Ulysses @100

 

First edition (1922)

Probably no other book taught me humility as did Ulysses by James Joyce. I read it in my late 20s just because it was one of the most discussed works of literature among literary intellectuals and geniuses in those days. I can’t even say that I read it though I did reach the last chapter which nearly drove me crazy. I can say with much confidence that I understood very little of the novel then. I never laid my hands on it again. I didn’t dare to.

The book has completed a century of its existence now. It was originally published in 1918 as a serialised work in the Little Review, but appeared as a book first in Feb 1922. The serial had already created quite a furore and hence the book was published from Paris. Copies of the first English edition were burned by the New York post office authorities while the second edition copies were seized by the Folkestone Customs authorities. It took ten years for United States District Court to decide that the novel was not obscene as alleged by the custodians of public morality.

I remember laughing occasionally while reading the book. There is much humour in it and some of it is blatantly blasphemous. [Example: Jesus stands before Lazarus’s tomb and orders, “Come forth, Lazarus.” Lazarus comes fifth and loses the job.] I don’t remember stumbling on obscenity, however. Probably I didn’t understand it so much. Or my standards of obscenity differed from most other people’s. It was both, I think now.

The massive novel (about 700 pages or so) tells the story of one day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, now known as Bloomsday. One day and 700 pages! Amazing. I dared to write a novel in the autumn of my life and its plot spans over a century and is over in some 140 pages. That’s one of the differences between a genius and a dunce, I guess: the genius spills over 700 pages in a day. I do have reasons to feel humble.

Of course, Ulysses is a lot more than pages. It has all the diverse colours of life with all its vitality. It tells the story of Leopold Bloom, an unsuccessful advertisement canvasser, Stephen Dedalus, would-be artist whom I met in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in my post-graduate course in literature, and Molly Bloom. Leopold is both a hero and an antihero. Life in Ulysses, as anywhere else, is both significant and insignificant. It can be at once trivial and heroic. The familiar can become exotic and vice versa depending how you look at it. Joyce’s Ulysses is the entire human universe, in other words.

That’s what I learnt in my literature classes. But I never dared to touch that universe a second time. Will I dare now as the book marches majestically into the second century of its existence? I doubt.