Ulysses, a detailed preview

[Angel]

ULYSSES

James Joyce

(A Detailed Preview)

Ulysses, by James Joyce, is a challenge to understand. It is at once a masterpiece and an anomaly, a novel that stretches the form and content of the genre of which it is a part. At the same time that Ulysses uses Homer’s Odyssey as a major literary referent, the work heralds the end of the nineteenth-century novel as it was commonly understood. It takes readers into the inner realms of human consciousness using the interior monologue style that came to be called stream of consciousness. In addition to this psychological characteristic, it gives a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people living in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904. First published in its entirety in France in 1922, the novel was the subject of a famous obscenity trial in 1933, but was found by a U.S. district court in New York to be a work of art. The furor over the novel made Joyce a celebrity. In the long run, the work placed him at the forefront of the modern period of the early 1900s when literary works, primarily in the first two decades, explored interior lives and subjective reality in a new idiom, attempting to probe the human psyche in order to understand the human condition.

Joyce supplied a schema for Ulysses that divides and labels the novel’s untitled episodes, linking each to the Odyssey and identifying other structural and thematic elements. The headings provided in this schema are used in the plot summary below, as is customary in literary analysis of this work. In the novel itself, there are three sections marked with roman numerals but no other explicit headings. The first line of each episode in the novel appears in small capital letters.

source: Novels for Students; vol.26; Ira Mark Milne; GALE Cengage Learning; 2008

[Angel]

ULYSSES

James Joyce

(A Detailed Preview)


PLOT SUMMARY

Foreword, District Court Decision, and Letter from Joyce

The 1934 edition of Ulysses begins with a Foreword written by Morris L. Ernst, a Random House defense attorney involved in the obscenity case against the novel. Ernst applauds the decision of John M. Woolsey, the presiding judge, to rule against the charge of obscenity and allow the novel to be published in the United States. Ernst claims this judicial decision marks a ‘‘New Deal in the law of letters.’’ The attorney explains the complications involved in the definition and application of obscenity and links this release from ‘‘the legal compulsion for squeamishness in literature’’ with the repeal of Prohibition, which occurred also in the first week of December 1933.

Next, Judge Woolsey describes in his opinion Joyce’s accomplishment:

[He] attempted . . . with astonishing success— to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries . . . not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious.

This technique, Judge Woolsey explains, is like ‘‘a multiple exposure on a cinema film.’’ In essence, the judge concludes, Joyce’s effort was to show how the minds of his characters operate. Woolsey also expounds on the legal meaning of the term, obscenity, as a characteristic in a work intended ‘‘to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts.’’ Read in its entirety, he maintains, the novel does not have this effect. Rather, it serves as ‘‘a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.’’

Also included is the April 2, 1933, letter of James Joyce to Bennett A. Cerf, the Random House publisher who decided to print Ulysses. Joyce explains the assistance he received from Ezra Pound and from Sylvia Beach, owner of an English bookstore in Paris which first published the novel. He also explains some of the difficulties in the United Kingdom and in the United States regarding the subsequent distribution and sale of this first edition.

I: Telemachia

TELEMACHUS

Early on June 16, 1904, Stephen Dedalus, the Englishman Haines, and Malachi Mulligan, called Buck, have breakfast at the Martello Tower at Sandycove on Dublin Bay which Stephen rents. Irreverently, Buck shaves as though he is celebrating mass and says a mock grace before the three eat breakfast. Buck also alludes to Stephen’s ‘‘absurd’’ Greek name. Stephen feels imposed upon by the Oxford student Haines, who was invited by Buck but has been disruptive during the previous night with a bad dream. Though it is Stephen’s place, Buck seems to have taken charge, serving the food, taking possession of the key to the tower, and getting money from Stephen for drinks later in the day. Stephen is preoccupied with thoughts of his recently deceased mother, having dreamed of her the night before. Buck goes off for a swim, Haines and Stephen smoke a cigarette, and both Haines and Buck refer briefly to Stephen’s theory about Hamlet. Haines draws a parallel between the Martello Tower and Hamlet’s castle and then asks Stephen about his belief in a personal God.
Stephen responds that he is ‘‘the servant of two masters . . . an English and an Italian,’’ meaning ‘‘the imperial British state’’ and ‘‘the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.’’ He adds there is a third master, Ireland, ‘‘who wants [him] for odd jobs.’’ It is about 8:00 a.m. when Stephen heads off to the boys’ boarding school where he teaches.
Buck asks that they meet at 12:30 at the pub called the Ship. As Stephen leaves, he promises himself not to sleep at the tower the coming night since Buck has taken it over. Stephen calls him a ‘‘usurper.’’ This allusion to the usurper King Claudius in Hamlet, as well as several references to Hamlet and to Stephen’s brooding depression, all suggest parallels between Stephen and the melancholy prince.

NESTOR

It is 10 a.m., and Stephen is teaching an ancient Greek history class in a boys’ school in Dalkey, drilling the students on Pyrrhus and picking on an unprepared student named Armstrong. It is a half-day at school, and the boys are eager to go out on the field and play soccer. Next, Stephen asks the students to read from John Milton’s ‘‘Lycidas,’’ an elegy on the death by drowning of Milton’s friend. Stephen then challenges the students to solve a paradoxical riddle. The class ends, and the students leave in haste, except for one, Cyril Sargent, who remains behind to get help with his math problems. Bending over Cyril, Stephen thinks about how some woman gave birth to this boy and loves him, thoughts associated in Stephen’s mind with the recent death of his own mother. Cyril leaves, and Stephen goes to collect his pay from the headmaster, Garrett Deasy, who expresses misogynistic and anti- Semitic views and wants a letter he has written on hoof-and-mouth disease to be published in local newspapers. He gives a copy of the letter to Stephen, asking him to take it to news offices where he has contacts. Mr. Deasy suggests that Stephen will not long work as a teacher. Agreeing that he is more learner than teacher, Stephen leaves with Mr. Deasy’s letter, laughing at the headmaster’s opinions and reminding himself that he has a date to meet Buck at the Ship pub at 12:30.

PROTEUS

Including very little dialogue, the third episode, which begins at 11 a.m., is the most interior of the first three. In this section, Stephen walks along Sandymount Strand, spending an hour and a half on the beach, thinking about the difference between the objective world and how it appears to his eyes. He spies two midwives, one with a bag. He thinks about the conception of Jesus and how, according to the Nicene Creed, Jesus was said to be of the essence of God, not created out of nothing as man was. The wind reminds him that he has to go to the newspaper offices with Mr. Deasy’s letter. Briefly he considers visiting his aunt, but then he misses her street. He thinks about being ashamed of his family when he was little. Headed toward the Pigeon House, he thinks of Mary and how her pregnancy was attributed to a bird. He thinks back to Paris and remembers a conversation with Kevin Egan on nationalism. At the edge of the water, he looks back, searching the view for the Martello Tower and again promising himself not to sleep there this night. He sees a dog running toward him followed by a couple who are intent on picking cockles. He thinks about his dream the night before, in which a man with a melon took him along a red carpet. When the couple passes Stephen, he thinks of a poem and writes it down on a scrap of paper torn from Deasy’s letter. When he decides to leave the beach.


II: Odyssey

CALYPSO

The fourth episode occurs at the same time as episode one. It is 8 a.m. at 7 Eccles Street, and Leopold Bloom is in the kitchen getting milk for the cat and a breakfast tray ready for his wife, Marion, called Molly, who is still in bed. Leopold loves organ meat and fancies a fried kidney for his breakfast, so he goes around the corner to a butcher to buy one. Back in the house, he fixes toast for Molly, boils water, and sets the kidney to fry in butter. Upstairs, he brings Molly her breakfast and gives her a card and letter. The letter is
from Hugh Boylan, called Blazes, and Leopold sees her hide it under the pillow. She asks him what the word, metempsychosis, means. He has received a letter from their daughter, Milly, which he takes downstairs and reads while he eats.
Bloom is wearing his good black suit because at 11 a.m. today he is attending the funeral of his friend Patrick Dignam. After breakfast, he goes to the outhouse to defecate. The church bells toll the hour.

LOTUSEATERS

Leopold Bloom heads in a roundabout way to a post office where he picks up a letter from Martha Clifford, with whom he is conducting a clandestine, erotic correspondence using the pseudonym Henry Flower. With the letter in his pocket, he runs into an acquaintance, C. P. McCoy, who talks to Bloom about Dignam’s death and asks that Bloom enter his name as an attendant though he will not be at the funeral. Off by himself, Leopold reads Martha’s letter and wonders what kind of woman she really is. Like its parallel episode in the Odyssey, this episode is full of indolence and repeated references to smoking and opiates, which Leopold associates with the East and with Molly, who is from Gibraltar. He enters All Hallows, the incense-filled Catholic Church, and observes part of the mass.
At 10:15 a.m., he heads to the chemist to buy some face cream for Molly. There he thinks of chloroform and laudanum. The cream must be prepared. The chemist asks for the empty bottle, which Leopold has neglected to bring. Leopold buys a bar of soap and plans to return for the cream.
Outside, he meets Bantam Lyons, who wants a newspaper so he can check on the Gold Cup horserace scheduled to run this day. Bloom offers his paper, saying he was going to throw it away, and Lyons rushes off to place a bet, misconstruing Bloom’s comment for a tip on the long-shot racehorse named Throwaway. Bloom resolves to have a bath.

HADES

In a funeral procession from Sandymount to Prospect Cemetery in Glasnevin, north of Dublin, at 11 a.m., Bloom travels in a carriage with Jack Power, Martin Cunningham, and Simon Dedalus. As they leave the village, shop blinds are drawn down and people on the street tip their hats in respect. Bloom notices Stephen walking along and mentions it to his father, Simon Dedalus.
Bloom thinks of his own son, Rudy, who died just a few days after birth and would be eleven years old now had he lived. They pass Blazes Boylan and the other men call to him, which secretly embarrasses Bloom, who knows Boylan will visitMolly at 4 p.m. Mr. Power asks about the concert tour, referring somewhat disrespectfully to Molly as ‘‘Madame.’’ It is 11:20 a.m., and Bloom thinks of Mrs. Fleming coming into 7 Eccles Street to clean. They pass Reuben J. Dodd, the Jewish moneylender, from whom each of them, except for Bloom, has borrowed money. They comment about how Dodd’s son almost drowned in the Liffey, and when a boatman saved him, the father gave him a small bit of money as thanks. Power comments
that suicide is the worst death, a family disgrace; Cunningham cuts him off, saying, ‘‘We must take a charitable view of it.’’ Bloom sees this as a kindness from Cunningham who knows that Bloom’s father was a suicide. At the cemetery,
Simon Dedalus cries at the grave of his recently deceased wife, May. A service is given in the chapel and some brief words spoken at the grave. As the mourners disperse, a reporter, Joe Hynes, asks Bloom for his full name and if he can identify a thirteenth man at the gravesite. Bloom cannot name the man in the mackintosh, but he does remember to ask that McCoy’s name be added to the list of those present.

AEOLUS

This episode takes place in the Freeman newspaper offices. The text here is divided by headlines like those appearing in a newspaper. Bloom gets a copy of the advertisement for Keyes tea and then heads into the Telegraph printing room and speaks to the foreman, City Councillor Nanetti, who is in conversation with Hynes about his report on Dignam’s funeral. Nanetti wants Bloom to get Keyes to agree to advertise his tea in the paper for three months. Bloom suspects Keyes wants the ad to run only for two months. Bloom goes into the Telegraph office, where Simon Dedalus and others are listening to Ned Lambert, who is making fun of a patriotic speech by Dan Dawson. J. J. O’Molloy enters, knocking into Bloom with the doorknob. Stephen Dedalus comes in and hands Deasy’s letter to Crawford, who decides to publish it. A group, including Stephen, heads out to a pub, pushing past Bloom as they leave. Bloom wants Crawford to agree to run the Keyes ad for two months rather than three, but Crawford rejects the idea.

LESTRYGONIANS

Bloom goes past a candy store and someone hands him a throw-away announcement of the arrival of an American evangelist. He passes Dilly Dedalus and feels sorry for the motherless child and condemns the Catholic Church for forcing people to have more children than they can afford. He thinks of the term, parallax, recalling his morning discussion with Molly about metempsychosis.
Sandwich board men weave their way through the pedestrians, advertising Hely’s, one letter on each board. Bloom meets Jossie Breen on the street, his girlfriend from years before, and they talk about Mina Purefoy, who is in protracted labor at the maternity hospital. Repeatedly his thoughts go back to Rudy’s neonatal death, to the pain of labor, to the fact that stillborns ‘‘are not even registered.’’ As a cloud blots the sun, Bloomthinks about the seasons of life, of Dignam’s funeral, and Mrs. Purefoy giving birth.
It all seems meaningless to him. Near an optometrist’s office, he thinks again about parallax and holds up his little finger to cover the sun; doing so makes him recall an evening walk with Molly and Blazes Boylan, and now Bloom wonders if the two of them were touching then or holding hands. Bloom tosses the announcement into the Liffey.
Eager for his lunch, Bloom leaves one restaurant where the customers are eating rudely and enters Davy Byrne’s for a cheese sandwich and glass of burgundy wine. There Nosey Flynn asks about Molly’s tour and in mentioning Boylan reminds Bloom of the upcoming meeting between his wife and Blazes. Flynn discusses the upcoming Gold Cup. Two flies stuck together on a window remind Bloom of a time when Molly fed him seedcake out of her mouth and they had sex. There is a big difference between their relationship then and as it is now; he thinks, ‘‘Me. And me now.’’ Elsewhere in the restaurant, men gossip about Bloom, about his work, his involvement with the Freemasons, his refusal to sign his name to contracts. As Bloom leaves, Bantam Lyons comes in, whispering about Bloom’s tip on the horse Throwaway. Outside, Bloom walks along calculating what he may make if he sells certain ads for the newspaper. Then he spots Boylan on the street and ducks into the National Museum to avoid him.

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

At the National Library, Stephen Dedalus puts forth some of his literary and philosophical views, along with his biographical reading of Hamlet, to a circle of men in the director’s office. The group includes the Quaker librarian Thomas W. Lyster, the literary critic and essayist John Eglinton, and the poet, A. E. To these men, Stephen suggests that Shakespeare identified with King Hamlet, that he saw in Prince Hamlet a version of his own son Hamnet who died as a child, and that Queen Gertrude is a dramatic version of Shakespeare’s own wife, Ann Hathaway.
A. E. objects to a biographical reading of the play, asserting that the text of the play ought to be the focus of any interpretation of it. The librarian Mr. Best comes into the office. Best has been showing Haines the library’s manuscript copy of Love songs of Connacht; the text of Ulysses at this point includes a line of music. A. E. is ready to leave, and Eglinton asks if they will meet at Moore’s that night for a poetry reading, to which both Buck Mulligan and Haines are invited. Stephen takes his exclusion from these plans as a snub. The literary discussion of Hamlet continues with Eglinton suggesting that Shakespeare most identified with Prince Hamlet. A worker enters, asking help from Mr. Lyster for a patron (Bloom) who wants to look at the newspaper called Kilkenny People. Stephen continues at length, mapping out supposed evidence in Shakespeare’s plays of Hathaway’s infidelity. At last, he and Mulligan leave the library, knocking past Bloom as they go out. Mulligan refers to Bloom as ‘‘the wandering jew’’ and also suggests that Bloom is a homosexual and is attracted sexually to Stephen.

WANDERING ROCKS

This long episode contains eighteen vignettes or small scenes that taken together give a sense of pedestrian traffic in Dublin between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. It begins with the Catholic priest, Father John Conmee, who sets out about 3 p.m. to visit a school in the suburbs to see if Dignam’s son can attend without charge. The episode concludes with the arrival of a cavalcade of the king’s governor- general at the Mirus Park charity bazaar.
These major treks weave through and around smaller scenes, some focusing on the principal characters, some on minor characters, and some on people who in a film would be called extras. Among these characters are a one-legged soldier; the dancing teacher, Mr. Maginni; Mrs. Breen, who earlier spoke with Bloom; and Corny Kelleher, the undertaker who handled the Dignam funeral. Two scenes occur at bookstalls. Stephen Dedalus pauses at a bookcart in Bedford Row and is approached by his sister Dilly who asks him if the used French primer she has bought for a penny is any good. Elsewhere, Leopold Bloom selects the novel Sweets of Sin for Molly. At the Dedalus home, Stephen’s sister Maggey boils shirts and his other sisters, Katey and Boody, lament the family’s poverty. When Maggey says Dilly is out trying to find Simon, Boody responds, ‘‘Our father who art not in heaven.’’ Martin Cunningham, who is involved in collecting money for Dignam’s son, speaks to the subsheriff about the boy. Molly’s arm appears at the second-floor window of the Bloom residence as she tosses a coin to the one-legged soldier who ‘‘crutche[s] himself’’ up Eccles Street. Blazes Boylan steps into a fruit shop and orders a basket to be sent ahead and looks down the open neckline of the shop girl’s blouse as he asks to use the telephone. Across town, Boylan’s secretary answers the phone and mentions his 4 p.m. appointment with Mr. Lenehan at the Ormond Hotel. Dilly waits in the street for her father and gets a shilling and two pennies from him. Through these and other tiny views of the street traffic, of people on footpaths, crossing bridges, and spitting out of open doors, the governor-general’s carriage is spotted or missed as it makes its way out of town.

SIRENS

Two of the sirens in this episode, Ormond Hotel barmaids Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy, lean out an upstairs window watching the cavalcade go by. The hotel is a meeting place for several groups of characters. Simon Dedalus enters the bar with Lenehan, looking for Boylan who arrives shortly. Elsewhere, Bloom buys stationery so that he can respond to Martha Clifford’s letter and then goes into the Ormond with Richie Goulding to have some dinner and spy on Boylan. As Goulding and Bloom order drinks, Boylan leaves with Lenehan, causing Bloom to sob. In the bar, Simon Dedalus, Ben Dollard, and Bob Cowley recall concerts and discuss Molly Bloom’s voice. The three sing together for the bar crowd, causing Bloom to think about how he once loaned Dollard evening clothes for a performance. Simon sings ‘‘M’appari,’’ from an opera called Martha.
Bloom listens, thinking about Dignam’s funeral, about how music is mathematical, and about how his daughter Milly is not interested in music. The blind piano tuner taps his return to the hotel to pick up his tuning fork. As Boylan drives to Eccles Street and knocks at the Blooms’ front door, Bloom hunches over the table, writing secretly to Martha. As he leaves the hotel, Bloom spots Bridie Kelly, a prostitute whose services he has used, and he turns away toward a shop window to avoid being recognized by her. He pretends to study a portrait displayed there of Robert Emmet and to read his last words.

CYCLOPS

The Cyclops episode begins at 5 p.m. with a description of a near accident in which a chimneysweep handles his brush carelessly and almost pokes out the eye of another person who is this episode’s unnamed first-person narrator. This speaker, quite distinct in his use of language from the omniscient narrator whose voice appears repeatedly in other episodes, turns to give the sweep ‘‘the weight of [his] tongue.’’ Indeed, the weightiness of the language in this episode is due to its pervasive vicious sarcasm and hyperbole. The narrator spies Joe Hynes and the two of them go off to Barney Kiernan’s pub where they are joined by the unnamed citizen, who takes the lead in a loud, combative talk about politics, the Gold Cup horserace (which the twenty-to-one long shot Throwaway wins), and other matters, all of which culminates with a verbal attack on Leopold Bloom. The pub is across the street from the courthouse where Bloom has agreed to meet with Martin Cunningham and together travel out to Sandymount to visit Dignam’s widow. As Bloom waits for Cunningham to arrive, the circle of drinkers in the pub enlarges, with O’Molloy, Lambert, Nolan, and Lenehan arriving after Bloom. The citizen’s narrow-minded nationalistic and racist rant is counterpoised by Bloom’s reasonableness and moderation. Bloom, the one nondrinker in the crowd and thus perceived by others to be giving offense on that count, remains broadminded, able to see more sides to the topics being discussed. In this way he inadvertently arouses the further ire of the citizen who, as Bloom spots Cunningham and leaves, runs into the street, yelling anti-Semitic remarks. Bloom and Cunningham escape into a carriage and pull away. This bombastic, ridiculous episode is complicated by thirty-two dispersed passages of extraordinarily inflated prose that present various styles and describe unrealistically other places and times, such as a courtroom scene, a public hanging, and action being taken in Parliament.

NAUSICAA

A third-person narrator in this episode uses language that parodies a second-rate sentimental novel, beginning with the description of Sandymount Strand and how ‘‘the summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace’’ and Gerty MacDowell, ‘‘as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see’’ with her ‘‘rosebud mouth.’’ Gerty sits apart from her friends, Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman, who are playing on the beach and watching younger siblings, Cissy’s little twin brothers and Edy’s younger brother. Having visited Dignam’s widow, Bloom has come to the beach. It is sometime between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.; his watch stopped at 4:30. In a nearby church, evening mass is being celebrated with prayers to the Virgin Mary. Bloom watches Gerty, and she realizes it, positioning herself so he can look up her dress. Bloom suspects his watch stopped at the very moment when Boylan and Molly engaged. Gerty gets up and walks away.

OXEN OF THE SUN

Said by many, including Joyce himself, to be the most difficult episode in the novel, this inscrutable section presents the evolution of the English language through the parodied idiom of major texts and writers, all of which is divided into nine sections to match the months of gestation. It is 10 p.m. and various medical students drink and discuss rather boisterously a variety of topics related to sexuality and gestation in last delivered of her ninth son. Leopold Bloom is in the room with drunken Stephen Dedalus and others, called ‘‘right witty scholars,’’ and while he hears their misogynistic and sacrilegious banter, he does not participate in it. Rather, as Mrs. Purefoy’s baby is born, Bloom thinks sadly of Molly and the birth of their son, Rudy, who only lived a few days. Buck Mulligan arrives and takes center stage from Stephen. The nurse tries to quiet the young men, and eventually they decide to leave for a pub. Among the group is Alex Bannon, who speaks about his girlfriend and only gradually realizes she is Bloom’s daughter, Milly. Bloom trails along, watching
Stephen.

CIRCE

This episode, the longest of the novel at about one hundred and seventy pages, is presented in play format, with stage directions and speakers’ names over their lines. It takes place about midnight in Night town, Dublin’s red-light district, where the drunken Stephen and his buddies go, and Leopold Bloom follows along. The scenes of this play or drama are a series of hallucinations or fantasies, some of which must be induced by fatigue or alcohol. Separated from the young men, Bloom goes into an alley where he feeds a dog some meat he has purchased. This act engenders an hallucination in which Bloom is questioned and charged by two policemen. Witnesses, including the ghost of Dignam, seem to materialize to accuse him. Bloom heads into Bella Cohen’s brothel, seeking Stephen... Stephen has an hallucination in which the ghost of his mother rises up and accuses him. This vision terrifies him, and he breaks away and runs outside, Bloom coming out after him. Outside there is a ruckus, and Stephen is knocked unconscious. Police come, but Corny Kelleher is nearby and helps resolve the tension. Abandoned by his friends, Stephen lies on the street, and Bloom looks over him, imagining he sees Rudy.


III: Nostos


EUMAEUS

After midnight, Bloom picks Stephen Dedalus up off the street and brushes him off. In this anticlimactic meeting between Bloom and Stephen, described in second-rate prose, the two walk arm-in-arm toward a cabman’s shelter, a late-night place where winos and stray loners can find a cup of coffee. In the role of Good Samaritan, as an ordinary older man offering a young man regular kinds of advice, Bloom cautions the not-yet-sober Stephen about drinking too much and about going into Night town to the ‘‘women of ill fame’’ without knowing ‘‘a little juijitsu.’’
Along the way, they come across an acquaintance of Stephen, called Corley, who asks for money. Stephen gives him a half crown, much to Bloom’s disapproval. Stephen remarks he has no place to sleep this night, and Bloom suggests Stephen go to his father’s house. The two enter the cabman’s shelter, which is operated by a man believed to be Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris, a person involved in the Phoenix Park murders. Here, Stephen and Bloom engage in conversation with a sailor who says his name is D. B. Murphy. When they exchange names, Murphy asks Stephen if he is related to Simon Dedalus. Stephen does not admit kinship, and Bloom offers that it must be a coincidence of names. Bloom looks at a paper and sees an article on the Gold Cup and one on Dignam’s funeral, in which among the attendants listed are a ‘‘M’Intosh’’ and a person named ‘‘L. Boom.’’ Talk turns to Parnell, and Bloom sympathizes more with Parnell and the married Kitty O’Shea than with O’Shea’s husband, who Bloom assumes deserved his wife’s betrayal. As chairs are inverted on tables, Bloom rises and takes Stephen outside, suggesting that the night air and a walk to Bloom’s residence in Eccles Street will do the young man some good. Bloom offers a cup of cocoa at his house, and Stephen accepts. Street cleaners watch the two men go off, arm-in-arm.

ITHACA

This episode is narrated in a question-and answer format, as might be seen in the dialogues of Socrates. According to Frank Delaney, in James Joyce’s ‘‘Odyssey,’’ Joyce described this as ‘‘the form of a mathematical Catechism.’’ It is 1 a.m. on Eccles Street at Leopold Bloom’s residence, and Bloom discovers he does not have the key. He has to drop to the basement level and climb in through a window. Holding a candle, he opens the front door, and Stephen enters. They make their way to the back kitchen where they drink cups of cocoa.
Bloom thinks maybe Stephen would be interested in Milly and invites him to stay the night, but Stephen declines. They talk about the Irish and Hebrew languages. About 1:30 a.m., they go out in the back, urinate side-by-side while observing a shooting star, and then separate. In his house again, Bloom sits in the front room, thinking about how he has spent his money on this day, about how his Dublin acquaintances are in bed and Dignam in his grave, about how he wishes he had enough money to buy a little house on the outskirts of town. He has observed evidence in the kitchen, front room, and elsewhere of Boylan’s visit, and he thinks of Boylan as one of many suitors for Molly, one in a series. The music for ‘‘Love’sOld Sweet Song,’’ is open on the piano. At 2 a.m., he goes upstairs to bed, lying down with his feet next to Molly’s head and his head at her feet. She awakes slightly. He tells her about his day, lying about some details. It has been over ten years since they engaged. This episode ends with a big dot, like an oversized period, marking the spot, the conclusion.

PENELOPE

According to Frank Delaney, Joyce described this episode as ‘‘amplitudinously curvilinear.’’
Delaney further explains that the first sentence contains twenty-five hundred words, that there are eight sentences in all, and the episode begins and ends, again quoting Joyce, with ‘‘the most positive word in the English language, the word yes.’’ Commonly referred to as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, this episode presents in stream-of-consciousness style her drowsy reverie.
Her first sentence begins with her surprise at Bloom’s request that she serve him breakfast in bed the next morning, ordering up two eggs before he falls asleep. She thinks about Boylan and the Breens’ marriage, concluding that hers and Leopold’s is better. In the next sentence, Molly thinks about men who have admired her, listing several of them. She wonders if she will get together with Boylan again and thinks of their upcoming concert trip to Belfast.
Among her many thoughts, she considers losing some weight and wishes Bloom had a better paying office job. In the third sentence, she thinks about how attractive breasts are and how unattractive male genitals are. Molly thinks back to her early years in Gibraltar, and her friend Hester Stanhope. She recalls how lonely she felt after Hester and her husband moved away. She also thinks about Milly and how she got a card from their daughter while Leopold received a letter.
The fifth sentence includes memory of her first love interest, Lieutenant Mulvey, whom she knew in Gibraltar. A train whistles in the distance, making her think of ‘‘Love’s Old Sweet Song,’’ which she has been practicing for an upcoming concert. In the next sentence, Molly thinks of her daughter, who is studying photography in Mullingar. She thinks about how pretty Milly is, quite like Molly herself was in her teens. In the seventh sentence, back in bed, Molly muses about Leopold’s finances, how she and he have moved several times. She wonders if he spent money this day on other women and wonders how much he offered at Dignam’s funeral. She thinks of Bloom’s circle of male acquaintances and about Simon Dedalus’s good singing voice. She recalls meeting Stephen when he was a little boy. In the eighth sentence, she ponders the fact that Leopold does not hug her any more. She thinks of Stephen’s mother recently dead and of Rudy’s death. She thinks about morning and about the possibility of telling Leopold about her encounter with Boylan, her first extramarital involvement. She thinks she will buy flowers for the house, in case Stephen returns. Finally, she thinks of being with Leopold sixteen years earlier at Howth, how he called her ‘‘a flower of the mountain’’ and proposed to her, and how she accepted him.

Following these memorable lines, the places and dates for the composition of the novel are given:
‘‘Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914–1921.

source: Novels for Students; vol.26; Ira Mark Milne; GALE Cengage Learning; 2008

[Angel]

ULYSSES

James Joyce

(A Detailed Preview)

CHARACTER ANALYSIS
(For Those Who Read The Novel Fully)

A. E.
The pseudonym of George Russell, A. E. is a highly respected Irish poet. He associates with other established literary people, a group which includes Haines and Mulligan but which excludes Stephen Dedalus, though he wishes to be a member.

Richard Best
Richard Best, a librarian at the National Library, takes part in the Scylla and Charybdis episode discussion of Hamlet. His comments represent conventional views of the play.

Leopold Bloom
Leopold Bloom, a thirty-eight-year-old canvasser, lives with his wife Marion at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin. Bloom is an empathetic, sensitive, earthy, sensual person who responds to the weather, to the smell of organ meat cooking, to women he sees on the street, and who puzzles over laws of physical science. He loves his daughter, fifteen-year-old Milly, and still mourns for his son Rudy, who died when he was a baby about eleven years earlier. On June 16, 1904, Bloom attends a funeral, visits a newspaper office and the National Library, has dinner at a hotel, and meets up with Stephen Dedalus in a brothel and invites him home. On this day in Dublin, Leopold Bloom anticipates and dreads his wife’s infidelity with Blazes Boylan, yet he himself continues a clandestine correspondence with Martha Clifford and masturbates on Sandymount beach as he watches Gerty MacDowell.

Marion Bloom
Voluptuous Marion Bloom, called Molly, is thirty-four years old and a professional singer. Her father was a British officer, and her mother, Lunita Laredo, was a Spanish Jew. Molly grew up in Gibraltar, and presumably she moved to Dublin with her father sometime in 1886. Since the neonatal death of her second child, Rudy, she has not had a sexual relationship with her husband or any other man, but on this day, while he is away from home, she has a sexual encounter with Hugh Boylan.

Millicent Bloom
Millicent Bloom, calledMilly, is the fifteen-yearold daughter of Leopold and Molly Bloom. She lives in Mullingar and is studying to become a photographer. On this day, Leopold enjoys a letter from Milly, in which she thanks him and her mother for birthday gifts.

Hugh Boylan
Hugh Boylan, called Blazes, is Molly Bloom’s concert manager. Boylan is a womanizer, a fancy dresser, and man about town. He walks in slick, highly polished shoes and his car jingles through the streets making a sound reminiscent of Molly’s bedsprings.

Josie Powell Breen
Josie Breen was years earlier a girlfriend of Leopold Bloom. She is now the wife of Dennis Breen, a paranoid who requires a lot of her attention and care.

The Citizen
This unnamed character, prominent in the ‘‘Cyclops’’ episode, is a vitriolic, narrow-minded nationalist, in favor of a free Ireland and willing to blame social ills on foreigners, especially Jews. In the pub, he verbally attacks Leopold Bloom, who responds logically and withdraws quickly. The citizen is the kind of man who sits around in a pub waiting for someone else to buy him a few drinks and then sounds off in a political harangue.

Martha Clifford
Martha Clifford writes letters to Leopold Bloom, whom she does not know face-to-face, addressing him by his pseudonym, Henry Flower. Martha’s letters indicate that she is poorly educated and not particularly daring in pursuing a sexual relationship with Bloom. Yet she enjoys the titillation of their clandestine correspondence.

Bella Cohen
Bella Cohen is the madam in charge of the brothel that Stephen Dedalus and his friends visit in Nighttown. She is domineering, with a large build. Concerned with appearances, she attacks the rowdy visitors in her establishment.

Martin Cunningham
One of the mourners at Patrick Dignam’s funeral, Martin Cunningham takes the initiative to start a collection for Dignam’s widow and son. He is sympathetic and kindly, speaking up on Bloom’s behalf several times during the day. In the late afternoon, he and Bloom visit Dignam’s widow in Sandymount Strand.

Garrett Deasy
Misogynistic, anti-Semitic Garrett Deasy is the headmaster of the boys’ school where Stephen teaches history. Mr. Deasy has written an essay on hoof-and-mouth disease and wants it published in local papers. He gives it to Stephen, asking him to present it to the newspaper editors with whom he is acquainted. He suspects that Stephen is not suited to a professional life in teaching.

Dilly Dedalus
Dilly Dedalus, one of Simon’s daughters and Stephen’s sister, has as much natural intelligence as Stephen has, but she is unlikely to have his opportunities to become learned. Nonetheless, she seeks to become educated and with a penny buys a used French primer in order to study the language. She waits on the street to get a shilling from her father and take the money home to her sisters who are washing shirts there and would have virtually nothing to eat were it not for the soup brought to them by a local nun.

Simon Dedalus
Father of Stephen and four daughters, Simon Dedalus recently buried his wife May and still mourns her. Simon has quite a good singing voice and likes to entertain his drinking friends with funny stories. Born in Cork and once rather successful, Simon has recently had financial problems. During this day, he spends money in pubs, doing nothing to help or protect his daughters at home. Simon is highly critical of Stephen, and when Stephen is asked if Simon is his father, Stephen demurs.

Stephen Dedalus
Recently home in Dublin from a year or two in Paris where he studied medicine, Stephen Dedalus is an intellectual and would-be poet, a well-read young man who takes himself very seriously and is depressed after his mother’s recent death and his ongoing alienation from Ireland and the Catholic Church. A teacher at a boys’ school, Stephen spends his time talking about his literary theories and drinking with his friends. At this point in his life, he is aware of having not found his professional place. He dissociates himself from his sisters and is alienated from his father, Simon.

Ben Dollard
A drinking friend of Simon Dedalus, Ben Dollard has a good voice and enjoys singing in pubs. He performs with Simon at the Ormond Hotel.

Lydia Douce
Lydia Douce is a barmaid at the Ormond Hotel. She has a crush on Boylan. She and Mina Kennedy are seen hanging out the second-floor window watching the viceregal cavalcade go by in the streets below.

John Eglinton
A published essayist, John Eglinton spends time in the National Library, where he hears Stephen expound on his theory about Hamlet. He finds Stephen over-confident and egotistical.

Richard Goulding
Suffering from chronic back pain, Richard Goulding, called Richie, has dinner with Bloom at the Ormond Hotel. Goulding is the brother of the deceased May Dedalus and thus Stephen’s uncle.

Haines
An Englishman who is temporarily staying at the Martello Tower with BuckMulligan and Stephen Dedalus, Haines has a bad dream during the night of June 15, waking the others by shooting a gun at an imagined tiger. Later, on June 16, Haines, an Oxford student, socializes with Buck and other literati, who exclude Stephen from their circle.

Joe Hynes
A local newspaper reporter, Joe Hynes borrows three pounds from Leopold Bloom but conveniently forgets to pay back the loan. He meets the narrator of the Cyclops episode in the street and accompanies him to Barney Kiernan’s pub for a conversation with an unnamed character referred to as the citizen.

Corny Kelleher
Corny Kelleher is the undertaker who officiates at Patrick Dignam’s funeral and is later seen in his shop doorway. Corny intervenes on their behalf when Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom get involved with two policemen on the street near Nighttown.

Mina Kennedy
Mina Kennedy is a barmaid at the Ormond Hotel. She and Lydia Douce flirt with their male customers. Blond Mina is more reserved than Lydia. Both women are seen hanging out the second-floor window watching the viceregal cavalcade go by in the streets below.

Lenehan
Lenehan is a sports editor for a local Dublin newspaper. Disliked by Molly Bloom, Lenehan makes fun of Leopold Bloom. He is a friend of Simon Dedalus.

Lynch
An old friend of Stephen Dedalus, Lynch is a medical student. He is involved with the prostitute, Kitty Ricketts.

Thomas W. Lyster
Quaker librarian at theNational Library, Thomas Lyster patiently hears Stephen expound on his Hamlet theory and is open-minded about it.

Gerty MacDowell
Gerty MacDowell is influenced by romance literature and women’s magazines and takes special care of her clothes and skin. She dreams of meeting a strong, handsome man who will marry her. Bloom is sexually aroused by her when he sees her on Sandymount Strand in the Nausicaa episode.

John Henry Menton
John Menton was once Leopold Bloom’s rival for Molly. A lawyer by trade, Menton was Patrick Dignam’s boss. Menton looks down on Bloom.

Malachi Mulligan
Popular Malachi Mulligan, called Buck, is a medical student and friend of Stephen Dedalus. Buck is lively, theatrical, and able to satirize anything. He is well-read and tells funny, offcolor jokes. Neither Bloom nor Simon Dedalus thinks well of Buck.

J. J. O’Molloy
J. J. O’Molloy is an unemployed lawyer who on this day is unable to borrow money. At Barney Kiernan’s pub, he defends Bloom.

Kitty Ricketts
A prostitute with aspirations for a better life, Kitty Ricketts dates Lynch.

George Russell
See A. E.

Florry Talbot
One of the prostitutes at Bella Cohen’s establishment, Florry Talbot entertains the medical students who visit the brothel with Stephen.


source: Novels for Students; vol.26; Ira Mark Milne; GALE Cengage Learning; 2008

[Angel]

ULYSSES

James Joyce

(A Detailed Preview)


THEMES

The Modern Hero

Ulysses has as its hero a most ordinary man, Leopold Bloom. So unlike the muscular, militaristic Homeric hero whose name serves as the novel’s title, Bloom is gentle, self-effacing, reserved, and peripheralized. Arguably more associated with home than the outer world, even though on this day he spends most of his time out about town, the kindly, other-centered Bloom is first depicted making breakfast for his wife and feeding the cat. He is a caring man, deeply attached to his wife and daughter and continuing to mourn the neonatal death of his son, Rudy. Whereas Ulysses welcomes adventures in strange and threatening places and has a crew of sailors he orders about, Bloom lives an ordinary man’s life and is a loner, an outsider, a Jew, a man who thinks about the physical world but chooses not to interfere, a man who lives very much in his body, responsive to women, courteous toward men, sensual in an unobtrusive way. He admires women on the street, wonders sympathetically about a woman in protracted labor, and talks politely to a childhood sweetheart. He helps a blind man cross the street, he tells an acquaintance his hat has a ding in it, and he kindly reminds someone of a loan and does not take offense when the man seems to brush him off.
While the daring epic hero slays the Cyclops and navigates between the rocks of Scylla and the whirlpool of Charybdis, Bloom maneuvers among offensive others, seeking to engage with them peacefully, deferring to others and not taking offense even when he is directly insulted. He dresses in black out of respect for a friend’s funeral and gives generously to the collection taken up for the man’s widow. While the epic hero is defined by his conquests, his ego, his selfcenteredness, Bloom is defined by his small gestures of kindness, his thoughtfulness of others and of the physical world, and his polite social restraint.
Sad about his wife’s infidelity, he is resigned rather than defensive or controlling. Though their marriage is sexless, he is not without desire, his thoughts here and elsewhere inevitably return to Molly, so comfortably is he bound to her. In many ways, Leopold Bloom is the antithesis of the classical Ulysses; he is not a world traveler or an adventurer; he is not larger-than-life, and he is not able to perform extraordinary feats. In this character, Joyce affirms what is extraordinary about an ordinary man’s character; he provides a new sense of the heroic, written in the small-scale actions of a twentieth-century urban man, in his kindliness in the face of alienation, in his ability to calmly analyze differences, in his civic decency.

The Artist’s Search for a Place in the World

Stephen Dedalus is a would-be poet, a wellschooled young man full of academic theories and familiar texts. In a sense homeless (he rents a place that is usurped by others, he is back in Ireland only temporarily, he has nowhere to sleep in this day), Stephen expresses the discomfort and ennui of a creative spirit who has not yet found his medium or made his mark. Like the young Icarus, the son of the mythological Dedalus, Stephen has yet to test his wings, and perhaps like the mythic son, he may fail when he does. He is hampered, he says, by two masters, the government of England that controls Ireland and the Catholic Church that clutches his conscience. Without the role model of a suitable father, Stephen drifts in Dublin literary society, working at a job that bores him, excluded by literary insiders he wishes to displace. His plight in part results from his age: he is just starting out, and he is at this moment hampered by grief and guilt concerning hismother. On a larger scale, his plight is a product of feeling trapped by a social context which is itself fettered by poverty and alcoholism.


source: Novels for Students; vol.26; Ira Mark Milne; GALE Cengage Learning; 2008

[Angel]

ULYSSES

James Joyce

(A Detailed Preview)


STYLE

Stream of Consciousness

The stream-of-consciousness novel takes as its subject the interior thought sequence and patterns of associations which distinguish characters from one another. According to A Handbook to Literature, the stream-of-consciousness novel assumes that what matters most about human existence is how it is experienced subjectively. The interior level of experience is idiosyncratic, illogical, and disjointed and the ‘‘pattern of free psychological association . . . determines the shifting sequence of thought and feeling.’’ The work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) offered a structure and way of understanding different psychological levels or areas of consciousness, and some modern writers, such as Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, drew upon Freud’s theories as they used the stream-of-consciousness style.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many English novels focused more on outer rather than inner events, and the plot was usually arranged in a linear fashion (as it is, for example, in Charles Dickens’s DavidCopperfield). Typically, when these novels traced the inner thoughts and feelings of characters, they did so within the single idiom of the narrator. In Joyce’s handling, the spontaneous flow of thoughts and associations which typify one character is presented in that person’s own idiom or voice. In part, what Joyce undertakes in Ulysses is to write the novel from the inner world of characters’ interior thinking, using their idiosyncratic language patterns.

In his review of the novel, Edmund Wilson explains that whereas earlier novelists presented their characters’ inner thoughts in ‘‘one vocabulary and cadence,’’ Joyce communicates ‘‘the consciousness of each of the characters . . . made to speak in the idiom proper to it.’’ In this way, as Wilson explains, ‘‘Joyce manages to give the effect of unedited human minds, drifting aimlessly along from one triviality to another.’’ For the inexperienced reader who brings to the novel expectations based on the nineteenth-century novel, the challenge is huge. Such a reader assumes that the novel will present first things first, that its characters will be introduced, that relationships will be explicit and clear, and so forth. However, in the case of Ulysses, the reader must experience the world of the novel from within each subjective consciousness as it is presented.


Autobiographical Novel

Ulysses is, in part, the portrait of Joyce as a slightly older young artist, back from Paris at the time of his mother’s death and staying for a while in the Martello Tower rented by his friend, Oliver St. John Gogart. Joyce was educated by Jesuits, and in 1904, he taught in a boys’ school in Dalkey, about a mile from the Martello Tower. Among his literary friends, he pronounced all manner of theories, not least of which was his biographical interpretation of Hamlet, and, with a fine tenor voice, he pursued a singing career, entering a singing competition and giving a couple of performances in the summer of 1904. The portrait in Ulysses of the feckless Simon Dedalus is based on John Joyce, and the Dedalus sisters reside at the same address in the novel that the Joyce family resided in that year: 7 St. Peter’s Terrace, Cabra. The choice of June 16, 1904, as the time for this novel honors Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle, an illiterate hotel maid who became the author’s long-time companion and years later his beloved wife. Although Joyce was no longer as young as Stephen Dedalus is portrayed in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Stephen in Ulysses has not yet proved himself as a writer and artist, Joyce nonetheless identified closely with Stephen Dedalus. Stephen’s moodiness, his egocentrism, and his creative puns and extensive web of literary and religious allusions parallel Joyce’s own manner of thinking and speaking and express the author’s feelings about Ireland and Catholicism.


Allusion

There are thousands of literary allusions in Ulysses, the countless corollaries to Homer’s epic being only one constellation of correspondences. One recurrent allusion is to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The play is mentioned in the first episode, with comparisons drawn between Stephen’s moodiness and the depressed self-absorption of Prince Hamlet and between the Danish castle and the Martello Tower. The allusion to Hamlet is prominent also in the Scylla and Charybdis episode, which takes place at the National Library. Here, Stephen Dedalus expounds on his biographical reading of Hamlet, basing his theory on suppositional information about Shakespeare’s life. The theory, which he admits not believing himself, argues that Shakespeare identified with King Hamlet’s ghost, that Prince Hamlet is aligned with Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, who died as a child, and that QueenGertrude is the equivalent of the unfaithful Ann Hathaway. Using this play as a referent and embedding this theory in the novel, Joyce capitalizes on certain themes well known to readers familiar with Shakespeare’s play. Parallels are suggested between the deceased King Hamlet, the betrayed husband and father of PrinceHamlet, and Leopold Bloom, who has an unfaithful wife and serves somewhat as a surrogate father for Stephen. There are other allusions to Hamlet: Stephen is apparently ousted by the so-called usurper BuckMulligan (just as Hamlet’s ascension to the throne is thwarted by his uncle, Claudius); and the tentative step-father relationship Stephen forms with Bloom may be an inexact reference to Hamlet’s uneasy relationship with Claudius. The literary allusion offers a point of departure or contrast by which the present text can be understood. This is a novel much about a son’s longing for a father (Homer set it up that way to begin with), and Hamlet is a Renaissance referent that also explores this theme. Joyce toys with the ideas of paternity and legacy and examines the forces that disrupt context and inheritance, situating his novel within the classical framework and extending it to Shakespeare’s play, among probably hundreds of other well-known and lesser-known texts, all in order to place his novel in a literary tradition of which it is a product and which it aims to reroute. His assumption throughout is that the reader has read as much as he has.



source: Novels for Students; vol.26; Ira Mark Milne; GALE Cengage Learning; 2008