Ulysses (1922) stands as the primary epic of modern Irish literature not only in the sense that it is the most comprehensive document of life in the Irish metropolis as it was lived at the period when the novel is set - 16th June 1904 - but also because it consciously follows the schema of the classical epic, Homer’s Odyssey, after whose central character it is named. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that Joyce was deeply versed in Greek literature since the self-confessed source of mythic parallels between his chapters and the episodes of the Odyssey was Charles Lamb’s readable synopsis of the original written in 1813, with children-readers mostly in mind.

For several of the modernist writers such as, notably, T. S. Eliot, his juxtapositioning - or, more exactly, mapping over - a ancient classical model and a modern narrative stood for an attempt to reduce the supposed ‘chaos’ of modern experience to some sort of manageable order: hence the title of Eliot’s famous essay of 1923 “Ulysses, Order, and Myth”, in the course of which he asserted that Joyce’s use of the Homeric parallel has ‘the importance of a scientific discovery’ (The Dial, LXXV, 5, Nov. 1923, pp.480-83). But this was a formula which made more sense to the anxious mind of the Anglo-Saxon modernists to whom - as to W. B. Yeats - the modern, democratic world appeared as a place of dissolution. It must not be supposed that James Joyce shared in their anxiety (not to say neurosis) or that his conception of the utility of the device was part of an attempt to save civilisation on the basis of a reconstituted classical order.

Joyce himself encountered the story of Odyssey in Lamb’s very readable version as an intermediate student at Belvedere College. Later he was to declare it his belief that Odysseus (otherwise known as Ulysses) was the greatest hero in literature on account of his celebrated characteristics: courage, judgement, resourcefulness, freedom from perplexity or despair in straightened circumstances, and an intense capacity to engage with women. Indeed, in talking with Frank Budgen Joyce made the point that Jesus Christ was a less sufficient model of heroic man because he had never attempted the most difficult thing of all, which was ‘to live with a woman’ - a point on which the novelist, of course, qualified through his life-long cohabitation (and latterly, his marriage) with the spirited Galway girl with whom he left Ireland, Nora Barnacle.

In one crucial respect, however, Joyce was at variance with the Homeric tale of Ulysses’s return to Ithaca after his long years involvement in the Trojan War. In Homer, the hero-king comes home find his wife Penelope beset with suitors who, presuming he is dead, vie with each other to claim his island kingdom through marriage with her, while she holds them off indefinitely with the promise that she will chose a husband when the tapestry she weaves is finally completed - though each night she unweaves as much as she has spun the day before. When Ulysses re-enters the scene, he bloodily slaughters all the suitors and hangs the conniving hand-maidens in the courtyard.

Joyce’s modern Ulysses (that is, Leopold Bloom) is conscious throughout the day that his wife is going to be unfaithful with her singing tour-manager Blazes Boylan, since he has actually carried the letter to her bedroom in which the assignation has been made. Consequently his thoughts are repeatedly troubled by images of the fatal encounter and even by sudden fears that Boylan will infect his wife with a venereal disease. At the end, however, he finds himself in a state of mind which Joyce variously describes as ‘Envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity’ - amounting, in sum, to forgive what he sees as a natural and understandable human act in the complex circumstances of his own sexual relations with Molly, discontinued since the death in infancy of their son Rudi.

The last act that we see him perform in the novel is to ‘kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation’ - and we are made aware in the ensuing chapter, Molly’s great “soliloquy”, that she is far from asleep when this tender, if self-abasing, gesture on the part of her husband is offered to her. It is perfectly consistent, therefore, that at the end of a chapter which centrally takes the form of sensual review of all her experience of life and loves, she recalls the reason why she accepted Leopold Bloom’s proposal on Howth head, because she ‘saw he understood or felt what a woman is and [she] knew [she] could always get round him’ - a wiley sentiment that is finally accompanied by her life-affirming ‘Yes’ in the last phrase of the novel.

Leopold Bloom is a very singular man and a very credible model of modern masculine humanity - or even humanism; he is even, to a significant degree, a man who combines in himself much of the sensitivity usually associated with women along with the fortitude associated with men in conventional fiction. In other words, he is an ‘androgynous’ creation, as Declan Kiberd strongly argues in his Introduction to the Penguin edition of the Corrected Text of Ulysses. At the same time, he is a very ordinary man and perhaps essentially a typical one in his daily processes and desires, his accommodations and comprises, his dreams and disappointments. Following the lead of the French classicist Victor Bérard, Joyce liked to believe that the very name of Odysseus meant ‘no man’ (outis) and, in that sense, he was also Everyman. Hence he selected as his latter-day Homeric hero a very ordinary person in the shape of Leopold Bloom, a freelance advertising agent of Jewish extraction living in a country increasingly obsessed with ideas of ethnic purity and nationalist separatism - leading to the clash between Bloom and the irate “Citizen” - a character closely modelled on Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletics Association - which stands at the centre of the novel.

In that episode (“Cyclops”), Joyce exploits a series of stylistic parodies to point up the comical mismatch between the pretensions of Gaelic revivalism - at least in the uncritical form in which men like Michael Cusack were advancing it - and the real conditions of men and women living in the first years of the twentieth-century. The fact that Ireland did indeed become an independent nation on the world-stage with Irish as its ‘first official’ language - though little spoken - is incidental to his criticism of the kind of blinkered vision implied in the title of the chapter and Joyce’s treatment of the Homeric parallel. For Leopold effectively extinguishes the remaining eye of the cylopean giant in his ‘snug’ (a private pub-room) by asserting the simple fact that he, a wandering Jew, is just as Irish as anyone else born on the island. ‘I’m Irish. I was born here.’

Much of the chapter is given over to extended paragraphs written in a style that Joyce called ‘gigantism’ and which takes the form of ridiculously heroic sentences and lists of so-called national treasures; the rest takes the form of a serious of sarcastic utterances on the part of a nasty-minded narrator who remains anonymous - though critics somethings suggest that he is actually Si[mon] Dedalus - and who resembles the embittered character Thersites in the original Homeric epic. Thersites is a pander, or pimp, in Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida - and hence toxic mindset and the corresponding style is appropriately called Thersitic. At the conclusion of the chapter, the language is that of the Bible in which Bloom’s hasty escape from the pub is represented under the form of the ascent of the prophet Isaiah into heaven:

Needless to say, the final phrases revert to the comical and obscene vernacular of the Thersitic narrator; and it is not irrelevant to note that, in a manuscript draft of the chapter, Joyce actually wrote the even more demotic words ‘like a shit from a shovel’.

The novel Ulysses began, we know, as a final story for Dubliners but very quickly outgrew its occasion and hence - as Joyce reported - ‘never got forrarder than the title’. In first conceiving it, Joyce’s attention was drawn by the memory of a certain Alfred Hunter, a commercial traveller originally from Belfast and a Presbyterian by birth (though he converted to Catholicism at his marriage). Hunter appears to have rescued the young Joyce from a fracas in the brothel quarter on or around 16th September 1904. In this sense, the novel offers an extraordinary recompense for kindness; but it is also a monument to the the day - that is, 16th June 1904 - on which Joyce first ‘walked out’ with Nora - or, more precisely, the occasion on which she voluntarily shared sexual intimacy with him and changed his life forever: for it is to that calendar day that the events of the novel are ascribed.

Viewed from the standpoint of his life-connection with Nora Barnacle, Ulysses may be quite properly regarded as a testament to an idea of wider humanity which lies far beyond the range of Stephen Dedalus’s painful - even solipsistically intellectual vision of existence; and it is significant that, though Stephen and Bloom meet, there is no sense in the narrative of their joint transactions that Stephen recognises in Bloom the future subject of his literary art. Just as what is astonishing about the hero of Ulysses is his ordinariness, it may be said that Ulysses the novel is an epical celebration of the ordinary in existence: those things that rarely summon our attention - and in this fact alone Joyce inaugurated a profound shift in the cultural awareness of literary men and women.

On the world-stage, Ulysses is a vital scripture of cultural democracy as well as a work of high culture; yet, in its Irish context it was also pointedly intended by its author to confront - and even to affront - the prevailing nationalist concept of the Irish hero and more especially intended as a a reproach to the anti-semitic mood of Irish nationalism in the period when it was conceived and written. In the autumn of 1904, after Joyce had left Ireland, a small-scale ‘pogrom’ of Jewish families settled in Limerick was organised by a certain Fr. Creagh and supported in the nationalist press by leading figures such as Arthur Griffith (founder of Sinn Féin) and Oliver St. Gogarty (the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses).

The latter went so far as to write, disgracefully, ‘there is something rotten in the state of Ireland’ and ‘I smell a jew’, in the columns of the former’s newspaper United Irishman. All of this Joyce (writing to his brother who at that date was still in Ireland) described as the ‘pap of racial hatred’. He was soon to find himself on friendly terms with a number of Triestino Jews whose political and cultural intelligence he admired and learnt from. To this extent, Ulysses can be read as a blow struck against anti-semitism on the European stage as well - though, if Leopold Bloom is the son of Rudolf Virag on one side, he is also the son of Mary Hegarty and underwent, odd as it seems, in both the Catholic and the Church of Ireland rites of baptism. What is more, we know from a detail in the ‘‘Nausicaa’’ episode of the novel that he has not been circumcised, as boys must be to qualify as orthodox Jews. (In fact, Jewishness descends in the maternal not the paternal line.)

But the immediate impact of Ulysses upon world literature had less to do with its Irish or its anti-semitic contexts than with its assault on the conventional decencies of prose fiction. Joyce was the first writer of acknowledged artistic excellence to bring his readers to the lavatory with a character, or to relay a woman’s uncensored impression of what it is like to be ‘fucked and well fucked’, as Molly remarks to herself of her afternoon encounter with Blazes Boylan. In reproducing these aspects of life in a novel, Joyce was loyal to his conviction that it was vitally part of the artist’s mission not to ‘distort in the presentment anything he has seen or heard’ - as he told Grant Richards in 1906 - combined with his lasting conviction that, in ‘putting a bucket down into [his] own soul’s well, [he was] drawing up their [e.g., Gogarty’s and Griffith’s] dirty water along with [his] own.’

Such a conviction has, of course, was very largely and publicly borne out by the contemporary triumph of psychoanalysis; and Joyce’s realist art is often regarded chiefly in this context, as a revelation of the unconscious mind, with its roots in the instinctual life of humanity rather than the politer, and more tidily ethical norms which are the staple of organised religions. Unsurprisingly the entire conception and practice of the so-called ‘interior monologue’ was greeted by admirers as a psychological discovery, though Joyce himself has reservations about its relation to the unconscious mind. ‘Why do they always talk about the unconscious?’, he asked, ‘what do they know about the conscious mind, that’s what I want to know.’

In writing Ulysses, and even during its early serialisation in literary magazines, Joyce used chapter titles corresponding to those in Lamb’s version of the Odyssey. In the published book he removed these withou substituting chapter numbers - a gap which every new reader naturally finds daunting. Although he supplied his Italian translator Carlo Linati with a chart of chapter-titles and mythic correspondences, it was not until 1930 that he authorised the publication of such information in a work by a trusted associate called Stuart Gilbert. This was James Joyce’s Ulysses (1930) - still a profoundly useful guide to the basic plan of the novel and its thematic intentions.

Estimates of the value of the Ulysses schema - as it is sometimes called - vary widely, however. [View schema.] On the one hand, it seems to have the importance of a “discovery” along the lines suggested by T. S. Eliot: that is, the discovery that the fundamentals of human narrative, human roles, and human values do not change from age to age in spite of the immense differences in the social and material condition of ancient and modern man. On the other hand it is often felt that the structure of Homeric correspondences, together with a host of symbolic scaffolding relating to anatomy, Catholic ritual and scholastic rhetoric, were ultimately of use to Joyce alone and not to the reader. Finally, the effect of the publication of the schema has often been (as Declan Kiberd argues in his Introduction to the 1992 edition) to turn Joyce’s great novel into a kind of literary Cluedo.

Similarly, the nature and scale of Joyce’s literary experimentalism has raised questions about the authenticity of such techniques as his celebrated ‘interior monologue’. If this is supposed to be a pyschological discovery about the way our minds actually work and the way in which reality is constructed from the individual standpoint, it is possible that too much is claimed for it. Joyce is not Freud, for better or worse, and the claims that he makes for his method are not scientific. On the other hand, no method of writing has ever been invented which conveys best (or more convincingly) what it is like to perceive the world in time and spac from the standpoint of the individual that you are. Or else, to confine ourselves to the characters of the novel, no method could conceivably depict Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom better than the one in which their successive thoughts and even half-thoughts are projected on the page in without any kind of reportage, paraphrase or explanation.

Not only the central characters but numerous incidental ones - of there is any such thing as “incidental” in Ulysses - are perfectly epiphanised through a stylistic method which Joyce seems to have derived from the ‘style moyen indirect’ invented by Gustave Flaubert. One such character is Fr. Conmee, the rector of Clongowes Wood school which Joyce attended and whom he Joyce captures as he gazes at a bargeman and his barge moored in a canal-lock near the centre of the city:

It goes without saying that the idea that God made turf for the poor and coal for the rich is a clerical conceit - the consolation of the comfortably well-off with a position in the Church and an illimitable belief in his own (and God’s) beneficence. At the same time, Joyce harpoons his man with the precision of his grammatical constructions. Only an Irish priest, sufficiently educated to form general ideas on theological themes with social implications but not quite master of the English language - at least, not to the degree that he can negotiate the subjunctive phrase ‘who had made turf to be in bogs’ without sounding like a very provisional learner of the language - would speak in such a way.

In this example, as in many others, the passages of the novel we examined had clear bearing on the reification of experience in a false - that is, an inauthentic - perspective. Another instance - notable for its pathos - is the case of Gerty MacDowell in the episode called “Nausicaa”. Here is a young woman, who turns out to be lame, and whose mental world is furnished by a vast array of compensatory ideas about lingerie and beauty-products but who nevertheless (if not for exactly that reason) manages to expose enough of her private person to Leopold Bloom on Dollymount Strand to excite him into masturbating at the revelation of her ‘nainsook knickers’ and similar accountrements. It is only afterwards, as she moves away with her friends, that Bloom notices her defect: ‘Tight boots? No. She’s lame! O! [...] Glad I didn’t know it when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same.’ [See longer extract.]

In fact each chapter of Ulysses is so rich in technique and meaning that it actually impossible to digest it without half a life-time of study. From that standpoint, the demands Joyce makes of his readers are impossibly high, and he was not entirely joking when he said, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I mean, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” That sentence has become the epigraph of the Annotations for Ulysses compiled by Don Gifford (1974, 1988) - a book to which every student must have recourse if he or she is to make a serious attempt at appreciation or interpretation. And not a few readers turn the business of reading Ulysses into something like a life-time’s vocation, if not indeed a livelihood.

There need be no cynicism involved in that since textuality is actually a core aspect of modern life and, perhaps, a fundamental dimension of fully-developed human consciousness. (Is the flight from text in our time a mark of fatal decadence?) Yet if Joyce book engages the puzzle-mind in a complete degree, it also exercises our sense of what it is to be human. If Leopold Bloom is not the most fully realised character in modern literature, that honour may belong to his wife Molly whose presence is felt rather than seen until the final chapter (“Penelope”) in which she is conveyed with unequaled immediacy by means of the technique of ‘interior monologue’ employed in the most uncompromising form: 62 pages in the Bodley Head edition with only four full stops by way of punctuation.

For Carl Jung, James Joyce seemed to know ‘more about a woman’s mind than the devil’s grandmother!’ - an oddly anti-feminist form of appropriation. Yet Molly is, quite simply, the life-affirming force in Ulysses; she is, as Joyce said, quoting Goethe, ‘the flesh that says Yes’, ending the novel with the great affirmation of love and sex and openness to experience: ‘and yes I said yes I will Yes’. Yet, while Joyce’s Molly affirms life in an almost palpable way, it remains for Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom to work out between them the intellectual formal of meaningful existence in keeping the supposedly more intellectual habits of men. (For Joyce is less a political feminist than an exponent of psychological liberation.)

There is a brace of phrases in the “Ithaca” episode which epitomises Joyce’s solution to the philosophical problem of post-doctrinal existence - that is, life without a system of beliefs - better than anything else he wrote, and here the contrast and the complementarity of the two sides of his personality which are represented by Stephen as artist and Bloom a citizen is also encapsulated perfectly. Because Stephen is an intellectual, he must formulate an answer to the problem of the absent deity verbally - as he does when he

And, because Bloom is inherently practical, he supplies an answer which, while corresponding to Stephen’s in verbal terms, expresses a completely different attitude of mind. That answer comes in the form of a celebration of the fact that he has solved the problem of entering his own house when the key is locked inside in his everyday trousers - he went to a funeral in the morning - by climbing the railings and lowering himself into the area of his house and letting himself in through the unlocked kitchen door:

Needless to say, the language employed here is Joyce’s, or else the narrator - or the “arranger”, as some critics like to call him. And the sentence is also, of course, a literary joke as involving the transposition to Bloom of the kind of language in which Stephen is a specialist, thus implying that Bloom’s praxis is easily the equal of Stephen’s theory. It is certainly relevant to mention here that, for Joyce, Odysseus in Homer’s poem was a hero - as Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen - because he was a competent all-round man who had mastered the arts of peace and war and knew what Bloom does and Stephen doesn’t, how to live with a woman.

In fact, the relationship between Stephen and Bloom, considered as a rehash of that between Odysseus and Telemachus, contains within it the absolute germ of the novel. Bear in mind that Stephen is Joyce’s age at time when the events described were happening, while Bloom is Joyce’s age at the time of writing Ulysses; or, to be more exact, he has passed from Stephen’s single state to the uxurious condition of Leopold Bloom. In this sense, Ulysses is the wedding of youth and age, just as it is the bonding of the sexes and the mapping of the relation between father and son, man and woman, self and society, nation and world, past and present, - in short a totalisation based on the premise that no entity is complete until it coalesces with its opposite.

For the final stage of Joyce’s exploration of the principle of coinciding opposites in art and experience it is necessary to go beyond Ulysses into the body of Finnegans Wake, a work of astonishing complexity at both the level of conception and execution which takes as its fundamental principle the coincidentia oppositorum of Giordano Bruno. In the long run, I would like to propose that the governing principle of Joyce's astonishing development as an artist, and the intrinsic law of his mature works, Ulysses and the Wake, is the dynamic principle of contradiction and unity between self and other, thesis and antithesis, one culture, sign or meaning and another culture, sign or meaning - but that is another day’s work!