Lecture

James Joyce Ulysses Centenary

Addressing the Blooms: A Celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Convenor: Peter Rex Valentine

Prof. Timothy Webb

University of Bristol

16 July 2004

James Joyce’s Ulysses was eventually published in book form in 1922 but it was carefully and deliberately set on 16 June 1904 (exactly 100 years before this lecture). Joyce went to great trouble to reconstruct the city of Dublin at that particular moment in time so that, for all its apparent immediacy, Ulysses is, in one sense, a ‘historical’ novel. In order to achieve his apparently realistic effects, Joyce made particular use of a contemporary Dublin directory and the Freeman’s Journal of the day, together with other kinds of evidence and his own sharply articulated memories.

The Freeman’s Journal, a paper for which Leopold Bloom canvassed advertisements, was a rich source of primary material (some of which was illustrated in the course of the lecture): advertisements for invalid port and a concert in the Ulster Hall; details of plays scheduled for performance in the Dublin theatres, providing food for Leopold Bloom’s urban meditations and an alibi for his erratic behaviour during the evening; and especially, the race card which illustrates one of the recurrent points of interest in the city and in Joyce’s book. This proliferation of verifiable detail is supplemented by many other particulars: notably the routes of the buses and identifiable addresses, whether of individuals or of shops and businesses. In some ways, the Freeman’s Journal itself might seem to provide a model for Joyce’s fiction: in its stylistic shifts, its lack of a central point of focus, its range and diversity, and its capacity to juxtapose the serious with the apparently trivial. Yet this carefully planned closeness to the newspaper should also remind us that it is dangerous to think of Ulysses as an archaeological reconstruction: although one can glimpse many ‘realities’ through its brightly polished windows, the book is also calculated, selective, designed to present the Dublin of 1904 and the worlds of Homer’s Odyssey as in some ways mutually reflective and, above all, and interestingly, fictive or fictional.lesser-known characters (often friends of Joyce’s father) who some- times appear under their own names and sometimes under fictional disguises, and characters such as the Blooms who are essentially fictional. Secondly, when it suits his purposes, Joyce adjusts the facts or the chronology of history. Thirdly, the novel includes a number of errors, some of which may be genuine mistakes, but at least some of which appear to be deliberate. For example, Leopold Bloom’s vital statistics as given in ‘Ithaca’ are highly improbable, even though they are included in a section, which seems relentlessly devoted to fact. Again, Joyce introduces a Jewish pork butcher to whom he assigns the name of Dlugacz, a good friend of his own in Trieste. These breaks in the surface of ‘reality’ should remind readers that Ulysses is a fiction and the work of a novelist rather than an urban historian. Or again there is the celebrated speech of John F. Taylor, which, strangely but significantly, appears to be the only part of Ulysses, which Joyce committed to a recording (which was played to the audience on 16 June). Comparison of contemporary and published accounts with Joyce’s version shows clearly that Taylor’s speech (itself concerned with language and national identity) was expanded and rhetorically enhanced by Joyce. Joyce’s recording of this speech demonstrates some of his capacities as an actor, just as the representation of the speech and of Dublin in the novel is, in its own way, a calculated performance rather than a report for the historical register.

The paradox of seeming to represent a ‘real’ world is beautifully illustrated by Joyce’s attention to sound. In many ways, Ulysses is strenuously concerned to capture the soundscape of a city within the capacities of printed verbal representation. So we have Davy Byrne, the moral publican, who ‘smiledyawnednodded aall in one’ - ‘Iiiiiichaaaaaaach!’; or we have ‘a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, oos’; or we have Leopold Bloom finally letting off wind in a fashion which curiously seems to imitate musical notation - ‘Pprrpffrrppfff’. A cat’s repeated cry is simulated by the progressive insertion of extra letters: ‘Mkgnao! … Mrkgnao! … Mrkrgnao!’ The sound of the printing machines in the newspaper office is rendered by a recurrent ‘Sllt’. The effect of these (and many other examples) is to present Dublin in 1904 partly and vividly in terms of its sounds (which also include its distinctive idiolects, the ways in which English is distinctively and differently spoken by a wide variety of figures). Yet these devices also draw attention to Joyce’s linguistic resourcefulness and consistently remind us that such writing is composed of words on paper, and follows a track of signs and printed conventions even as much or more than pursuing the claims of the mimetic (that is, the process of imitation).

These strategies are richly exemplified by the novel’s attention to style. Famously, Ulysses has no style of its own but frequently changes voice and perspective so that the range of its discourses can include, among many others, the novelette, newspaper notices and the catechism. When it suits the purposes of the book as a whole, Joyce can even write ‘badly’ for an extended period. Locally, too, the objective is recurrently stylistic rather than descriptive. For example, the interest in the following passage is primarily centred not on its representation of the urban scene but on its ostentatiously schismatic structure:

Another example is provided by the Sirenic attractions of Grafton Street: ‘Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.’ Sometimes these effects are based on the resonance of an individual word. One of the meticulously observed details of the kitchen dresser in Bloom’s house is ‘a halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and Co’s white invalid port, half disrobed of its swathe of coralpink tissue paper’. In this scrupulous catalogue, the word ‘disrobed’ instantly stands out from its context: not only do its human suggestions hint at the presence of Leopold Bloom and his recurrent anxiety about his wife’s adultery with Blazes Boylan but they also recall a scene much earlier in the book where Boylan is choosing a present for Molly. Readers are told that the shop assistant ‘bedded the wicker basket with rustling fibre’, that Boylan handed her ‘the bottle swathed in pink tissue paper’ and that she ‘bestowed the fat pears neatly, head by tail, and among them ripe shamefaced peaches’. Likewise, when Bloom seats himself on the outside lavatory, the unusual word ‘cuckstool’ looks back to Stephen Dedalus’ self-consciously literary use of ‘cuckquean’ in the first chapter and suggests, obliquely, one of the many ways in which Stephen and Bloom are connected. In both these cases, the observational acuteness of the text and the force of its larger structures seems to override any considerations which are merely local.

Joyce’s almost obsessive attention to stylistic matters can be further illustrated by the extensive process of rewriting vividly, if painfully, recorded in the proofs and in the progressive stages which led Joyce from the first thoughts of his drafts, through the published versions which appeared as chapters in the Little Review, to the final publication of Ulysses in the form of a book. A particularly telling example of these procedures is provided by the fairly late insertion of headings or captions (in the style of newspapers and perhaps of silent cinema) in the text of ‘Aeolus’ (illustrated in some detail in the handout).

The cumulative force of these stylistic strategies is to ensure that Ulysses is much more than a novel which is merely, if meticulously, realistic. In its way, it as careful a document as the opening of Arnold Bennet’s Clayhanger (also illustrated in the handout), and what tourist agencies like to call ‘Joyce’s Dublin’ can still be discovered, at least partly, by the use of a street map. Yet, although it cannot claim the free-floating or comparatively liberated status of an imaginary place, the Dublin of Ulysses is a city of words even more than a city of streets, shops and pavements. The house in which the Blooms live at 7 Eccles Street is a creation of Joyce’s imagination as well as a construction of bricks and mortar, which once existed. In spite of the deliberately exaggerated attempts to suggest a ‘real’ grouping of domestic interiors in ‘Ithaca’, 7 Eccles Street is essentially a ‘House of Fiction’ and Leopold and Molly Bloom never existed. Even if their postal address strongly indicates a real house in a real street, if we try to contact them or their descendants or to investigate the problems of their existence, we must conclude that their house, like their lives, is merely fictional. Photographs of Joyce himself recurrently suggest that what he self-consciously presented to the camera was ‘James Joyce’, a carefully constructed portrait of the artist, rather than James Augustine Joyce in all his human frailty. Like these photographs, and like the recording of the John Taylor speech, Ulysses offers itself to us in ways which determine its own reality.

Timothy Webb