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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 in Dublin, eldest of the ten sur-
viving children born to Mary Jane (‘May’) Murray and John Joyce. Joyce’s
father was then a Collector of Rates but the family, once prosperous, had just
begun its slow decline into poverty. Educated first at the Jesuit institutions
Clongowes Wood and Belvedere Colleges, Joyce entered the Royal University
(now University College, Dublin) in 1898. Four years later Joyce left Dublin
for Paris with the intention of studying medicine but soon his reading turned
more to Aristotle than physic. His mother’s illness in April 1903 took him back
to Dublin. Here he met and, on 16 June 1904, first stepped out with Nora
Barnacle, a young woman from Galway. In October they left together for the
Continent. Returning only thrice to Ireland — and never again after
1912 — Joyce lived out the remainder of his life in Italy, Switzerland, and
France.
The young couple went first to Pola, but soon moved to Trieste where Joyce
began teaching English for the Berlitz School. Except for seven months in
Rome, the Joyces stayed in Trieste for the next eleven years. Despite disputes
with recalcitrant publishers, severe eye problems, and the pressures of a grow-
ing family (both a son and a daughter were born), Joyce managed in this time to
write the poems that became Chamber Music (1907), as well as Dubliners (1914),
and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). By the time the family moved
to Zurich in July 1915, he had also begun Ulysses.
Over the next seven years, first in Zurich, later in Paris, Ulysses progressed.
Partial serial publication in the Little Review (1917–18) brought suppression,
confiscation, and finally conviction for obscenity. Sylvia Beach, proprietor of
the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, offered to publish it (publi-
cation in an English-speaking country risked another prosecution). The first
copies arrived in Joyce’s hands on 2 February 1922, his fortieth birthday.
The acclaim publication brought placed Joyce at the centre of the literary
movement only later known as Modernism, but he was already restlessly
pushing back its borders. Within the year he had begun his next project,
known only mysteriously as Work in Progress. This occupied him for the next
sixteen years, until in 1939 it was published as Finnegans Wake. By this time,
Europe was on the brink of war. When Germany invaded France the Joyces
left Paris, first for Vichy then on to Zurich. Here Joyce died on 13 January
1941 after surgery for a perforated ulcer. He was buried in Fluntern
Cemetery.
Jeri Johnson is Peter Thompson Fellow in English at Exeter College,
Oxford, and Academic Director of the Exeter College Summer Programme.
As a postgraduate student at Oxford, she worked with Professor Richard
Ellmann. She has edited Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man for Oxford World’s Classics, Virginia Woolf ’s The Years for Penguin,
and has written on Joyce, Woolf, Freud, textual theory and editing, and feminist
literary theory.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
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and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
Editorial material © Jeri Johnson 1993, 2022
First published 1922. This edition reproduced from copy no. 785 in the
Bodleian Library, shelfmark [Link]. 50.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1993
Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998, 2008
New edition 2022
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
CONTENTS
ULYSSES
Appendix A: The Gilbert and Linati Schemata 734
Appendix B: Ulysses: Serialization and Editions 740
Appendix C: Errata 747
Explanatory Notes 763
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/01/22, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/01/22, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION
‘Worst is beginning’
‘Where do you begin in this?’ (25) Stephen Dedalus asks his Dalkey
schoolboys, ‘this’ being the book before them. The question returns
with each new reader approaching Ulysses for the first time. The com-
monplace response of the contemporary Joyce critic is itself Joycean:
of course, there is no possibility of beginning Ulysses, much less of
finishing (with) it. Joyce’s book has so colonized modern anglophone
culture that we can never now enter it for the first time. Instead, we
most resemble members of that parade of guests Bloom imagines
both preceding and succeeding him into Molly’s bed: ‘he is always
the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding
one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas
he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in
and repeated to infinity’ (683).
There is more seriousness in this contention than first meets the
eye. While every new reader faced with this book addresses it new, this
newness is modified by the generations of readers who have come
before and whose disseminations of it have seeped into virtually every
aspect of high and popular culture. Approach must now be made
through an air thick with rumours about the book and from a position
inside a culture saturated with the effects of its influence. In 1941
Harry Levin declared Ulysses ‘a novel to end all novels’.1 In saying so,
he credited it with being the culmination of one tradition (say, the
nineteenth-century realist novel) while setting out the questions to be
debated in the next (next two, perhaps, Modernism and postmodern-
ism). If, after Joyce, everything suggested itself only as repetition,
many found the repetition fruitful, not least Joyce’s immediate con-
temporaries Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Later (to
name but a few of Joyce’s more obvious beneficiaries), Samuel Beckett
and Dylan Thomas, later still Anthony Burgess, B. S. Johnson,
Martin (if not Kingsley) Amis, A. S. Byatt, and Salman Rushdie all
1 Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (1941; rev. edn, New York: New
Directions, 1960), 207.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
x Introduction
bear the mark of his influence, as, in the wider sphere, do Jorge Luis
Borges, Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, Umberto Eco, and
a whole generation of American novelists. And this is to stay within
the realm of ‘high’ culture. The impact is no less felt on television,
film, popular music, and Bloom’s own profession, advertising, in their
use of montage, open-ended narrative, pastiche, parody, multiple
viewpoint, neologism.
While this may be incontestable, it is as likely to leave the novice
reader as much bemused and intimidated as enlightened and encour-
aged. Often rumours create more static than clear signal. A small
example. Ulysses, the title, utterly flummoxed many early readers. To
them it conjured up classical associations: the Roman name of the
Greek hero Odysseus. Expecting perhaps a modern novelization of
Homer’s epic, they opened the book only to discover themselves
thrown into the middle of a narrative (in medias res — in the midst of
things — the way all good epics begin) featuring ‘Stately plump Buck
Mulligan’ (hardly a Greek or Roman name), then a ‘displeased and
sleepy’ Stephen Dedalus (here, at least, was a Greek name), then
Haines, a ‘ponderous Saxon’. Where was Ulysses?2 Most modern
readers don’t face this dilemma because by now the title has virtually
lost its ability to refer to the Roman name of a Greek hero. Now it
simply means ‘That Book By James Joyce’. If today we are to recog-
nize both the significance and the force of the title, we may need to
make it strange again, to untie the knot binding it to its creator.
Jennifer Levine suggests imagining that this book is called Hamlet to
‘regain a sense of it as a text brought into deliberate collision with
a powerful predecessor’.3 That’s the kind of ‘making strange’ required.
There is a further related problem. If Joyce has spawned gener
ations of writers, he has no less stimulated whole libraries of criticism.
What may have appeared at the time as enormous egoism — Joyce’s
2 The fact that ‘Ulysses’ does not appear until episode 4, and then under the guise of
‘Mr Leopold Bloom’, bourgeois advertising canvasser, confused at least one hapless critic.
As Joyce took delight in relating to Harriet Weaver: ‘Another American “critic” who
wanted to interview me (I declined) told me he had read the book with great interest but
that he could not understand why Bloom came into it. I explained to him why and he
[was] surprised and disappointed for he thought Stephen was Ulysses. He heard some
talk of Penelope and asked me who she was. This also I told him but did not convince him
entirely because he said rather doubtfully “But is Penelope a really Irish name?” ’ (LI 184).
3 Jennifer Levine, ‘Ulysses’, in Derek Attridge (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 131–2.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
Introduction xi
claim, ‘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’ ( JJ 521) — begins to seem
modest a century later. More to the point, virtually every Joyce critic
these days expects one to know already things about the book which
aren’t to be found within it: the episode titles, for example, or the
history of Joyce’s personal campaign to create a critical context for the
book. What is a new reader to do?
In what follows, that question (or its twin, what do you need to
know to read Ulysses?) focuses my discussion. This is by no means to
suggest that anything can substitute for the vertiginous experience of
actually reading the book, nor that a preface of this sort does not run
the risk of creating its own static. My hope is of kindling curiosity
rather than dampening it, and of opening just enough doors that the
reader will want to walk through.
xii Introduction
oddest thing about this proliferation of ‘critical opinion’ is that
reviewers were addressing an audience about a book which they
hadn’t a chance of obtaining for at least another twelve or fourteen
years, when the first unlimited editions were published (in the USA
and England respectively). Still, the book’s appearance was considered
a literary event of such magnitude and a publication so threatening
(‘literary Bolshevism’) that every respectable journal or ‘DAILY
ORGAN’ (114) had to respond. H. G. Wells is reputed to have said
that when he put the book down, having finished reading, he felt as
though he had suppressed a revolution.
What was it about Ulysses that struck Joyce’s contemporaries with
such tremendous force? The vast majority of them could make nei-
ther head nor tail of the prose: ‘Two-thirds of it is incoherent’;
‘Ulysses is a chaos’; ‘inspissated obscurities’.8 While even these critics
inevitably praised Joyce’s stylistic facility — when he set his mind to
it — rudimentary comprehension of large sections of the book lay
beyond the grasp of its first readers. What could be understood
deserved pruning, they thought. The book was ill-disciplined, its
author perverse. As Holbrook Jackson stated the case most dispas-
sionately, ‘Everything that is never done or never mentioned is done
and said by him.’9 Of course, Jackson really means ‘never done or never
mentioned’ in Proper Literature. Precisely. Ulysses assaulted propriety.
For Joyce’s co-Modernists, his social improprieties (which they
met with varying degrees of tolerance) were a small price to pay for
the stylistic possibilities opened up by his literary ‘improprieties’.
For T. S. Eliot, Joyce’s Ulysses took a major ‘step toward making the
modern world possible for art’.10 Ezra Pound praised Joyce’s stylistic
veracity and compression: ‘Joyce’s characters not only speak their
own language, but they think their own language.’11 ‘[There is] not
a line, not a half-line which does not receive an intellectual intensity
incomparable in a work of so long a span.’12 Virginia Woolf found the
Introduction xiii
‘indecency’ less tolerable, but eventually admitted to having read it
‘with spasms of wonder, of discovery’.13 If the populace was being
warned that Joyce was scandalous, incomprehensible, a ‘frustrated
Titan . . . spluttering] hopelessly under the flood of his own vomit’,14
the literati were being given notice that this writer could not be
ignored. ‘ “Unite to give praise to Ulysses,” ’ declared Pound; ‘those
who will not, may content themselves with a place in the lower intel-
lectual orders.’15
Sufficient numbers even of those who praised the book found it so
disconcertingly unreadable, at least in part, to prompt the question
‘why?’ The charge of incomprehensibility may be laid fairly at the
door of the book’s uncanny likeness to, and utter difference from,
novels which had preceded it. As Hugh Kenner argues, ‘printed
words on a page — any words, any page — are so ambiguously related
to each other that we collect sense only with the aid of a tradition: this
means, helped by prior experience with a genre, and entails our know-
ing which genre is applicable’.16 Ulysses looked like a novel, but it also
looked like drama, or catechism, or poetry, or music depending on
which page one happened to open. If the book had played a little
more fair — had it, say, used quotation marks to identify the speakers
of dialogue and to make that dialogue more readily distinguishable
from the circumambient prose, or had it provided a leisurely pre
amble setting the scene and gently leading the reader towards a first
encounter with Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus, had there been
less neologistic wordplay of the sort more usually found in poetry, or
less psychological verisimilitude, less parody, pastiche, or stylistic
extravagance — it might have been recognized as a novel. That it
wasn’t is simply because it isn’t — a novel, that is. Not quite. Or
rather, it contains within itself at least one novel (a point to which we
13 And ‘then again with long lapses of intense boredom’. From Woolf ’s diary entry of
15 Jan. 1941, on hearing of Joyce’s death (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier
Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols (1984; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), vol. v.
1936–1941, p. 353). ‘Indecency’ is Woolf ’s word: ‘the pages reeled with indecency’. The
effect of what Woolf might have ‘discovered’ on first reading Ulysses in 1922 can perhaps
be seen in her own evocation of a single day in June, Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925.
14 ‘Domini Canis’ (Shane Leslie), ‘Ulysses’, Dublin Review (Sept. 1922), repr. in Deming
(ed.), Critical Heritage, i. 203.
15 Pound, ‘Paris Letter’, in P/J 194.
16 Hugh Kenner, Ulysses (1980; rev. edn, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987), 3.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
xiv Introduction
will return), but it also challenges, expands, even explodes that genre’s
previously established conventions. Joyce himself began by calling
it a novel, soon abandoned this for ‘epic’, ‘encyclopaedia’, or even
maledettissimo romanzaccione,17 and finally settled simply for ‘book’.
From the outset, Joyce recognized that his audience, whether popu
lar or literary, was going to be nonplussed. As early as Ulysses’s initial
appearance in the Little Review (where it was serialized between 1918
and 1920),18 Joyce began filling his letters to loyal friends with explan
ations and exegeses. If Ulysses were to find an informed, appreciative
audience, its author would have to create one.
17 Italian for, roughly, ‘damnedest monstrously big novel’. These three euphemisms
all occur in Joyce’s letter of 21 Sept. 1920 to Carlo Linati (SL 270). For a discussion of
the book’s defiance of generic classification, see A. Walton Litz, ‘The Genre of Ulysses’,
in John Halperin (ed.), The Theory of the Novel: New Essays (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1974), 109–20.
18 See ‘Composition and Publication History’, below.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
Introduction xv
suggested portions for reading at the ‘séance’, then critical hints,
including a ‘plan’ of the book, versions of which he had been circulat-
ing to select friends since at least a year earlier. In Larbaud’s lecture
we can see the seeds Joyce has planted beginning to sprout. Here we
first glimpse the arguments which will determine the shape of future
critical debates.
What did Larbaud, nudged by Joyce, think readers ought to know
about the book confronting them?19 ‘Preparatory to anything else’
(569), the ways in which it was a novel. Larbaud stressed that the nar-
rative consisted of eighteen discrete episodes though it is rendered
coherent by the continuing presence of one or more of the three prin-
cipal characters: Stephen Dedalus (late of A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man), Leopold and Molly Bloom. The setting: Dublin. The
time: a single day in June (16 June 1904 to be precise). Further, the
narrative made frequent use of monologue intérieur, the unmediated,
first-person rendering of the characters’ private thoughts in their
own idiom and the registering in those thoughts of external events,
conversations, physical surroundings, sensations, memories. Much
of the action is thus related through the consciousness of these three
characters. By attending to these aspects of Ulysses, one could see, as
Larbaud stressed, that ‘in this book . . . the illusion of life, of the thing
in the act, is complete’.20
If Ulysses was novelistic triumph, though, it had another, more dis-
comfiting side and that was its relation to its epic precursor, The
Odyssey. It is hard to imagine any reader stumbling on to this relation
on her or his own. True, there is that title. A little cogitation might
take one as far as Homer’s hero (by way of his Roman descendant),
but had Joyce left only the title, chances are that that is where one
would come to a halt. Should anyone later have suggested that the
book was, at least in part, an extravagant contemporary rewriting of
Homer, they would probably have been laughed out of the academy.
But, on this matter, Joyce was taking no chances.
From the time that Ulysses was sufficiently complete for its publi-
cation to be seriously discussed, Joyce began to refer in his letters to
19 Valery Larbaud, ‘James Joyce’, Nouvelle Revue française, 18 (Apr. 1922), 385–407.
This is an expanded version of Larbaud’s original lecture. A translated lengthy excerpt of
this article is reprinted in Deming (ed.), Critical Heritage, i. 252–62.
20 Larbaud, in Deming (ed.), Critical Heritage, i. 259.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
xvi Introduction
sections of it as bearing Odyssean titles. Any published edition of the
final book contains only three clearly numbered divisions: I (the first
three episodes), II (the next twelve), and III (the final three). These
Joyce alluded to with Homeric inflection as the Telemachia, the
Odyssey, and the Nostos (or ‘Return Home’) (LI 113). Further, each of
the eighteen episodes contained within these three Homeric divisions
had titles gleaned from Odysseus’s adventures. These Joyce released
in dribs and drabs until in 1920 he sent to Carlo Linati, proposed
translator of Exiles, what he described as ‘a sort of summary — key–
skeleton — schema’ of the entire book ‘(for home use only)’ (SL 270).
Unfortunately, Linati took Joyce at his word and held on to the
schema, so that when it came time for Larbaud to deliver his lecture,
Joyce had to provide him with another plan of the book. This plan
differed considerably from the first in detail, but the essential features
were the same.21 The title of each episode was given: the Telemachia
comprised ‘Telemachus’, ‘Nestor’, ‘Proteus’; the Odyssey: ‘Calypso’,
‘Lotus Eaters’, ‘Hades’, ‘Aeolus’, ‘Lestrygonians’, ‘Scylla and
Charybdis’, ‘Wandering Rocks’, ‘Sirens’, ‘Cyclops’, ‘Nausicaa’, ‘Oxen
of the Sun’, ‘Circe’; and the Nostos: ‘Eumaeus’, ‘Ithaca’, and
‘Penelope’.22 In addition, it seemed, Joyce employed correspondences
between Homeric characters and his own: obviously Stephen was
Telemachus (son of Odysseus/Ulysses); Bloom, Ulysses; Molly,
Penelope (his faithful, weaving wife); but, too, Mulligan was Antinous;
the barmaids, Miss Lydia Douce and Miss Mina Kennedy, were the
Sirens; Bella the brothel keeper was Circe; and so on.23 Further,
Homeric places were translated as Joycean themes: Scylla the Rock
became Dogma, while Charybdis the Whirlpool became Mysticism;
or Helios’s sacred Oxen became Fertility or Penelope’s Suitors,
21 A version of this second plan was first published in Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s
‘Ulysses’ (1930) — the first substantial book of Ulysses criticism, written again with Joyce’s
approval and with the benefit of his guidance. Both the Linati and Gilbert schemata are
reproduced in Appendix A, below. The Linati schema has also been published, in both
Italian and a different translation, in Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (London:
Faber & Faber, 1974).
22 The episodes can be located in this edition on the following pages: ‘Telemachus’
(3–23), ‘Nestor’ (24–36), ‘Proteus’ (37–50), ‘Calypso’ (53–67), ‘Lotus Eaters’ (68–83),
‘Hades’ (84–111), ‘Aeolus’ (112–43), ‘Lestrygonians’ (144–75), ‘Scylla and Charybdis’
(176–209), ‘Wandering Rocks’ (210–44), ‘Sirens’ (245–79), ‘Cyclops’ (280–330), ‘Nausicaa’
(331–65), ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (366–407), ‘Circe’ (408–565), ‘Eumaeus’ (569–618), ‘Ithaca’
(619–89), and ‘Penelope’ (690–732).
23 See the Explanatory Notes for Homeric glosses.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
Introduction xvii
Scruples. Joyce had an infinitely adaptable creative mind which thrived
on noticing the ways in which one thing (a Dublin conversation, say)
both was and was not like another (a battle between a Greek warrior
trying to get home and the immediate opponent who stood in his
way). It is these not-quite-samenesses which Joyce exploits in his
connecting Ulysses and The Odyssey.
Beyond the strictly Homeric parallels, each episode had its own
particular setting, hour, bodily organ, art, colour, symbol, technique
(and earlier, in the Linati schema, its own ‘Meaning’). As Joyce
explained this elaborate system to Linati:
[Ulysses] is the epic of two races (Israel–Ireland) and at the same time the
cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). . . . It is also
a kind of encyclopaedia. My intention is not only to render the myth sub
specie temporis nostri but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour,
every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic
scheme of the whole) to condition and even to create its own technique.
Each adventure is so to speak one person although it is composed of
persons — as Aquinas relates of the heavenly hosts. (SL 271)
Now this was a novel with a difference. Larbaud might stress that ‘the
plan, which cannot be detached from the book, because it is the very
web of it’ was actually subordinate to ‘man, the creature of flesh, liv-
ing out his day’,24 but the extraordinarily intricate and elaborate sym-
bolic systems carry it away from the domain of more conventional
fiction and towards something which, for lack of a better name, we
might call the ‘hyperliterary’. For this is literature which draws atten-
tion to itself as literature, as artefact constructed out of words and
symbols and correspondences and systems which we take pleasure in
precisely because of (rather than despite) their craftedness, precisely
because they draw our attention to word as word, symbol as symbol,
system as system, rather than simply urging us to see through this
artifice towards some meaning residing within. If we have been
trained to read novels in such a way as to discover the correlation
between the novel and life, or to provide a paraphrase of its ‘mean-
ing’, or to explicate the moral dilemma, this foregrounding of word,
symbol, system, correspondence, frustrates that training. What pos-
sible ‘moral’ can be drawn from the proliferation of flower names in
xviii Introduction
the ‘Lotus Eaters’ episode? or from the fact that ‘Calypso’s’ colour is
orange? or that ‘Ithaca’s’ symbol is ‘Comets’? Ulysses in this mode
will not play that game.
It is probably time to attempt the formulation of a rule about
Ulysses, a rule which emerges as the logical conclusion of Joyce’s hav-
ing drawn Larbaud’s attention simultaneously to two different (both
independently verifiable) aspects of the book. The rule: A salient, if
not the quintessential, characteristic of Ulysses is that it is allotropic.25
That is, it is capable of existing, and indeed does exist, in at least two
distinct, and distinctively different, forms at one and the same time:
in this case, ‘distilled essence of novel’ and ‘extravagant, symbolically
supersaturated anti-novel’.
The two strains had been alive in Joyce’s mind at least since 1912
when he delivered two lectures at the Università Popolare in Trieste
under the series title ‘Verismo ed idealismo nella letteratura inglese
(Daniele De Foe–William Blake)’.26 To any reader of Ulysses, the
combination of Defoe and Blake comes as no surprise. Joyce’s Defoe
is the master of ‘matter-of-fact realism’ and prophetic creator of
characters who embody the coming ‘Anglo-Saxon spirit’: ‘English
feminism and English imperialism already lurk in these souls.’27 In
other words, his Crusoe is both particular and typical. Joyce’s Blake is
a sensitive, practical idealist — practical in that he practised in his life
what he preached in his art — visionary seer, the ‘humble’ through
whose mouth the ‘Eternal’ spoke. What Joyce found in his art was ‘the
innate sense of form [and] the coordinating force of the intellect’.28
Joyce stresses not Blake’s mystical visions but his capacity for, and
attendance to, the artistic matters of form and correspondence.
Verismo and idealismo, Defoe and Blake, become in Ulysses the two
competing yet coordinated strains we have already identified.
25 ‘Allotropy’: from chemistry, the property of certain elements to exist in two or more
distinct forms: e.g. carbon exists within nature as graphite and diamond.
26 The two lectures have been published as ‘Daniel Defoe by James Joyce’, ed. and trans.
Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies, 1/1 (Dec. 1964), 1–27; and James Joyce, ‘William Blake’,
ed. Ellsworth Mason, Criticism, 1 (Summer 1959), 181–9; trans. and repr. in The Critical
Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking,
1959), 214–22. See also James Joyce, ‘Realism and Idealism in Literature (Daniel Defoe–
William Blake)’, in Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry, trans. Conor
Deane (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics/Oxford University Press, 2000), 163–82.
27 Joyce, ‘Daniel Defoe’, 12, 24, 23.
28 Joyce, ‘William Blake’, 218, 221.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
Introduction xix
These two allotropes or ‘modes’ each inevitably produced its own
school of Ulysses criticism. The two contrasting critical positions (‘it’s
a novel’; ‘it’s a symbolic system’) were adopted respectively by two of
the book’s most ardent admirers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Pound,
who had been intimately involved with the book’s serialization, pre-
ferred to ignore the Homeric correspondences and to focus instead on
its huge humane expansiveness and its stylistic fidelity to nuances of
character. In fact, Pound bears responsibility for gen erations of
Joyceans approaching the systems and symbols with embarrassment,
for in an early review he announced, ‘These correspondences are part
of Joyce’s mediaevalism and are chiefly his own affair, a scaffold, a means
of construction, justified by the result, and justifiable by it only.’
Instead, he pronounced the book a ‘super-novel’.29 Eliot, who never
demonstrated any particular affection for fiction, was antithetically dis-
posed. In his influential review, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, he declared,
Mr Joyce’s parallel use of the Odyssey has . . . the importance of a scientific
discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before. . . . I am
not begging the question in calling Ulysses a ‘novel’; and if you call it an epic it
will not matter. If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form
which will no longer serve. . . . In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous
parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce [has discovered]
a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. . . .
Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.30
One might be forgiven for thinking that Eliot’s peroration has per-
haps more to do with his own 1922 ‘mythic parallelism’ The Waste
Land than with Ulysses, but it served as his declaration both of how
Joyce’s book should be conceived and of what Modernism might
mean (more on this anon). Henceforth Joyce critics would steer
a course between the Scylla of novelistic realism and hard facts and
the Charybdis of myth, symbol, and form for its own sake.31 The
first major critical book on Ulysses, Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s
xx Introduction
‘Ulysses’ (1930), emphasized, through constant reference to the
schema with which Joyce had previously provided Larbaud, the elab-
orate systems, correspondences, and significances of the book.
Balancing this four years later was Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and
the Making of ‘Ulysses’, which placed Bloom, bourgeois Everyman, at
the centre of the ‘novel’ and asserted the comic spirit of the whole.
Both books were written with Joyce’s knowledge, encouragement,
and occasional advice. A generation later Richard Ellmann (with his
Ulysses on the Liffey) and Hugh Kenner (with Dublin’s Joyce, Joyce’s
Voices, and Ulysses) took up (respectively) the Gilbert and Budgen,
Eliot and Pound, lines once again. However, by the time of the arrival
of this second generation of Joyceans, readers had begun to attend
very carefully to the book’s language, to its predisposition not only to
fulfil conventions but also to push them to the bursting point, to its
seeming self-conscious awareness of itself as a written yet material
artefact, to the way in which it seemed not only to say things but also
to do them. In short, readers became aware of Ulysses as, in Roland
Barthes’s use of the term, a ‘Text’: an actively productive, literally
paradoxical, non-closed, irreducibly plural, playful, self-pleasuring
writing.32
Ironically, something of Ulysses’s textual nature had been detected
as early as 1927, by another of Joyce’s co-Modernists, Wyndham
Lewis. Where recent readers have leapt on this discovery with enthu-
siasm and delight, Lewis deplored it. In his Time and Western
Man, he excoriated ‘The Mind of James Joyce’.33 Here he puts
succinctly — he intended it to sting — what many another Joyce critic
missed: ‘what stimulates [Joyce] is ways of doing things, arid technical
32 Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’ (1971), repr. in Image Music Text, ed. and
trans. Stephen Heath (1977; repr. London: Fontana, 1984), 155–64. Though note that
Barthes uses the term ‘play’ in the various senses of ‘like a door, like a machine with play’,
‘playing the Text as one plays a game’, and ‘playing the Text in the musical sense of the
term’ (162). See, too, Levine’s description of Ulysses’s ‘textual’ aspect in her discussion
of ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (Levine, ‘Ulysses’, 146–58).
33 Wyndham Lewis, ‘An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce’, in Time and Western
Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), 91–130. Lewis’s criticism is mainly known to
Joyce scholars through Kenner’s use of him as the buffoon who clumsily misreads Joyce’s
style. Kenner was one of the earliest critics to attend to the ‘productive’ aspect of the
book which Lewis so deplored. See Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1978), 16–17, 23, 69–70.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/12/21, SPi
Introduction xxi
processes, and not things to be done’.34 Of course, Joyce himself was
well aware of his predilection. He once boasted to Samuel Beckett,
‘I have discovered that I can do anything with language I want’ ( JJ 702).
Notice that he does not say, ‘I can say anything I want with language.’
For Joyce, language was for doing, not saying; it was dynamic, not
static. If the first fifty years of Ulysses criticism were spent in a tug-of-
war between the critical offspring of Eliot and Pound, the last fifty
have brought Lewis’s (unintended) progeny to the fore. But all have
in one way or another been Joyce’s posterity. A closer look at Ulysses,
as novel and as symbolic/stylistic system, but with one eye always
open to its ‘textuality’, reveals much about why it might be con
sidered, as it refers to itself, as a ‘chaffering allincluding most farra
ginous chronicle’ (402).
34 Lewis, ‘Analysis’, 106–7; emphasis in original. See, too, Derek Attridge and Daniel
Ferrer, ‘Introduction’, in Attridge and Ferrer (eds), Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from
the French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 5–6.
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