A dedalian bloom of internet articles and radio programmes to celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses in the past week or so, which coincided with Joyce's 40th birthday on 2.2.22 (I'm sure, as a lover of Dante, he was drawn to that rhyming of numbers too.) Due veneration and recognition of its pivotal importance somehow still seem tempered in some quarters with bafflement or peevish contempt for its supposed "impenetrability," as though holding it up as a great cultural monument absolves you of the need to actually read it. Even Anne Enright in The Guardian, while showing some regard for the novel and for Joyce, repeats the notion that "it's a novel in which nothing happens" whereas surely the opposite is the case:
"It is an epic of two races (Israelite — Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). […] It is also a kind of encyclopaedia."
This is an excerpt from a letter Joyce wrote to his friend Carlos Linati, quoted in the most fascinating of the articles I've come across, "Deadline Ulysses" by Phillip Keel Geheber in the LA Review of Books, who makes the point that up to a third of the novel was added at the final revision stage in 1921 including some of the most original, innovative material.
Just as Ulysses repays frequent re-readings throughout a lifetime, because its kaleidoscopically multiple perspectives and layers will yield a intrinsically different novel to the reader at different points in their own timeline, so does it morph and undulate in its wider valency to history and society. What I keep noting on my current re-perusal is how much a novel for own rancorous, divided times this is. Most of the other high Modernist classics - from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and The Waste Land to A La Recherche, The Man Without Qualities and The Magic Mountain - counterbalance a fraught vision of fragmentary modernity with plaintive nostalgia for a more stable age d'or when high culture supposedly held societal values in place and liberal humanist sensibilities had not begun to suffer dissociation. Joyce - a life-long socialist (in distinction to almost every other major Modernist) - was more inclined to celebrate the bustling, interactive heterogeneity of the modern city than deplore it, in particular foregrounding the rich linguistic buzz of different registers and idiolects weaving in and out of one another.
However, in choosing a second generation Jewish inhabitant of Dublin as his wandering mock-hero, Joyce hones in on the potential prejudice and ostracisation caused by what we now call "othering". You might miss them on a first reading, but the early chapters involving Bloom (especially 'Hades') are subtly dotted with moments of "micro-aggression", of slights and shrug-offs, nothing overt but enough to mark him as an outsider within the bluff, jokey discourse of Dublin street-life. This rises to a mock-heroic climax in his encounter with The Citizen, a one-eyed Cyclops who demonstrates that nationalism of any kind (even the anti-British, Irish nationalism with which Joyce had some sympathy) invariably masks a xenophobic agenda - as we have seen disastrously writ large in the age of Brexit and Trump. But Bloom's rejoinder to the antisemitism of the grandiloquent myope sums up the novel's underpinning ethos:
"Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life (...) Love"
This is why Joyce's encyclopaedic epic of the human race, of the human body in all its fallibility and persistence, culminates in a small act of kindness between two apparent outsiders - Bloom the intinerant Jew, continually on the run from thoughts of his wife's adultery and his son's death in infancy, helps out Stephen Dedalus the malcontent poet, in flight from the nets of state and religion and thoughts of his mother's recent death. Nothing happens in Ulysses the way it does in War and Peace or A Tale of Two Cities or even Middlemarch - but if a profoundly rich and detailed celebration of the ordinary "life for men and women" and an unlooked-for action of support for another human being is nothing then we need to keep reading and re-reading the novel for another hundred years.
