Review: Ulysses

Ulysses by James Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first read Ulysses almost thirty-five years ago, when I was roughly the same age as Stephen Dedalus - one of the first characters we meet in the book. I was backpacking across Indonesia on the cheap with a friend, eating Gado-Gado and Nasi Goreng, and climbing volcanoes.

In Sumatra, where I first opened the pages of the book, a cramped day-long mini-bus odyssey across the equatorial jungle cost a few dollars, accommodation a dollar, lunch just 25 cents. In truth, I enjoyed the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of Indonesia more than I enjoyed the book back then, and I recall swapping the finished book with some satisfaction at one of the many travellers' shops for a couple of Julian Barnes’s novels. ‘Look, it’s almost 1000 pages; that must be worth two books.’

Ulysses is this year’s family project - we intend to visit Dublin on Bloomsday, the long summer day when the book's protagonist journeys around Dublin. Returning to Ulysses as part of the trip preparation, I am now sixteen years older than the main character, Leopold Bloom, and it definitely feels like reading a different book. Despite being written at a time when Freud was revealing the subconscious, I was struck by how closely Joyce anticipates modern ideas about cognition. Perception is reconstructed from fragmentary sensory input; emotion colours interpretation; memory constantly reshapes the present. Bloom’s mind in particular feels uncannily real: associative, curious, drifting yet tethered to practical concerns.

Thursday 16th June 1904 starts with the youthful Stephen: the brooding intellectual, restless, proud, wrestling with theology, literature and identity, and then pivots centre stage to Bloom.

‘Stephen said…there is a saying of Goethe's.. Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life’

After sharing his breakfast with the cat: fried kidney, 'which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine', the forty-year-old Bloom defecates, before setting off on his mind-wandering around Dublin. Selling advertising, attending a funeral, helping a blind man cross the street, worrying about his wife’s likely infidelity, and caring for a drunken Stephen long after others would have walked away. Bloom emerges as the moral eye in the storm: patient, curious, and humane. He is not flawless. He is voyeuristic, passive at times, occasionally melancholic, but his overall decency endures.

The book's ambitious stylistic range remains astonishing. Thoughts wander. Memories intrude. Snatches of song, advertisements, biblical cadences, scraps of Shakespeare or Burns float into consciousness without invitation.

‘greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his wife for his friend. Go thou and do likewise’

As Borges noted in reviewing the book in 1925: conjecture, suspicion, fleeting thought, memories, lazy thinking, and the carefully conceived enjoy equal privilege in this book; a single point of view is noticeably absent. In writing Ulysses, he said: 'Joyce is as bold as the prow of a ship, and as universal as a mariner's compass'.

Reality emerges from competing mental models constantly trying to interpret the world. Each episode adopts its own rhetorical form from parody, musical composition, theatrical hallucination, scholastic catechism, and streams of consciousness. It’s a literary equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting, pushing the medium itself to its limits. Few writers followed Joyce down this path; perhaps the experiment was simply too complete and too complex. It could also have done with some editing, since it was published in parts and subject to Joyce’s own seven-year Odyssey.

Two chapters near the end of the day crystallise the novel’s emotional core, much needed after the complex vortex of "Circe". In "Ithaca," Bloom is finally home, and his ‘examined life’ is exposed through a scientific catechism of questions and answers, as though his life were a philosophical experiment. The tone is logical, analytical, almost like a school investigation sheet dissecting an ordinary life. Then Joyce pivots completely in “Penelope.” Here, his wife Molly’s unpunctuated monologue dissolves structure into pure vitality: memory, sexuality, irritation, nostalgia, and longing. If Bloom represents patient curiosity and Stephen represents intellectual striving, Molly embodies life itself. She is sensual, contradictory, and unapologetic.

We learn about Molly’s childhood in Gibraltar, where she stood on the rock of empire and gazed across the unknown African continent, giving her imagination a horizon wider than Dublin’s streets. Her monologue moves from childhood awakening to adult frustration with Bloom, revealing a marriage complicated by grief. The death of their infant son, Rudy, cast a long shadow over both of them. In earlier chapters, in the confoundingly difficult Circe episode, Bloom sees Rudy in a vision as an eleven-year-old boy in a life that never happened. In some ways, Stephen becomes a faint echo of the son Bloom might have raised.

In the end, the book remains deeply humane. People quarrel, flirt, drink, gossip, fart, and stumble through their day. Poverty and disappointment are real, yet life continues with a surprising softness and humour. Joyce never moralises. No character is without flaws, yet each searches for some version of Ithaca, a place of return, reconciliation, and rest.

And after hundreds of pages of exhausting intellectual play and psychological excavation, the novel closes with Molly’s famous affirmation:

Yes.

Not a philosophical conclusion, but a simple acceptance of life itself. Storms pass. The mind wanders and questions endlessly. But somewhere beneath it all remains the possibility of saying yes to love, yes to memory, and yes to the strange persistence of ordinary life.

Re-reading Ulysses after many years, I realised that Joyce was not only writing about Dublin on a single day in 1904. He was writing about the restless, searching nature of consciousness itself.

Some of the episodes are magnificent; some are torturous. As Borges again notes: 'Joyce... unfolds his hero's single day into many days upon the reader. (I haven't said many naps).'The book is far too long, and Joyce at times stands at the centre of a large canvas, flicking blobs of words in all directions. 'He is a millionaire of words and styles,' according to the great Argentinian labyrinth builder.

Of course, it is a masterpiece, but it is a difficult, exhilarating, and at times an exhausting read. I gave it Four Stars.

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