An Introduction to Ulysses

Philip Kitcher first read James Joyce at thirteen, on a summer afternoon when his school sent him outside with a book. He went from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Dubliners to the school library's copy of Ulysses, understood very little of it, and has been rereading it ever since. The same school later refused to give him the book as a prize.

He lays out the plot in a paragraph. An ordinary man who canvasses for newspaper advertisements, Leopold Bloom, wanders around Dublin for a day while his wife Molly begins an affair he knows is coming. Stephen Dedalus, the hero of Portrait, wanders too. They meet, and the meeting doesn't come to much. Bloom ends up in bed next to Molly, and we listen to her view of their marriage. That's just about it. Kitcher says the Homeric titles people give the eighteen episodes are something Joyce was relaxed and unsystematic about, and what Joyce really wanted was to get us inside the minds of Bloom, Molly and Stephen more closely than any other novelist has managed.

He also wants you to know the book is funny. Joyce never asked readers whether they understood Ulysses; he asked whether they laughed. Kitcher's advice for a first reading is to relax, enjoy it, and expect the parts you don't fathom to get clearer each time you come back.

Transcript

I look forward to discussing this great book with you, with all of its complexities and all of its difficulties and all of its rewards. This is James Joyce's Ulysses on Rebind.

Hello, I'm Philip Kitcher, and it's an enormous privilege to talk about Ulysses, something that I really love doing.

Let me begin by telling you about how I came to Ulysses. It all started when I discovered Joyce, and that was one summer afternoon. I was about thirteen, I think. I had to go outside my school and read for the afternoon, and I picked up this book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I just devoured it. I read it that afternoon, and that led me to want to read much more by Joyce, and so I found his collection of short stories, Dubliners, and I read those, and I was equally impressed. So I wanted to read what I'd heard was his masterpiece, Ulysses.

Now, people sort of know things about Ulysses. Perhaps they know that it was originally banned, so it's a dirty book. Perhaps they know that it's a great novel. That's the rumor about it, and sometimes it even gets voted as one of the great novels in the English language. But they also know that it's rather difficult.

Anyway, my school library had a copy, and I borrowed it, and I read it. Interestingly, though the school library did have a copy, when I wanted to get one as a prize some years later, that was refused. So I read Ulysses and knew that I had not understood very large parts of it. But the parts I had understood, or thought I'd understood, were so rich and so interesting that I've read it again and again and again throughout my life. It really is a book for a lifetime. It's a book to read and reread, and the more you read in it, the more you discover in it. It's never the same on subsequent readings. The readings just get richer and richer and richer.

But as many people say, it is difficult. Why is it difficult? Why does it have to be so difficult? That's a question asked by one of the characters in the book, and there is an answer to it. This is not a novel for you if you are really keen on plot. The plot of Ulysses is easily summarized. A man, actually a very ordinary man, a man who canvasses for advertisements for newspapers, wanders around Dublin. And during this time, his wife begins an adulterous affair with another man, and he knows this is going to happen from relatively early in the book. Another character who comes to Ulysses straight out of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, the hero of that earlier book, also wanders around throughout the day. And finally they meet, and the meeting doesn't come to very much. So we're left at the end with the advertising canvasser, Mr. Leopold Bloom, lying in bed next to his wife with the remnants of the afternoon's adultery there in the bed, and we listen finally to her approach to the whole thing, her view of what life is and what their marriage has been. That's just about it.

So why did Joyce need to write it in such a complex and peculiar way? Well, the title tells you something. Ulysses is, of course, a name for the hero whom the Greeks called Odysseus. Homer wrote The Odyssey about Odysseus and his wandering home from Troy to his faithful wife, Penelope. And that, of course, is a very great work of literature. People like to draw parallels between The Odyssey and Ulysses, and so the eighteen episodes of the book are often given names for episodes in The Odyssey itself. I think this is something that Joyce was pretty relaxed and unsystematic about. Sometimes these parallels work and sometimes they don't.

But what Joyce really did want to do was to get us inside the lives of his principal characters: Stephen Dedalus, the hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who is now a rather secondary figure in Ulysses, and Leopold Bloom, who is the central character, and his wife, Molly. We come closer to these characters, I think, than to any other characters in fiction. We're taken inside their minds and their lives. We see them in all sorts of actions that normally don't get recorded in novels. We come very close to them. And in coming close, we understand things about mood, change of mood, and all of the ways in which life has an impact on somebody in the course of a single day.

It's an extraordinary accomplishment, and it does something for us. What literature at its best does is not simply tell us stories, but I think give us new perspectives on life, gives us new understandings of our lives and the circumstances in which we live. And Joyce does this in far greater scope and with far greater profusion of perspectives than any other novelist I know. It is truly an extraordinary book because it takes us in its various episodes into these lives and shows them from so many different angles, and it's in that multiplication of perspectives that increases the reader's understanding that the true greatness of the novel lies.

But it's also extremely funny. Joyce wrote a book that is both serious and a comedy. In this, he imitated Shakespeare, against whom he always wanted to measure himself. For Joyce, Shakespeare is the great dramatist, and Joyce aspires to be equally great in the realm of the novel. And what he wanted people to get out of Ulysses was a deeper understanding of themselves and their lives, but he also wanted to make them laugh. He never asked people whether they understood his late novels, Ulysses and the even more difficult Finnegans Wake that followed it. He asked them, "Well, did you laugh?" And the woman with whom he lived for so many years, whom he eloped with in 1904, Nora Barnacle, whom he eventually married, said about Joyce, "I could hear him in the next room, reading and writing and laughing all the time."

So the great message for coming to Ulysses is relax. Enjoy it. On a first reading, there will be bits that you probably won't really fathom at all, but they get clearer and clearer and richer and richer the more times you read it. It truly is a novel for a lifetime.