So, I Finally Read Ulysses

"Ulysses, by being everything, performs both the egalitarianism of the artwork and its inexhaustibility."

A book is more than the pages bound between its cover. Like all objects, they have afterlives. One can experience them quoted in snippets, read aloud, posted online, scribbled on walls, at readings or in the pleasure of conversation. Reading—if we are to leave it ill-defined—is a surprisingly diffuse activity. The classics especially are objects held in common in this way. At the heart of two irreverent essays I penned on having not read James Joyce was this view; where does the object end and discourse about the object begin? Where, exactly, is the book?

Ulysses, Joyce’s magnum opus, is probably a book more discussed than read. This is certainly proven true in my singular case. At least with Finnegans Wake there has been a general agreement that it is too difficult, and we all get a pass. But there is a cultural obligation to read Ulysses, and it is from this text that quotes and passages fly out, unmoored from their textual anchoring. Most know or have heard the book’s infamous closing line “yes I said yes I will Yes.” Slightly less (somehow!) known is the book’s opening: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed.” Okay, we tend to know as far as “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan”, but my point stands.

I was interested in these scenes; in the parts of Ulysses we know even if we haven’t read the book. If you’ve made some of the same mistakes I have, such as studying philosophy, you might be familiar with Jacques Derrida making a lot out of a phrase in Ulysses “jewgreek is greekjew”, which becomes (if I had to guess because I haven’t read the relevant Derrida essay) a point about the difficulty of reading both Spinoza and Aristotle seriously. You might have heard of Ulysses’ infamous “wanking on the beach scene” where an ejaculation is compared to/coincides with a set of fireworks (more on this later). You might have heard that our hero, Leopold Bloom, is a cuck! Truly a man ahead of his time.

So I was interested in all these things about the book we know in spite of the fact we haven’t read it. And I was interested too in the problems of editions, manuscript errors and errata. Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are the heart of serious controversies about what the correct edition of the book is, or how it should actually read! This means there’s a fun and tenuous way in which while I haven’t read Joyce no one else has either!

Except, I have read Joyce. In September 2023, at the tender age of 30 (my whole life ahead of me!) I finally read one of the great classics of literature. What struck me on this reading? All the bits of the book that we don’t discuss! See, there isn’t just a glowing afterlife of these phrases, which circulate with varying velocity through our cultural lives. There is also a graveyard of prose, passages forgotten and neglected, under discussed. I have descended the mountain, urged on by rumours of greatness and what have I found? A tomb.

Allow me to elaborate. The same month I finished reading Joyce, Colm Tóibín published an essay in the London Review of Books on “Joyce’s Errors.” He starts with a famous incident in the penultimate chapter. Bloom is locked out of his house at No.7 Eccles Street. To get in he drops over a railing and enters through an unlocked secondary door. If you were to visit No.7 Eccles Street shortly after reading this passage in Joyce (close to its original publication date) you might find not only that Joyce’s description of the place rang true, but there were railings and that they could be surmounted in the manner he describes. This is, Tóibín tells us, characteristic of Joyce. Apparently in 1921 he wrote to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking her to check if such a manoeuvre was possible. When she didn’t reply Joyce relied on the memory of his friend J.F. Bryne, who he had seen do such a manoeuvre. All Joyce needed to do was make Bloom similar in build to Bryne and his overly accurate portrait of Dublin would hold.

Tóibín’s essay goes on to point out that Joyce overdoes his accuracy, including details that would not always be obvious to a person in the street, but would be obvious if someone was reconstructing Dublin from maps and directories. What was striking to me was that nowhere in Tóibín’s piece or in the LRB podcast episode he did about his piece, did he (or anyone) mention how weird the penultimate chapter of Ulysses is. Perhaps this is just good editorial practice, cutting the fluff and all that. Yet, the penultimate chapter of Ulysses is written in a quasi-scientific report style. The entire tone of the chapter is stiff, clinical and distant. Here’s the first paragraph of the chapter to give you a sense of this:

What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?

Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner’s place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of Temple street: then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching, disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before George’s church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends.

This is a weird stylistic choice, why pass over it with no remark? Or, if it is simply not worth noting, why did it stand out to me so? I am sure the oddities of this chapter and the rest of Ulysses have been discussed by academics and scholars the world over. But despite the rampant narcissism of the academy, it is only on occasion that their lofty interpretations gain cultural cache.

In fact, every chapter of Ulysses is written in a different style. Somehow this hadn’t been mentioned in what I read on the book. In fear that I was simply an ignoramus, I decided to check Wikipedia. It says the book emulates different styles of English literature. But the scientific report is not a style of English literature. The point is not so much that no one mentions this as that I had just so happened to never see it mentioned and so it became, for me, a surprise of the novel, something pristine for me to encounter. Shortly after putting my perplexities to pen I soon found myself stumbling across account after account of Ulysses that pointed to its shapeshifting character.

In the second of my essays on not reading Ulysses (cheekily published for the 100^th anniversary of the novel) I made a brief allusion to all the ways the book multiplies: through its manuscript errors, what we bring to the text and our own, often faulty, memories of it. Yet it also multiplies through our own ignorance: what is pristine in Ulysses for me will not be (most likely) what is pristine for you.

Still, it seems to me that just as there was so much of Ulysses in our world, there was much that remained left to explore in the text. Let’s take Derrida’s use of that phrase “jewgreek is greekjew”. He makes much of it. Or rather his commentators do. Derrida drops the quotation at the end of his infamously gruelling text on Emmanuel Levinas, Metaphysics and Violence. He calls Joyce “the most Hegelian of modern novelists” and seeks, by invoking this phrase “jewgreek is greekjew” to highlight the tensions between Athens and Jerusalem, to question if Greek thought (Plato, Aristotle, German Idealism) can be reconciled with Jewish thought. It’s a nice bon mot from Derrida. His commentators, however, are obsessed with this turn of phrase and pepper their papers with it. Yet none of these references to such a famous passage of Joyce actually get into of the context for this phrase. In a real sense they are quoting Derrida, not Joyce.

There is good reason for this. This quote comes from an insane hallucinatory (I think?!) passage. Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, at this point in Ulysses, confront (or appear to confront) a series of tormenting personalities in a vaudevillian tragicomedy written like a play. The phrase loses a touch of its punch in these surroundings, another swirling locution in a phantasmagorical chapter full of linguistic twists and turns.  

I’d said I would return to the infamous ejaculation/fireworks scene. In this scene, our hero, Leopold Bloom, is having a wank (“(for it is he)”). He does so while watching a young woman called Gerty MacDowell. It is not unconceivable from the text that she is, to use modern parlance, rubbing one out as well. This is a famous scene, a famous comparison. Isn’t it all a bit like the fourth of July anyway? Well, when I read it, knowing full well what would happen, I missed the climactic moment and was forced to re-read three or four pages. This was in part because right before the scene peaks, the perspective is solely MacDowell’s:

She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!

Of course, it all seems so obvious now. But our attention drifts when we read, sometimes we gloss. And now I’m finding infamous phrases strewn out of context, failing to parse famous passages, coming across facets of the book I’ve never heard mentioned before. What are we to make of all of this? What am I to make of all of this? Joseph Albernaz, professor of Comparative Literature and English at Columbia University, once told me that Ulysses is “unreadable.” Then he told me he prefers Finnegans Wake, so I’m not sure he can be trusted. I, however, did not find Ulysses “unreadable.” Difficult at times certainly. I should give credit to Joseph, however. For there is one chapter that is inscrutable to me. Bloom is in the pub (again, I think) talking to a rotating cast of characters. It is extremely difficult to parse what is occurring. In the very next chapter Bloom is reunited with Dedalus and everyone talks in a proper and pompous English. It is again unclear what style of English literature is supposed to be on display here. What is on display here and in the penultimate chapter are some of the many, many ways English can be spoken and written. What is on display are not so much different styles of literature (arguably, yes) but different modes of expression and thought. If it is true that Ulysses seeks to encompass many forms of literature between its covers, it is also true that for Joyce literature is spoken as well as written.

In Jacques Ranciére’s book Modern Times he says something extraordinary. While discussing the great circadian artworks—of which the exemplars are Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera—that emerged in the 1920s, he points to a radical political undercurrent of modernism. He calls these works “the new fiction” and highlights their significance like so:

The new fiction invokes the time of the everyday, comprising a multiplicity of microscopic sensible events, all equally important, which link the life of each individual to anonymous life in general, which knows no hierarchy. That is why the setting of the day does not simply substitute the empirical succession of minor facts for the causal sequence of great events. More profoundly, it replaces the time of succession – a hierarchical time – with an egalitarian time of coexistence.

This scene in the pub that I find so difficult to parse is simply the written expression of a common and in-common experience. At the bar people come and go, invent and deploy novel phrases and witty impersonations. There is a figure Ranciére is fond of, Joseph Jacotot, who taught his pupils without instructing them. Ranciére calls him the ignorant schoolmaster and it was the opinion of such a schoolmaster that an “emancipated community…is a community of narrators and translators.” This should strike one as a broad definition, so broad as to include anyone who is capable of even a modicum of communication. This would include many of the world’s drunks, Joycean or not.

Tóibín quotes Joyce as expressing a wish “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” For Tóibín this is a spatial desire. But it is a linguistic one too. Ulysses contains the world of English—as literature, as speech—and the world is a multitude of singular and somewhat incompatible phraseologies. In Joyce’s Dublin everyone is a storyteller, he is the documentarian. How to capture this fact in the medium of the novel? To show that there are many ways a story can be told. One of Ranciére’s great principles is that everyone thinks. The very idea of the stream of consciousness as literary device holds this principal. The infamous closing of Ulysses, the chapter where we finally, truly, encounter Molly Bloom as a character who has been much discussed, we encounter her thoughts, raw and unfiltered. Everyone—young and old, male or female (or neither), perverted and/or repressed—thinks.

For Ranciére, the idea everyone thinks is necessarily political. Day to day politics obscures this fact, a fact often revealed in moments of irruption and mass radical politics. For Joyce’s Dublin, set in 1904 but written after the Irish Rebellion of 1916, the vibrancy of the novel, its “egalitarian time of co-existence” is not romantic fluff. Fights for self-determination are assertions that people who are supposed to be incapable of thought do, in fact, possess this very capacity. It’s the very lesson of anti-colonialism, which (to put it mildly) has a history both inside and outside of Europe.

Tóibín points out that Bloom, hapless literary cuck, might be a figure of resistance. There are long passages on Bloom’s Hungarian heritage. Upon reading Tóibín’s article I learnt that Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin in 1905, formulated his ideas in relation to the compromise of 1867, an agreement between Habsburg Austria and Hungary in which the countries would have their own governments but share a king.

Joyce places Bloom as the source of Griffith’s ideas: “So anyhow when I got back they were at it dingdong, John Wyse saying it was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith.” Here’s Tóibín on what this all means:

…while Bloom might seem inconsequential in many ways, it was he, with his Hungarian heritage, who nudged Griffith towards Sinn Féin, and led in turn to the growth of militant Irish nationalism that led in turn to the 1916 rebellion that led in turn to Joyce, writing…after the rebellion, suggesting that it was his hero who set it all in train, like the butterfly whose wings started the storm.

Perhaps we have travelled a long way from where we began. Mostly this was to be a fun little essay about what remained for me in Ulysses despite the bits and pieces of it that have been absorbed into our collective consciousness. I would, following this thread, go on to say that I strongly suspect that everyone finds some part of Ulysses unreadable but that they do not always find the same part unreadable. Thinking through the stones unturned in the novel’s passages I realised that I had in my hands my own private Ulysses. Such a conclusion would draw us away from politics and community back to the individual reader. Yet what unites often divides. Having first not read and now read Ulysses I found the book splitting and doubling, uncertainty about editions and correctness multiplying. What we hold in common—speech, art, thought, land—can also divide us. The problem with the idea of my own private Ulysses is that I must narrate it to someone. Indeed, this whole time I have simply accumulated other’s private Ulysseses; Tóibín’s and Ranciére’s here, John Kidd’s, Hans Gabler’s, my friend Louis’ as he pontificates on the book one summer’s day under a willow tree by the river that cleaves our campus in two.  

Ulysses, by being everything, performs both the egalitarianism of the artwork and its inexhaustibility. In this sense content and form merge. Perhaps Derrida was right and Joyce really was the most Hegelian of the modern novelists. Or perhaps he was the most Marxist. Ranciére, after all, has a name for this “egalitarian time of co-existence”: he calls it the time of communism.

Duncan Stuart is an Australian writer. His writings have appeared in Firmament, 3:AM Magazine, The Cleveland Review of Books, Jacobin, and Overland. He publishes a monthly substack, Exit Only, and can be found on Twitter @DuncanAStuart.