“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles
that it will keep the professors busy for centuries
arguing over what I meant,
and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”
James Joyce
Ulysses is easy to summarise. It takes place in Dublin on 16 June 1904 and follows a single day in the lives of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly Bloom. To describe the complexity of this simple story, which is a 933-page book in the edition I read, is almost impossible. So I will just highlight some of the elements that struck me. First, the structure of the book, in 18 episodes, loosely follows Homer’s Odyssey, the story of a father (Odysseus/Leopold Bloom), a mother (Penelope/Molly Bloom) and a son (Telemachus/Stephan Dedalus), and Ulysses is also closely related to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. So I joyfully read both books. These 18 episodes are all written in a different narrative style. The first episodes are simple, but it gets more and more complicated. Four episodes that I really liked, or at least that really amazed me, are :
10. Wandering Rocks: Fragmented vignettes of various characters around Dublin, creating a kaleidoscopic effect. Forty-eight characters, including the mysterious man in the brown macintosh.
14. Oxen of the Sun: Imitates the evolution of English prose styles, from archaic to modern. Really difficult but also fun.
15. Circe: Described by Hastings as “doozy”, this is a script for a play that moves between reality and hallucination, where the line between the two is difficult to discern.
18. Penelope: A flowing monologue, without a single punctuation mark, that captures Molly Bloom’s inner thoughts, touching and also quite erotic.
I was really impressed by the many references throughout the book. Joyce mentions several operas and arias: Don Giovanni (Mozart), Martha (Flotow), The Bohemian Girl (Balfe), Il Trovatore (Verdi) and La Sonnambula (Bellini), as well as numerous songs that serve as links between the characters’ memories. Apart from the obvious references (The Odyssey and Hamlet), literature is also very present, with references that I have noted to Aristotle, Plato, Oscar Wilde, Hamlet, Blake, Dante, Boccaccio, other works by Shakespeare, King Lear and The Tempest, Virgil, Cervantes, Ibsen. Religion is ever-present, with references to and critiques of the Irish Catholic Church, Jewish identity and Protestantism in the light of British colonialism, but there are also references to paganism, atheism, mysticism. Several languages are used throughout the book: Latin, French, Italian, German, Greek, Gaelic, Hebrew and even Swedish. I also loved the celebration of the English language and its complexity, with puns, dialects and linguistic experiments that often border on the incomprehensible. This novel is indescribable, so complex, so intelligent and crazy at the same time. It’s a rocky moment to get through these pages, I felt I had to find tenacity and stubbornness deep inside me to stick with this book, but I did, and I’m very proud of it. I even think I might read it again someday. In short… a wonderfully unreadable novel.
“The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower.”