Ideas - Ulysses and the Art of Everyday Living

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

What does it mean to be a good person? Irish scholar and writer Declan Kiberd argues that Ulysses — James Joyce’s iconic novel — has lessons to teach us about the art of everyday living.

Every language is a note in the symphony of our heritage. Together they create a harmony that cannot be silenced. Discover your voice on the new APTN Languages TV channel. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad. Stately, plump buck mulligan came from the stairhead,

bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. That's the opening of perhaps the most famous novel of the 20th century, James Joyce's Ulysses. Today is February 2nd, James Joyce's birthday, and also the day on which Ulysses was published in Paris in 1922. So happy birthday, James Joyce, and happy 102nd birthday to your great novel. I think in some ways Ulysses was an answer to a question that nobody had yet asked. Just as you could say the Easter Rising was an answer to a political question

that no one had quite asked in that form. Loosely inspired by Homer's great epic, The Odyssey, the book, all 900 plus pages of it, follows the adventures of advertising salesman Leopold Bloom and aspiring writer Stephen Dedalus as they walk across Dublin on one day, June 16th, 1904. Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crust crumbs, fried hen cods rose. The two don't meet until near the end of the novel, but the intersection of their lives, the older half-Jewish outsider and the young idealistic student, that meeting is the climax of one of the most complex and

influential novels of all time. My view is that the Irish modernists were way ahead of their time. They presented something that was extraordinarily new, futuristic and path-breaking. But they presented it, of course, as Irish people always do, as a return of something old and familiar. Today on Ideas, a visit to the world of Ulysses in the company of one of the great Joyce scholars, Declan Kybert, author of many books on Ireland and Irish literature. Ideas producer Philip Coulter met with Declan Kybert at his home in North Dublin. Here's their conversation. And borrowing from the title

of one of Declan Kybert's books, we're calling this program Ulysses and the Art of Everyday Living. Can you talk a little bit about your own first experiences of that book, of Ulysses? My first experience of Ulysses was pretty illicit. My father had three books in his wardrobe, which we children were not supposed to see. One of them was the Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior of Americans. The other, I can't remember, I must have been bored, but the third was Ulysses. And I took it down in hopes of finding what we used to call juicy bits. And they were few and far between,

but I eventually did get to something that looked pretty racy. And I have to say it was a book that he loved because it reminded him of the Dublin in which he'd grown up. And I was interested in that too, the idea that there was a book that somehow captured the world from which he came. This book, Ulysses, has been described

as one of the masterpieces of modernism, not least of all by you yourself. What makes Ulysses such an important book? I think in some ways Ulysses was an answer to a question that nobody had yet asked, just as you could say the Easter Rising was an answer to a political question that no one had quite asked in that form.

So my view is that the Irish modernists were way ahead of their time. They presented something that was extraordinarily new, futuristic and path-breaking, but they presented it, of course, as Irish people always do, as a return of something old and familiar. So, you know, the Easter rebels, like Connolly, talked about the old system of landholding in medieval Ireland, where the chief held the land in the name of all the people. He said now, instead of that, it would be the

government that would hold the land in a kind of socialist or social democratic system. And by a similar logic, I think Joyce invoked the Odyssey, one of Europe's oldest, most revered texts, as a kind of base model for what turns out to be a really radical departure. And I think that illustrates the truism that to be original, one always has to go back to origins. And that's what he was doing. It's like Picasso going back to cave paintings. You know, so many of the modernists were steeped, not just in the culture of the day before yesterday, but in really ancient culture, which they were trying to activate for the modern, postmodern world. So we're going to get into all of this later on, but first of all,

let's try and summarize what takes place in this novel and give a, I guess, give a thumbnail sketch of the two principal characters. So in a kind of lightning round of this massive, massive book, essentially, what is the story that it tells? Well, it's a day, June the 16th, 1904, on which nothing really significant happens. I think that's part of the point that, as Arnold Bennett said, it's the dailiest day in the history of creation. And Joyce was trying to reinstate the ordinary as the proper domain of art. You know, 19th century Irish history had been filled with extremes, with famine, with war, with shooting. And now suddenly the act of drinking a cup of tea seems revolutionary by contrast. And we first meet the main character, Leopold Bloom, preparing breakfast, including a cup of tea for his wife.

An act which would be common enough nowadays in post-feminist Ireland, but at the time my father said was tantamount to perversion. Even before we meet Bloom, we meet a postgraduate student named Stephen Dedalus, who is with his friends trying to rustle up a breakfast in the sandy mound Martello Tower. Stephen fetched the loaf in the pot of honey in the butter cooler from the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet. What sort of kip is this, he said. I told her to come after eight. We can drink it black, Stephen said thirstily. There's a lemon in the locker. Oh, damn you and your Paris fads, Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandy Cove milk. And in a way, the opening of the book contrasts the ways in which the Irish people can deal with food.

The young men eat their food with a kind of sullen resentment, as if there should be present a woman who might tend to their needs. Bloom treats the preparation of buttered bread and tea for his wife Molly, almost in a sacramental way. The coals were reddening. Another slice of bread and butter, three, four. Right, she didn't like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. And I think this was something Joyce picked up from his time on the continent of Europe, on mainland Europe,

that, you know, Irish people tended to bolt down food with kind of resentment, as I say, perhaps as a legacy of the famine. And the idea that food was problematic and if there was any, you got it into you as fast as possible then joyce goes to you know trieste zurich paris and he sees people lingering lovingly over their meals and bloom who has this slightly foreign element is lingeringly making a beautiful sacramental breakfast for his wife on quietly cre boots, he went up the staircase to the hall,

paused by the bedroom door. She might like something tasty. Thin bread and butter she likes in the morning. Still, perhaps, once in a way. He said softly in the bare hall, I'm going round the corner. Be back in a minute. And when he had heard his voice say it, he added, You don't want anything for breakfast? A sleepy, soft grunt answered. No, she didn't want anything. Now the day proceeds, and of course, Bloom wanders the streets. Stephen teaches school for a few hours, Stephen teaches school for a few hours, but neither of them could be said to get very much done. Yet the climactic meeting towards which the whole book moves is between Stephen and Bloom.

And I think it's a really interesting one because Bloom is an ad canvasser. He sells small ads for a newspaper for which he works. Stephen is an intellectual and the idea of the meeting between them, I think, is the meeting between, if you like, the bourgeois and the bohemian. In the rest of Europe for almost a hundred years, perhaps since the French Revolution, the bohemian and the bourgeois were seen as enemies. You know, they were seen as having very different class and cultural interests. But Ireland had not really developed a middle class of a bourgeois kind. And therefore, the meeting that happens in this book is a happy occasion. It's really a pleasing climax, in the course of which, in fact,

Bloom administers to Stephen coffee and a drink. So it becomes like a displaced version of Eucharist. But to me, the great moment is, you know, that the bohemian and the bourgeois can lie down in happiness together. And Stephen goes back to Bloom's house. in happiness together. And Stephen goes back to Bloom's house. He doesn't stay, but they do have an interesting discussion about science, religion, all kinds of things. And then at the very end, Molly, Bloom's wife, who is the significant third party in the book, is described trying to sleep, but pretending to sleep beside her exhausted husband. But she's not asleep. She's going through an amazing monologue, which is a review of the day. And in the course of which she decides she was

right to marry this strange man, Bloom, even though he has his peculiarities. At least he understands or feels what a woman is. I never thought that would be my name, Bloom, when I used to write it in print to see how it looked on a visiting card or practicing for the butcher. And the blige, M. Bloom. You're looking blooming, Josie used to say, after I married him. Well, it's better than Breen or Briggs. Does Brig are those awful names with bottom in them? Mrs. Ramsbottom or some other kind of bottom, Mulvey, I wouldn't go mad about either. Or suppose I divorced him. Mrs. Boylan, my mother, whoever she was, might have given me a nicer name, the Lord knows. Let's talk a little bit about the context of the book itself. You've written about the book more or less being stolen from its natural readers,

which is ordinary people. What did you mean by that? Well, Joyce once said, he looked out the window of his apartment in Paris and pointed to the concierge's son and said, someday that boy will be a reader of Ulysses. When he was in Paris, after Ulysses was published by Sylvia Beach in Shakespeare and Company, he gave his own free copies of the book to his favourite waiter and to a woman who sold tickets for operas he liked to go to. He gave them to ordinary people because he felt that the book was a celebration of the ordinary man and woman. Joyce once joked that the extraordinary can always be safely left to journalists, that they're the ones who have crash-bang horror headlines in the newspapers. He always thought that newspapers should be much more democratic and also much more two-way, that, you know, those who read them should also contribute to them. much more two-way, that, you know, those who read them should also contribute to them.

And Bloom, who, as I said, is an ad canvasser, foreign newspaper, he actually says that the job he would really like would be an agony uncle, where someone would write in, dear Mr. Editor, what is a good cure for flatulence? And you could give your sovereign remedy for farting. Ireland by country, member for College Green. He boomed that workaday worker tack for all it was worth. It's the ads and side features, Sella Weekly, not the stale news in the Official Gazette.

Queen Anne is dead, published by Authority in the year 1000 and Domain situate in the townland of Rosnalis, Barony of Tynahinch. To all whom it may concern, schedule pursuant to statute showing return of number of mules and jennets exported from Ballina. Nature notes. Cartoons. Phil Blake's weekly Pat and Bull story. Uncle Toby's page for tiny tots. Country bumpkins queries. Dear Mr. Editor, what is a good cure for flatulence?

I'd like that part. Learn a lot teaching others. The personal note. And Joyce believed that the ordinary was the proper domain of the artist and that there had been a kind of flight from the ordinary among artists in the late 19th, early 20th century, which was itself one of the contributory factors behind World War I. Young men going off, bored with, you know, years of peace, seeking a kind of fulfillment in the extremism of war, just as a few years earlier, many of them had gone on polar expeditions or climbing high mountains in the attempt to find some kind of fulfillment that everyday life wasn't giving. But Joyce believed that everyday life was the thing most Irish people yearned for and hadn't

had enough of. I want to pick up on one of the points you just made, which is, in the context of its time, this is a book that is a product of the First World War. Can you talk a bit more about the significance of that? Well, Joyce is writing the book during World War I. He was once asked about that, and he said, oh, I hardly noticed it. But of course he did. I mean, he was in Locarno at a time when aerial bombardment had started. And I think the book is actually a protest against war, the technological means by which war is conducted in Joyce's time. I think that, you know, he picks Odysseus because Odysseus is a draft dodger.

He doesn't want to go to the wars and he does his best to avoid it and can't in the end. You know, in England, you have the whole Rupert Brooke, Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori, it's a sweet thing to die for your country, mimicked in Ireland by the rebels of 1916, who believe it is noble to take up arms in defence of a beleaguered nation. Joyce certainly didn't believe that. He was, I think, a kind of pacifist. And I think of Ulysses itself as a book which is a protest against war. In an early chapter, there are boys playing hockey on a playing field. And if you think about it, this is 1904. These are the boys who will, in due time, end up fighting, and many of them dying, in the trenches of World War I. And this is the chapter in which Stephen says,

history is a nightmare from which I cannot awake and then adds what if that nightmare gave you a back kick and I think the back kick was World War I because most of the boys in that chapter are from pro-British families and they are going to end up like so many Irish men did fighting and being killed in World War I. On the steps of the Paris Stock Exchange, the gold-skinned men, quoting prices on their gemmed fingers, gabble of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thick plodding under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs, these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full, slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancors massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside,

plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonors of their flesh. Who has not? Stephen said. What do you mean? Mr. Deasy asked. He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His under jaw fell sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me. History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. I think that the democratic element in post-World War I is part of a much wider interest in ordinariness and the everyday and the notion that this can be both celebrated and codified. Remember, for instance, newspapers become very important as communicators of

information. And I think that in some ways, Ulysses is a sort of super newspaper. After all, it deals just with the events of a single day, which is what newspapers by then were doing. But technologically speaking, you couldn't have that kind of newspaper until fairly recently, a few years before the time of Joyce. Before that, newspapers had to cover much longer tracks of time. So the idea of a single day and even individual hours in a day being important is made potent by the newspaper. You know, you have different editions of the same newspaper on a given. Kakani. Cunning old Scotch hunks. All the toady news. Our gracious and popular Vice Rain. Bought the Irish field now. Lady Mount Cashel has quite recovered after her confinement and rode out with the Ward Union staghounds at

the enlargement yesterday at Rathoat. But this coincides with, say, the fact that the Impressionist painters will tell you that they're not just painting a field of puppies, but a field of puppies as it appears at one o'clock, at a given hour in the day. And, of course, Joyce's great book is divided by the hours, beginning at eight in the morning and working through. So there's a sense in which time, notions of time itself, have changed. But this is all very important. You know, people in rural Ireland probably wouldn't have governed their lives by clock time until the beginning of the 20th century. They just looked at the position of a shadow in the doorway of a farmhouse relative to the doorframe and they could tell roughly what time it was. Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread, mustard a moment, mawkish cheese.

Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I'm not thirsty. Bath of course does that. Just a bite or two. Then about six o'clock I can... Six. Six. Time will be gone then. It's also true that Ireland was a half an hour later than Greenwich Mean Time in those years. It was in fact possible to back horses in races that were already concluded, if you were smart enough. And some people did.

And of course, what happened then was time was rationalized. The Irish time became the same as Greenwich Mean Time, partly to facilitate boat crossings, railway journeys, etc. But also, I think, because, you know, the Irish weren't allowed to have Irish time. And I remember reading about people in the west of Ireland, elderly people, who objected to priests who began conducting masses on the new Greenwich Mean Time, and only supporting priests who kept to the old time. So, as Salman Rushdie said about India and Pakistan, even time can be partitioned, you know. But I think that's interesting too, the sense in which we don't experience the flow of time in a completely

unified way. You know, 10 minutes can feel like two hours, and two hours can feel like 10 minutes. And he is trying to show you that, as Virginia Woolf did too, in the stream of consciousness and in the flow of time. And in the latter parts of the book, there is certainly lots of stuff glossed over, lots of time lost. But I think that, you know, this is part of Joyce's point that people aware of time are aware of also losing it. At what o'clock did you dine? He questioned of the slim form and tired, though unwrinkled face. Sometime yesterday, Stephen said. Yesterday, exclaimed Bloom till he remembered it was already tomorrow.

Friday. Ah, you mean it's after twelve. The day before yesterday, Stephen said, improving on himself. You're listening to Ideas and to an episode called Ulysses and the Art of Everyday Living. You can hear ideas wherever you get your podcasts and on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear us on the CBC Listen app. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Every language is a note in the symphony of our heritage. Together they create a harmony Together, they create a harmony that cannot be silenced. Discover your voice on the new APTN Languages TV channel. Essential reading for everyone. Health for All is the instant number one national bestseller by Jane Philpott, former federal minister of health and Ontario lead on primary care.

With over 6 million Canadians lacking basic health care, Philpott offers a prescription for a healthier society focusing on hope, belonging, and purpose. Available in hardcover and audiobook. Narrated by Jane Philpott. 1904, the year in which Ulysses is set, was also the year that Joyce left Ireland. Starting a new life as a writer, he spends years wandering, living in Paris, in Trieste, and in Zurich. There's a book of short stories, Dubliners, then a novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and along the way he's working on Ulysses,

exchanging letters with friends in Ireland, asking for details about Dublin and its streets. By 1920, he's back in Paris, and the long-anticipated novel is finally published on this day in 1922, Joyce's 40th birthday. The New York Times said it was a great book, but that Joyce was, quote, the only individual that the writer has encountered outside of a madhouse who has let flow from his pen random and purposeful thoughts just as they are produced.

He does not seek to give them orderliness, sequence, or interdependence. Ulysses is also a book about ordinary people and ordinary lives, in all their mass and model. This is Ulysses and the Art of Everyday Living. Here are Ideas producer Philip Coulter and writer Declan Khybert. I want to pick up on one of the things you've been talking about there, and that is the book Ulysses is, of course, telling the story of one unremarkable day, as you've been describing, in the life of Dublin, June the 16th, 1904. How important is this Irishness to the book?

I don't want to be a chauvinist and say that, you know, only Irish people can understand Ulysses, because some of the greatest readers of the book, like my teacher Richard Ellman, came from the Midwest of America, and it is really a book for all the world. But I do want to say that the forwardness, the futuristic quality, is in some ways rooted in the Irishness. I mentioned to you that I thought that The Easter Rising was an answer to a question no one had quite asked, and that so was this book. And I do think that the Irish presented the avant-garde in the guise of the archaic as something very old being restored and that's tremendously Irish attitude always has been for instance I remember asking a

student back in the 1980s in probably the final days of Catholicism in contemporary Ireland. What do you do, Jim, on a Saturday night? And he said, oh, I go out with my girlfriend and we sow our wild oats. And then he said, on Sunday morning, we slink into church and we pray for crop failure. And I said to him, well, you're an Irish modernist then. You're part of the archaic avant-garde. And I've always felt this, even about recent developments in our history. For example, a few years ago, voters voted for same-sex marriage, by considerable

majority actually, and a lot of old people who weren't expected to support it did. And I was in Italy at the time, and the Italians were a bit surprised and said, oh, we thought Ireland was kind of a bit backward or traditional. And I said, yes, it is very traditional. It's so traditional that everyone in Ireland believes in the family. And therefore, because it's one of the central pivots of our constitution, the family, they believe that gay people have the right to family life as well as everyone else. So there's a sense in which what looks very radical is actually a deeply traditional gesture. About the book itself, put Joyce in the tradition of Irish writing.

I don't think of Ulysses as a novel because a novel is about a made society, an Irish society was still being made. And in my mind, the really great prose narratives of Ireland, going right back to Swift and Gulliver's Travels, are not novels. They're collections of micro-stories in the drag of what seems to be a novel. But in the case of Gulliver, he learns nothing from each of his adventures and has to start all over again. It is a book of sections, kind of stories, and I just don't think of that in any way in novelistic terms. And Joyce's book is full of micro-stories too, as is Beckett's trilogy, as is Martin O'Kane's great Irish language

text Crane Aquila. I think of all these books as being forged out of the Irish gift for short storytelling and for oral narrative, for the brief rather than the prolonged narrative. And they look like novels because the stories are strung together, but they're not. His mood? He had not risked, he did not expect, he had not been disappointed, he was satisfied. What satisfied him? To have sustained no positive loss, to have brought a positive gain to others. Like to the Gentiles. How did Bloom prepare a collation for a Gentile? He poured into two teacups, two level spoonfuls, four in all, of Eps soluble cocoa, and proceeded according to the directions for use printed on the label,

to each adding, after sufficient time for infusion, the prescribed ingredients for diffusion, in the manner and in the quantity prescribed. Adorno once said that when a society is undergoing change, the forms of art go into meltdown. My argument would be that the forms of prose narrative have been in meltdown in Ireland for centuries. And even now we still haven't got a fully finished society you know in the way that Jane Austen could write about the military the educational establishment parliament etc etc and think of the place as stable and stabilized Ireland is still very much, as Yeats once said, hot wax, still forming, solidifying. And just as, say, this city we're talking in, Dublin, doesn't strike me as a city like Paris, from which I've just come,

which was designed by a houseman in terms of boulevards that give you the sense of a singular intelligence behind it. that give you the sense of a singular intelligence behind it. Ulysses is a collection of stories in the drag of a novel, but it doesn't give you the sense of a singular intelligence either. And I think this is one of the features of modernism, actually. If you look at Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, what is maybe, along with Guernica, Picasso's most famous painting, the whores in that painting, there's five of them, they're all painted in a different style, each of them. And the thing I think about modernism,

and Irish modernism in particular, is the way in which the structure of Ulysses, with its differently styled, bitty, fragmented short stories, mimicsics this city which is really a collection of villages bolted together rather than just a kind of house manny and singular urban creation i lived once in the twin cities in minnesota and was always struck by minneapolis a poet once said to me minneapolis is a city which steadfastly refuses to become a metaphor because it was grid-like and Lutheran and modern in that way. But St. Paul was higgledy-piggledy, full of villagey bits, just like an Irish city or town. And I think that's the difference. And the structure of Ulysses reflects intimately the fragmented nature of Dublin and the different bits of villages that make it up.

Bloom, I beg, he swerves, sidles, step aside, slips past and on. Bloom, keep to the right, right, right, if there's a signpost planted by the touring club at Step Aside. Who procured that public boon? I, who lost my way and contributed to the columns of the Irish cyclist, the letter headed in darkest step aside. Keep, keep, keep to the right. Rags and bones at midnight. Offence, more likely.

First place murderer makes for. Wash off his sins of the world. Jackie Caffrey, hunted by Tommy Caffrey, runs full tilt against Bloom. Bloom, oh, shocked on weak hams, he halts. Tommy and Jackie vanish there. There, Bloom. Oh! Shocked. On weak hams. He halts. Tommy and Jackie vanish. There. There. Bloom. Pats with parceled hand. Watch. Fob pocket. Book pocket. Purse pocket. Sweets of sin. Potato soap. Ulysses is also a very political book in that it celebrates the importance of ordinary people and ordinary lives.

Is there a new idea of democracy being developed here, which is to say that democracy is not so much a matter of structures and outside political forms. It's really something that has to come from individuals and it's an issue of individual change and development. I think, yes, democracy does come from below rather than above. Yes, democracy does come from below rather than above. Even the censorship, which was horrible in Ireland, though it didn't manage to censor Ulysses, came from below. Someone walked into a library, a taxpayer who didn't like something in a book, and objected at the censorship board.

That's totally different from the censorship in Eastern Europe under the commies, where the censorship was imposed from above and was mostly political. I think that there's a sense in which Joyce's understanding is that ordinary people generate meaning, and the meaning is shared and tested, and that is how a true democracy works and I feel that Ulysses is a deeply democratic book because it allows the reader become a co-creator of meaning even though it has a reputation for difficulty and might seem like a kind of elite imposition. In fact, in order to understand Ulysses, all you really need to know are basic things like how water gets from the reservoir to the domestic tap, or, you know, what the plot of Shakespeare's Hamlet is. And actually, these were things that ordinary people knew and were expected to know in 1922 when the book came out.

There are wonderful stories, for instance, told about Anu McMaster, who had a group of travelling players who went around the country putting on Shakespeare. And they put on King Lear in Wicklow, and a farmer came up to McMaster afterwards and he said Jesus that was a mighty play whichever of yous wrote it and McMaster then went into Limerick and he wasn't sure he was in Limerick with his strolling players so he pulled down the window and he asked the porter who was passing are we in Limerick and the porter looked and recognized him and said why sir this is illyria so you have a culture in which the common man and woman don't feel shakespeare is an elite imposition it's just a democratic possession that anyone can access if they want to and it always

amazes me that people think the constituent elements in Ulysses are elitist and difficult. The technique of the book is of course challenging, but the actual content on which Joyce relies, anyone would know. Put Joyce and his project in the context of what Yeats was doing at the same time. They were both in a sense reimagining an Irish literature as well as a new Irish society. So in terms of political vision what's Joyce's sense of what a new Ireland should be or what a new Ireland might actually turn out to be? I think that Joyce would have thought of it in plural terms as a place which was open and which welcomed all kinds of traditions. I think the fact that Bloom is part Jewish is very important

and that Joyce is anticipating the way Ireland has in fact become. It's an example of a wild said. The future is what artists already are. You know, we now have so many different religious traditions, Protestant fundamentalism, Judaism, militant atheism, you know, Unitarianism, you know, Unitarianism, slight skepticism, and still residual Catholicism, all coexisting together as part of the jigsaw that is Irish society. But I think that Joyce pre-imagined all that when he had Bloom behave almost like an anthropologist, going into the churches, looking at the old ladies receiving the communion, and thinking, you know, I'm an anthropologist, going into the churches, looking at the old ladies receiving the communion and thinking, you know, I'm an ad man. Buy from us, buy from us, buy from us, pray for us, pray for us, pray for us. He could see an analogy between the ways in which the

Catholic Church sold its goods, so to speak, and the ways in which a more modern emerging world of advertising and so on, the madmen of fabled TV time, operate. Mass seems to be over. Could hear them all at it. Pray for us and pray for us and pray for us. Good idea, the repetition. Same thing with ads. Buy from us and buy from us. Yes, there's the light in the priest's house, their frugal meal. Kidney of bloom, pray for us. Flower of the bath, pray for us. Mentor of Menton, pray for us. Canvasser for the freemen, pray for us. Charitable mason, pray for us. Wandering soap, pray for us. Sweets of sin, pray for us. Music without words, pray for us. Reprover of the citizen, pray for us. Friend of all frillies, pray for us.

Midwife most merciful, pray for us. Potato preservative against plague and pestilence, pray for us. So, yeah, I think he wanted a true republic that was open to, if you like, pluriculture, the kind of word. And he believed it had existed in the past, because Ireland is, there's a famous book called The Book of Invasions. Ireland was always being added to by various traditions and people of varying backgrounds, including people who came up by sea from North Africa and the Mediterranean.

And I think he felt that that kind of plural Ireland would re-emerge, as indeed it has done. Just picking up on another point that you made a moment ago, one of the major themes of Ulysses is what you call, quote, the dead denying power of the past from which the main characters are trying to liberate themselves. Can you talk a little bit about that, that the book is also trying to propose a way of dealing with the past? Well, I think Joyce felt that many Irish people were caught in the notion of an idealized heroic past, and this would apply, for instance, to Yeats, and that this was just another way of trying to escape the mediocrity of the present.

That because, in some ways, Ireland was undercapitalized, poor, and felt itself inferior, say, by comparison to England, we had to ransack our ancient history to find a much more glorious version of ourselves. And I think that Joyce disapproved of those tendencies. He felt we were good enough as we were. We were already modern, despite the fact that some of us didn't realize it. And his view would be that the worship of the past had about it qualities of deadness, evasion, and a kind of pathos. So, for instance, in the Sirens chapter in Ulysses, the men around the piano, the piano is likened to a coffin because the songs they are singing are all about the glorious rebellion of 1798. Who fears to speak of 98 as one of the famous songs? What occupied the position originally occupied by the sideboard?

A vertical piano, cadby, with exposed keyboard, its closed coffin supporting a pair of long yellow ladies' gloves, and an emerald ashtray containing four consumed matches, a partly consumed cigarette, and two discolored ends of cigarettes, its music crest supporting the music in the key of G natural for voice and piano of Love's Old Sweet Song, words by G. Clifton Bingham, composed by J. L. Malloy, sung by Madame Antoinette Sterling, open at the last page with the final indications

ad libitum, forte, pedal, animato, sustained pedal, ritorando, close. But Mr. Bloom, who is much more up-to-date, says, who fears to speak of 1904? And this is Joyce asking, you know, you know, who is afraid to live in the present? And of course, he's writing that a few years after 1904. Even he gets caught in this kind of, you know, sentiment about the recently abandoned past. you know, sentiment about the recently abandoned past. Joyce is interested in the world of his father because nothing seems more remote than the recently abandoned past.

All gone, all fallen, at the siege of Ross, his father, at Gorry, all his brothers fell. To Wexford, we are the boys of Wexford, he wed, last of his name and race. I too, last of my race. Millie, young student. Well, my fault, perhaps. No son. Rudy. Too late now. Or if not. If not. If still. He bore no hate. Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am old. Big Ben, his voice unfolded.

Great voice, Richie Goulding said, a flush struggling in his pale, to bloom soon old. But when was young? Ireland comes now. My country above the king. She listens. Who fears to speak of 1904?

Time to be shoving. Looked enough. You know, there's a sense in which vinyl LPs by the Beatles seem almost more prehistoric than the Stones of Newgrange. And Joyce is aware of that, but he's trying to cope with a way of excavating the present, which would in fact allow people face into the openness of the future. I think although there's a lot about the dead and the past and coffins and all the rest of it in Joyce's writing, really what he's trying to do is blast open a way into a viable Irish future. He really is thinking years ahead. And even now, Joyce is, you know, an answer to a question we haven't fully asked.

Well, as you've pointed out, Ulysses also comes across as a book in which there is much to teach us about the world we live in. There's advice on how to cope with grief, how to be frank about death, how women have their own desires. It's a very practical book. Yes, I've been unpopular among most joy scholars for saying this, for saying that the book is a book about how to live. And I believe it. It teaches you how to tell a joke and how not to tell a joke. It shows

you how to deal with the dead in a frank but honest way. For instance Bloom thinks that the wrong messages are written on the tombstones in Glasnevin. Instead of saying who departed this life, it should say, I made good Irish stew, or I travelled for cork linoleum, and give some idea of the biography of the person who's lying under the earth. Who passed away? Who departed this life? As if they did it of their own accord. Got the shove, all of them. Who kicked the bucket? More interesting if they told you what they were. of them. Who kicked the bucket? More interesting if they told you what they were. So and so, wheelwright. I travelled for cork lino. I paid five shillings in the pound. Or a woman's with her saucepan. I cooked good Irish stew. Eulogy in a country churchyard. It ought to be that poem of who is it Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell. Entered into rest, the Protestants put it.

Old Dr. Murrens, the great physician, called him home. Well, it's God's acre for them. Nice country residence, newly plastered and painted. Ideal spot to have a quiet smoke and read the church times. I think Joyce was producing, in some ways, an alternative, not just to the newspaper, as I said, but to the Bible, which is certainly a book of how to live and what the real values are. And this is why Joyce said that the concierge's son might benefit from it. benefit from it. By the way, I've always thought of Joyce as a religious writer in the deeper sense of not religion as a rule-keeping activity, but as a way of relating to the infinite, what we might call the divine, or the forces out there that we don't fully understand but will return to.

And remember that Joyce used to frequent the ceremonies of the Catholic Church in Holy Week. He knew the Latin by heart and he said it with the priest. Now he stood in the doorway with one foot in and one foot out. There was something always very conditional about his involvement with the religion. But I think it does also perhaps suggest that in teaching us how to live, he is saying that one of the mistakes Irish people made was to reduce their religion to rule keeping. This was the mad rule-driven Catholicism of my childhood. And it went back to the mid-19th century and it was the Catholicism that Joyce objected to. He wanted a much more religious rather than religiose kind of belief. But I think that Ulysses is literally a bright book of life. It is a sacred book and William Faulkner understood this. He said

to understand Joyce you have to approach him with reverence. Faulkner really believed that it was a holy book, and so do I. Way earlier in our conversation, you made the point that in order to be original, you have to go back to origins. And just now you've been talking about the book, to a certain extent, being a kind of epic. I think that Joyce is writing an epic for Ireland because he knows the English have Milton, the Americans have Whitman,

whom he loved and always read in Sylvia Beach's shop. But I think Joyce had very specific understanding of epic, which is rather different from the one I was taught in school. I was taught that epic was, you know, the confident assertion of a successful society and its length, its audacity, its range of tones captured all this. I think that Joyce saw epic rather as something

that came at the end of a dispensation, at the end of a civilization. It was a beautiful swan song, but it was a swan song. And he is writing Ulysses as a kind of celebration, stroke, lament for bourgeois man and woman. Bloom spends the whole day in a dark suit because he has attended a funeral. And I think there's a sense in which Joyce would have looked back to Milton

and seen him writing about the collapse of Republican ideals in the England of his time, and that Paradise Lost was in some way a lament for all that and he would have seen Whitman also believing that the great democratic potentials on which America was founded are in some kind of decay particularly after the Civil War so that in Joyce's view, epic is magnificent, but it's a magnificent lament. Houses of decay, mine, his, and all.

You told the clongos gentry you had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsha's library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas.

For whom? The hundred-headed rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeball stars, humanum, horse nostriled, the oval equine faces, temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, lanterntern Jaws, Abba's father, Furious Dean. What a fence laid fire to their brains? Half. The book as you've described it is very much about the importance of the everyday, the importance of the sense of self. In our own time, a little more than a hundred years after it was first written, what's the importance of Ulysses in our own time? The importance of Ulysses is that we still are fatally seduced by extremism,

not just in politics, but in terms of cultural experience. You know, we look to sex, for instance, in its more extreme and kinky forms, rather than realizing how beautiful it is. So I would say the world we live in now, because of the media available, has tended to glorify rather extreme situations in the way it did 100 years ago. In some ways, we're very much in the pre-World War I world all over again. You know, we see the rise of autocratic leaders. We think we're tremendously enlightened because of some technological breakthroughs, but we haven't mastered that technology. There is no Ulysses that has been produced out of the internet or, you know, even out of the kind of breakthroughs in the 60s and 70s that preceded the internet. There's a sense rather that we are slaves to that technology in the way that Joyce felt the newspaper's democratic potential had not been fully achieved.

had not been fully achieved. It should have been a two-way process whereby people could feed their ideas into the newspaper and not just passively consume it. So the questions he raised are still relevant. You know, how do you find a way of mastering a new technology rather than being mastered by it. And, you know, Walter Benjamin once said, and he said it around the time that Joyce was writing Ulysses, that we are the primitives of electronic civilization. And he gave this as a reason why there was so much interest in cave art and Homer and going back to the very ancient world, that because we were primitives, we were looking back to prior primitives in the history of the world. But I think that's true.

I mean, when you look at the ways in which, you know, Twitter, the internet, etc., are not so much used as abused, you would have to say that the users are primitives. And yeah, Joyce was grappling with all this for us 100 years ago, and there's a lot he can still teach us. Oh, and the sea, the sea, crimson, sometimes like fire, and the glorious sunsets, and the fig trees, and the Alameda gardens, yes, and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a flower of the mountain, yes, when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used, or shall I wear

a red, yes, and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall, and I thought, well, as well him as another, and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again, yes, and then he asked me, would I, yes yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes. Yes, I will. Yes. On Ideas, you've been listening to producer Philip Coulter in conversation with Irish writer Declan Kybert, author of the book Ulysses and Us, The Art of Everyday Living. Readings from Ulysses were by Mev Beattie.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our acting senior producer is Lisa Ayuso Technical production, Danielle Duval Our acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly And I'm Nala Ayed For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.