Next Thursday, 16 June, is Bloomsday – named after Leopold Bloom, hero of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, and the day on which the book is set. Bloomsday is too often an exercise in commercialised nostalgia, but it is worth going back, in this 100th year since the book’s publication, to exactly why Ulysses was so revolutionary.
If much of what is called modernism is a response to what the poet TS Eliot called the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” that followed the first world war, then Joyce’s modernism is distinct. It gives order to the anarchy, celebrates the richness of modern life, and often sounds a comic note.
Ulysses, a novel of ordinary lives, is organised around Homer’s Odyssey – advertising agent Bloom being Odysseus to Molly, his Irish Penelope. It insists on the mundane – lavatory visits, smelly cheese sandwiches – while being extraordinary in its methods: different styles from different literary periods jostle for control. In Ulysses, Joyce remade the English language, over and over again (“The scrotumtightening sea”, for instance). He “pounded language to jelly”, as the novelist Elizabeth Bowen put it, but also made it sing. It is famously hard to read, and many never finish it.
Bodies were a central part of Joyce’s argument for ordinariness as a fit subject for serious art. This applied to women too, though perhaps too much so, as some feminists have complained, noting that Molly Bloom, and especially her final silent stream of consciousness – “yes I said yes I will Yes” – is all body, at the expense of mind. Others argue the opposite. That famous monologue, argued one critic recently, is “the funniest, most touching, arousing, and truthful ... representation of a woman anyone has written in English”.
Ulysses was written by an immigrant (from Ireland to mainland Europe) about the son of an Austro-Hungarian immigrant (Leopold Bloom); the deliberate variousness of Joyce’s approach can be seen as an ongoing enactment of sympathy and diversity.
Ulysses broke open the novel, and writers ever since (Irish ones in particular) have found themselves reckoning, whether they like it or not, with the anxiety of his high modernist influence – or with the permission Joyce’s heresy gave to break free of convention. The novelist Anne Enright argued recently that the latter has been more strongly felt by Irish women such as Edna O’Brien, Eimear McBride and Mary Costello.
Joyce, who researched Dublin in great depth before writing his masterpiece, made no apology for his small city. “I always write about Dublin,” he wrote to a friend, “because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” Every now and then there comes a time when the world has changed so much that art must remake itself to keep up.
If a novel or any artistic creation is to last, however, any refashioning of language and form cannot be at the expense of certain universals: truths about the body, and life and love, about who and what we are. At 100, Ulysses still passes that test.
