Courses

Ulysses

english 4001
 
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: — Introibo ad altare Dei.

That is the first paragraph of the first chapter of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses. Six or seven hundred pages later the last chapter, fifty pages long (consisting of three sentences in three paragraphs), trickles to its end with the following:

I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

In between, Joyce stuffs the oddest amalgam of things: a catechism; an expressionistic drama, set in a brothel; a parody of a sentimental novel; a chapter highlighted by newspaper headlines; a history of the English language; and an argument about Shakespeare’s Hamlet. All this material is stuffed into a constricted space, for the action of this monstrous book takes place on one day: June 16, 1904.

T.S. Eliot, considered by some to be the most influential poet and literary critic of this century, intoned in 1923 that “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Not everyone was so enthusiastic. Reviewing the book in 1922, the Sporting Times grumbled that Ulysses “appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a specialty of the literature of the latrine.”

Over the course of the fall, this class will set itself the task of reading Ulysses. In addition to experiencing what I hope will be a thoroughly enjoyable read, we will address such topics as narrative structure, modernism, obscenity, elitism, Homer’s Odyssey, and the smell of a frying kidney.

 

Text

James Joyce: Ulysses