James Joyce was living in Trieste when war broke out in 1914, having left Ireland ten years previously. As a British citizen, he was lucky not to have been captured by the Austrians. The following year he fled to Zurich with his family. By then he had completed the first three chapters of his massive novel, Ulysses. He wrote to Ezra Pound that it was the sequel to his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which also featured guest appearances from protagonists from his collection of short stories, Dubliners.
Over the next five years, however, the novel changed. Joyce gradually became less interested in the characters and more concerned with the style. It was as if the creation of characters and scenes itself aroused a kind of excitement in him, a restlessness that made him reinvent the genre of the novel.
In the beginning there was a plan. Joyce would take a single day of a Dublin summer – June 16, 1904. He was superstitious, he took dates seriously. June 16, 1904 was the day he first walked with Nora Barnacle, who would become his lifemate. He arranged his narrative around episodes from Homer’s “Odyssey”. Through the details from the “Odyssey” he used, he combined the epic with the ordinary with ironic intent.
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Bloom is a modern man and, like his author, a complete city dweller
“Ulysses” is rich in shifts and jumps. While working on the fourth chapter “Kalypso” in Zurich, Joyce introduced his hero Leopold Bloom, whose way of perceiving the world and exposing himself to feelings would appear later in many chapters of the novel.
Secondly, Joyce proceeded like a standard novelist. When Bloom bought a bar of soap and put it in his pocket, Joyce made sure that soap appeared in various later scenes. Bloom’s memories remain constant – memories of the death of his young son Rudy, his father’s suicide, his wife Molly’s infidelity.
Bloom is a modern man who makes his living as an ad salesman. He is Jewish but not religious, is sensual and open. In a country whose literature celebrated the rural and the windswept, Bloom, like his author, was a quintessential city dweller. Joyce enjoyed the streets of Dublin, which, like its characters, is one of the book’s protagonists.
As the work progressed, he became interested in the experimental
Joyce’s manuscripts help us reconstruct what he intended. One of the most exciting and explosive chapters in “Ulysses” is the twelfth, “The Cyclops”, which he wrote in 1919. In the passage, Leopold Bloom meets a group of Irish nationalists in a pub and argues against violence and prejudice, among other things: “Violence, hatred, history, all that. This is no life for men and women, abuse and hate.”
Into these ordinary scenes of Dublin pub life, Joyce inserted elaborate parodies of certain themes then going on in Ireland. He picked out, for example, the execution of the patriot Robert Emmet in 1803, an event of importance to Irish nationalists, and made tremendous fun of it, listing those who had come to watch as if it were some comic spectacle. As the book was being completed, Joyce added more delicious details to these parodies and drove the French printers crazy with his constant corrections in illegible handwriting.
After the completion of “Ulysses” James Joyce felt a “lively exhaustion”, but he wanted to hold the first copy of the book in his hands all the more urgently on his 40th birthday.
(Photo: Fran Caffrey/AFP)
We know that Joyce wrote these parodies first. As the work progressed, he became increasingly interested in the experimental. The realism of the tavern passages in “The Cyclops” only serves as connecting material in between. Then, in the chapter “The Cattle of the Sun God,” Joyce traced the conversations of some men gathering in a maternity hospital, using traditional narrative forms of English literature. Each line of this section is a pastiche.
Then, in the next chapter, “Circe,” Joyce abandoned narrative prose altogether, creating the phantasmagoria of a brothel like a play or an opera libretto, with many competing voices and the dead moving among the living.
While Joyce loved the big moments of pure linguistic and inventive energy, realistic detail and topographical precision were important to him. For example, in November 1921, when the printers were already calling for the final version of the book, Joyce wrote to his aunt in Dublin to assure himself that it really “is possible for a normal person to go over the parapet at 7 Eccles Street to rise”, the house in which Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly live.
The book became a third thicker in the correction
Written at a time of turmoil in both Ireland and continental Europe, “Ulysses” is deliberately unstable and provocative. As Joyce, a few serialized chapters in the American magazine The Little Review published, the publication was confiscated by the US authorities. The editors were tried in February 1921. As a result, American and British publishers began to tremble at the prospect of Ulysses.
Even getting the manuscript typed turned out to be a problem. The husband of a typist in Paris was so outraged by the pages he saw that he threw them straight into the fire.
Joyce feared his book would never see the light of day. When Sylvia Beach of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Co. offered to publish it herself, Joyce accepted. Beach found a literary printer in Dijon named Darantiere, and while it seemed that that solved Joyce’s problems, he now entered a frantic race, not so much to finish the book as to get it into shape , which seemed acceptable to him.
Joyce had a plan for Ulysses before he began writing, but as the work progressed he became more ambitious and energetic. Not only did he make the final chapters more experimental and inventive, he also revised and added to earlier parts, usually only when the proofs came back from the printers. The book became a third thicker in the correction.
Joyce’s manuscripts attest to a tough writing process. The author became more and more ambitious, rewrote chapters several times and indulged in endless correction loops.
(Photo: Dan Loh/AP)
Perhaps Joyce could have continued writing his book for years. But in 1921 an idea came to him. February 2, 1922 would be his fortieth birthday. An auspicious date to release his masterpiece. Now he had a deadline.
In November 1921, however, he still tried to get changes through, for example sending the exhausted printers another supplement, which they received on November 15th. To the long list of fictional characters, many with silly names (such as “Ali Baba Backsheesh Rahat Lokum Effendi” and “Hokopoko Harakiri”), who attend Robert Emmet’s execution, Joyce was keen to add the name “Borus Hupinkoff”. But the printer answered “trop tard”. It was too late for any more changes.
From 1922 until 1984, when Hans Walter Gabler, editor of the genetic-critical edition of Ulysses, gave Hupinkoff its rightful place in the text, Borus had to go about the world without his name being found in Ulysses .
On February 1, Darantiere wrote to Sylvia Beach in Dijon to inform her that he would be sending three copies of the finished book; they should arrive at noon the next day. Joyce described his condition at this point as “vivid exhaustion”. He felt that such an approach would leave too much to chance. Instead, it was arranged that the printer would hand the book over to the conductor of the Dijon-Paris express train, which would arrive in Paris at 7 a.m.
So Sylvia Beach waited for the train, met the conductor and was handed a package containing two copies of “Ulysses”. She took a cab to Joyce’s apartment and gave him one. She exhibited the other in her shop.
It was February 2, 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday. It was the first day of “Ulysses”, whose publication we are celebrating a hundred years ago.
Translated from the English by Marie Schmidt.