With the recent publication of Prof Declan Kiberd’s commentary on Ulysses, Dr John Wallace reflects on the development of the book that revolutionised the modern novel
James Joyce had little time for middle-class thrift. Because of financial hardship, he wrote Ulysses in over twenty different flats, located in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. However, though he may have been poverty-stricken and living in a garret, James Joyce did not have Bohemian qualities.
He preferred, where possible, to lead a measured and bourgeois life. He hated Bohemian cafes and while he might write four-lettered words, he would never, ever, voice them.
Roddy Doyle
Roddy Doyle feels that many passages of Ulysses are in need of a good editor. The work has always been associated with obscenity and obscurity. Yet Joyce’s book is about the wisdom of the ordinary, middle range of human experience. He wanted the familiar and the ordinary to instruct and entertain. He wished to give ‘the charm of novelty to the things of every day’.
Reading Ulysses has always been challenging. The book is regarded as the peak of literary experimentalism and does not defer to prevailing values. It was written from 18 different points of view and so has a succession of differing styles. The main theme however, is consistent, and addresses the central place of emotion in human experience.
The plot of Ulysses is also straightforward: it deals with 18 hours in the life of an ordinary man. The book describes the events of a single day in Dublin. It documents the adventures of two quite different characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, throughout Thursday, June 16, 1904.
Bloom is Joyce’s greatest and most enduring creation. While he is very ordinary, there is a ‘god within him’. He is multi-dimensional, and like Ulysses of old, he is subject to many trials that with wisdom, he manages to overcome.
Joyce’s book is the work of a storyteller drawing on a wide range of European literature, much of it derived from Catholic sources. The book is a masterpiece of modernism, like In Search of Time Lost by Proust, and first editions continue to attract high prices.
Nora Barnacle
The author of Ulysses, James Joyce was born on February 5, 1882, the year his father’s name appeared in Stubb’s Gazette. His mother, ‘crippled-with-children’, had endured 15 pregnancies. The downward financial spiral of Joyce’s father led the family through a variety of addresses from Mountjoy Square to Cabra.
Despite his uneven early life, James was the best-read pupil in his class in UCD in 1899. But he was already becoming suspicious of conventional ideas and wisdom.
Joyce’s aim now was to become a recognised writer and he later put what he had learned in UCD to good use.
Lacked motivation
On completion of his studies, Joyce followed a number of his college friends into the Cecilia Street Medical School in Dublin. Then, in November 1902, he applied to the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris. By early December however, he realised that he lacked the necessary qualifications, and more importantly, the motivation, for the life of a medical student.
By now his relationship with his wife, Nora, involved periods of intense literary activity, interspersed with spates of high living that he could ill-afford. In Trieste, his wife was forced to take in washing. Joyce was hospitalised with rheumatic fever when Nora gave birth to their daughter, Lucia, in the pauper’s ward of the same hospital.
At this time Joyce’s usual garb was a second-hand, ill-fitting overcoat tied with a military belt that ‘had an incongruously dapper effect’.
Irregular living also led to attacks of iritis. He liked to drink absinthe and, in 1915, he was diagnosed with glaucoma. Though in great pain and requiring an iridectomy on his right eye, he kept writing.
A defiantly uncommercial work, the plot of Ulysses began to take shape in his mind in 1912. He made notes on the back of advertisements and on his shirt cuffs. Using these, he began the tentative process of composition, drawing especially on his childhood memories of Dublin.
He wrote much of Ulysses while lying in bed, dressed in a white suit. The resulting work is testimony to the ‘continual affirmation’ of the human spirit.
He confided, “I am almost afraid to treat such a theme.” Ulysses is pivotal to the history of the novel and Joyce was aged just 38 when he finished it. With Ulysses, Joyce believed that he had exhausted the English language and that now there could be no going back.
Proust
Ulysses was published on February 2, 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday. Like Proust, Joyce was a publisher’s nightmare. The Irish writer was still sending in corrections a week before the publication date. He had spent 16 years thinking about the book and seven writing it.
Joyce started the work in Trieste but composed much of it in Zurich. He wrote it surrounded by activity and ‘immersed in the chaos of the real world’. The English language, he discovered, was not sufficient to his purpose; it had enough words, but not the right ones. Despite this, in Paris, aged 38, he completed the final three episodes.
Ulysses was a major advance for fiction, but, at the time, it provoked a violent reaction. Cambridge University was told that any student found with a copy would be prosecuted. With its cobalt blue cover and white lettering, 1,000 of the 2,500 copies printed were quickly confiscated. Nobody could accept his stylistic experimentalism. And his life-long supporters fell away.
In May 1922, after he underwent a sphincterectomy of his left eye, his physician noted that James Joyce was living in ‘considerable squalour’ in his Paris flat. He wrote Ulysses despite these eye problems, the alarming mental distress of his daughter and the alienation of his friends. He confided to his family that he doubted if ‘anything lies ahead of us, except ruin’.
Richard Ellmann
Professor Declan Kiberd maintains that Ulysses is not an elitist work. It is about an ordinary form of wisdom found on the streets of Dublin. Joyce drew on all the detail of the Irish capital for his book. But the work went beyond the personal adversity that he had experienced in his lifetime.
According to the biographer, Richard Ellmann, Joyce joined the best English words to express the best Irish subject. In the Italian restaurant where Joyce unwrapped the first copy of his newly published work, the waiters proudly asked if they could show the book to the other customers.
‘An abominable writer’
The day before Ulysses was published, a stranger on the street bumped into Joyce and mumbled, “You are an abominable writer.” Virginia Woolfe felt that the book finally proved that the James Joyce was ‘low bred’. Others however felt that, with the publication of the book, Ireland made a sensational return to the best world literature.
James Joyce, the author of Ulysses, exiled and alone, died of a perforated ulcer and generalised peritonitis in the early hours of January 13, 1941. He was aged 58.
Ulysses and Us: A Guide to Everyday Living (2009) by Declan Kiberd, is published by Faber and Faber.
About Greg Baxter
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