Ulysses

Author: James Joyce

First Published: 1922 (in book form); 1918-1920 (in serial form, which started all the trouble)

What Happens: Joyce uses over 700 pages to describe one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a Dublin man convinced his wife Molly is cheating on him.

Each chapter of Ulysses corresponds to an episode of Homer's Odyssey, and scholars tend to refer to the chapters by episode ("Circe," "Oxen of the Sun," and so forth). Some characters correspond as well; Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus, the son figure to Bloom's Odysseus. For each chapter, Joyce uses a different narrative technique appropriate to the events of the episode. So, for example, when Bloom visits a friend whose wife is in labor, the technique is embryonic development, and the chapter's style therefore develops from early medieval Anglo-Saxon prose to a jazz- and slang-inflected 1920s patter.

Why The Odyssey? Well, in that story, Odysseus wanders the sea for ten years while his wife Penelope fends off suitors at home. A crucial difference: Penelope is faithful. She promises to choose a suitor when she finishes her weaving; then every night she surreptitiously unravels the day's work. (Oh, sure, it sounds a bit arbitrary, but it's actually the very same strategy the City of Chicago uses for road construction.)

Censorship History: Unholy. This is one of the grandaddies of literary censorship cases. Ulysses caused more burning, bowdlerization, piracy, arrest, smuggling, and destruction than the MacGuffin in a Dan Brown novel. In the process, it went through so many editions and revisions that there is no single definitive text. And it's still being censored today by certain Web nanny software.

But let's start at the beginning. Ulysses might not have been published at all without the efforts of Ezra Pound, who had championed Joyce and already helped him publish A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce called Pound "a miracle worker." (In one of those episodes that illustrates the way talent grows in clusters, they had met through W.B. Yeats.) Pound helped Joyce obtain serial publication of Ulysses in the American literary magazine The Little Review. But the magazine ran into censorship trouble almost immediately. Pound himself deleted about 20 lines from the fourth episode; he suggested to the editors that they run a disclaimer: "'until literature is permitted in America,' we cannot print Mr J's next sentence."

The serial raised eyebrows a few more times, but the episode that really got everyone in trouble was number 13, "Nausikaa." In this chapter, Bloom sees a beautiful young woman on the shore, and he surreptitiously masturbates. (The narrative device is tumescence/detumescence.) Clearly, the idea that a man might masturbate--especially while looking at a young woman--was too much for the American public to handle. In bringing the magazine to the attention of the authorities, John Sumner, of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice, said that the episode was "so obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, and disgusting, that a minute description of the same would be offensive to the Court and improper to be placed upon the record thereof." Tell us what you really think, John.

Bail for the editors of The Little Review was set at $25 apiece. (Bail! For editors! Of a literary magazine! Of course, back then, archaeologists outran Nazis, and novelists fought bulls and fascists. How can we bring that level of adventure back to the desk job?) The ensuing trial declared Ulysses "unintelligible" but no less offensive for that; the magazine had to stop the serialization and the editors were fined.

The expat Sylvia Beach offered to publish Ulysses in Paris, with her small press Shakespeare & Company. That edition appeared in 1922, but it had some problems. For one thing, the typesetters didn't speak English. For another, Joyce's worsening glaucoma made his handwritten edits sometimes impossible to read. And there were multiple, sometimes contradictory drafts. Beach estimated that the 1922 edition contained one to six errors per page.

Shakespeare & Company sent 500 copies to the U.S., but they were nearly all confiscated or destroyed. In 1923, English Customs seized the replacement shipment and burned 497 of its 500 copies. Some copies were smuggled into the States in the literary equivalent of a plain brown wrapper--a binding bearing the title The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

Through no effort of the author, Ulysses popped up in serial form again in the late 1920s. The U.S. magazine Two Worlds had pirated it and published it, heavily bowdlerized. Artists everywhere protested.

In 1932, the Odyssey press brought out an edition that it claimed was definitive, edited by Joyce's friend Stuart Gilbert. Though others have disputed the edition's definitive-ness, there's no doubt that Gilbert is one of the most useful authorities on Joyce; woe to the solo reader who attempts Ulysses without Gilbert's guide to the chapter-by-chapter narrative schemata. But whether his edition is definitive is unfortunately moot, since the printer's plates were probably destroyed when Hamburg was bombed in World War II.

Finally, in December 1933, the U.S. lifted its ban on Ulysses. In the same week, Prohibition was repealed. It's not hard to imagine one hell of an editorial party.

What Else: Ulysses is one of the watershed moments of modernism. Many people consider it the greatest novel of the 20th century. By most standards, it's a masterpiece of experimental prose. To my mind, looking for smut in a novel like this is like visiting Fallingwater and checking under the upstairs mattress.

But let's be clear: The average reader, working unassisted, will probably never make it to the passages that provoked such an uproar. The paragraphs are dense. The allusions are tricky and obscure. Bloom's stream of consciousness, like Bloom himself, wanders all over the place. In the hallucinatory "Circe" chapter you just have to accept that for the next hundred pages you won't know what's going on. The American reader must further get used to the Irish dialogue device of em dashes rather than quotation marks. Most readers give up long before Bloom discovers the Greatest Love of All.

If you do make it through, you'll be rewarded. The book justifies months of study and re-reading. It is part novel, part word puzzle, part song. Joyce's prose is some of the best ever committed to paper, and the catharsis of the final chapter is breathtaking.

Value as Erotica: If you're looking for a one-handed read, look elsewhere; your other hand may indeed be occupied, but it will be taking notes.

Trivia: Joyce wasn't the only writer who got a boost from Ezra Pound. Pound also helped Robert Frost and another censors' darling, D.H. Lawrence.

Though early opponents of Ulysses were particularly concerned about the book's effects on young ladies, young ladies--Sylvia Beach, and The Little Review's Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap--were responsible for actually putting it in print.

Ulysses tends to evoke some rather strong responses from other writers. George Bernard Shaw, playwright and professional crank, called it "a revolting record of a disgusting piece of civilization." E.B. White admitted he had attempted to read it but been unable to finish, and Vladimir Nabokov--another master prose experimentalist with his own share of run-ins with the censors--claimed that Joyce had never influenced him "in any manner whatsoever."

Random House published the first U.S. edition in 1934, but it used as its basis a pirated ninth edition from Shakespeare & Company, so it duplicated many typos and passed them into modern Joyce scholarship. Gabler's 1984 "synoptic" edition sought to correct many of these errors, and though many Joyce scholars endorsed it, others attacked its accuracy.

There have been at least two attempts at creating a hypertext version of Ulysses, but there has yet to be an electronic version free of the errors that have dogged the print versions. The Internet Ulysses includes Joyce's chapter-by-chapter schemata.

McSweeney's posted a fantastic spoof of Joyce's feedback from his writing workshop. (Surely, the MFA is part of why the adventure has leached out of desk jobs.)

Joyce had more say in his cover design than many writers do today. The first edition appeared as he wanted it, with the word "ULYSSES" in white letters against a deep Aegean blue, to evoke the Greek islands against the sea.

Characters from Joyce's earlier works Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appear in Ulysses.

A 1935 edition, now rare, was illustrated by Henri Matisse.

June 16--the day on which Ulysses takes place--is now known as Bloomsday. Dublin observes Bloomsday with a festival, public readings, costumes, and walking tours. But Joyce originally chose that date because it marked his first excursion (some say his first sexual encounter) with the woman who would become his wife, Nora.

Nora, for her part, is said to have asked her husband, "Why don't you write books people can read?"