I’m e rathke, the author of a number of books. Learn more about what you signed up for here. Go here to manage your email notifications.
MYSELF
Famed for its difficulty, for its obscenity trial—which changed the publishing industry—for the many self-aggrandizing things Joyce said about his work, Ulysses is a mountain standing off in the distance that most fear approaching lest they tumble back on down to the ground and admit that they didn’t like it or found it too confusing and opaque, that it bruised their tailbone.
And I understand that.
I do.
Even though I’d read it before, when I picked it up this spring after reading A Portrait of the Artist, I bounced right off it. And I knew what to expect! Had read (and liked it!) before.
But I tried again in the autumn and this time fell into it. Not the way I did when I was 20, when I first raced through the novel, but in a new way.
Interestingly, to me, my reaction to A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses flipped from the original ones I had fifteen years ago. At first read, I thought A Portrait of the Artist was just all right and Ulysses was the real book.
Now, I think I’m inclined to disagree and say A Portrait of the Artist is the real book and Ulysses is a grand yet collapsing cathedral.
Ulysses is a difficult book. More difficult and uninviting than I remembered and even reading all of Joyce in preparation for it doesn’t properly prepare you to deal with the pyrotechnics of his prose here. It can, at times, be difficult to even follow what’s happening.
Some books teach you how to read them, with the initial difficulty spike becoming more normal. You fall into the style and start swimming with the current rather than against.
Not so with Ulysses! For the simple reason that each chapter forces you to learn a new way to read.
The trick is to be okay with the confusion and confounding nature of the text. To understand you’re going to get lost and that you just need to let the language flow through you, wash over you.
There’s a lot of fun to be had in this novel but it is also, at times, tedious on purpose and perplexing to a degree that feels malicious, like Joyce wants you to bow before what he’s done. It’s a bit obnoxious, honestly. If you’re not paying extremely close attention, you may miss key plot details or even what’s happening in the scene you’re reading.
It’s less fun and less funny than I remembered it and while there are big rewards, I’d compare it to a theme park, in a way.
If you’re not willing to stand in line for most of the day to ride a rollercoaster for five minutes, you may as well stay home.
You cannot talk about Ulysses without talking about prose and style, but I’m going to try to make you understand what I think is the most important aspect of the novel and how and why it changed literature. And I’m going to do it mostly without discussing prose.
And so I want to talk about exactly one chapter in the novel, which, I think, is the most important chapter of the novel, which makes it one of the most significant and important chapters in English literature and the 20th Century.
ALL OF US
Before Joyce, most literature had these characteristics:
Important people
Doing important things
Both were not a requirement, but usually they were both present. Even when the protagonist was not, initially, an important person, the climax would reveal that they were a prince or princess all along or maybe their actions led them to join the nobility in some way, shape, or form.
Joyce brought fiction to us. Regular people doing regular things.
But what’s most significant, I think, is that he took the Epic to us. Ulysses is famously structured and modeled after The Odyssey, one of the most important Epics in western literature. Perhaps, simply, the most important. Wily Odysseus. Cursed Odysseus. Who spent twenty years away from home, who made an enemy of Poseidon, who fooled gods, who watched those gods kill all his friends and companions. The man who finally returned to Ithaca and murdered a house full of suitors to claim his home once more.
Joyce brings this all important, foundational story to us. And, more interestingly, he makes no great claim for us. No demand to be special or original or even interesting.
In fact, he allows us to be boring idiots wandering what was an unremarkable town full of unremarkable people.
We follow Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they wander Dublin in 1904, when Dublin was still under English rule and kept in abject poverty by that ruling class across the Irish Sea.
So let’s talk about Nausicaa.
NAUSICAA
A quick summary of the chapter:
At the rocks of Sandymount Strand—where Stephen watched a dog piss in the Proteus Chapter while doing a bit of thinking—a young woman named Gerty is watching some children with her friends. She, too, had a bit of a think about love, marriage, and femininity as the sun tumbles from the sky. In the distance, she notices a man—Leopold Bloom—watching her from the shore. She teases him by hiking her skirt up a bit to show him some leg and Bloom masturbates, climaxing as some fireworks go off nearby. When she stands and walks away, Bloom sees that she has a lame leg.
Despite almost nothing happening in this chapter, there’s quite a lot to unpack here and so I’ll try to tackle it piece by piece, but first I’m going to outline the section of the Odyssey it’s modeled after:
Odysseus shipwrecks on the island of Scheria. Nausicaa, the princess of this land, goes to the shore with her attendants to do a bit of laundry. Odysseus hears them and comes to them for aid, completely naked. This sends Nausicaa’s handmaidens running in fright, but Nausicaa remains. Odysseus compliments her beauty and fears touching her, and she clothes him in the laundry she has but not before telling him that he needs a wash and him telling her that she needs a husband. This strikes her, for she seeks a husband and a home of her own. Perhaps, this big brawny beautiful man from the sea, who she recognizes as lost, could take her, bring her to his home.
Okay, still with me?
Great.
Now, let’s get to it.
bring me to the gutter
While Ulysses was being serialized, it immediately gained a reputation as Important Literature. Praised by some of the most respected and famous authors of the 1910s, from across the world. And what Joyce does with Nausicaa, at the very start, is imitate cheap romance novels.
And if you think the Romance genre has a certain reputation now, it had the same one back then. The difference is that art designed for women was seen as even less serious than it is now (unpacking this may take longer than the rest of the planned length of this essay, but I suspect women reading this know what I mean).
Nausicaa happens past the midway point of the novel, so Joyce has already convinced the literati and purveyors of culture that he is writing Great Art. And so one of the most radical things he does here—that few seem to comment on or recognize—is drag this maligned and demeaned genre up into the realm of Great Art.
He demands that you, the literate and cultured man of letters, read his Great Book in the style of a novel that your daughter or niece or even wife might read. The kind you have silently or loudly mocked as unserious.
And so he’s dragging you into a private humiliation. He’s tricked you, you smart and beautiful boy, into girl’s literature when you thought you were reading a book for Men with Big Brains.
And then, while he’s dragging you through the mud of Women’s Lit, you slowly realize that the protagonist—the hero—of this novel is quietly and not so secretly masturbating in public to this young woman (incidentally, this happens immediately after Bloom has been chased out of a pub by antisemitic rants and the threat of violence).
This man, this hero, who, at this point, you may or may not realize is spending the day out of the house so his wife and her lover can fuck in his bed.
Joyce isn’t done yet, though. After dragging us through books for little thoughtless girls, he brings us, obscenely, to a man masturbating, and, finally, reveals to us that this young woman is a cripple.
desire
This kind of movement, today, would be called problematic.
And so it’s worth contextualizing this for a moment.
If you think the disabled are viewed negatively now, try looking back a century!
Not always but often enough, characters with disabilities were used in a few ways. Sometimes their disability gave them oracle-like abilities, turning them into almost magical creatures meant to help reveal something important to the Important People before kindly fucking off out of the narrative. Other times, their disability was seen as a sign of their wretchedness or perhaps was something that twisted them to wickedness. Or maybe their wickedness twisted their body. Or something like that.
Never was a disability seen as desirable and never was a person with a disability seen as an object of desire.
Sitting here, now, a century after publication, it may be difficult to understand how this single movement changed literature and publishing.
For one thing, it led to obscenity trials and printers changing the text without Joyce or his publisher’s permission. This is a fascinating and weird tale of the novel that I’ll write about more at a later day, but Kevin Birmingham’s excellent The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses is definitely worth reading if you’re still with me in this essay.
This single chapter in Ulysses did more to reveal and revel in the humanity within us all. The dirty, grimy, ugly sides of us, but it also gives humanity to people who have never received that treatment in literature before.
Gerty is, first, a person. A person with desires.
She wants to be married. She wants to be seen as a woman. She considers how her friends are all finding men and get proposals while she sits, waiting.
She wants a home and a husband. More than that, she’s a woman and maybe she just wants a man. Even without the ring, if you get me.
Maybe all women have bodily desires and sometimes that’s more important, in the immediate, than their social desires.
And she sees Bloom watching her, his hand in his pocket. Sees him rubbing at himself. And she plays with him. Is, in a way, happy to be seen this way. And so she teases and cajoles him along all while playing the game of being a young woman, pretty and mild, unaware of the debauchery happening because of her.
An innocent.
An object of desire.
We shift focus to Bloom and inhabit his skin. To him, she is a woman. Pretty and young. And he feels alive. Virile. Tries not to consider that his wife has rejected him in favor of another, that he’s just been told that he is not Irish because he is a Jew. First and only, he is a Jew to those who meet him. Never mind that he’s Irish!
And here is one of the crucial moments where Joyce tries to create a tether between the Jewish and Irish people, but that’s an idea, no doubt, well explored by others. And if that’s not the case, I’ll leave it to some future other.
Perhaps you, dear reader.
Though Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce does a decent amount of work as a start.
Bloom is fascinated and enraptured by her while he sits watching, leering, and he enjoys the way that he knows that she knows that he is watching, that he knows she knows he desires her.
When she stands and limps away, Bloom does not deny his attraction or her humanness. Rather, he understands, in an instant, why she has been left on the shelf, as he says.
It’s important, I think, that we begin this chapter with Gerty and that we come to know her humanity first. But it is crucial that he reveal her disability to the reader, after.
First, he makes her beautiful. Makes you know her. Makes you love her. Makes you desire her.
And then when he shows you that she is crippled, he demands you resolve this for yourself.
Are you going to lie to yourself and say that you never desired her, never wanted her? Will you, now, deny her humanity, her beauty?
All because of a limp?
COMING HOME
Joyce built the modern world, whether we like it or not. The Ulysses obscenity trial in the US may be one of the most important First Amendment cases in history, as its effects spilled across the world to change the protections artists received from criminal prosecution for creating challenging, transgressive art.
Because Ulysses was championed by so many of the biggest names in world literature and the serialization took so many years, the reputation continued to grow and expand before the final publication. And then to have the publication so mired in controversy, where people were spending obscene amounts of money to get illegally imported or bootlegged versions of the novel made it become a literary event unlike any before or, really, since.
I mean, people went bananas for Twilight, but no one risked going to prison for buying it.
The FBI didn’t burn truckloads of Harry Potter books.
But what’s most important about Ulysses and about Joyce is the humanness of his novels. We are invited so deep into the characters of Ulysses, forced to inhabit them so fully that we are subjected to their every awful thought. Every banality and obscenity.
And in knowing them inside and out, hearing and smelling every fart, tasting every booger, wiping away every handful of jizz, we are forced to become more human. To understand all the things we hide and never speak of are the things that we all share, that bind us all as one.
Joyce brought literature to the gutter and he brought us all with him, where we bathed in sewage and muck and shit.
And there we found ourselves.
Found all of us.
My novels:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Some free books for your trouble: