e-Books for Free #4: 'Ulysses' by James Joyce (High quality PDF)

Ulysses is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach in February 1922, in Paris. It is considered to be one of the most important works of Modernist literature, and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement". "Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking." However, even proponents of Ulysses such as Anthony Burgess have described the book as "inimitable, and also possibly mad".

Ulysses
James Joyce

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An introduction to Ulysses
by Katherine Mullin

Since its publication in 1922, readers have been daunted, dazzled and puzzled by Ulysses. Katherine Mullin introduces James Joyce's novel, exploring both its commitment to modernist experimentation and to the portrayal of everyday life.

Reputation and reception

James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) may be more talked about than read. It occupies an intimidating position within the literary canon as a byword for experimental modernism. Joyce helped to forge its reputation, mischievously claiming 'I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality'.[1] Even Virginia Woolf, reading shortly after publication, found Ulysses a struggle, dismissing it as 'diffuse', 'brackish' and 'pretentious'.[2] Prestige is evident in its perennial placing in lists of 'Great Books', and echoed in its value to collectors.[3] In 2009, a first edition sold at auction for £275,000, the highest sum ever achieved for a 20th-century novel.[4] Yet its reputation for difficulty masks the extent to which Ulysses is warm, welcoming and witty, granting a uniquely intimate perspective on what it is to be human.

Classical learning and popular culture

Ulysses is ostensibly a modern reworking of The Odyssey. Its 18 chapters were each named after an episode of Homer's epic, and Joyce's first critics made much of this tribute to shield him from the charge of obscenity. But Joyce's appropriation of classical heritage is loose and irreverent. Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, is a middle-aged advertising salesman, whose wanderings are not across the world during many years, but around Dublin over the course of one day, 16 June 1904. Bathos is an essential part of Ulysses's comic treatment of its own cultural ambitions. Leopold Bloom's first contact with the classical world comes in the fourth chapter, 'Calypso'. Attempting to explain the term 'metempsychosis' to his wife Molly, he gestures towards a picture, The Bath of the Nymph, framed above the marital bed. The title suggests Greek legend, but the image is plainly titillating – and Bloom recalls it was 'Given away with the Easter number of Photo Bits: splendid masterpiece in art colours'. Molly has read the term 'metempsychosis' in a popular novel – the sensational circus romance Ruby, Pride of the Ring – and Bloom endeavours to explicate 'the ancient Greeks' through reference to a promotional souvenir from a notorious soft-core men's magazine. Later in 'Lestrygonians', Bloom wonders whether Greek goddesses have anuses, and, in 'Scylla and Charybdis', Buck Mulligan reports he has seen Bloom peering furtively at the private parts of Greek statues to check. Such moments summarise how Ulysses persistently entangles the high and the low, taking Homer as a frame for the shape of the novel, but embedding classical allusions within the fabric of throwaway popular culture or bawdy jokes. Homeric erudition is counterbalanced by rich references to sexy films shown on 'What the Butler Saw' peephole machines, or the music-hall song 'Those Lovely Seaside Girls', or an advertising jingle for 'Plumtree's Potted Meat'. Joyce's canvas is not the mythic past, but the vibrant contemporary life of the modern city.

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