The book as image demands these glosses as registers of their meaning.
(Richard Ellmann justifying his high-level, abstract, structural analysis, page 60)

Almost everything is coupled.
(Ellmann’s habit of defining binaries and dichotomies on every page, p.72)

Joyce liked to work his prose into patterns as intricate and individualised as the initial letters in the Book of Kells.
(Pretty analogy if not, ultimately, very useful, p.73)

A quick reminder of the chapter numbers and names in James Joyce’s epic modernist novel, ‘Ulysses’. Pretty much all discussions of the book refer to them but note that none of the Greek chapter titles are indicated in the actual text of ‘Ulysses’; they were given by Joyce to early commentators who published them in books and articles about the novel, and have been used by critics and commentators, including me, ever since – but none of them actually appear in hard copies or online versions of the text, which only indicate the chapters with numbers.

Part 1. The Telemachiad or the odyssey of Telemachus

1. Telemachus
2. Nestor
3. Proteus

Part 2. The Odyssey

4. Calypso
5. Lotus Eaters
6. Hades
7. Aeolus
8. Lestrygonians
9. Scylla and Charybdis
10. Wandering Rocks
11. Sirens
12. Cyclops
13. Nausicaa
14. Oxen of the Sun
15. Circe

Part 3. The Nostos or Return

16. Eumaeus
17. Ithaca
18. Penelope

Ulysses on the Liffey

This is an old book, written in the late 1960s and early ’70s, before the deluge of modern critical theory transformed the discipline of literary criticism. Back then American scholar and academic Richard Ellman (1918 to 1987) was famous as the man who wrote the huge and definitive biography of James Joyce (published in 1959) which single-handedly transformed Joyce studies. And yet this book, published just 13 years later, is deeply disappointing. I wouldn’t recommend it. Read the Hugh Kenner primer about ‘Ulysses’, but don’t bother with this one.

This is because Ellmann goes very heavy indeed on the schemata, on the high-level diagrams of organs, and colours, and symbols and tones that Joyce drew up for the book – and to which Ellmann adds further levels and frameworks of his own. On every page he adds structural analyses, building platforms upon platforms – for example his suggestion in the first chapter that ‘Ulysses’ needs to be interpreted on four levels: literal, ethical aesthetic and anagogic.

The trouble with his relentless focus on the (pretty simple-minded) structures he finds everywhere in the book is that they continually take us away from the actual text and make us dwell in the bloodless world of tables and blueprints. This book not only reproduces the detailed schema which Joyce sent to the Italian critic Linati, it is punctuated by three schemas of Ellman’s own creation summarising the first, middle and final six chapters.

• The Linati scheme on UlyssesGuide

And they’re not one-page wonders, they’re very detailed, each one extending over six pages. Possibly they’re considered the USP and backbone of this volume, maybe this book exists not to help the reader read ‘Ulysses’ better but as a scholarly presentation of Ellmann’s structural and thematic theories but I found them unreadable. Like reading a PowerPoint presentation about ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Buzzkill. Way to drain all the joy out of a subject.

His chapter on Molly Bloom is disappointing

But not only is Ellmann’s approach boring, it’s often disappointingly banal.

I read his chapter ‘Why Molly Bloom menstruates’ immediately after reading the Molly Bloom chapter of ‘Ulysses’ and was immensely disappointed. First he wastes time summarising the theories of William Empson and Edmund Wilson (from the 1930s) and then disappears off into more schemas. He tells us that, according to Joyce’s notes, in the previous chapter Leopold Bloom had headed off into Deep Night while Stephen headed for Alba, the dawn. Is this useful? Sort of, kind of, mildly interesting – but it doesn’t really illuminate your reading of the actual words.

He says that after the dry officialese of ‘Ithaca’, Molly’s soliloquy offers ‘a joyful efflorescence’. Except it doesn’t, does it? It’s a long rambling repetitive tissue of memories about neighbours and soldiers and relatives and boyfriends and shopping and childhood games and biscuits and lots of graphic sexual descriptions. Until the last page which, for sure, leads us up to the famous great lyrical climax. But it’s not an ‘efflorescence’ before that. It’s a rambling character sketch. Ellmann’s characterisation is, in my opinion, flat wrong.

Ellmann compares Molly to the Wife of Bath (p.163) and Moll Flanders (p.165), which struck me as bleeding obvious, but missed what to me is the even more obvious point that all three of these famous fictional women were created by men. What does that tell us? But Ellmann doesn’t notice.

He asserts that if Stephen represents genuine philosophy, and Bloom represents half-educated magazine philosophising, then Molly represents all flesh. But isn’t that a very patronising and (as usual) over-schematic way of thinking about her? Instead of considering what she actually says, Ellmann is more concerned to fit her into his high-level patterns and plans.

I couldn’t believe it when he writes:

Molly’s nature [is] so much more earthy, trivial, sexualised and lyrical than Aristotle’s or Hume’s… (p.163)

Er, yes. This isn’t in doubt, the question is what makes you want to compare Molly Bloom to Aristotle in the first place? I well understand that Stephen expounds Aristotelian ideas in ‘Proteus’ and ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ and that Molly, in her semi-literate physicality, could be said to embody anti-philosophy. This would make her having Stephen to stay and her fantasies of having sex with him a real meeting of opposites. But directly comparing Molly the character with Aristotle or Hume seems to me ludicrous.

Ellman’s endless thirst for binaries and dichotomies is typified when he says:

Basically she is earth to Bloom’s sun, modifying his light by her own movements. (p.166)

This may or may not be ‘true’ but I think it misses the point by being so abstract. It feels like any moment he’s going to tell us that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Or, in Ellmannese:

The ‘Ithaca’ episode had offered a heliocentric view of Bloom, Molly offers a geocentric one, the two together forming the angle of parallax… (p.167)

I know that one of the guiding principles of ‘Ulysses’ is the notion of parallax which the dictionary defines as ‘the displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight’ (basically seeing the same thing from two points of view) and I certainly know that Molly’s character can be described as ‘earthy’ – but I don’t really see why Bloom should be considered as especially ‘heliocentric’ and I don’t see that it helps my close reading of specific passages, or of the text as a whole.

I just don’t like thinking about ‘Ulysses’ like this. It seems pointless and boring to me. It takes us light years away from the actual text in all its wonderful detail and difficulty and comedy and makes the thing sound like a lecture in comparative religion or structuralist anthropology. But this dry colourless theoretical level is the only level Ellmann operates at.

Despite disliking it more and more as I read on, I persisted and here’s the best summary I can manage. I try to give credit where credit’s due for Ellmann’s insights and ideas.

Learnings, sort of

Threes Joyce liked threes, so Ellmann suggests that the chapters proceed in triads: three in the opening section, four sets of three in the middle, three in the final section. Each trio contains internal contrasts and Ellmann has his own schema to impose:

I shall propose that in every group of three chapters the first defers to space, the second has time in the ascendant, and the third blends (or expunges) the two. (p.19)

Thus:

• chapter one (space) opens in the extremely solid tower, with plump Buck Mulligan, the serving of food, and looking out over the big sea
• chapter two (time) opens with a history lesson and contains Stephen’s famous outburst about history being a nightmare from which he’s trying to awake. Within this chapter Ellmann divides time into two types, secular and spiritual time, Caesar’s and Christ’s
• chapter three synthesises the first two as Stephen crackles his way through the bladderwrack testing Aristotelian reality by closing then reopening his eyes, to see if the world is still there. (Oddly enough, it is)

Layers As a freethinker Bloom is post-Christian. As a Christian convert, he is post-Judaic. As a Judeo-Christian he is post-Homeric. So his character represents historical layer upon layer.

Dedalus If you think about it, Dedalus is a bad name for the young male protagonist in this novel. Stephen Dedalus perfectly suits the character in ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ because he is (like Saint Stephen) the ‘martyr’ of the new religion (in Joyce’s case, of the new literature) which, like the legendary Greek Daedelus, he has fathered, a labyrinth of artistic artifice. But in ‘Ulysses‘ Stephen is no longer a father (as Daedelus was father to Icarus), he is a son. If you think about it, there’s a real confusion here, which Joyce just outfaces and all his critics accept.

Loose fits Similarly, none of the many literary correspondences the text invokes – namely to the ‘Odyssey’ and ‘Hamlet’, with occasional nods to Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ and Goethe’s ‘Faust’ – fully fit.

• In ‘The Odyssey’ Telemachus goes looking for his actual father but in the novel, Bloom is not Stephen’s father and Stephen isn’t consciously looking for him.
• Hamlet is in mourning but for a dead father whose wife has quickly had sex with/married his uncle, whereas Stephen is in mourning for a dead mother, and there’s not a shred of unfaithfulness about either Simon or May Dedalus.
• In chapter 4 Molly stands for Calypso, the sensual enchantress, and yet in chapter 18 the same Molly stands for the devoted wife Penelope. Not only that, but Penelope is famously chaste while Molly is famously promiscuous.

In other words, the classic literary texts hover in the background like ghostly amplifiers or underpinnings of the narrative, but they only loosely inform the main characters. To put it another way, Joyce plays fast and loose with all the correspondences, making them close when they can be, but quietly ignoring them altogether when they don’t fit.

Antisemitism Ellmann tells us that antisemitism is Joyce’s touchstone for ‘cravenheartedness’. I’ll second that. Both the Englishman Haines, the Unionist Deasy, and the Irish nationalist citizen are guilty of it. For me antisemitism is not only bigoted racism but, just as bad, it’s stupid. It indicates someone who can’t cope with the complexity of the modern world and so resorts to medieval simplifications.

Two types Haines represents a British empire reduced to having nightmares and shooting in the dark, combined with embarrassing sentimentalism about the locals i.e. the milkwoman, while Mulligan is flashily hollow, ‘Ireland’s gay betrayer’, betrayer of his own culture. They represent antitheses with Stephen in the middle.

Refuser At the Forty Foot bathing hole Stephen refuses to bathe with the other two. This is because he is the great refuser; he refused to kneel at his mother’s bedside, he has refused Roman Catholicism, he refused the suggestion of becoming a priest in ‘A Portrait’, he refuses the Italian music teacher’s kindly suggestion to become a professional singer, he refuses the Irish nationalism of the peasant student Davin and the drunken bigot the citizen. All leading up to the climactic moment in the brothel where he smashes the chandelier as he declares he will not serve. He is Mr No.

Just regarding the refusal to bathe, it’s noteworthy that Stephen is a hydrophobe. We are told he hasn’t had a bath for months. He must have stunk. It’s typical of Ellmann that he instantly spots the structural element of the Forty Foot rejection scene, neatly pointing out how Stephen’s refusing to pray and refusing to swim amount symbolise his rejecting spiritual and physical purification, but isn’t interested in its practical consequences (p.11).

Chapter 3. Proteus

Aristotle Joyce worshipped Aristotle. He thought him the greatest thinker who ever lived. What he chiefly liked was he was against Plato’s idealism.

What he liked about Aristotle was he had demoted Plato’s Ideas, had denied that universals could be detached from particulars, and in short had set himself against mysticism. (p.13)

Just as Joyce set himself against the Celtic Revival, the fairies and twilight and legends of Olde Irelande, against aestheticism and the yellow nineties, occultism and spiritualism. As dramatised in the confrontation with A.E. in the National Library in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’.

(I agree, which is why I try to stick as closely as possible to the actual text and narrative of the books I review. The further away you get, the more it becomes something else. So it’s ironic that Ellmann fully understands Joyce’s liking for Aristotle while himself demonstrating precisely the flight from the (messy, confusing) details of the text into (overneat and tidy) literary archetypes and symbols, which sound more like Plato and his timeless Forms.)

The now, the here This is the point of Stephen’s dismissal of William Blake’s followers (although he himself liked Blake and lectured on him) for wittering on about the void and eternity, whereas Stephen wants to concentrate on the exact present. Stephen thinks:

Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. [Whereas we should] Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Crunching Hence Joyce is so careful to describe the sound of Stephen’s boots crunching through the bladderwrack on the beach and then tries to depict the sound of the waves with made-up words. ‘Ulysses’ is about these vivid sensual details. Almost all of which are overlooked in Ellmann’s quest for structures and schemas.

The Holy Office In his poem The Holy Office, Joyce mocks female coyness as much as male idealism because they are both denials of the mucky reality of love and sex – they are part of what Ellmann summarises in a powerful phrase as ‘the general self-deception’ and refusal to face reality. Joyce is about facing reality. People are not what you want them to be. The world is not what you want it to be. You are not what you want to be. Face it.

Ellmann says Joyce’s message is ‘Accept the universe’. It is what it is and ‘Ulysses’ is an encyclopedic transcription of its itness. This, of course, is highly debatable, because the book presents a polemically dirty, messy, squalid often very sordid view of human nature. Now wonder Virginia Woolf loathed it. For her it missed vast realms of beauty and art. My point is that Ellmann’s description of the book is not really adequate. Like many fans and commentators he takes Joyce’s own opinion of it at face value.

Caesuras Ellmann points out something I hadn’t noticed which is that most if not all the chapters have a break or caesura in the middle. I can see that in the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter (first half ladies’ romance, second half reverting to the initial style) but less so the others. In the first half of chapter 3 Ellmann says Stephen is thinking about creation, fathers, mothers, fertilisation and giving birth; but half-way through he changes the direction of his walk and this triggers a change in his thoughts, which become about death and decomposition, starting with the carcass of a dog he sees on the beach. So two parts: birth and death, growth and corruption. Maybe. But I’m suspicious of this because Ellmann quickly turns everything into binaries and opposites. And it feels so easy just throwing out these grand pairs of synonyms and antonyms: Expansion and collapse. Addition and subtraction. Creation and destruction. I could go on all night.

Pee Meanwhile, in the actual text, Stephen has a pee (‘Better get this job over quick’) then picks his nose: ‘He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully’. You can see how very aggressively non-spiritual, how aggressively, vulgarly materialistic this deliberately is.

More antitheses Ellmann spots that the chapter opens with Stephen reading (the signature of all things) and ends with him writing (a poem). The poem he wrote in ‘Portrait’ is a portrait of attraction (‘Lure of the fallen seraphim’), here it is a poem about death, and so of repulsion.

Rosevean Stephen looks over his ship and sees a ship, the Rosevean, but for Ellmann, this ship also:

seals the marriage of form and matter, of body and soul, of space and time, at which Aristotle officiated. (p.26)

Yes I know Joyce packed the book full of structures and correspondences, so no doubt the ship is part of his elaborate symbology because everything is, I’m not denying that. I’m just suggesting that Ellmann’s focus exclusively on these structures a) excludes the riot and fun of the language and b) often feels stretched and contrived.

Chapter 4. Calypso

Ellmann prioritises abstract over concrete Language is diffusive, fissiparous, uncontainable, whereas Ellmann continually locks everything down to really boring binaries. This chapter covers the introduction of Leopold Bloom in chapter 4 of ‘Ulysses’ and embarks on another set of binaries comparing him and Stephen. Father versus son. Married versus single. Intellectual versus middle-brow. Solipsist versus realist. Inbound versus outbound. I could go on for hours trotting out the same slightly interesting but ultimately tedious dichotomies. Stephen is edgy, Bloom is placid. Stephen is a loner while Bloom is convivial. Stephen gets drunk while Bloom stays sober. Bloom has a job while Stephen is unemployed. Stephen thinks about the soul, Bloom about the body (specially sex). Stephen ponders the nature of the Trinity; to Bloom, such questions are pointless. Stephen is haunted, Bloom is not. Stephen’s lost a mother, Bloom’s lost a father. I could go on…

These facts are not untrue, and they are sort of interesting, and it’s probably as well to know them but, in my opinion, they are just the starting point for engaging with the difficult and cornucopian text itself, whereas for Ellmann, stating these very obvious binaries and dichotomies is where he ends, is the end result.

Disembodied/embodied If Stephen in chapter 3 is a disembodied intellect, Bloom in chapter 4 is an aggressively embodied material man, what with buying and cooking and eating the pork kidney, admiring his wife’s plumpness, feeding the cat, going for a poo and so on.

Both In something like a joke, discussing the not perfect fit of Molly with either Calypso or Penelope, Ellmann cracks that:

Whenever confronted by a choice between two possible things to include, Joyce chose both. (p.34)

Bloomism Ellmann coins the term ‘bloomism’ which he defines as an effort to recall an important fact and getting it wrong. Like when Bloom thinks the elegy in a country churchyard was written by Wordsworth (rather than the correct author, Thomas Gray).

Reject/accept Stephen opens the novel with a series of rejections; Molly closes it with her famous acceptance, Yes.

Zionism versus beddism But Bloom is a rejecter too. In the butcher Moses Dlugacz’s he picks up a leaflet for Zionist settlement in Palestine and has a strangely negative image of it, triggered by vague ideas about the Dead Sea, of a barren volcanic ash land, ‘a barren land, bare waste’. Out in the street a wizened old hag crosses his path. All this dried-up deathness makes him want to hurry back to plump warm Molly in bed, ‘Warm beds; warm fullblooded life’ (p.51). Bed, warmth, life.

Chapter 6. Hades

Life and death The same fundamental (and pretty obvious) dichotomy between life and death underpins chapter 6, ‘Hades’, set in the funeral carriage going to Glasnevin Cemetery. Ellmann’s entry-level binaries make it all sound very boring, which it isn’t to actually read, not least because like most of the rest of the book, it’s full of gags and gossip and character studies. But Ellmann isn’t interested in any of that, misses out everything that makes ‘Ulysses’ fun to read, just cherrypicks the details which help his structural analyses and comparisons with Homer.

Chapter 7. Aeolus

Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof.

Three types of diffusion Ellmann usefully points out the schematic nature of the opening of chapter 7, ‘Aeolus’, describing three modes of diffusion: in quick succession we see 1) a fleet of trams setting out from their base in the heart of Dublin; 2) His Majesty’s mail cars setting out from the post office; 3) and draymen rolling barrels of stout to be loaded onto carts and distributed to the city’s pubs. Ellmann neatly summarises these as exemplars of 1) physical, 2) written and (insofar as booze loosens tongues) 3) oral communication – appropriate for a chapter referencing the Greek god of wind’s far-reaching influence, and its modern incarnation in the power of the press.

Keys… Ellmann embarks on the idea that Bloom and Stephen (who both appear in this chapter, separately visiting the newspaper office of the Evening Telegraph) are in some sense seeking the keys which will unlock the city. I’ve no idea what he means and it only becomes more obscure when he goes on to suggest that they themselves are the keys which unlock the gates to Dante’s purgatory, with the claim that these central, post-hell chapters, are purgatorial.

… and Keyes The keys theme is more obvious in Bloom’s mission to get an ad into the newspaper for The House of Keyes, owned by Alexander Keyes (‘tea, wine and spirit merchant’) who’s devised his own logo. Ellmann acutely points out that both Bloom and Stephen are keyless, Stephen having had the key to the Martello tower taken off him by Mulligan, and Bloom (though he doesn’t know it yet) will find out in penultimate chapter, ‘Ithaca’, that he’s left his front door keys in his other pair of trousers. And in the closing portion of the chapter the newspaper editor Crawford turns out to have mislaid the keys to his office. OK. We have to be key-sensitive.

Three speeches Ellmann points out that, in line with the theme of windy communication, the ‘Aeolus’ chapter contains three speeches which can be compared and contrasted. Less understandable is his claim that the speeches represent ‘three sorties’ ‘sent out’ by the city of Dublin ‘against’ Bloom and Stephen. Ellmann claims that in these central chapters the two men are ‘in league against the powers of this world and the next’, albeit ‘unconsciously’. This high-level interpretation may or may not ring your bell. I found his focus on the specific speeches more useful.

1. Bloom enters the office as Ned Lambert is reading out an amazingly flowery speech given by Dawson, a baker, to the city council about the importance of Ireland’s forests, as reported in the paper and mockingly read out by Lambert. This speech is deliberative.

2. The speech of the barrister Seymour Bush in the Childs murder case, which is praised in the newspaper office by the lawyer J.J. O’Molloy. This speech is forensic.

3. A speech given in 1903 by John F. Taylor in defence of the Irish language revival and published as a pamphlet, declaimed by Professor MacHugh in the newspaper office (not without interruptions). This speech is a public oration.

This is all true, but it’s also important and funny that Simon Dedalus comments on the first speech:

—Agonising Christ, wouldn’t it give you a heartburn on your arse?

And begs Ned to stop reading it:

Shite and onions! That’ll do, Ned. Life is too short.

The structures are no doubt there, and noticing them is part of the pleasure. But so is the texture of the prose.

Wind Types of wind are referenced throughout, as when Bloom thinks about how newspapermen change jobs.

Funny the way those newspaper men veer about when they get wind of a new opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same breath. Wouldn’t know which to believe. One story good till you hear the next. Go for one another baldheaded in the papers and then all blows over.

Or Professor MacHugh calls Dawson an ‘inflated windbag’.

The tissues rustled up in the draught, floated softly in the air blue scrawls and under the table came to earth.
—It wasn’t me, sir. It was the big fellow shoved me, sir.
—Throw him out and shut the door, the editor said. There’s a hurricane blowing.

The highfalutin proverbial description for poetic inspiration, ‘the divine afflatus’, simply means breath, wind. And one of Homer’s stock descriptions for Troy is ‘windy Troy’. In other words, as with so much Joyce, once you’re tipped off to start looking for a particular theme, you find more and more of it hidden in plain sight.

Lungs One interesting thing Ellmann says is that the organ Joyce himself assigned to ‘Aeolus’ in his schema was the lungs and this explains why so many phrases are paired and follow the rhythm of breathing, in and out, in a process of ‘pulmonary give and take’. Doors open and close, people enter and leave (although you could say the same of every play ever written).

The door of Ruttledge’s office whispered: ee: cree. They always build one door opposite another for the wind to. Way in. Way out.

Caesura Ellmann identifies the caesura in this chapter as coming when the three speeches have been discussed, and Stephen proposes that everyone shifts location to the nearest pub, Mooney’s – so they severally exit the office and make their way confusedly down the stairs and into the street.

Nelson On this walk to the pub Stephen tells the Professor his rather stupid story about two old ladies who buy some fruit and go on a holiday excursion to the top of Nelson’s column where, puffed out, they eat fresh plums, spit the pips out through the railings, and look up at ‘the one-handled adulterer’.

Mockery There are two ideas at work here. 1) The characters have just heard detailed descriptions of three types of grand Irish speech; Stephen’s story is intended to deflate all three and mock all grand rhetoric. 2) More specifically, the Taylor speech contained a description of Moses climbing to the top of Mount Sinai. Stephen’s story is a parody and a mockery in that, instead of Moses, it’s two old biddies who are granted a ‘vision’ out over ‘the unpromised land’ of Ireland.

Clever, very, but no matter how many times I’ve had this story explained, I’ve never found it funny.

Pretentious It sometimes feels as if Ellmann’s writing becomes steadily more pretentious as he has steadily less to say:

Here in ‘Aeolus’ Joyce is less threnodic though equally clamant. (p.65)

The episode proceeds by magnification and parvification. (p.71)

By the latter he means that certain figures (Taylor, Moses) are bigged up in the first half of the chapter and then satirised in the second. Ellmann finds the same pattern in the famous newspaper headlines which litter the chapter, which start out genuinely impressive but become steadily diminished. Here’s on from the start of the chapter:

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

Whereas see how an example from towards the end of the chapter has become longer but cruder:

SOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP.

Chapter 8. Lestrygonians

This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.
(Bloom’s internal monologue)

‘Lestrygonians’ is all about food and is packed to the hilt with food references, similes and metaphors. Bloom feeling hungry, seeing people eating in the street, fantasising about food, looking into Burton’s restaurant which is so packed with diners he backs out and instead drops into Davy Byrne’s pub for a cheese sandwich.

Church versus state Ellmann spots one of the book’s recurring binaries at the start, between State and Church. If you recall, this is encoded in the very first sentence of the book which starts with the word state and ends with a cross.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Similarly, here at the start of ‘Lestrygonians’ Bloom 1) sees ‘A sugarsticky girl shovelling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother’ and then 2) notices a lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King, and imagines King Edward VII sitting on his throne sucking boiled sweets. Christian / king. Church / state.

Up and down Quickly Ellmann is quick to find in this chapter the kinds of binary opposition he loves. Bloom’s thoughts always start on the ground, Stephen’s in the air. Stephen is racked with guilt, which is a sort of intellectual bad feeling; Bloom’s more earthy equivalent is disgust.

Comparisons Meaning is generated by a whole series of binary contrasts:

• Molly versus Josie Bloom bumps into Mrs (Josie) Breen. She was at one point Bloom’s girlfriend but Molly won him off her. She has aged badly compared to Molly.
• Josie versus Denis Breen This is because she married a man with severe mental problems, Breen, who she tells Bloom received an obscure insulting postcard reading U.P. up this morning.
• Two madmen: Breen cf Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell.
• Mina Purefoy versus Molly Josie tells Bloom Mina Purefoy is having a terrible time giving birth at the maternity hospital; Bloom compares this with Molly’s easy deliveries.
• Large versus small families Bloom sees poverty-stricken Dilly Dedalus and marvels that May Dedalus bore 15 children, Mina is bearing her ninth, while Molly only had two.
• Sandwich men versus blind Bloom sees the five men wearing sandwich boards spelling HELYS pass by, but has to help the blind stripling across the road.
• A.E. and Lizzy Up behind walk the noted Dublin poet and mystic A.E. accompanied by a lady poet. Bloom can’t help despising their airy-fairy artiness, the opposite of his own earthiness.
• Meat versus vegetarian A.E. and lady friend have just exited a vegetarian restaurant while Bloom’s thoughts are stuck on all types of meat, butchery and cooking.
• Molly versus Martha Molly is obviously a real woman of flesh and blood, versus Martha Clifford who only exists in her rather pathetic letters.
• Fertility versus disease For a bad moment Bloom panics that Blazes Boylan may give Molly a venereal disease – their diseased and infertile sexual act contrasts strongly with the ‘healthy’ philoprogenitive sex of May Dedalus and Mina Purefoy.
• Love versus sex Contrasted with the implied animality of Boylan tupping Molly, Bloom has a lyrical memory of their tender first kissing and touching on Howth Hill (the scene which Molly will vividly remember at the end of her soliloquy in chapter 18).

In the same spirit, Ellmann neatly points out that Boylan is as thoughtlessly sensual as the men stuffing their faces in Burton’s restaurant, because womanising is like gourmandising, both are about objectifying and consuming inanimate objects. Whereas love, which is what Bloom has for Molly, animates its object, brings it to life.

Chapter 9. Scylla and Charybdis

The aesthetic debate In this chapter Stephen Dedalus tries and fails to make an impression on representatives of Dublin’s literary elite by making an informal presentation of his theory about Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the (real-life) author and mystic A.E., and author, editor and librarian John Eglinton. From his materialist Aristotelian point of view, Stephen seeks to refute the kind of gassy aesthetic idealism which places Shakespeare among the gods or says he’s great because he embodies spiritual ideals. A.E. expresses this high-minded aesthetic thus:

—Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring… The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas.

Stephen refutes this with a thumping return to earth, insisting that what powers the great plays is Shakespeare’s life, his biography. Thus he thinks ‘Hamlet’ is so much more than another Jacobean tragedy because it is powered by Shakespeare’s rage and humiliation at being cuckolded, that one of his brothers had an affair with his older wife, Anne Hathaway, who he abandoned back in Stratford for twenty long years while he made his career in London (the length of time that Odysseus was absent from Ithaca).

Ellmann the biographer Now Ellmann was, of course, himself a famous biographer, having written monumental biographies of Joyce and Oscar Wilde. In a chapter about biographies, then, Ellmann can be forgiven for letting down his schematic guard for a moment and sharing some biographical facts about Joyce. These are that Joyce himself delivered a set of no fewer than 13 public lectures, in 1912 to ’13, solely on the subject of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. In addition, we know he had read the recent biographies of Shakespeare by Dowden, Lee, Harris and Wilde, as well as following the latest scholarship about newly discovered manuscripts. Sort of interesting to know, but then what…? If anything, the fact that Joyce did so much reading about Shakespeare makes the thinness of his presentation in the Library scene all the more disappointing.

Caesura Remember how Ellmann thinks every chapter is divided in two by a caesura? In this chapter he neatly suggests the caesura is marked by the arrival of Buck Mulligan halfway through Stephen’s presentation.

Mulligan mocks Up to this point in the narrative, there’d been an easy binary, between the young materialist Stephen set against the high-minded idealist, old A.E. Mulligan’s arrival introduces a third element because he is as irreverent as Stephen, he is as much a materialist as Stephen, but unlike Stephen he doesn’t care about the subject. Mulligan immediately jumps to the sexual interpretation of everyone, including Bloom who he later implies is gay – but done in a frivolous, superficial crowd-pleasing way.

Stephen’s theory is serious and hard-won, but Mulligan merely exaggerates and mocks it for effect, producing with a flourish a parody he’s written named ‘Everyman His Own Wife or A Honeymoon in the Hand (a national immorality in three orgasms)’ in which the artistic productivity of Stephen’s theory is reduced to a crude farce about masturbation.

Envy So Stephen is furious when it is Mulligan who is invited to a literary soirée at the author George Moore’s house that evening.

As Ellmann puts it, for A.E. the things of this world are illusory; for Mulligan they are inconsequential; only for Stephen are they real, as he repeatedly tells himself throughout the book.

Vico I’m translating this into my own phraseology, which I continually try to make comprehensible and practical. Not so Ellmann, who is ever-ready to rope in not only Homer and Shakespeare, Aristotle and Hume, Dante and Goethe but, in this instance, the Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian and jurist, Giambattista Vico (1668 to 1744).

Stephen is propounding here not subjectivism, but Vico’s notion that the human world is made by man, and that we can only encounter it in what is already implicit in ourselves. Put another way, Shakespeare’s plays are a record of what was possible for him, and so are his experiences. Life coexists with art as a representation of self. (p.84)

Is that helpful to you? We know that Joyce read and admired Vico for his huge vision of the eternal recurrence of human history but:

1. it’s not true
2. Ellmann’s summary of it isn’t very useful (‘the human world is made by man’, duh, who did you think the human world was made by, dolphins?)
3. it’s a foolishly simplified summary of Shakespeare’s plays to say they were ‘a record of what was possible for him’ – what does that even mean? but mostly it’s hugely misleading and grossly simplistic, they were based on all kinds of sources and written for a complex and fast-changing market

Ellmann’s discussion leads up to a pithy and meaningless summary: ‘Life coexists with art as a representation of self.’ What does that mean? It might just about mean something, but it’s barely worth knowing, is it?

Ellmann then goes on to a series of grand statements about Art which are so witless they made me really cross. Like most literary critics he is obsessed with sex, and suggests that Joyce solves the Scylla and Charybdis problem (what problem?) by having the two monsters have sex with each other. This is because:

The sexual act is the essential act of artistic as of natural creation.

Is it?

This act has to occur within the artist’s brain so that he is mother as well as father of the issuing word. Shakespeare, has, therefore, like all artists, a double nature, is like Bloom, a womanly man, is victim as well as victimiser… God himself must be both father and mother to Christ in the same way. In short, the artist, combining both parents in himself, is an androgyne. (p.86)

Does God have to be both mother and father to Christ? Does the artist have to combine both parents and become an androgyne? Why am I reading this pretentious guff? Was Bach an androgyne? Constable? Van Gogh? It leads into a small orgy of Ellmann’s favourite trope, the dichotomy.

In this two-backed beast are united the various symbols of maleness and femaleness in this episode – ashplant and hat, flag and pit, Prospero’s buried staff and drowned book, and also the categories of space and time… the present and the possible, the now-here and the there-then, Stratford and London, Dublin and Paris, land and sea. (p.87)

Remember how I summarised Ellmann’s claim that it is A.E. and Mulligan who are the real opposites here, well Ellmann takes this to extremes:

Mulligan mocks his ‘conception’ by saying that he is himself his own father, and by offering to parturiate. He also offers his own play, an anti-Hamlet, in which he says his hero is his own wife. Instead of being androgynous, like the true artist, he is only masturbatory, like the false artist…

‘Masturbatory, like the false artist…’ Is there such an easily knowable thing as ‘the false artist’? But there’s more:

Mulligan is all penis while A.E. is all vagina. (p.87)

If you think it helps you understand ‘Ulysses’ to know that ‘Mulligan is all penis while A.E. is all vagina’, then this is the book for you, as it overflows with such high-level and often preposterous generalisations. But I’m more tempted to say, with Simon Dedalus:

—Shite and onions! That’ll do, Dick. Life is too short.

Chapter 10. Wandering rocks

Ellmann is on fire now. At the end of the previous chapter, Stephen emerged into the open air and saw two plumes of smoke mounting heavenward which Ellmann thinks represent Stephen and Bloom. Remember how The Artist (apparently) has to combine both parents in himself? Well, Ellmann now tells us that The Artist also has to fuse with God:

God the creator has fused with man the creator, both androgynous, ostlers and butchers, Iagos and Othellos, both producing, by intercourse of contraries, life from death, generation from corruption, art from dialectic. (p.89)

Of course it has to be an intercourse of contraries as this is more or less the only mental structure Ellmann seems to know. Anyway, all that came at the end of the preceding chapter; at the start of this chapter Ellmann continues in the same high mystical vein, summarising Stephen’s aesthetic thus:

The true parents of the artist are less his real father and mother, who engender his body, than a ghostly pair who, in the spiritual womb of mankind, husband and wive to form the soul.

Put another way [a favourite phrase of Ellmann’s] male and female elements – world without world and world within, agent and reagent – copulate to form by spirit from what once was flesh the word which is fleshed spirit. (p.90)

‘The spiritual womb of mankind’ eh? If, like me, you don’t believe there is a God or a spirit or a soul let alone a ‘spiritual womb of mankind’, then although you have to concede that these words have a kind of gestural, ghostly or psychological meaning (because words always have some meaning) you can be fairly certain they bear no relation to anything in the real world.

Compare and contrast Ellmann’s high diction with just one random sentence from the concrete reality of the text itself.

Blazes Boylan walked here and there in new tan shoes about the fruitsmelling shop, lifting fruits, young juicy crinkled and plump red tomatoes, sniffing smells.

That is more immediate and compelling, more inventive and interesting, more revealing of ‘Ulysses” concerns and processes, than anything in Ellmann’s entire book.

The labyrinth of doubt

But Ellmann soldiers on. In chapter 10, he suggests that in order to be tested, his theory of copulating androgynes must enter ‘the labyrinth of doubt’.

Now I have to concede that Joyce himself very much did deal with this level of abstraction. He was the first to create complex schemas for the novel, in which he attributed to each chapter a presiding subject, tone, organ, colour and so on. In the Linati scheme he actually states that the meaning of chapter 10 is ‘the hostile environment’, so Ellmann is not wrong to pick up on these themes and ideas and to address them systematically.

What I object to is I think he develops them in a particularly fruitless way, travelling further and further from the complexity (and the humour and Irishness) of the text, and deeper into an academic fantasyland, into a mode of discourse where he increasingly relies on big names (Blake, Milton, Goethe, Shakespeare, Homer) in formulations which sound more like they’re devised to impress American college students doing Great Works of Western Literature 101 courses. A lot of the time Ellmann’s theories feel only vestigially attached to the actual text of ‘Ulysses’ the book.

In my opinion, Joyce needed his elaborate schemas in order to create his text; they are quite literally foundations and scaffolds and frameworks upon which he built the multistorey palace of the final text; they were the matrix within which to create evermore complex systems of images, comparisons, metaphors and so on which he packed into every chapter. You only have to notice the scores of words describing different types of wind in ‘Aeolus’ or of food in ‘Lestrygonians’ to see this. But in my reading, these elaborate schemas were an aid to composition not necessarily to understanding.

It is necessary to understanding the book to know that each chapter is based on an episode from Homer, and that each chapter focuses on a particular theme, often accompanied by keywords and images and, in the later chapters, all cast in an appropriate mode or format. And it is fairly important to understand Stephen’s commitment to Aristotelian materialism against Plato’s forms, so that you understand the debate taking place in chapters 3 and 9. But you don’t need to know much more than that. No-one needs to know that:

male and female elements – world without world and world within, agent and reagent – copulate to form by spirit from what once was flesh the word which is fleshed spirit.

That is just Ellmann taking elements from the text and taking them to rarefied and esoteric heights – quite impressive as a virtuoso performance in literary criticism of a certain flashy type, but pretty much irrelevant to an actual reading of the actual novel.

Joyce is far more vivid, immediate, evocative and funny and textually interesting than Ellmann’s colourless abstractions ever suggest. Most of ‘Ulysses’ sounds like this:

He crossed Westmoreland street when apostrophe S had plodded by. Rover cycleshop. Those races are on today. How long ago is that? Year Phil Gilligan died. We were in Lombard street west. Wait: was in Thom’s. Got the job in Wisdom Hely’s year we married. Six years. Ten years ago: ninetyfour he died yes that’s right the big fire at Arnott’s. Val Dillon was lord mayor. The Glencree dinner. Alderman Robert O’Reilly emptying the port into his soup before the flag fell. Bobbob lapping it for the inner alderman. Couldn’t hear what the band played. For what we have already received may the Lord make us. Milly was a kiddy then. Molly had that elephantgrey dress with the braided frogs. Mantailored with selfcovered buttons. She didn’t like it because I sprained my ankle first day she wore choir picnic at the Sugarloaf. As if that. Old Goodwin’s tall hat done up with some sticky stuff. Flies’ picnic too. Never put a dress on her back like it. Fitted her like a glove, shoulders and hips. Just beginning to plump it out well. Rabbitpie we had that day. People looking after her.

It is rich with felt life and textual tricksiness. Ellmann’s discussion of Aristotle and Hume, Vico and Blake are obviously not completely irrelevant, as we know from letters and lectures that Joyce thought deeply about those specific authors, and also their names are mentioned in the text itself. I just think that the way Ellmann discusses them is showy but superficial, and always takes us away from the specificity of the text.

David Hume

He does this big time when he embarks on the claim that the presiding spirit of chapter 10 is no longer Aristotle but the Scottish sceptical philosopher David Hume (1711 to 1776). If Aristotle presided over the first nine books, Ellmann suggests that Hume presides over the final nine.

Now Hume is a hero of mine and I have read several of his books very closely, notably the ‘Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’, and I think Ellmann’s discussion of him is problematic. Number one, Joyce himself seems to have thought, erroneously, that Hume was in part an idealist, which I understand to be completely wrong. Hume was the sceptic’s sceptic, pushing philosophical scepticism to the limit.

Second objection is I think Ellmann’s discussion of Hume is short and superficial. Here’s an adapted AI summary of Hume’s thought:

Empiricism Hume divided all knowledge into 1) ‘relations of ideas’ (logic/mathematics) which have an internal logic and 2) ‘everything else’, which can be categorised as ‘matters of fact’ i.e. based on experience. Hume argued that we cannot prove anything outside these two categories. Hence all theology, metaphysics and a good deal of what passed for philosophy is literally non-sense and should be rejected.

The Problem of Causation Hume argued that we cannot directly perceive causation. Instead of knowing that A causes B we only observe that A and B appear together, leading us to feel a causal connection based on habit, not reason. None of us can know, for sure, that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that there will even be a tomorrow. Most of our knowledge of the world we live in is based on habit not reason.

Moral sentimentalism Ditto morality. Morality is rooted in feelings, sentiments, and emotions (what the eighteenth century called ‘passions’) not reason. Virtue arises from sympathy, and our reactions to events around us are mostly based on sentiment and emotion not reason or logic.

Scepticism and religion Hume fiercely attacked religion, the belief in God, miracles and so on, advocating for a purely naturalistic understanding of the world.

The self Hume argued that the ‘self’ is just a bundle of perceptions, not a stable, persisting entity.

In a nutshell, Hume dismissed all talk about subjects which aren’t based on either 1) pure maths / logic or 2) on observed phenomena, as rubbish. That’s to say, Hume dismissed all theology and most philosophy, certainly all idealist philosophy which supposes Ideals stored in some high Otherplace, all this he considered ‘sophistry and illusion’. In fact in his ‘Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding’ Hume famously argued that any book containing neither “abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number” nor “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence” should be “committed to the flames”.

This is not quite my position, I have a more open, tolerant position which is closer to William Blake’s saying that ‘Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth’. Put another way (as Ellmann so often says), theology and metaphysics are interesting 1) as intellectual games to play, like chess and 2) were and are valid creative activities of the human mind. But it doesn’t make them ‘true’ in the sense Hume uses.

When I read ‘Game of Thrones’ I lend Westeros credence in my imagination for as long as I read the books, so why can’t I lend the theology of St Augustine or Don Cupitt just as much credence, and of the same sort, getting thoroughly involved in them as I read them – but pretty obviously separating them from my lived experience of life?

It’s intellectually rewarding to study and follow the lines of thought of the major theologians and philosophers; and it’s also part of the intellectual legacy of humankind. But it’s not ‘true’. There is no God, there is no heaven, there is no soul, there are no angels, there is no Devil, there was no Fall, there is no redemption, there is no salvation, and so on. Just as there is no Hamlet or Jon Snow or Stephen Dedalus.

The way these made-up entities effect our mental lives may be very powerful indeed and in that way – in terms of psychological effects – they can have an awesome reality, as they determine the thoughts and actions of real people in the real world, in fact they can affect entire cultures, they can determine the course of history. But that doesn’t make them ‘true’ in the way this laptop I’m typing these words on is a verifiable fact. They don’t objectively exist outside the human imagination.

So I know these metaphysical imaginings are non-real (like Hume did) but I don’t commit them to the flames as hastily as he did because they are part of the vast imaginarium which we are all heirs to and it would be pointless to deny their enormous influence over people’s lives in former times, and their legacies which live on and underpin a surprising amount of what people still think and believe today. Imaginative truth (Hamlet is a powerful imaginative creation) is different from objective truth (Hamlet does not now and never has existed).

As Wittgenstein put it (and in my mind, Hume and Wittgenstein are closely allied, in their outcomes if not in their methods), ‘The world is all that is the case’. My take on this is that ‘the world’ also includes everything that has ever been believed by everyone.

This is where I differ from liberals and the high-minded who limit their view of human achievement to a handful of Great Achievements of Civilisation by a handful of Great Men, constantly citing Michelangelo or Rembrandt or Shakespeare, narrowly cherrypicking humanity’s positive achievements.

In my version of human history, everything that humans have done is our legacy, and this includes not just all the philosophy and theology, all the literature, poetry, tales and legends — but also the innumerable atrocities, slaughters and genocides. In my view, we have to face the totality of the facts, no matter how disgusting.

• Human history

Anything less is sentimentalism, denial, self deception. We are what we are and we have done what we have done, no sweeping it under the carpet. I know many people who are so upset by a true understanding of the horror of history that they reject it, deny it, don’t want to know. My view is that, the more unshrinking a view you have of the abattoir that is human history, the more rare and precious become the urges to create and beautify, the more wonderful and beautiful become the relics of culture, from whichever culture, from all cultures.

This face-the-facts-and-accept-everything view is very close to Joyce’s, which is why I not only enjoy but relate to the ‘Ulysses’ so much, with all its farting, belching, masturbating, snot and semen, menses and afterbirths. It embraces the entire human organism and all of human experience as it actually is. And this is why Virginia Woolf – with her high-minded Bloomsbury view that Literature should be about Art and Beauty, so utterly loathed it. I can understand her point of view. But I’m in Joyce’s camp.

Two objections Ellmann suddenly reveals that Hume might be as much of a source for Stephen’s thinking as Aristotle was in chapter 3. This is an unusual and largely unevidenced thing to say and there are two problems with it: 1) why does Joyce only reveal it now half-way through the book? Why was Hume not present from the start? The answer might be that if Joyce had invoked Hume alongside Aristotle his explication would have gotten too complicated. But I think there’s a simpler explanation, which is that Hume isn’t as important to Joyce as Ellmann claims he is.

Ellmann cites some passages from Hume’s masterwork the ‘Treatise of Human Nature’ in which Hume describes closing and opening his eyes to test the concept of space and extension before going on to say that the concept of time is indicated by the succession of our thoughts or perceptions. Ellmann finds places in ‘Ulysses’ where Stephen has similar thoughts about space and time and quotes them to prove that Joyce is here basing Stephen on Hume.

The trouble with this is, which major philosophers have not at some point meditated on the nature of time and space? Not to mention the astronomers and cosmologists? And all the theologians? Thousands of them have. If you put a little effort into it I bet you could compare Stephen’s doodling about space and time with the writings of any number of philosophers and theologians since those are just the kinds of subjects most of them spent a lot of their lives writing about…

The main problem with Ellmann’s presentation is not so much that it might be untrue but that it is only a fraction of the possible sources. They’re just snippets which he has cherry-picked. A full and complete discussion of the concept of time in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ would take an entire book and call on countless philosophers and theologians for detailed comparisons.

But none of these alternative sources are mentioned here and why not? Because Ellmann’s book isn’t a serious presentation of the issues. It’s a snapshot. It’s a summary. It’s a brief overview of some of the philosophical issues raised by the book. It’s not really serious. It’s a brief presentation of snippets and fragments, for students-in-a-hurry to finish their Great Books of Modern Literature modules. It’s a TikTok version, a Twitter treatment of the themes.

So Ellmann’s assertion that if the spirit of Aristotle presided over the first half of ‘Ulysses’, then the spirit of Hume presides over the second half is an example of fun intellectual games critics can play with an epic text like this (if you like these kinds of games). But I don’t think anyone should be fooled into thinking it’s either 1) ‘true’ (whatever that means) but more importantly 2) that it’s necessary for reading and understanding the novel. There are other, faaaar more relevant and practical things to pay attention to first.

Back to ‘Ulysses’ Ellmann is more modest and therefore more useful, when he points out the simple fact that in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ chapter, Joyce begins to play with space and time. All he means by this is that fragments from one of the 18 vignettes are likely to pop up in another vignette, and he usefully refers to them as ‘interpolations’.

Church and State (again) More useful to my practical text-based way of thinking is when Ellmann points out that chapter 10 is, once again, foundationed on the binary of church and state. By this all he means is that the chapter opens with the friendly priest Father Conmee walking through the streets of Dublin and bumping into various acquaintances, popping up in the background of other people’s vignettes; while in the second half of the chapter, we catch steadily more glimpses of the progress of the Viceroy of Dublin riding in his carriage to open a bazaar, glimpses which lead up to its full presentation in the 19th and final vignette.

Thus it’s easy to claim that a representative of Church and a representative of the State establish the physical and conceptual framework of the chapter by topping and tailing it, and it is then fleshed out with appearances from 40 or more other characters in between.

Mocked And the key point here, is that both representatives are mocked, gently but steadily. With Father Conmee, Joyce does it with the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth squeaky cleanness of Conmee’s supposed thoughts. With the Viceroy the mockery is implicit in the generally indifferent reaction to his passing by of the various Dubliners.

Material rebukes The final response to the Viceroy in the chapter is the Italian music teacher Almidano Artifoni going into his house and, in effect, turning the bum of his trousers to the august carriage as it trots by. Father Conmee receives a more obvious rebuke to his values and worldview when he is suddenly confronted by a couple stumbling out of some bushes, flushed because they’ve just had sex. Sex, in comedies, especially farces, is the great puncturer of human pompousness and pretension.

Binaries Both Stephen and Bloom are given one of the 18 vignettes. Both find our protagonists looking at books, according to their intellectual levels: Bloom is buying a popular romance, Sweets of Sin, for Molly; Stephen is looking through Abbot Peter Salanka’s book of charms and spells, specifically ones designed to attract a woman’s love. Love and sex. Highbrow and middlebrow versions.

Heart If you visualise Dublin as a heart (as the first headline in ‘Aeolus’ suggests):

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

Then the 40 or so characters we meet in chapter 10 can be thought of as blood corpuscles circulating round it and bumping into each other.

• Wandering Rocks review

Chapter 11. Sirens

Bulging According to Ellmann, in chapter 11 ‘Sirens’, the ear is female, concave and a receptacle whereas in chapter 12 ‘Cyclops’, the eye is male, bulging, invasive.

Music ‘Sirens’ is about sounds and music, it contains countless references to music, sounds and noise, to different instruments up to full orchestra, and also related defects, as in the comic figure of Pat the (almost) deaf waiter and the blind piano tuner.

Singer Joyce had a fine tenor voice and briefly considered a career in singing before rejecting it. Late nineteenth century aestheticism took it for granted that music was the highest art form but Joyce rejected this and claimed literature was.

Fugue ‘Sirens’ is Joyce’s extended attempt at converting musical form into language. It is based on the classical music form of the fugue.

A fugue is a contrapuntal compositional technique based on a main theme (subject) introduced alone, then imitated in succession by other voices. It traditionally follows a three-part structure: Exposition (subject/answer entries), Development (alternating episodes and subject entries in new keys), and Final Entry (return to the tonic).

Key components of fugue structure

• Subject: The principal, recognizable musical theme that drives the entire piece.
• Answer: The subject repeated by a second voice, typically transposed to the dominant key.
• Countersubject: A distinctive contrapuntal melody that accompanies the subject/answer, often returning throughout the piece.
• Exposition: The opening section where every voice has stated the subject at least once.
• Episode: Transitional, developmental sections that do not contain the full subject, often using sequences and modulations to create contrast.
• Middle Entries: Subsequent appearances of the subject after the exposition, often in related keys.
• Stretto: A device where subject entries overlap, with a voice starting the theme before the previous voice finishes it, increasing tension.
• Coda/Final Entry: The conclusion, often featuring a strong, final statement of the subject in the original key.

Developmental techniques

Fugues often manipulate the subject through various techniques:

• Inversion: Playing the melody upside down (intervals reversed).
• Augmentation: Doubling the note values (making it twice as slow).
• Diminution: Halving the note values (making it twice as fast).
• Retrograde: Playing the subject backward.

Once you know all this, the game becomes to apply these rules to the elements in the ‘Sirens’ chapter. Can you find examples of every rule somewhere in the prose? You can be some academic somewhere has written a book about it.

A tale of two barmaids The chapter is set in the Ormond Hotel and the obvious binary at the centre of the chapter is the contrast between the two young attractive barmaids, Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce, the one a redhead, the other dark.

Chapter 12. Cyclops

All the chapters are packed with ingenious references to their leading theme, wind in ‘Aeolus’, food in ‘Lestrygonians’, music in ‘Sirens’, and so it’s eyes in the chapter about the one-eyed cyclops. Which is why its opening sentence is:

I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D. M. P. at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye.

Exactly as Odysseus and his men drove their stake into the single eye of the cyclops who had imprisoned them (Stuart Gilbert pointed all this out, apparently).

Having sketched out the ubiquity of eye imagery, Ellmann goes beyond it to suggest that the waspishly cynical narrator of ‘Cyclops’ is a modern avatar of mean-minded cynical Thersites, the meanest hero in the original Odyssey, who has a larger part in Shakespeare’s play of the Tale of Troy, ‘Troilus and Cressida’. Ellmann suggests cynicism is a more subtle form of bigotry, the nationalist Citizen’s crime of being one-eyed. In this respect, when Bloom stands up for himself and his ‘race’, the Jews, rejects violence and calls for love, he is showing himself to be two-eyed. Full stereoscopic vision.

Continuing the idea, Ellmann suggests that if the previous chapters had leaned on the influence of (generous) David Hume, this one invokes the spirit of the dry, satirical Voltaire. Maybe. Hardly helps you either read or understand the text, though.

For reasons I couldn’t follow, Ellmann suggests that at the climax of this chapter Bloom is apotheosised i.e. turned into a god, but many of his assertions seem so wilful and contrived as to feel a little demented.

• Cyclops review

Chapter 13. Nausicaa

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’s shipwreck is caused because he has offended two gods, Hyperion the sun god for killing his cattle and Poseidon for blinding his son, Cyclops. As is his way, Ellmann immediately sees a binary at work, declaring Hyperion represents idealism and Poseidon materialism, or height and depth (he could have carried on with light and darkness, or dry and wet).

As he stated at the start, Ellmann thinks the 18 chapters are arranged in triads; here he adds the thought they all these triads enact the dialectic i.e. thesis, antithesis, synthesis. And so Ellmann suggests chapters 13, 14 and 15 enact:

• Nausicaa – sentimentalised idealism
• Oxen of the Sun- materialistic callousness
• Circe – both

More practically useful, Ellmann confirms a really basic fact about ‘Ulysses’ which is that, for all its obsessive detail in many places, in others it contains great yawning gaps. For example, we never learn how Bloom made it from running out of Barney Kiernan’s pub as the Citizen threw his biscuit tin at him, to being comfortably leaning against a rock on Sandymount Strand about an hour later. We are never told how he got there or what happened during that hour.

High on Hegelian dialectic, Ellmann claims that, in this setting, Joyce makes Howth promontory male, the bay itself as female, and the voice of the priests praying to the Virgin a combination of both = androgynous.

Back with his more obvious binaries, he tells us that the chapter is a tale of two fantasies or the projecting of imagined mirages: Gerty projects her sentimental romantic fantasies onto Bloom; Bloom projects his narrow sexual fantasies onto Gerty; and both are accompanied by two priests projecting their fantasy of the Mother of God onto the world.

‘Cyclops’ is notable for featuring a narrator who isn’t the omniscient third-person narrator of the ‘initial style’. ‘Nausicaa’ furthers the text’s uncoupling from the novel’s early style in being written in a comic pastiche of sentimental romantic fiction, which is attributed to Gerty. The nauseatingly sentimental style is, it is implied, the tone of Gerty’s half-educated thoughts.

Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see.

(Ellmann notes that some critics have thought the entire thing is also a sly dig at the Edwardian author Samuel Butler, who claimed the Odyssey was written by Princess Nausicaa not Homer. That’s entertaining gossip about the aim but doesn’t help much with appreciating the actual text. )

It’s also, of course, a chapter contrasting not only idealism and realism, female fantasy and male earthiness, exhibitionism and voyeurism, but also youth and age. In amid her naive thoughts, Gerty thinks of herself as unique and special, and this is the classic delusion of youth (‘I’m special. I’m different. No-one has ever felt like this before.’) By contrast, after he’s climaxed and slowly come back down to earth, Bloom rather gloomily thinks it’s the just same old thing again, repetition, nothing new under the sun. Youth = the delusion of uniqueness. Age = the disillusion of familiarity.

So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she. Circus horse walking in a ring.

• Nausicaa review

Chapter 14. Oxen of the Sun

Having described sexual ejaculation in chapter 13, the next chapter moves on to its consequences, fertilisation and pregnancy.

Here, in the common room of the National Maternity Hospital, the drunk medical students offend the god by mocking true fertility, by telling all kinds of jokes, bawdy humour, climaxing in Buck Mulligan’s jokey setting up a company whereby he promises to fertilise any woman who asks, for a fee.

There is a tension between the students’ cynical stripping of the act of love down to its heartless physical basics and the way Joyce chose to convey it, in a series of elaborate pastiches of historical English prose styles. If the subject is infertility, the parade of prose styles demonstrates exactly the opposite, humanity’s endless fertility in coming up with new and intricate ways to describe things and tell stories.

Ellmann notes something I hadn’t heard before which is the way the prose goes all to hell after the students leave the hospital and go round to the nearest pub. I’d read that the chaos of voices reflected closing time in a busy city centre pub. Ellmann makes the clever suggestion that it also represents the messy afterbirth, slopping everywhere after Mina Purefoy’s baby has been born.

’Tis, sure. What say? In the speakeasy. Tight. I shee you, shir. Bantam, two days teetee. Bowsing nowt but claretwine. Garn! Have a glint, do. Gum, I’m jiggered.

• Oxen of the Sun review

Chapter 15. Circe

In the morning light at the start of the novel Stephen had descanted on the ineluctable modality i.e. continuity, of the visible. In ‘Circe’ it is far after dark and all such certainties have disappeared, leaving the characters in a place which has no rules of extension or time or logic, but inhabits the inner self of anxieties, lusts, fantasies and hallucinations.

As you might expect, Ellmann finds in this longest and most delirious chapter a cornucopia of his favourite pattern, dichotomies – inside and outside, mind and body, dream and reality, male and female, body and soul, ego and id, England and Ireland (in the form of the soldiers and the Watch), you name it, it’s here. This is what I disliked about this book: it reduces the teeming fecundity of the weirdest, most diverse novel in the Western tradition to a handful of threadbare clichés.

Ellmann equates Bloom’s sudden vision, at the end of the chapter, of his dead son Rudy but now 11 years old, as he would now be, with the visions in Dante. Well, OK, but there are plenty of other works of literature featuring visions. And Dante doesn’t have a son.

He also claims that with the visions of this chapter, Bloom has harrowed hell, as did Odysseus, Jesus and Dante before him. But did he? Metaphorically maybe. Maybe this is a valid, even obvious, suggestion but, as I’m always saying, it takes you away from the wonderful (and often gross) specificity of the text and into a Western Literature 101 seminar room where everyone’s talking about Dante, Vico and Blake, and nobody’s talking about the obscenity of the Croppy Boy scene, because that’s difficult, embarrassing and vulgar. As it’s meant to be. Ellmann’s schematic approach sanitises Joyce, who went out of his way to be as scabrous as he could be (where scabrous means ‘indecent, salacious or scandalous material that is shocking or offensive’).

• Circe review

Chapter 16. Eumaeus

Although Stephen announced the annihilation of space and time in ‘Circe’ when he smashed the chandelier in the brothel, the next chapter reveals the return of time and space, solider than ever.

Addicted to his philosophers, Ellmann says that if (big ‘if’) Hume’s scepticism has guided the chapters of the second half of the novel, then space and time return in the spirit of Immanuel Kant, not as the properties of things, but as the conditions of perception built into the human condition. Maybe. It’s a thought, if you know enough about Kant to really apply it…

Trinities are nearly as addictive to the conspiracy theorist as simple dichotomies, and Ellmann reads into the final three chapters an earthly trinity of Bloom the father, Stephen the son and… well, there is no equivalent of the Holy Ghost, instead the best he can offer is Molly as a blasphemous avatar of the Virgin Mary (just as she is a mocking avatar of the chaste Penelope) (remember what I said at the start about Joyce using all kinds of literary, theological and philosophical patterns when it suited him and when it didn’t… just walking away).

In the Linati schema Joyce described the style of ‘Eumaeus’ as ‘relaxed’, which seems signally inadequate – it’s a ‘tired’ and threadbare in the style of provincial newspapers, made up of journalistic clichés but without any of the vim and vigour of ‘Aeolus’. It’s ‘Aeolus’ with a hangover.

Nowhere in his book does Ellmann address the fact that large chunks of ‘Ulysses’ are so cryptic and chopped-up as to be almost unreadable. His book gives the impression it’s all clear and readable figures of allegory and philosophy which you can understand with a little guidance, as in Dante or Spenser. Nowhere does he engage with the actual text which is often impenetrable.

Hark! Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap! Pflaap! Blaze on. There she goes. Brigade! Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up! Pflaap! Tally ho. You not come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap!

In the same way, both he (and Hugh Kenner) treat the later chapters as if they’re the same as the earlier ones but they aren’t at all: ‘Nausicaa’, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, ‘Circe’, ‘Eumaeus’ and ‘Ithaca’ are all much, much easier to read and process than the earlier chapters. I once read someone saying ‘Ulysses’ starts out very English and clear and comprehensible but then gets steadily more Irish and radical and impenetrable, whereas in my reading I’ve always found it the other way round. Here’s Stephen’s stream of consciousness from chapter 2:

Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a dispossessed. With mother’s money order, eight shillings, the banging door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger toothache. Encore deux minutes. Look clock. Must get. Fermé. Hired dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun…

It requires quite a lot of effort to tease out the meaning and point of every one of these cryptic references. Whereas:

Nausicaa – pastiche but immediately understandable:

The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.

Oxen of the Sun – the style of some of the parodies might be a little difficult but a) not if you’re used to older English prose, and b) there’s none of the clipped, truncated, cryptic quality which makes the first half so challenging:

And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came against the place as they stood a young learning knight yclept Dixon.

Circe – is delirious and occasionally cryptic but nowhere near as impenetrable as Stephen’s thoughts:

The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o’-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fans. Round Rabaiotti’s halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble.

Eumaeus – stylised, maybe, but very, very easy to read.

Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion which he very badly needed. His (Stephen’s) mind was not exactly what you would call wandering but a bit unsteady and on his expressed desire for some beverage to drink Mr Bloom in view of the hour it was and there being no pump of Vartry water available for their ablutions let alone drinking purposes hit upon an expedient by suggesting, off the reel, the propriety of the cabman’s shelter, as it was called, hardly a stonesthrow away near Butt bridge where they might hit upon some drinkables in the shape of a milk and soda or a mineral.

Ithaca – once you’ve got the hang of the question and answer format this, again, is mostly a breeze to read:

What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?

Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner’s place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of Temple street: then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place.

Penelope – and even Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy, the critics and commentators all make it sound difficult, and in some places the stream of thoughts does jump about a bit, but the thoughts themselves, once you get a handle on her biography and the telegraphic style, are not that hard to understand:

Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was

Back to ‘Eumaeus’, addicted to binaries, Ellmann decides it is all about duplicity, lies and truth. He bases this on the relevant episode in the Odyssey, where Odysseus wakes up on the shore of his kingdom and cautiously adopts a disguise before making his way to the hut of his old swineherd, Eumaeus. Here he makes up a cock and bull story about who he is while Eumaeus greets him with open-hearted candour and hospitality. Secrets versus honesty. And so Ellmann finds numerous instances of secrets and deceptions in this chapter:

• the chapter opens with Bloom cautioning Stephen against Mulligan’s deceitfulness
• although Lynch accompanied him into Nighttown, Stephen calls him Judas for abandoning him
• the pair get lost and have to double back through the streets
• Bloom delights in the Italian being spoken by some loiterers round the shelter but Stephen points out they’re arguing over money
• all the characters they meet are deceitful e.g:
  • Lord John Corley who isn’t a lord
  • the shelter owner may or may not be Skin-the-Goat itself (obviously) a pseudonym
  • the sailor D.B. Murphy tells tall tales which Bloom thinks are probably a pack of lies, purveyor of what Bloom calls ‘genuine forgeries’
• the conversation takes in all kinds of secrets and lies:
  • Skin’s claim that Parnell isn’t dead, his coffin is full of stones, he’s alive and well in Paris from whence he will return
  • someone claims Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays
  • reference to the fraudulent Protocols of Zion
  • cases of forged identity such as the Tichborne Claimant
  • the Evening Telegraph gets details of Paddy Dignam’s funeral wrong, notably Bloom’s name (spelled as Boom)

It’s an impressive list of deceits and errors, in the same way as ‘Lestrygonians’ is packed with references to food and ‘Sirens’ with references to music etc. This kind of specificity, which takes you back to the detail of the text, I like.

• Eumaeus review

Chapter 17. Ithaca

This is the chapter cast in the form of a catechism, questions and answers. (Ellmann likens it to the cold information retrieval systems of a computer, reminding us that this book was published in 1972, over half a century ago – computers have come on a bit since then.)

Ellmann, like Kenner, reacts negatively to this chapter, saying it strips human activity to the skeleton, that ‘the imagination is impoverished’ (p.157) but I’ve always liked this chapter for the same reasons: it is clear and lucid, it tells us exactly what is happening but also, far from being unimaginative, many of the answers depart on wild fantasias of factuality, for example the ones about water or about the stars.

Ellmann zeroes in on the sections which supposedly compare Stephen and Bloom’s contrasting views about the purpose of literature: well, he would say that, being a professor of literature. Personally I find writers writing about writing the most boring subject in the world, whereas the descriptions of the lost key, the evocative objects in Bloom’s drawers, the pondering on the mystery of the stars, the magic qualities of water and so on, I find these fresh and vivifying, enlivening, expanding my understanding of the world. And often very funny.

Ellmann is still banging on about finding the influence of Aristotle wherever he looks. Thus, in the answer about human nature:

He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.

Whereas fooey to Aristotle, I love the image of these two so different men sharing an amiable pee in Bloom’s back garden under the twinkling stars.

At Stephen’s suggestion, at Bloom’s instigation both, first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom’s, then Stephen’s, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.

Treating an outdoor piss in this pseudo-scientific way is funny. Well, I find it funny. But comedy is difficult if not impossible to convey in literary analysis, whereas detecting binaries and dichotomies everywhere is like falling off a log.

Bloom’s pottering round his house after Stephen leaves, as he intersperses getting undressed with poking around in drawers, finding objects and photos which trigger memories of his family, before climbing into bed next to the slumbering Molly – all this I find warm and homely and moving, all the more so because it is conveyed not with conventional sentimentality, but in the brilliantly hard and clear FAQ format Joyce had invented for this chapter.

• Ithaca review

Chapter 18. Penelope

Ellmann tells us the conclusion of the book has been much debated. He cites two critics who were still active forces when he wrote, William Empson and Edmund Wilson, who were both concerned about what happened next, after the end of the book. Empson speculates that Stephen did indeed come back the next day, 17 June, to give the first of his Italian lessons to Molly and receive singing lessons in return. Wilson speculated that Bloom’s request to have breakfast served to him in bed symbolised his return to mastery in the marriage with Molly, which would be cemented by them having sex for the first time in 11 years.

Both now seem wildly out of date and irrelevant. What might happen to the characters after the end of the book is a completely different type of conversation, academics at the dinner table conversation, pub conversation, next to nothing to do with the chapter under discussion which, of course, is entirely concerned with Molly’s late-night thoughts.

It is in this chapter that Ellmann compares Molly’s character to Aristotle, Hume and Darwin, which I found ridiculous.

He quotes Joyce writing to his friend Frank Budgen that ‘Penelope’ is ‘more obscene than any preceding episode, which is debatable, seeing as the entire chapter ‘Nausicaa’ is about a middle-aged married man masturbating in public at the sight of a young woman’s knickers, and that ‘Circe’ has some scenes of unparalleled obscenity. But I take the point that Molly’s soliloquy contains more sustained and explicit descriptions of sex than any previous chapter.

Ellmann briskly runs through some of the details in the chapter but without really capturing its spirit and power. He tells us Molly at moments mixes up her various men, calling them all ‘he’. But at other moments she makes a very clear distinction between her lover, Blazes Boylan who is exciting but doesn’t respect her, and her husband Bloom, who is a little odd, a little boring but who does genuinely care for her.

But on the whole Ellmann isn’t happy down among the details. He’s happier when he can find an abstract binary, and so hastens to tell us that Molly is the earth to Bloom’s sun, which is fine and dandy but doesn’t really get us anywhere (p.166). He thinks Molly’s soliloquy:

resolves the questions of belief and incertitude which have dogged Stephen and western philosophy (p.168)

Which is ludicrous because a) she doesn’t – if she had what are all the philosophers in all the Philosophy departments of the universities of the world wasting their time doing? And b) can you see how wildly adrift of the actual content of her soliloquy this is?

Ellmann’s bloodless approach can’t do justice to sex, real mucky flirty dirty sex, any more than it can do justice to Joyce’s many types of comedy and humour, both crucial elements in the book, both overlooked as he struggles to make out Molly Bloom as a thinker on a par with Aristotle or David Hume.

Maybe those elements are there; maybe Joyce himself described them as being there: but they’re not the main part of the book. The book is the text itself and not the neatly cut and dried concepts which Joyce attributed to it and generations of academics have enthusiastically added to.

Obsessed with academic notions of art and artists, Ellmann whips himself up into absurdities:

Joyce said that his episode had no art but his book is consummated by the principle that art is nature’s self. (p.173)

What does this mean and why should I care? Meanwhile, of Molly’s desires and schemes and fantasies and seductions and flirtations and consummations, her friendships, her love of flowers, her fondness of displaying herself in the bedroom window to attract the attention of the handsome young medical student in the house across the road, of everything which makes her such a storming presence in modern literature, nothing, nothing at all.

Dwelling on abstract structures to the bitter end, Ellmann claims that:

The first nine episodes of the book ended with a vision of the act of love as the basic act of nature. The last nine episodes end with a vision of love as the basic act of nature. (p.174)

What Ellmann doesn’t bring out, on his own ground, on his own terms, is that Molly (and, by implication Joyce) in her soliloquy, says it all comes down to sex; that sex is the ultimate truth of human nature, of human life. This I would agree with, and is one way of summarising Darwin: we breed, we rear young, for all sorts of reasons to do with the environment, competition from other families and species, and huge slices of dumb luck, some survive to create the next generation; all organisms do this; the result over billions of years is the beautifully intricate web of natural ecosystems which form the world around us and which humanity is busily destroying and degrading as I write.

But the urge to reproduce is central and this is, of course, contrary to Christian ideology and so completely contrary to Dante (and Plato) who Ellmann is roping in here at the end of his book. In their different ways both Plato and Dante thought sexual love must be rejected, in Plato to achieve the highest form of rational thought, in Dante in order to achieve full love of God.

Molly denies all of that and locates the highest reality in her big breasts and hungry fanny. Oh how she is longing for Monday to come when she will see Boylan again, and he will plook her senseless again with his big willy.

But that’s not how Ellmann sees it. He ends this short but gruellingly wrong-headed book with a slab of characteristically high-minded rhetoric. If you like this kind of thing, you’ll love this book:

On the ethical level Bloom and Stephen have succeeded in taking the city of Dublin by exposing enthusiasm and superstition there, and by disclosing a truer way of goodwill and freedom. Molly’s hardwon approbation confirms their enterprise. On this historical level, the characters have awakened from the Circean nightmare of history by drawing the past into the present (a timeless present) and making it an expression of love instead of hatred, of fondness rather than remorse. Art has been shown to be a part of nature, and in all its processes an imitation of natural ones. These processes have their summit in love, of which the highest form is sexual love. (p.175)

Well, we agree about that much. But what a mealy-mouthed, detail-denying way of getting there.

• Penelope review

Credit

‘Ulysses on the Liffey’ by Richard Ellmann was published by Faber and Faber in 1972.

Related links

• Ulysses on Planet Gutenberg

Joyce reviews

• Dubliners (1914)
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

• Ulysses by James Joyce: introduction
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Wandering Rocks
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Cyclops
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Nausicaa
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Circe
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Eumaeus
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Ithaca
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Penelope

• Ulysses by James Joyce: Stephen’s theories
• Ulysses, James Joyce and Jacques Derrida
• Ulysses by James Joyce: cast list
• Ulysses by James Joyce: famous quotes
• Ulysses by James Joyce: sex, physicality and speaking objects

• Ulysses by Hugh Kenner
• Ulysses on the Liffey by Richard Ellmann