James Joyce’s Ulysses turned 100 this month. After Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it was, for most of the 20th century, the world’s most infamous book. It has been banned, restricted, and even burned. When I was a young man in the mid-’60s, politicians, clergymen and anxious parents were still raging against its supposed indecency. My best friend’s older brother got hold of a copy and, presumably with somebody’s help (since he didn’t strike me as the literary type), had helpfully tabbed the smutty bits. The three of us sat in his Dodge convertible one night with a torch, passing the book furtively from one to the other, tingling with expectation.
It was a letdown at first, then a revelation. A letdown because the smutty bits weren’t smutty enough, or at least not specific enough. All the sex in Ulysses, apart from one forlorn and endlessly drawn-out wank, is remembered, imagined, or anticipated. I found it passionless and impenetrable. A bit limp, you might say, especially in comparison to D.H. Lawrence’s eye-opening directness.
The revelation, though, was the opulence of Joyce’s prose, its lilt and rhythm and complexity, along with its apparent casualness, as if he were just putting down the first thing that came into his head. I’d never read anything so daring and (to borrow one of Joyce’s own words) myriadminded.
Along with many others of my generation, I eagerly bought a copy and, like them, spent several years vainly trying to make it past the end of chapter one. Eventually, I realized I’d been approaching it in the wrong way, fretting over every sentence in search of meaning. Once I decided to just go with the flow, letting all those strange words and phrases wash over me, I fell into its musicality and began to enjoy it.
I don’t think I would have the stamina to read Ulysses a second time, not all the way through, but I do frequently take it down to read paragraphs or whole chapters at random. Once you’ve got the overall hang of it (which is fairly straightforward because there’s very little by way of plot: It simply describes one day in Dublin in 1904 through the eyes and imaginations of its two main characters), this is a great book for dipping into. My battered 1986 edition is festooned with colored tabs marking not the smutty bits but the passages I want to reread again and again just to luxuriate in the language. And each time I do, I uncover some new connection.
Reading Ulysses is an adventure, like visiting some unknown foreign country where, although you don’t always understand what people are saying, you are swept up in the noise and clamor and excitement, and where every unfamiliar sight and sound is potentially arresting. You arrive home a different person. My first reading left me dizzyingly estranged. The filters that we normally use to separate what’s interesting or important from what doesn’t matter are removed and everything is revealed as equally interesting. Sounds, thoughts, and spoken words overlap, interrupt, and interweave, making it hard to keep track of which is which. Events are seen from differing perspectives, as in a Cubist painting. Incidental noises — a dog’s bark, the clatter of a cart on cobblestones, a dripping tap — suddenly intrude into the middle of sentences just as sounds intrude in real life. Everything is on the same plane.
Some of the words Joyce invents are unpronounceable nonsense, or so it might seem. They’re the ones that put many readers off. At first, I skipped over them as mere typographical flourishes. After all, what can you do with Bbbbblllllblodschbg? But repeated readings gradually revealed their sense. For instance, Pprrpffrrppffff is perfect for when Mr. Bloom, the novel’s chief protagonist, farts. Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong is the whistle of a passing train that interrupts the erotic fantasies of his wife, Molly, as she lies in bed. Sllt is the rhythmic mechanical scrape of a printing press as it spits out the pages of a newspaper: “Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. The door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt.” There is bound to be an internet site that explains all the meanings, but where’s the fun in that?
It wasn’t so much these admittedly sometimes strained neologisms that kept me going through that dreamlike first reading, but the rumbustious wordplay. Some of it is infantile (although none the worse for that, of course): “If others have their will Ann hath a way,” for example, or the “ickylickysticky yumyum kisses” blown by prostitutes. You can almost hear Joyce chuckling as he wrote them down. But the humor can also be quite sophisticated. In chapter 17, for instance, Mr. Bloom fills the kettle for a cup of tea, prompting a rambling dissertation on the various manifestations of water, including “the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.”
As those examples suggest, much of the fun arises from a clash of registers, the freewheeling juxtaposition of high culture and low. Street slang, newspaper reports, bureaucratic pomposity, children’s rhymes, the elevated diction of the educated: All happily rub up against one another. Joyce also exposes the randomness of our thought patterns, as when a newspaper’s proofreader scans an article for the next day’s edition in chapter 7: “It is amusing to view the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry with a y of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn’t it? Cemetery put in of course on account of the symmetry.” When you read that passage aloud it all falls into place beautifully.
Yet, despite all these literary pyrotechnics, the most powerful and affecting word in the book is the most mundane.
The final chapter sees Bloom’s wife, Molly, in bed with her husband, letting her thoughts wander: thoughts about her neighbors and friends, her marriage, her health, and many other things, but mainly about sex, both real and imagined. Thirty-five pages with hardly a comma or full stop! (The best way to appreciate it is to follow the text while it is being read aloud: There is a complete recording on YouTube.) As sleepy sensuality overtakes her, the word “yes” occurs with increasing frequency, gradually taking on an orgasmic urgency. “… and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said I will yes.”
Never has one ordinary three-letter word been called upon to bear so much significance. If my friend’s brother had been alert to the erotic rather than just the smutty bits, these would surely have been the first pages he would have tagged.
Peter Timms’s latest book is Silliness: A Serious History, published in Australia by Wakefield Press. He lives in Tasmania.
