Novels, Deep-Read · James Joyce · No.8
James Joyce · 1922 · Dublin · 16 June 1904
Eight in the morning, two places in Dublin. On the roof of a squat round gun tower by the sea, a medical student holds up a bowl of shaving lather and intones the opening of the Mass into the mist, teasing the man he lives with. That man is twenty-two, wearing a year-old mourning suit, and he has still not knelt to pray for the mother who died in it.
Across the city, in the kitchen of 7 Eccles Street, a thirty-eight-year-old advertisement canvasser pours milk for the cat, walks out to buy a pork kidney, and fries it. It catches slightly. His wife is still in bed upstairs. On the hall floor lie two letters and a card, and one of the letters is addressed to her in a bold black hand he recognises at a glance. He carries it up. He does not ask.
Nothing much happens on this day. It is the most minutely recorded day in the world.
On 16 June 1904, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertisement canvasser in Dublin, knows that his wife will go to bed with another man at four in the afternoon, and so walks around his own city for nineteen hours rather than go home; late that night he picks up a drunk young man named Stephen Dedalus who has just been floored by a British soldier in the red-light district, takes him home, makes him a cup of cocoa, then gets into bed at his wife's feet and tells her a version of his day; and she lies in the dark turning over forty unpunctuated pages of her own mind until she remembers an afternoon on a headland sixteen years earlier, and says the word.
James Joyce (1882–1941) left Ireland at twenty-two with a hotel chambermaid named Nora Barnacle and spent the rest of his life in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, teaching English, borrowing money, and writing about nowhere but Dublin. The day Ulysses takes place is the day he and Nora first walked out together. He took the best day of his private life and rewrote it as the most humiliating day in the life of a cuckolded middle-aged man.
The novel was serialised in the American magazine The Little Review from 1918, and printed in Paris by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday, in an edition of a thousand copies. Around 265,000 words, eighteen episodes, one day. Its position in literary history is not in dispute: it is the origin point of the modernist novel — before it, fiction was mainly organised around what happens; after it, what passes through a person's head became something a whole book could be made of. It is also the most banned, most annotated and least finished book of the twentieth century.
The Martello tower (a squat coastal fort from the Napoleonic era, later rented to civilians) at Sandycove. Buck Mulligan, a medical student with no brakes on his mouth, is shaving. Also in residence is Haines, an Englishman collecting Irish folk wisdom, so courteous he makes your hand itch.
The third tenant is Stephen Dedalus, twenty-two, university-educated, author of a few lines of verse, teaching half-days at a private school and in debt to everyone. His mother died a year ago; at her deathbed she asked him to kneel and pray, and he would not — not because he did not love her, but because he no longer believed, and to perform a faith he did not have so that a dying woman could die easier struck him as an insult to them both. He did not kneel. The scene replays in his head daily. Mulligan makes a joke of it in front of the Englishman.
After breakfast Mulligan goes down to swim, and on the way holds out his hand for the key to the tower — the tower whose rent Stephen pays. Stephen hands it over, and two pence with it. seed ① One word goes through his mind as he walks away: Usurper. He knows he will not be sleeping there tonight.
He teaches a morning class; afterwards the headmaster, Mr Deasy, pays him, lectures him on saving money, and remarks with satisfaction that Ireland has never persecuted the Jews — because she never let them in. Stephen's most famous line of the day is his answer:
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."Episode 2 · Stephen to Mr Deasy
At eleven he walks alone on the strand, shutting his eyes to test whether the world is still there, his mind churning with theology, tides, Paris, his mother's body, the work he has not written. So far this could be a standard portrait-of-the-artist novel. Then chapter four opens, and the camera swings away from him to a man frying a kidney on the other side of the city — and never fully swings back.
Leopold Bloom, thirty-eight, sells advertising space for the Freeman's Journal. His father was Rudolph Virag, a Hungarian Jew who changed his name, changed his religion, and finally took poison in a country hotel. His mother was not Jewish. Bloom himself has been baptised three times, keeps no observance, attends no synagogue, and eats pork kidney for breakfast. By religious law he is not a Jew at all, but all Dublin agrees that he is — which is his whole situation: a man not quite inside anything.
He carries the post upstairs. His wife Molly (Marion Bloom, thirty-three, professional singer, raised in Gibraltar) is in bed with a cheap novel, and points at a word: what does metempsychosis mean? She has mangled the pronunciation. Bloom explains: the transmigration of souls, the dead coming back in another body, an idea of the Greeks. seed ② The word keeps surfacing in his head all day; he turns it over like a sweet in his mouth.
The letter in the bold hand is from Blazes Boylan, the impresario organising Molly's coming concert tour, who is calling at the house at four to go through the programme. Bloom knows everything. Molly knows he knows. Neither says it. This is the book's fuse: not what happens at four o'clock, but the three minutes at eight in the morning in which a man decides not to ask. He then leaves and spends the entire day describing circles around his own house.
First to the post office, where under the alias "Henry Flower" he collects a letter from Martha, a typist he hooked with a fake advertisement — months of suggestive correspondence, never a meeting. A flirtation guaranteed never to acquire a body, to offset the one at home that has. On the street an acquaintance asks to borrow his paper for the racing page, and Bloom says he was about to throw it away — which the man hears as Throwaway, the name of a twenty-to-one outsider running in the Ascot Gold Cup that afternoon. seed ③ Bloom has no idea what has just happened.
At eleven he goes to the funeral of a man he barely knew: Paddy Dignam, drunk himself to death, wife and children left behind. Four men share a carriage to the cemetery. Someone brings up suicide and calls it the meanest, most cowardly thing a man can do; he does not know that Bloom's father died that way, and Bloom, in his corner, says nothing. Passing a child's coffin he thinks of his son Rudy, dead at eleven days old, who would be eleven now. seed ④ He and Molly have not had complete relations since — ten years, five months and change. The root of the four o'clock appointment is an infant who lived eleven days.
At the graveside there is one extra mourner nobody knows, in a brown mackintosh. He turns up several more times, a loose thread running through the book — and it is a thread Joyce never ties off. The evening paper prints the list of mourners, and the unknown man is entered as "Mr M'Intosh" (the reporter has taken the raincoat for a name); the same list misprints Bloom as "L. Boom". A man's entire existence in his city can amount to a typo on a list.
At lunchtime, hungry, he steps into an eating-house, sees a room of men shovelling food, and walks straight out again, ending up in a small pub with a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy. The wine brings back an afternoon years ago on Howth Head: the rhododendrons, Molly passing him seedcake from her own mouth, his asking her, her saying yes. seed ⑤ On the way out he sees Boylan across the street, his heart jumps, and he ducks through the museum gate — it is not the man he cannot look at, it is four o'clock.
Two o'clock, the National Library. Stephen is performing his Shakespeare theory for a few literary men, brilliantly and nastily: in Hamlet, Shakespeare is not the prince but the ghost — the dead, betrayed father who comes back to speak to his son. He runs the theory into the marriage: the wife eight years older who may have betrayed him while he was away, the son Hamnet who died. Asked whether he believes any of it, he says flatly: no.
This is the intellectual hinge of the book, because it prises "father and son" away from biology: paternity, Stephen says, is a legal fiction — the mother is a visible fact, the father is always only a claim. So real fatherhood is not begetting but claiming. He is looking for a father who is not his father; and across the city a man who lost a son is walking this way. As Stephen leaves, Bloom comes in to check an advertisement layout, and the two pass in the porch, one of them stepping slightly aside. Neither notices.
Around three the point of view shatters like dropped glass: priests, girls, beggars, police, debt collectors all going their own way, and finally the viceroy's cavalcade crossing the city and catching each of them in a posture. Bloom picks out a piece of erotic fiction for Molly at a bookstall.
At four he walks into the dining room of the Ormond Hotel — because he has seen Boylan's cab at the door. There is singing in the bar; Stephen's father Simon sings an Italian aria, and at the word return the whole room of men goes quiet. Bloom sits in the next room, listening, writing his reply to Martha, and hears hooves outside: Boylan leaving. He knows exactly where that cab is going, and he stays where he is and finishes the letter. The episode is written as music — sentences cut into beats, words repeated into echoes — because music is precisely what Bloom is using to get through the hour.
Five o'clock, Barney Kiernan's. The narrator here is an unnamed debt collector with a mouth full of acid. At the bar sits an old nationalist known only as the Citizen, with a vicious dog and a speech about the greatness of Ireland, the vileness of England, and the foreigners bleeding the country dry. Bloom comes in to wait for someone, does not drink, smokes a cigar, and commits two capital crimes: he argues reasonably, and — Throwaway has in fact won the Gold Cup, so the pub has decided Bloom collected a fortune and is too mean to stand a round. payoff ③ ↑ A sentence misheard at ten in the morning becomes a roomful of hatred by five in the afternoon. Joyce does not move his plot with coincidence; he moves it with a word heard wrong. It is the finest single piece of engineering in the book.
Pressed on what country he belongs to, Bloom says: Ireland. I was born here. The room goes briefly quiet. Then he states the moral centre of the novel, clumsily, flatly, without a shred of style (replayed in slow motion below):
"Insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life." … "Love. I mean the opposite of hatred."Episode 12 · Barney Kiernan's
He then commits the last offence available to him: he says that Christ was a Jew too. He is thrown out, and the Citizen hurls a biscuit tin after him.
Eight o'clock, the strand. Some girls are minding children; one of them, Gerty, sits on the rocks running a romance novel in her head, aware that the gentleman in black is watching her. This half of the episode is written in the syrup of cheap women's magazines. She leans back to let him see more; fireworks go up over the bazaar. Then she stands and walks away — she is lame. The style snaps off at that instant and becomes Bloom's tired, scattered interior: he has just masturbated in the dark and is thinking about going home, about his wife, about not being young. Half a chapter of a girl's fantasy and half a chapter of a middle-aged man's self-disgust turn out to be the same thing from two sides: both are in love with somebody who is not there.
Ten o'clock, the maternity hospital, where a woman he knows has been in labour three days. He finds a group of drunk medical students, Stephen among them, being blasphemous about birth. The prose of the episode evolves from Anglo-Saxon alliteration through the whole history of English style to contemporary slang, growing as the foetus grows. The baby is delivered safely. Bloom looks at this young man sixteen years his junior drinking himself into the ground, and decides to keep an eye on him.
The longest episode in the book — over a hundred and fifty pages, written as a playscript, sliding out of the real and into hallucination. Stephen and a companion go to the brothel quarter and Bloom follows. Under the gaslight everything the day suppressed climbs onto the stage: Bloom is tried in court, accused by society ladies of writing them filthy letters; Bloom is elected Lord Mayor and proclaims the new Jerusalem; Bloom is turned into a woman and made to kneel to the brothel-keeper; his father, his mother, his dead son, and the shrivelled potato he carries in his pocket as a charm all speak. None of it is supernatural. It is a man's shame, desire, fear and compensatory fantasy put on stage with sets, dialogue and stage directions — the first time the unconscious was staged rather than described.
On Stephen's side, the ghost of his mother rises with half her face rotted away, kneeling, begging him to repent, begging him to kneel. He shouts the name of the sword from Wagner's opera and smashes the chandelier with his ashplant. Out in the street he says something obscene about the King to two drunk British soldiers, and one of them knocks him flat.
Bloom talks the police down, picks up the young man's stick and hat, and crouches beside him. And then, looking up, he sees it: a boy of eleven in a neat Eton suit, a little bronze helmet, glass shoes, holding a book and reading it silently from right to left, smiling, kissing the page. The boy does not look at him and cannot hear him. payoff ④ ↑ A book read right to left is Hebrew — the child is reading his father's father's language. It is Rudy, dead eleven years, eleven years old. Seven hundred pages of stylistic fireworks, and the one wholly unguarded moment is buried at the bottom of a hallucination: a middle-aged man in a gutter finally seeing his son. He says nothing. The book explains nothing.
One a.m., a cabman's shelter, two men over coffee like mud. The prose here is exhausted, clichéd, circling and never landing — which is how people talk at one in the morning. A sailor is telling the room he has been everywhere on earth. Bloom produces a photograph of Molly and shows it to Stephen, with something in his manner that is part boast, part sales pitch, and part something else.
Then he takes the young man home. At the door he finds he has no key — he changed trousers this morning and left it in the other pocket. payoff ① ↑ The day opened with Stephen handing away the key to the tower he pays for; it closes with Bloom locked out of the house he owns. Two keyless men meet at two in the morning, and the whole Homeric scaffolding, the whole father-and-son theme, the whole business of exile and homecoming resolves into one absurdly concrete action: he climbs the area railings, drops down, and lets himself into his own house like a burglar. Then he opens the front door and lets his guest in.
This episode is written as a catechism, question and answer, cold and exact and unfeeling: which reservoirs the kitchen tap water has travelled from and what it costs per gallon, the ratio of the two men's ages, the brand of the cocoa. The colder the sentence, the hotter what is under it. They drink the cocoa and talk about Irish and Hebrew and about their fathers. Bloom offers him a bed; Stephen declines. They walk into the back garden and urinate side by side under a sky full of stars while a church bell strikes. Stephen leaves, destination unknown, and never appears again. They do not become father and son, and they do not become friends. They got each other through one night. This is Joyce's realism: the end of the epic is two strangers pissing in a garden and then going back to their separate solitudes.
Bloom tidies the house and undresses in the dark. There is the impression of another body in the bed, and some crumbs. He runs the day's accounts through his mind — jealousy, incomprehension, and then something he himself calls equanimity — lies down head to her feet, kisses her rump, tells her about his day (some of it true, some edited, some omitted), and makes one request: breakfast in bed tomorrow morning. No confrontation, no ultimatum. He simply resumes making a husband's request. Then he sleeps.
The last forty pages belong to Molly. Lying in the dark, startled by that breakfast request — he has not spoken to her like that in a decade — she lets her mind run without knots: Boylan is coarse but effective; Bloom is odd and always thinking too much, but there is not another man in Dublin who understands women like that or is that gentle; her daughter Milly is grown; her body; her first kiss at sixteen in Gibraltar; her dead son. Eight sentences, almost no punctuation. She also circles back to the hard word that stumped her that morning, still mispronounced, still wanting it in plain speech. payoff ② ↑ Those three lines about metempsychosis at breakfast were the book's own instruction manual left on the bedside table: an ancient hero's soul reborn in a Dublin adman. The title was on the cover all along; nobody took it literally. And then she remembers Howth. The rhododendrons, the seedcake passed from her mouth, the man asking her to say yes — payoff ⑤ ↑ the same afternoon Bloom turned over at lunchtime three hundred pages ago, now thought again from the other side by the woman lying next to him. The last line of the book is:
"… yes I said yes I will Yes."Episode 18, final words
That yes is not for Boylan, and not entirely for Bloom either. It is a person remembering that she once said yes, and saying it again in the present tense. Seven hundred pages come down to one woman's memory of one afternoon sixteen years ago.
To wind the whole chain back onto one fuse: it is not four o'clock, and it is not even the infant who lived eleven days. It is eight in the morning, a letter on the hall floor, a man recognising the handwriting, carrying it upstairs, and deciding not to ask. The nineteen hours of circling, the letters under a false name, the dodge into the museum, the abuse in the pub, the strand, the hallucinations, the railing climbed at two in the morning — all of it is the wake of those three minutes. What keeps this from being an adultery novel is that it spends its entire strength on the part afterwards: a man does not demand an explanation; now what is he going to do with the rest of the day?
Play it again: a room of men abusing the English, the Citizen's voice climbing, the dog grumbling under the table. Someone asks Bloom what a nation is. A nation, he says, is the same people living in the same place. Laughter. He adds: or also living in different places. Louder laughter. Someone asks what country he is. Ireland, he says, I was born here. Then he talks about his people being hounded for thousands of years, about people being sold and beaten at this very moment; someone shouts that he should take a gun to it, then; he says no, that is useless, that is the same thing turned around; and he says love, and hears at once how ridiculous the word is in that room, and adds quickly: I mean the opposite of hatred.
Why it lands: every paragraph in this episode is inflated by a parodied grand style — parliamentary transcript, Irish saga, court report — forever turning a dog into an ancient bard or a scuffle into an earthquake bulletin. Bloom's speech alone carries no style at all. It stammers, it repeats itself, it sounds like a man who cannot talk trying to get something said. Joyce surrounds him with magnificence so that your ear can hear that the magnificence is empty. The point of view is chosen just as ruthlessly: the whole chapter is told by a debt collector who despises him, so every description of Bloom you get is poisoned. You have to see past the narrator to the man, and performing that manoeuvre is exactly what the chapter is teaching.
Play it again: the chandelier smashed, the police talked down and gone, Stephen face down on the pavement muttering. Bloom crouches, recognises him as old Simon's son, brushes the shavings off his coat, holds his stick. He says the young man's name; nothing. He stands and looks into the dark — and a boy of eleven is standing there reading a book from right to left, smiling, kissing the page, not looking at him.
Why it lands: the information arrives extremely late, and unannounced. Rudy has been mentioned in fragments since episode six — eleven days, eleven years, the little wool jacket Molly knitted. Joyce never assembles them. He waits until the reader has been numbed by a hundred and fifty pages of hallucination, and until Bloom has just done something genuinely selfless, before letting the child out. And he puts it inside the hallucination chapter, where every previous apparition has been a product of shame or desire and therefore false — so your guard is exactly where he wants it. Rhythmically, everything before this is carnival, shouting, transformation; here it all goes quiet, and there is only a stage direction. The cruellest touch: Bloom says nothing, the author explains nothing, and the next chapter cuts straight to coffee in a cabman's shelter. Explaining it would make it sentimental; giving him a reaction would be a lie, because people often have no reaction at the time.
Play it again: one o'clock, a small pub, a man over a glass of burgundy remembering Howth Head, the rhododendrons, the seedcake pushed from her mouth into his, gulls, goats. He thinks: me then, me now. Three hundred pages later, in bed before dawn, the same flowers come up in another mind — but she remembers what he looked like, how she caught him with her eyes, how she thought well, him as well as another, and said yes.
Why it lands: it is the only time in the book the two memories touch. Across seven hundred pages this couple barely says one honest thing to each other — those three lines about metempsychosis are the most intimate exchange they get. Joyce gives them no reconciliation, no confrontation, no conversation. What he gives them is one memory recalled from both ends, three hundred pages apart, with the whole humiliating day lying in between. Technically it is the recovery of an image: the same props (flowers, cake, sea) returning without any prompt, and in the instant you recognise them, two separately lonely people close together inside your head. And the book ends on her side, not his: his evidence for the day is that he did not demand an explanation; hers is that she still remembers.
Ulysses does not run on a scientific premise. It runs on three machines.
One: a single day. Compressing a long novel into eighteen hours empties out the space normally occupied by plot. Ordinary novels advance on "and then what"; this one has no and-then — you learn in chapter four what four o'clock will bring. The vacated space is filled with density: everything that actually crosses a mind between waking and sleeping. The side effect is unforgiving: the reader has to switch off the habit of waiting to see what happens, and anyone who cannot switch it off puts the book down after thirty pages.
Two: interior monologue. The method is concrete: delete "he thought", delete the subject of the sentence, delete the explanatory connectives, and let each thought appear in the shape it actually has in a head — half a phrase, a noun, a shop sign cutting in, a line of a song, a number. Bloom passes a shop and holds simultaneously the window display, yesterday's accounts, his wife's afternoon, an advertising slogan, and whether to buy soap. On the page these sit side by side without hierarchy, because in the head they have none. "Stream of consciousness" makes it sound like free-writing; in fact it needs more control than ordinary narration — every jump has to be followable, and the jumps themselves have to identify the person: Stephen jumps to theology and Latin, Bloom to prices and popular science, Molly to bodies and people. You can tell who someone is purely from how they get distracted, and that is the finest thing this machine does.
Three: one style per episode. The most easily dismissed as showing off, and the hardest piece of design in the book: the newspaper chapter is broken up by headlines, the bar chapter is built like a fugue, the girl on the strand gets the prose of a romance magazine, the maternity hospital runs the history of English style alongside the growth of a foetus, the brothel becomes a playscript, the homecoming a catechism. The shape of the telling is the thing told. Form stops being a container: the sensation of language growing that you undergo in the hospital chapter is that chapter's content. The price is that the reader must relearn how to read at the start of every episode.
And there is the scaffolding: Homer. The eighteen episodes track the Odyssey — the Cyclops is the one-eyed nationalist in the pub, the Sirens are the barmaids and the music, Circe is the brothel-keeper who turns men into swine, Penelope is the wife in the bed. Two things matter. Those titles are not printed in the published book — Joyce circulated a private schema to friends, and that is where they come from. And it is a ladder, not the content: knowing the parallels gives you more, not knowing them costs you less than people claim. Its real use is inverted: not to promote Bloom to hero, but to drop the word "hero" onto a man who sells advertising space and hides in a museum doorway, and see what is left of it. What is left: feeding a cat, guiding a blind man across a street, organising a collection for a widow, making cocoa for a stranger.
1 · He did not go home at four o'clock
Bloom knows all day what four o'clock means. He does not go home, does not confront anyone, does not intervene, does not even curse for very long; in the catechism chapter he audits his own jealousy and files the result under equanimity. Is that cowardice, or something harder than courage?
The case for cowardice is strong. This is not tolerance, it is fear: he cannot even look Boylan in the face, and bolts through a museum gate to avoid him. He compensates with a correspondence under a false name that can never be cashed, and discharges himself watching a girl on a beach. That is not equanimity; it is trading a hard conflict for easy substitutes. And the silence is not necessarily kind to Molly: in the last forty pages she complains plainly about a decade of his evasions and hints. To be left cold for ten years and receive not a question but a tolerance is itself a form of abandonment. Calling your avoidance maturity is the most common self-flattery adults have.
The case against is just as strong. He knows he is implicated — after the child died it was he who withdrew from that bed first — and he knows his wife has a life of her own and is not his property. He does not demand an explanation because he can calculate the result: what would a row retrieve, other than making two people permanently ashamed? So he walks the day out, comes home, lies down, and asks her for breakfast — the smallest possible concrete request, starting again from the bottom. That is not surrender; it is choosing to stay after honestly assessing the odds. And "love, I mean the opposite of hatred" is not a slogan in his mouth: he is stepped on, cheated and mocked all day, never once hits back, and never turns bitter. Whether not hitting back can count as strength — the book votes yes.
Bring it home: you know something you have not said — a colleague's manoeuvre, a friend's lie, the thing in your family nobody names. You let it stand and told yourself that was maturity. One usable test: after not saying it, are you still willing to be good to that person? If yes, it was probably forbearance. If what remains is only coldness and coded remarks, it was something else. Bloom's answer is that kiss and that request for breakfast.
2 · Kneeling at the deathbed
Stephen's dying mother asked him to kneel and pray. He does not believe, and he did not kneel. She died. He has dreamt of her ever since, and the book torments him with it from page one to the ghost in Nighttown that kneels and begs him to kneel.
He should have knelt: it was the last request a dying person will ever make, and the cost was one bend of the knee and some moving lips. He held to an abstraction and let a specific, suffocating human being pay for it. His honesty had no audience in that room — by his own account God is not there, so the performance he refused to give was a performance for himself alone. Letting your mother die disappointed in order to keep a pure image of yourself is not courage, it is vanity. And it bought him no freedom: he has carried it for a year, which suggests he does not think he was right either.
He should not have knelt: if a man will fake belief to keep the room comfortable, every true statement he makes afterwards is discounted. What he refused was not his mother but the bargain that says at the decisive moment what you want matters more than what is true. And the request itself was not clean — a dying woman spending her last strength to force a declaration out of a son who no longer believes is love, but it is also decades of religious authority leaning on him. Kneeling would have comforted everyone at the bedside except him. As for the guilt afterwards, that is evidence he took the harder road: the easy option does not ache for a year.
Bring it home: this scene runs constantly in ordinary families with the props swapped — whether to nod along at dinner with something you think is false, whether to complete a ritual you do not believe in, whether to promise a frightened old person something you cannot deliver. The costs are permanently asymmetric: you spend a few minutes of insincerity, they receive years of peace of mind. The book gives no verdict, only an observation: Stephen did not kneel; the price was a year of nightmares; and he did not become a liar. Both of those are true.
3 · Making an adman into Odysseus
Joyce takes the oldest heroic story there is and fits it onto a middle-aged man who eats kidneys, visits a brothel, writes secret letters to a typist and gets thrown out of a pub. Does that elevate ordinary people, or abolish heroism?
It elevates. This is the most complete democratisation in the history of the form. Before it, only princes and tragic protagonists were entitled to epic treatment; Joyce proved that any person's any day, written finely enough, carries epic weight. More importantly he supplies a new scoring system: not how many men you killed, but how many unnecessary decencies you performed in a day. Bloom kills no suitors; he merely declines to become a bad man in a city where everyone else is keeping warm on big words, hatred and mockery. That standard is harder than Homer's, because there is no audience for it.
It abolishes. Shrinking ten years of wandering, choosing and killing into nineteen hours of walking round a city is a declaration that action no longer counts and only consciousness does — possibly the single largest surrender in twentieth-century literature. Bloom is kind, and he changes nothing: his wife sleeps with Boylan anyway, the young man walks off anyway, the Citizen is still shouting in the pub tomorrow. Does a book that makes a virtue of not acting also hand out a permit for every failure to act? A century of readers has learnt from it to admire hesitation, ambiguity and rich interiority — and also to mistake the absence of action for depth. Move the hero from the battlefield into the head, and nobody has to actually do anything again.
Bring it home: was there one thing today you did not have to do and did anyway? By this book's arithmetic that makes you a hero today. If the arithmetic feels too cheap, you are standing with the other side — you still believe a hero has to leave the world different. You live every day under one or the other of those two scoreboards.
4 · A novel you need annotations to read
Ulysses comes with a small industry of guides, maps, indexes and annotated editions, and a great many people read the notes and the novel in roughly equal measure. Joyce is reported by his biographer Richard Ellmann to have said he had put in so many puzzles and enigmas that the professors would be busy for centuries. Is that difficulty artistically necessary, or is it snobbery?
Necessary: the book is transcribing what is actually in a head, and what is in a head comes without commentary — you do not annotate your own daydreams. To let a reader inside another consciousness you must first fire the tour guide. The difficulty is not a gate, it is the content: the vertigo you feel in the maternity chapter as the language evolves is what that chapter is giving you; the inability to tell real from hallucinated in Nighttown is the protagonist's own condition. Translate it into clear narration and you are no longer writing that thing. And it does not truly require the apparatus — the notes buy you maybe another thirty per cent; the rest is available to patience.
Snobbery: a work that needs an academic industry in order to be consumed has already excluded most readers, whatever the author's motives. A writer who says out loud that he wants to keep professors busy for centuries is conceding that part of the design is not to be understood. The cult of difficulty-as-depth spreads from here: a hundred years of mediocre work has since dressed obscurity up as altitude, while readers keep quiet for fear of looking uncultured. And a book that cannot circulate without being explained ends up living in classrooms rather than in hands.
Bring it home: there is a book on your shelf you feel you ought to finish and have not. Is it deep, or only hard? A serviceable test: when you stall, are you bored, or are you working but with something moving? Bored — put it down; there are not that many books worth your patience. Something moving — go another thirty pages.
Paralysis. His first book, Dubliners (1914), is fifteen stories about one thing: people who know exactly what they should say, or do, or leave, and cannot move. The last of them, "The Dead", puts a comfortably self-satisfied man in a hotel room at night listening to his wife talk about a boy who loved her and died young — and discovering he has never mattered to her in that way. The couple in Ulysses is that night stretched to a full day: a man, a wife, and a past he was not present for.
Fathers. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Stephen has to leave father, church and country to become himself, under the banner of silence, exile and cunning. By Ulysses, the same young man is finding out that after the escape you still have to fill the vacated position, and the book's hidden line is a mutual claiming: a man who lost a son, a young man who has no usable father. Joyce's conclusion is severely unromantic: they meet, they drink cocoa, they part. Claiming does not have to succeed, or even be noticed.
Betrayal and staying. He wrote betrayed men all his life — in Dubliners, in his play Exiles, in Bloom. It was close to home: he went through a period of believing Nora had been unfaithful early on, and wrote some agonised letters about it. And every time, what he chose at the end was not revenge but remaining.
Language can be taken apart. Eighteen shapes of English were not enough; he spent the next seventeen years on Finnegans Wake (1939), kneading dozens of languages into a speech nobody speaks, to write one night and one dream. Ulysses is the daylight book and the Wake is the night one; one is waking consciousness, the other sleeping. He finished both halves and then died.
1. The plot is over by chapter four; the remaining seven hundred pages are about how a man gets through a day whose ending he already knows — which is most people's actual situation.
2. The fuse is not four in the afternoon. It is eight in the morning: a letter on the floor, a recognised handwriting, a decision not to ask.
3. Two missing keys: a young man gives his away at breakfast, a middle-aged man leaves his in the other trousers, and at two a.m. they stand outside together. The epic homecoming is a man climbing his own railings.
4. "I was just going to throw it away" is misheard as the name of a horse, and hours later it is a roomful of hatred. The plot does not turn on coincidence; it turns on a word heard wrong.
5. The flattest sentence in the book belongs to the man being thrown out of the pub: love, meaning the opposite of hatred. Every grand style around it exists to make that sentence sound clumsy.
6. A hundred and fifty pages of hallucination exist to deliver one boy of eleven, reading Hebrew right to left, who never looks up at his father.
7. Two men miss each other twice in daylight, meet at midnight, and get one cup of cocoa and a shared piss under the stars. Claiming a father does not have to work.
8. The same rhododendrons come up once in a husband's head at lunchtime and once in a wife's before dawn, with a whole humiliating day in between. It is the only real conversation they have.
9. The final yes is not for the lover and not exactly for the husband: it is a person remembering that she once said yes, and saying it again now.
10. The Homeric frame is not there to promote Bloom to hero but to ask what the word "hero" still means when you drop it on an advertising canvasser — and the answer is: feeding a cat, helping a blind man across the road, collecting for a widow, making cocoa for a stranger.