Ulysses

One Day in Dublin

Ulysses takes place on a single day — June 16, 1904, now celebrated worldwide as Bloomsday — and follows three characters through Dublin with a comprehensiveness that makes one ordinary Thursday feel like the whole of human experience. Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, is the novel’s Odysseus: middle-aged, good-natured, intellectually curious, and aware that his wife Molly is planning to sleep with her concert promoter Blazes Boylan that afternoon. Stephen Dedalus, the young writer who appeared in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is Telemachus: talented, proud, in mourning for his mother, searching for a father he can respect. Molly Bloom, who appears in full only in the novel’s extraordinary final episode, is Penelope: waiting, unfaithful in body but complex in feeling, given the last word.

Joyce divided Ulysses into eighteen episodes, each corresponding to a section of Homer’s Odyssey, each assigned its own hour, setting, organ of the body, colour, and symbol. The parallels are sometimes conspicuous — the episode in the cave of the Cyclops corresponds to Bloom’s confrontation with a virulent antisemite in a Dublin pub — and sometimes submerged almost to invisibility. But the Homeric scaffolding is not merely decorative. It is Joyce’s argument that the wanderings of an ordinary man through a modern city are as mythically significant as Odysseus’s ten-year voyage. Bloom cooking kidneys for breakfast, attending the funeral of a man he barely knew, visiting the offices of a newspaper, eating lunch in a pub, watching fireworks on the beach — these mundane events accumulate into something inexhaustibly rich. The novel insists that the domestic and the mythic are not different in kind but in scale of attention.

The Eighteen Episodes

The radical formal achievement of Ulysses lies in Joyce’s decision that each episode would not only be set in a different location but written in an entirely different style. The technique is not ornamental; each formal choice is expressive of something about that episode’s subject, organ, and moral atmosphere.

The Aeolus episode, set in a newspaper office, is structured around newspaper headlines that interrupt the prose — rhetoric as wind, empty grandiloquence as the chapter’s dominant tone. The Oxen of the Sun episode, set in a maternity hospital where Bloom waits for a friend’s wife to give birth, cycles through every major style in the history of English prose from medieval Latin through to contemporary slang, enacting the development of the language as an analogue to the development of the foetus. The Circe episode — the midnight confrontation in the brothel district — is written as an expressionist play, with stage directions, hallucinations, and a nightmarish eruption of everything the characters have repressed throughout the day. And the final episode, Penelope, is Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated interior monologue: eight enormous sentences, no full stops, rolling through her memories of marriage and men and Gibraltar and Bloom with an erotic and emotional directness unlike anything else in English prose.

The point that emerges across all eighteen episodes is that no single style, no single technique, can be adequate to the fullness of consciousness and experience. Each episode’s formal choice enacts what conventional narrative would have to paraphrase. The exhaustion some readers feel with the more demanding episodes — Oxen of the Sun, Ithaca with its catechism format — is itself part of Joyce’s design: he wanted a book that could not be consumed passively.

Why It Still Matters

Ulysses established, against the whole weight of novelistic tradition, that the interior life of an ordinary person — Jewish, middle-aged, sexually cuckolded, professionally modest, morally decent — was a fit subject for the highest literary art. Leopold Bloom is not heroic in any conventional sense. He is solicitous, curious, slightly cowardly, capable of small generosities and petty resentments. He worries about money. He thinks about food. He is aware of his wife’s infidelity and does not confront it. And yet Joyce renders him with such precision and such sympathy that Bloom has become one of literature’s indispensable figures: the fully human protagonist against whom all subsequent ordinary protagonists are measured.

The novel’s influence on everything written after it is impossible to overstate. Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and countless others absorbed what Joyce had shown was possible and built on it. The stream of consciousness technique, the free indirect style pushed to extremes, the formal restlessness — all of these became available to literature because Ulysses existed.

Bloomsday itself — the annual celebration on June 16 when readers worldwide gather to read, recite, and reenact the novel — is a testament to something that gets lost in discussions of the book’s difficulty: its essential warmth, its comedy, its humanism. The last line of Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy, “yes I said yes I will Yes,” is not a difficult passage. It is one of the great affirmations in all of literature: life chosen, love consented to, the world accepted on its own terms.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — The most formally demanding novel in English is also, when you find your way inside it, one of the most humanely funny and deeply felt.