The Experimental Novel of the 20th Century

Ulysses by James Joyce - the search for a symbolic eternity -

Experimental literature. Modernism.

Experimental literature is largely defined as written work whose main purpose is innovation, especially in matters of technique. But it wasnt until the Modernist movement, which arose from the radical, abrupt changes that Western societies from the 19th and early 20th centuries were subjected to, that artistic experimentation became a prominent force. Literary modernism was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their time , hence the urgency to revolutionise the style and the structure of written discourse.

 With the appearance of both James Joyces Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land, 1922 was a key year in the history of English-language literary modernism. In Ulysses, Joyce employs stream of consciousness, parody, jokes, and virtually every other established literary technique to present his characters. The action of the novel, which takes place in a single day, 16 June 1904, sets the characters and incidents of the Odyssey of Homer in modern Dublin and represents Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope and Telemachus in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, parodically contrasted with their lofty models. The book explores various areas of Dublin life, dwelling on its squalor and monotony.

Ulysses in a nutshell
James Joyce's Ulysses is, arguably, the single most influential novel of the 20th century. Written in a wide variety of styles, chock-full of an encyclopedia's worth of allusions, rife with enough puns and jokes to fill a comedian's career, the novel focuses on one day June 16, 1904 in the life of Mr. Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jewish man living in Dublin, Ireland. The groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness style allows the reader not only to trace the actions of Bloom's day, but also to follow the movement of his thoughts, to hear the inner timbre of his needs and desires, his joy and his despair. In doing so, the novel nearly breaks the back of realism (literature with a goal of portraying people and events as they exist in the real world). Ulysses is so saturated in Dublin life and in the particularities of its characters that, at times, it strains coherence. In other words, it is (as you may have heard) hard.

 There is a noticeable progression in the body of Joyce's work, and you can see him begin in Portrait to toy with a number of the techniques that he would flesh out and master in Ulysses. Namely, we're talking about stream-of-conscious writing and other radical ways of depicting a character's internal life in relation to the world around him. Similarly, some of the more radical techniques in Ulysses are extended even further in Finnegan's Wake. Ulysses itself was originally going to be a short story in Dubliners about an erudite young teacher who has a run-in with an English constable and is rescued by a middle-aged Jewish man (this story was itself based on an actual experience of Joyce's). But then it grew. And grew. And grew

 So what's the big deal? As T.S. Eliot's poem The Wasteland (1922) did for poetry, Ulysses changed people's ideas about what a novel is and what it can do. Joyce, more than any author before him, realized that how you write about something determines what you can write about. In other words, form is inseparable from content, and content from form. While other writers realized this and just lamented the fact, Joyce strove to master a wide variety of styles instead of becoming imprisoned by them. He wanted to give his language the power to say anything.

 Ulysses is best known for its stream-of-consciousness style, where Joyce forces readers to become intimately familiar with his characters' thoughts no matter how fragmentary and disoriented they may be. But style is also extremely flexible in the novel, giving Joyce the power to alter his form to fit his content. Hence, a chapter set in a newspaper office is broken up with newspaper headlines; a chapter set in a maternity ward is written in styles ranging from Old English verse to contemporary Dublin vernacular, as if language itself were going through a gestation period and being prepared for delivery; a chapter set almost entirely in Leopold's Blooms fantasies and nightmares is written out as a play script.

Ulysses and The Odyssey

Famously, Ulysses is structured on Homer's Odyssey, with each of the eighteen episodes in Joyce's book corresponding to a given episode in Homer's work. Joyce makes his hero, Leopold Bloom, a sort of modern-day Ulysses (called Odysseus by Homer). He casts Bloom's wife, Molly, as Penelope, and casts the aspiring artist Stephen Dedalus (first encountered in Portrait) as Telemachus. What is Joyce doing? Here, he might be trying to modernize the ancient epic, to strive to (in the words of Ezra Pound) "Make it New." Ulysses moves the epic journey from the realm of external adventures to the realm of the mind, and in doing so Joyce dares to make a heroic figure of an ordinary urban man of no apparent distinction. For all its difficulty and obscurity, what Ulysses can do is to reveal the ordinary as extraordinary.

 With his novel, Joyce changed the way people thought of the concepts of "epic," and "hero." Instead of Ulysses experiencing adventures as he navigates his way home to Penelope, Joyce gives us an ordinary Jewish man by the name of Leopold Bloom, trying to make his way through a (relatively) normal day in Dublin, Ireland. By doing so, Joyce moves the genre of epic from wild globetrotting adventures into the mind of an average man. The Odyssey becomes a mental journey through the perils of everyday life: embarrassment, boredom, despair, lust, pride, etc. Making the journey a mental one allows Joyce to elevate the everyday to Homeric levels; he re-invents the epic by treating Leopold Bloom as a hero.

Why I love this book Stephen Fry about Ulysses

Ulysses as a form of preserving James Joyces literary immortality

Although every chapter of Ulysses represents an episode of the Odyssey, and the main characters find an equivalent in those from Homers poem, there is so much more underlying meaning to Joyces novel, each scene corresponding to a particular organ of the body, to a given art form, to certain colors, to one dominant symbol, to a certain type of literary technique . Joyce himself stated that he had "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". Thus, it is safe to say that the writer aspired to, and ultimately achieved, creating an eternal oevre.

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