embedded in the text.

  In 1929, Samuel Roth published the first American edition without Joyce's authorisation, first serially in Two Worlds Monthly and then as a single volume. Reportedly two thousand to three thousand copies were printed before the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice raided Roth's offices on the 4th of October 1929 and seized and destroyed most of them.

  The most contentious scholarly effort at a corrected text was Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 edition. In June 1988, John Kidd published an essay titled "The Scandal of Ulysses" in The New York Review of Books, charging that Gabler had made errors in over four hundred places and had changed the names of real Dublin figures: Harry Thrift became "Shrift" and cricketer Captain Buller became "Culler", both on the basis of misread handwriting. Gabler reversed those specific changes in 1986, before Kidd's article appeared. By 1990, Random House had withdrawn the Gabler edition and restored its 1961 text; Bodley Head revived its 1960 version; and Penguin dropped Gabler in 1992. The novel entered the public domain under US copyright law in 2012, after which reprints of the original 1922 text became widely available.

• 8. Afterlives in Art and Sound

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  On Bloomsday 1982, RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, aired a full-cast unabridged dramatised radio production of Ulysses that ran uninterrupted for twenty-nine hours and forty-five minutes. That broadcast preceded the Naxos Records release of an unabridged reading by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan, issued on twenty-two audio CDs in 2004 and directed by the composer Roger Marsh.

  Luciano Berio composed Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) between 1958 and 1959, an electroacoustic work for voice and tape built from a reading of the novel's "Sirens" chapter by his then wife Cathy Berberian. Umberto Eco, a lifelong admirer of Joyce, contributed to its realisation. Kate Bush's 1989 song "The Sensual World" drew on Molly Bloom's closing monologue; the Joyce family initially refused her request to use the actual words of the soliloquy. When Bush revisited the recording for her 2011 album Director's Cut, the family gave permission, and she renamed the song "Flower of the Mountain" and incorporated sections of the original text.

  In theatre, Ulysses in Nighttown, based on the "Circe" episode, premiered off-Broadway in 1958 with Zero Mostel as Bloom and reached Broadway in 1974. A 2012 Glasgow stage adaptation written by Dermot Bolger and directed by Andy Arnold toured Dublin, Belfast, Cork, the Edinburgh Festival, and China before a revised version directed by Graham McLaren opened at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin as part of the 2017 Dublin Theatre Festival. On Bloomsday 2010, the writer Frank Delaney launched a weekly podcast called Re:Joyce, working through the novel page by page. He was still on the "Wandering Rocks" chapter when he died in 2017.