Book: Ulysses
Author: James Joyce
Name of reviewer: Melissa Williams
SUMMARY
Ulysses, by James Joyce, takes place in Ireland and tells the story of two protagonists: Stephen Dedalus, a young writer, and perhaps most famously, Leopold Bloom, a half-Jewish advertising man. At first, the novel seems pieced together erratically, lacking in any real structure. Looking closer, though, the reader finds it is divided into eighteen episodes, each with a corresponding theme to Homer’s Odyssey. Therefore, the episode titles take their names from The Odyssey. “Telemachus”, “Calypso”, and “Sirens” are just three examples. Every episode has a theme, a stylistic technique, and dialogue of some kind between its characters and characters from The Odyssey. These features are what give the novel its basic structure and thematic framework, but apart from them, the novel reads like many vignettes, jumbled together.
MY THOUGHTS
The novel was obviously ahead of its time in many respects. It contains stream of consciousness passages and overthrows conventional structure. It also is earthy and irreverent for its time, shirking the primness and prudishness of earlier Victorian writing and unreservedly detailing all manner of life: bodily functions, sexual fantasies, and grotesque behavior included.
There were parts of the novel that repulsed me, many in fact. I also find James Joyce’s writing to be too self-consciously complex. I sense a sort of pretentious smugness in Joyce’s writing (delighting in his abilities to shock the reader and especially to make his meanings difficult to extract). Indeed, Joyce himself said of this novel that he ‘put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.’ Well, pardon us. For the rest of us who don’t bank on professors appraising our writing and analyzing it for “centuries”, we would like to be able to derive clearer meaning sometimes from a text and perhaps have to work just a wee bit less for some kind of coherency. His own wife, Nora Joyce, is quoted as having asked her husband, “Why don’t you write books people can read?”
That said, I think it is a worthwhile read not only because it is widely known and a commonly referenced and alluded to book, but also because it is like nothing else you’ve ever read or ever will read again. And again, Joyce was certainly writing ahead of his time.
WHY THE BOOK WAS ONCE BANNED
Ulysses was burned in the U.S. in 1918, in Ireland in 1922, and in England in 1923. It also was banned in England in 1929. One could almost write a book about all the objections that have been raised against this novel, but I will attempt to reduce them all into a nutshell. By and large, the novel came up time and time again from 1914 into the 1930s against obscenity charges. In 1920, a passage in which a character masturbates caused a group called the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to attempt to keep the book out of the U.S. In United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, the U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in 1933 that the book “was not pornographic and therefore could not be obscene.” This ruling was affirmed in 1934, and it seems that from then on, Ulysses was allowed within the U.S. It still is not a book often recommended for high school reading, and I think I would concur that it is not the right sort of reading for teachers to be teaching at that level. And, by the way, interestingly, the book was never actually banned in Ireland.
CONCLUSION
Ulysses is one of those books that anyone who desires to be widely read and literature savvy should read. Will everyone enjoy the book? I think not. Some will delight in its subversive disregard for rules, both literary and cultural. Some will enjoy it as a puzzle to unpack and piece together if they can. Others will be disgusted and even offended. There is one thing I think most readers can agree upon regarding Ulysses: it is not a book easily forgotten, nor is it one people generally feel passive about. You either abhor and deride it for its offensiveness and/or disorder, or you find amusement and pleasure in its quirky characters and honest depictions of real life and real life functions. I guess, in a sense, Ulysses continues to be censored and may long continue to be, just on smaller scales, whether that means schools opting not to assign it as reading, or individual readers deciding it’s not worth their time, deeming it as “trash”. It’s just one of those books everyone has to have an opinion about.