Ulysses
by James Joyce
Summary
Advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom wanders through Dublin over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904, his ordinary errands, a funeral, a newspaper office, a maternity hospital, a late night walk home, mapped in painstaking detail against the loose framework of Homer's Odyssey, with Bloom standing in for Odysseus and the young writer Stephen Dedalus for Telemachus. Joyce shifts styles constantly across the book's eighteen episodes, moving from interior monologue to newspaper parody to a chapter written as dramatic script, pushing the novel's form to its limits while tracing Bloom's quiet decency and Stephen's restless intellect amid the city's noise and grief. The two men's paths finally cross late in the book, Bloom taking the drunk, wandering Stephen briefly under his wing, though the connection between them remains tentative rather than resolved. The novel closes in the mind of Bloom's wife Molly, her extended, unpunctuated nighttime soliloquy running back over her own life, her marriage, and her memories of courtship, ending on her repeated, affirming yes, I said yes I will Yes, the single word Joyce lets carry the whole book's final note.
Joyce spent seven years writing it, and the book asks real patience and rereading in return, its stream of consciousness technique and constant formal experimentation making it one of the most demanding widely read novels in English. It rewards that difficulty rather than merely testing it, since Bloom's ordinary generosity across an extraordinary single day gives the book's formal daring an emotional center that keeps it from becoming pure exercise.
Joyce reportedly said he had packed the book with enough enigmas and puzzles to keep professors busy arguing over it for centuries, and the first edition, riddled with more than two thousand printing errors, remains a genuine textual problem editors have argued over for a century since.
Historical Context & Significance
United States customs officials banned the novel as obscene for over a decade, and no major prize committee of the era would touch a book an American court had convicted and the British Home Office had barred from import. The Little Review's American serialization, running from 1918 to 1920, drew a prosecution under the Comstock Act after it printed the Nausicaa episode, and the magazine's obscenity conviction in 1921 kept the book effectively banned in the United States, with the Post Office burning seized copies through much of the decade; Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company finally published the complete novel in Paris on February 2, 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday.
Judge John M. Woolsey's landmark 1933 ruling in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses found the novel not obscene, making America the first English speaking country where it could be sold openly; Britain kept its own ban until 1936, and Ireland did not see it freely available until the 1960s. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot championed it immediately, and it now regularly tops lists, including the Modern Library's, of the greatest English language novels of the twentieth century.