When a painter visited James Joyce in his Parisian apartment, the famous author pointed out the window to the son of the concierge playing on the steps. “One day,” he said, “that boy will be a reader of Ulysses.” Already the book had a reputation for obscurity as well as obscenity, but Joyce remained confident that it would reach and move many ordinary readers. On its publication in 1922 he gave a copy as a present to François Quinton, his favourite waiter at Fouquet’s. In those years he preferred not to discuss literature with experts or writers, but “loved to carry on a dialogue about Dickens with some unknown attendant at the post office window or to discuss the meaning and structure of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino with the person at the box office.” Sylvia Beach, whose bookshop published Joyce’s masterpiece when nobody else would, noted how he treated everyone as an equal, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses or charladies. He confided in her that everybody interested him and that he had never met a bore.
The middle decades of the 20th century were the years in which the idea of a common culture was abandoned — yet Ulysses depends on that very notion. Joyce himself was not forbiddingly learned. He cut more classes at University College Dublin than he attended and averaged less than 50 per cent in many of his exams. His classmate Con Curran noted that he made the little he learnt there go a very long way. When Joyce left secondary school at 18 he knew most of the basic things that you need for reading (or writing) Ulysses — the Mass in Latin, the life and themes of Shakespeare, how electricity works, how water gets from a reservoir to the domestic tap, Charles Lamb’s version of The Adventures of Ulysses.
In his youth Joyce described himself as a socialist artist and a believer in participatory democracy — that everyone, whether wealthy enough to have a higher education or not, should have equal access to this common culture. To his brother Stanislaus he wrote from Austria in May 1905: “It is a mistake for you to imagine that my political opinions are those of a universal lover: but they are those of a socialistic artist. I cannot tell you how strange I sometimes feel in my attempt to live a more civilised life than my contemporaries.”
Ulysses took shape in a world in which for the first time were the possibilities of mass literacy and the emergence of working men’s reading libraries. Virginia Woolf, perhaps unintentionally, captured that element when she sneered at it as the book “of a self-taught Dublin working man”. Its succession of disparate and discordant styles seemed to her an embarrassing example of an autodidact conducting his own education in public. These were the years in which H. G. Wells’s Outline of History sold more than two million copies. As Richard Hoggart observed: “The reading of working men was likely to be wide, solid and inspiring.” In the later years of the First World War and the years just after it there was a decline in deference to church and state authority and an assertion that the working man, landless labourer and voteless woman were persons of dignity in their own right. This was the era when democracy meant that anyone could enjoy Shakespeare. When a group of travelling players asked a porter in Limerick railway station whether they had reached their destination, the man raised his cap in mock salute and said: “Why, sirs, this is Illyria.”
Nobody then spoke of Hamlet as an example of elite art being imposed on the helpless children of labourers, for in those years a radical populism meant training readers in the art of self-reliance. These were the conditions in which Joyce made free play with texts such as the Odyssey or Hamlet, not as specialist knowledge but as the property of all who shared in a common culture.
After the mid-twentieth century, that common culture was replaced by the creation of specialist elites. Democracy was no longer seen as the sharing in a common fund of textual knowledge, but as providing access to this or that super-educated grouping. No longer was the prevailing idea that anyone bright enough could read and understand Hamlet or Ulysses, but that anyone sufficiently clever could aspire to become one of the paid specialists who did such things. Today’s social movements aim at the inclusion of gifted souls in the dominant structure rather than at the revolutionary transformation of social relations. Hence the pseudo-radical interpretations of Joyce produced over the past two decades of “critical theory” have challenged neither the growing corporate stranglehold over universities nor the specialist stranglehold over Joyce. Rather, they have strengthened both forces. And that is because “theory” is rarely concerned with linking analysis to real action in the world.
Ulysses was written to celebrate the reality of ordinary people’s daily rounds. From Baudelaire to Flaubert, much of the most powerful writing of the previous century contained corrosive critiques of everyday life, motivated by their authors’ rebellion against the repetitive character of city routines reduced to mere banality. Most persons who are bored to numbness cannot even perceive this malady, but Baudelaire and Flaubert set out to bring them to a consciousness of it. “Boredom is the everyday become manifest,” Maurice Blanchot observes, “and consequently, the everyday after it has lost its essential, constitutive trait of being unperceived.” But Joyce took a very different line. He believed that by recording the minutiae of a single day he could release those elements of the marvellous latent in ordinary living, so that the familiar might astonish. The “everyday” need not be average, but a process recorded as it is lived — with spontaneity and openness to chance.
It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people. The more snobbish modernists resorted to difficult techniques in order to protect their ideas against appropriation by the newly literate masses; but Joyce foresaw that the real need would be to defend his book and those masses against the newly illiterate specialists and technocratic elites. Whereas other modernists feared the hydra-headed mob, Joyce used interior monologue to show how loveable, complex and affirmative was the mind of the ordinary citizen. Ulysses gives such persons the sort of ceremonial treatment once reserved for aristocrats. While other writers followed Nietzsche in attacking mass culture (“the rabble spit forth their bile once a day and call the results a newspaper”), Joyce offered Ulysses as a counter-newspaper that would capture even more acutely the events of a single day. As others voiced their fear of the passivity and tractability of the mob, he tried to democratise intelligence and to produce a more active, creative kind of reader. The more frightening the world became, the more abstract art seemed to become; Joyce tried to keep everything concrete.
Although Ulysses is a book of privacies and subjectivities, an astounding number of its scenes are set in public space — libraries, museums, bars, cemeteries and, most of all, the streets. Its characters enjoy the possibilities afforded by those streets for random, unexpected meetings. And it is this very openness to serendipity that allows Joyce to renew his styles and themes with each succeeding episode. Far from seeing “street people” as a problem, he treats them as the very basis of a civilisation — the civic bourgeoisie.
The bourgeois saw that even a modest income carried social obligations — to one’s neighbours, fellow citizens, even one’s nation. Accordingly, Bloom doesn’t just help a blind stripling to cross the street or give beyond his means to the fund for the bereaved Dignam family. He also frets about how to improve transport systems in Dublin and how to combat cruelty to animals. It has even suggested that he may have given the idea for Sinn Féin to Arthur Griffith. Insofar as he identifies with the Jewish people it is less with their suffering sense of victimhood and more with their achievements, those of Mendelssohn in music and Marx in social thought.
One of the most attractive features of Bloom is his blend of imagination and practicality, of theory and practice. He sees no contradiction whatever between bohemian and bourgeois. That is the meaning of his climactic meeting with Stephen Dedalus near the close of the book, a book that may be unique in the history of modernism because it suggests concord rather than eternal enmity between poet and citizen.
Joyce remained always steadfast in his belief. In his youth he had tried to establish a daily newspaper in Dublin called The Goblin, to be published like certain continental papers each afternoon. “Its establishment,” a friend noted, “would cost a sum that in the Dublin of that day was fabulous.” Later, he would open the city’s first movie house, the Volta, as a going concern in 1909, with financial backers from overseas. Unlike their European counterparts who had learned to detach themselves from the hated bourgeoisie, Irish intellectuals were still bedazzled by the idea of business success. Wilde and Shaw wrote their plays avowedly for money; Yeats ran the Abbey Theatre without government subsidy as a business; Joyce even tried to sell Irish tweed in Trieste. He had little truck with Bohemians, preferring to emphasise the practical value of art for a full life. The Irish painter Arthur Power recalled how “he hated bohemian cafés and anything to do with them. His life was very regulated and it was bourgeois in all its aspects. He was a great family man.”
Joyce knew that national epics give people their ideas of what sort of persons they should be. The Odyssey even gave the Greeks their notions of what gods they could make their own. Joyce set his book alongside Homer, the Bible, Dante and Shakespeare precisely because he believed that it could project ideas of virtue. Any teacher knows that many students today sprinkle their essays with quotations from the lyrics of rock music and from popular films. This suggests that they still yearn for instruction from artists on how to live. The need now is for readers who will challenge the bloodless, technocratic explication of texts: amateur readers who will come up with what may appear to be naïve, even innocent, interpretations. Today’s students have been prevented by a knowing, sophisticated criticism from seeking such wisdom in modern literature. In it they seek mainly tricks of style, rhetorical devices, formal experiment and historical insight, but seldom if ever lived wisdom. The contemporary gulf between technique and feeling cries out to be bridged in the classroom, through the work of teaching and learning.
© Declan Kiberd 2009. Extracted from Ulysses and Us, published by Faber on June 4 at £14.99
