Hannah Driver (Editions)
The Random House edition of the novel includes information from the obscenity trial surrounding the ban of Joyce’s Ulysses by the United States District Court and the rendering of its prohibition be rethought. The Random House edition is the first edition to be legally published in America following the courts acceptance to lift the ban on the novel. This publication is symbolic of the history of Ulysses and its spread around the world. Even though Joyce wrote in the midst of the modernist movement, conservative 1933 readers of the novel found his novel “obscene”. Woolsey argues against the obscenity ban based on the nature of the word and how important the novel is to conversations of basic human instinct. For a story so famous in the literary world, the stylistic version of the Random House publication is quite understated. The book cover has an ashy black background, with a big grey “U” where the points of the letter elongate into the darkness of the background, and a blue “L” with the stem of the “L” elongated. The rest of the title is in yellow block letters. Not only is the graphic design of the novel too elusive, but there is no representation of the Greek myth allusions at all. While flipping through the pages, it is noticeable that the novel does not have any episode title pages indicating when each episode starts and the myth symbolism. The tie to the epic of Odysseus that the Greek myth supports is a part of the story that interests me the most. I find James Joyce’s story quite mundane, and while it makes this novel one of the hardest stories to get through, I do believe that the mundane is intrinsically linked to the fantastical elements that the Greek myth brings to the story and conceptions of a modern hero.
Joyce pushes boundaries in writing thematics for his time and while undermined for its odd style, he challenges intellectuals with a modernist twist, rooted in a classical background, both working with and against the characters in the text. The importance of classical elements to the novel is the parallel’s to Greek myth, but also how Joyce flips his story and rejects the thematics of Homer’s Odyssey. Under the influence of Charles Lamb, Joyce’s writing “represents a liberalizing of the Greek epic’s structure” (Wykes, 304). Ulysses is a modernist retelling of a classical story, and radical changes only Joyce would attempt. Such as, “dismantling the heroic age in an attempt to help us all psychologically live within our means” (Galperin, 456). William H. Galperin is more plainly stating that Bloom is relatable, in contrast to the heroic Odysseus. He explains the importance of individuality to the novel and the turning inwards of Bloom. The character of Odysseus is important to Joyce because of the universality that he has across international literature. He is a very known character and easy to manipulate. Wykes illustrates Bloom as elemental to a rejection of the nature of heroics, “a real hero” (Wykes, 315). Joyce’s Ulysses reflects “historical shifts in attitudes over time” (Norris, 68) and Norris touches on the progressiveness of Bloom’s sense of identity, but also inverting that identity. His character is a paradox, both rooted in Odysseus and a rejection. John Turner agrees that Joyce “is both reader and writer, bound by myth and yet its re-creator” (Turner). Ulysses’s has been termed a “mock-epic” (Theoharis, 587) derived from its structure and often comical remarks. Theoharis points out the irony of the story in its relationship to the profane and mundane. Ulysses predates progressive shifts in stylistic writing and intellectual thought that are enigmatic even presently, but also somehow still accessible to readers in the 21st century as they were to Joyce’s readers in the 1920’s.
Leopold Bloom is a deconstructed Odysseus who’s fetishes permeate an anti-heroism throughout the novel. The fluidity with which Ulysses explores all levels of lewdness is abstract, especially fetishization. Bloom is a piteous character and cuckold. Molly’s unfaithfulness with Blazes Boylan is known to Bloom, but his feelings surrounding the adultery are convoluted. He reminisces on the pleasant memories he and Molly share, but fantasizes about watching Boylan have sex with his wife while he cheers “[p]lough her! More!” (15). Bloom understands the humanistic need for Molly to relieve her sexual urges like he does on the beach, and has no courage to stop her if she has to “get rid of it somehow” (13); tumescence that is. Bloom and Molly’s relationship is a complete inversion of Odysseus and Penelope’s in Homer’s Odyssey. Despite all her eager suitors, Penelope waits twenty-two years for Odysseus to return to Ithaca without compromising her faithfulness, meanwhile Odysseus is frequently adulterous during his journey. It’s not that Bloom is an asexual being- as we evidently know from his consciousness- it’s that his sexuality is subdued to the confines of his psyche. A lot of his intrusive thoughts are sexual in nature, but he has certain fetishes that prevent him from participating in the prior ways of intimacy with Molly. The crux of Bloom’s relationship with Molly is rooted in the grief he feels for his son Rudy who died eleven years ago from when the novel is set. Bloom’s voyeurism of women is an inability to engage in the physicality of sex with another woman because of Bloom’s fear of reproduction and “[c]ould never like it again after Rudy” (8) Voyeurism is elemental to the stream of consciousness stylistic model employed by Joyce, and another one of Bloom’s fetishes. He constantly admires women’s clothing and fantasizes about what lays underneath, especially “[s]ilk flash rich stockings white. Watch!” (5) and boots with all their “laces dangling” (5). Rudy’s death is symbolic of a kind of castration complex, like a metaphorical disconnect of flesh and progeny. In the Circe episode of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus fears bedding Circe and that she may make him “unmanned” or castrated. Castration and the possible transvestitism, or fluidity of gender and identity, is a fixation throughout the novel. Bloom is an emasculated man- but also not a woman- who undergoes an odyssey of identity.
The modernist movement disrupted pleasure values of art and initiated less desirable conversations surrounding the rigidity of art’s purpose. James Joyce’s modern Odysseus turned the need for moral implications of art on its head with Ulysses. Woolsey argues that lack of didacticism is the point of Joyce’s novel and an aestheticism of its’ own unravels when the human psyche is left without moral barriers. Woolsey’s aesthetic response to the novel is “somewhat emetic” (Woolsey, Random House, XIV) but, yet doesn’t falter on the novel’s importance. Woolsey delves specifically into the intent of which the text was written. He concludes that it is not pornographic because there is no “leer of the sensualist” (Woolsey, Random House, pg. X). He also addresses the issue that the court has with “the man learned in the art” (Woolsey, Random House, pg. XIII), but Woolsey points out the reality of harmless sexual instincts. Joyce illustrates an unfiltered and uncensored consciousness of an average man that eradicates the gender binary norm between man and wife. The disgust that readers feel is a violation of their own sexual identity which differs from Bloom’s… or Joyce’s. The boundless thoughts that are experienced throughout the novel are a reflection of his characters innermost thoughts and desires, but are also about the fragility of heroism. Joyce shows the unattainability of being a hero like Odysseus. For an ordinary man like Bloom- fetishes and all- the true heroism comes from accepting the mundane and that is the premise of Joyce’s novel.
Works cited
- Galperin, William H. “The Defeat of the Suitors: Homer and Joyce Once More.” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 4, 1983, pp. 455–59. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25476545. Accessed 14 Nov. 2022.
- WYKES, DAVID. “The Odyssey in Ulysses.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 10, no. 2, 1968, pp. 301–16. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40753991. Accessed 14 Nov. 2022.
- Turner, John. "HOW DOES LEOPOLD BLOOM BECOME ULYSSES?" Philosophy and Literature 38.1 (2014): 41-57. ProQuest. Web. 14 Nov. 2022.
- Theoharis, Theoharis Constantine. “Making Much of Nothing.” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 4, 1996, pp. 583–91. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25473769. Accessed 15 Nov. 2022.
- “Joyce’s Cultures, the Classical, and the Popular.” The Value of James Joyce, by Margot Norris, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016, pp. 66–94. The Value Of. Accessed 14 Nov. 2022.