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Ulysses | Introduction

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. The schema can be found in a number of works on Joyce; one of these is Reading Joyce’s Ulysses, by Daniel R. Schwarz. For explanations of references and parallels to Homer’s epic, readers will find Don Gifford’s exhaustive work, “Ulysses” Annotated, indispensable.

Ulysses 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 in which Stephen imagines there is a miscarried fetus. He considers the possibility of an umbilicus long enough to serve as a telephone line across which one could phone up navel-free Eve in Eden. 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, he urinates, picks his nose, and then looks around to see if anyone is observing him.

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, envisioning himself lying back in the water, his penis floating like a flower.

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 visit Molly 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... » Complete Ulysses Summary