Read Modern Mind for Free Online Page B

the
Little Review,
which published other chapters of the book, but in February 1921 that magazine was found guilty of obscenity, and the editors were fined. 29 Finally Joyce approached a young bookseller in Paris, another American named Sylvia Beach, and hershop, Shakespeare & Co., published the book in its entirety on 2 February 1922. For the first edition, one thousand copies were printed.
    There are two principal characters in
Ulysses,
though many of the countless minor ones are memorable too. Stephen Dedalus is a young artist going through a personal crisis (like Western civdisation he has dried up, lost his large ambitions and the will to create). Leopold Bloom – ‘Poldy’ to his wife, and modelled partly on Joyce’s father and brother – is a much more down-to-earth character. Joyce (influenced by the theories of Otto Weininger) makes him Jewish and slightly effeminate, but it is his unpretentious yet wonderfully rich life, inner and outer, that makes him Ulysses. 30 For it is Joyce’s point that the age of heroes is over. * He loathed the ‘heroic abstractions’ for which so many soldiers were sacrificed, ‘the big words which make us so unhappy.’ 31 The odyssey of
his
characters is not to negotiate the fearsome mythical world of the Greeks – instead, he gives us Bloom’s entire day in Dublin on 16 June 1904. 32 We follow Bloom from the early preparation of his wife’s breakfast, his presence at the funeral of a friend, encounters with newspaper acquaintances, racing aficionados, his shopping exploits, buying meat and soap, his drinking, a wonderfully erotic scene where he is on the beach near three young women and they are watching some fireworks, and a final encounter with the police on his way home late at night. We leave him gently climbing into bed next to his wife and trying not to wake her, when the book shifts perspective and gives us his wife Molly’s completely unpunctuated view of Bloom.
    It is one of the book’s attractions that it changes style several times, from stream of consciousness, to question-and-answer, to a play that is also a dream, to more straightforward exchanges. There are some lovely jokes (Shakespeare is ‘the chap that writes like Synge’, ‘My kingdom for a drink’) and some hopelessly childish puns (‘I beg your parsnips’); incredibly inventive language, teeming with allusions; endless lists of people and things and references to the latest developments in science. One point of the very great length of the book (933 pages) is to recreate a world in which the author slows life down for the reader, enabling him or her to relish the language, a language that never sleeps. In this way, Joyce draws attention to the richness of Dublin in 1904, where poetry, opera, Latin and liturgy are as much a part of everyday lower-middle-class life as are gambling, racing, minor cheating and the lacklustre lust of a middle-aged man for virtually every woman he meets. 33 ‘If
Ulysses
isn’t fit to read’, said Joyce to his cousin, responding to criticism, ‘life isn’t fit to live.’ Descriptions of food are never far away, each and every one mouthwatering (‘Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith.’). Place names are left to hang, so we realise how improbable but very beautiful even proper names are: Malahide, Clonghowes, Castleconnel. Joyce revisits words, rearranges spelling and punctuation so that we see these words, and what they represent, anew: ‘Whether these be sins or virtues oldNobodaddy will tell us at doomsday …’, ‘He smellsipped the cordial …’, ‘Her ample bedwarmed flesh …’, ‘Dynamitard’. 34
    In following Bloom the reader – like Dedalus – is exhilarated and liberated. 35 Bloom has no wish to be anything other than who he is, ‘neither Faust nor Jesus’. Bloom inhabits an amazingly
generous
world, where people allow each other to be as they are, celebrating everyday life and giving a