In Our Time - James Joyce's Ulysses

Episode Date: June 14, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss James Joyce's novel Ulysses. First published ninety years ago in Paris, Joyce's masterpiece is a sprawling and startlingly original work charting a single day in the life of the Dubliner Leopold Bloom. Some early readers were outraged by its sexual content and daringly scatalogical humour, and the novel was banned in most English-speaking countries for a decade after it first appeared. But it was soon recognised as a genuinely innovative work: overturning the ban on its publication, an American judge described Ulysses as "a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind."Today Ulysses is widely regarded as the greatest example of literary modernism, and a work that changed literature forever. It remains one of the most discussed novels ever written.Steven ConnorProfessor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of LondonJeri JohnsonSenior Fellow in English at Exeter College, OxfordRichard BrownReader in Modern English Literature at the University of LeedsProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in a celebrated case brought before the District Court of New York in December 1932, Judge John Woolsey was asked to decide whether James Joyce's novel Ulysses was obscene. The book had been banned shortly after its public.

10 years earlier, following outrage about its sexual content. Judge Wool's ruling is an unusual combination of legal reasoning and shrewd literary criticism. Ulysses, he wrote, is not an easy book to read or to understand. After describing the work as a serious experiment in a new literary genre, he calls it an amazing tour de force, and its author, a great artist in words. Over turning the ban, the judge concluded that the work was not obscene, but a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary, method for the observation and description of mankind.

Ulysses describes a single day in the lives of the Dubliners Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. It's packed with classical illusions, often difficult and experimental writing, but it's also funny and earthy, musical and rude. And it's generally guarded as a, if not the, towering masterpiece of modern fiction. With me to discuss James Joyce Ulysses are Stephen Connor, professor of modern literature and theory at Berkbeck University of London. Jerry Johnson, Senior Fellow in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and Richard Brown, reader in modern English literature at the University of Leeds.

Steve Connor, James yours was born in 1882 in group in Dublin. Would you tell us something about his early life? Well, he was one from a member of a very large family, what became in the end ten children, son of a larger-than-life character kind of improvident father. So nevertheless, he was able to have really very kind of intensely academic education, which stood in very good stead, during a period in which Ireland was experiencing a huge kind of upsurge

of cultural self-confidence, which came dramatically to a halt in 1889 with the death of the Irish parliamentary leader who led the Home Rule movement, and everyone thought that Home Rule was going to come. His name was Charles Stuart Parnell. And as a result of a sexual scandal, he, fell from power, died shortly afterwards. Thereafter, there was a kind of parting of the ways. Ireland itself, the Irish literary

revival continued, but it's been thought by many in a very much more introverted way. There was a kind of mystical or mental revolution that took the place of something secular and political. Joyce turned aside from that, as a young man, his point was to try to forge some much large sense of his own identity, a European sense, not a narrowly Irish one. Let's go back to the education in a moment.

He was the eldest in what became ten children, the father was well off at the start. So he got a classical education at a good public school in Ireland, based on English public schools, and he went to Dublin University, the Royal University of Dublin, as a classical scholar, but also specialising in modern languages. This was a very solid enlightenment education. Very solid. Lots of theology, lots of classical education. which although Joyce turned away from the theology, he never forgot it and remained deeply.

He was educated, in fact, at school by Jesuits and remained deeply appreciative. Deeply saturated was his word, yes. Yes, in those forms of thought. But he was also open to, I mean, he also had intense linguistic consciousness. He was studying French and German, I believe. he deliberately also studied Italian and taught himself at the age of 17

what then was Norwegian and now is a bit closer to Danish in order to study the works of Henrik Ibsen. So we have a man, a young boy who's got the best education that can be provided and he takes to it and he takes to Catholicism deeply before he rejects it. He's a Dubliner as well so he knows what a colonial city is like. He knows what being under imperial rule and yet being against those or officially against imperial rule.

So there's quite a lot going on there. Jerry Johnson, he left Ireland in 1902 and moved to Trieste with his lover, Nora Barnacle. When did he start writing and what were his earliest works? Well, he went to Paris in 1902, came back and then left for Trieste in Polar in 1904. And in 1904, he's publishing already, short stories. He's asked by AE to provide short stories for that strange magazine,

the Irish Homestead, combination of agricultural advice and high literature. And he publishes under the pseudonym of Steed and Daedalus, three stories, which become three of the stories in Dubliners. He's already published an essay on Ibsen, Drama as Life, and from the continent attempts to get Dublin has published. It's unsuccessful. Dominine knows it will be a collection of short stories. That's right, a collection of short stories. He tries to get these published

unsuccessfully. There are complaints about possible obscenity. There are complaints about offence to the English King. He does eventually get them published by 1914. By that point, he's already started a second book, which is at that point Stephen Hero,

a quasi-autobiographical novel. He grows frustrated with it, understandably. It's kind of, as Hugh Kenner says, a run of the Mill Edwardian novel. Nothing exciting, nothing particularly interesting about it. So he throws that away and starts again and begins what becomes Portrait of the Artist. So as early as 1907, he's starting Portrait of the Artist, a book which really is a modernist novel in its style and its technique and in its construction. Can you tell us what bearing the portrait of the artist as a young man had on Ulysses, how it was a precursor of Ulysses? Absolutely. The most obvious

thing is its central character. A portrait of the artist is a building's remand, a novel about the growth and development of an individual. That individual looks an awful lot like James Joyce. So we're talking about autobiographical fiction. Absolutely. Though Joyce being Joyce

is one to challenge the very notions of autobiography, but yes, the events of Stephen's life... All autobiographers are. Yeah, of course. The events of Stephen's life are the events of Joyce's life rearranged for the purposes of fiction. The second most... important thing it seems to me is the style in which the book is written. It is intensely

close to Stephen. It isn't... What do you mean by that precisely? It's written in the third person. In other words, Stephen is always a he crossed the road. He crossed the road rather than I cross the road. Nevertheless, the style in which that third person narrative proceeds is attached to the growing mind of the young boy. So can you Give us an example how that works. Well, right at the beginning, the story begins with his father telling him a story. Once upon a time there was a moo cow coming down along the road, and this moukow that was coming down along the road met a nice and its little boy named baby Taku.

So very childish, very simple prose. But as the book proceeds over five distinctive chapters, the style becomes more mature. At times it becomes unbearably precious, as Stephen becomes unbearably precious. So it's very, very... Do you think that's unconscious or conscious? On whose part? Stevens are Joyce?

Joyce. Do you think he's becoming unbearably precious? Or he wants Stephen to become unbearably precious? I think he wants Stephen to become unbearably precious. Joyce famously said about the book, if only anybody would recognize that it said a portrait of the artist as a young man. So he's standing in some ironic distance to Stephen.

But the important thing here is that he's connecting character to style. So a particular language produce is identifying of the character itself. Have you got an example to hand? Well, the whole portrait of the artist, as it grows, grows... Can you give us something more specific? I don't have the book to hand, but any sentence there will do. If we think for a minute ahead, I know I'm getting ahead here, but of Ulysses, we have

three primary characters in the text, each of which, each of whom has an identifying style. So Leopold Bloom writes in staccato or thinks in staccato sentences. Stephen, still very precious, is thinking in long, involuted sentences, complex,

subordinate clauses and so on. And Molly Bloom thinks, in the end, wholly without punctuation in a continuous flow. Thank you very much. Now, Richard Brown, I made a mistake. I said he went to trust in Dono, too, he went to Paris, but it's slightly difficult to leap up with him when he and Nora

go to the continent it's Paris, I'm not excusing myself, I made a mistake. Paris, Trieste, Zurich and so and so forth. They're knocking around very much and that's when he began to work on this book Ulysses. But I want to have a digression here, if I may. He had met Nora Barnacle, a chamber made from Galway, he'd met her in Dublin,

he'd taken her out one night, and that seems to be an evening, it's not a night, seems to be an earthquake in his sexuality, and his vision of womenhood. Was it as important as I am suggesting it might be? I think it's a very important part of the Joyce's story. And for that reason, a very important part of Joyce's development. Steve mentioned his education, Joyce's hyper-scholarly education, his education supersaturated in Catholicism.

And I suspect many people would have expected Joyce to have found a partner with a similar kind of fascination with the scholarly, perhaps with the theological, and Nora was the absolute opposite of that. She was an ordinary girl, beautiful. She seems to be quite extraordinary girl, doesn't she? I mean, she sort of got hold of him one way and another on that night and never let go.

Well, absolutely extraordinary in those terms. You're absolutely right. Also, there's an exchange of scatological letters between which we're not allowed to talk about, and I wasn't allowed to include in the program we did many years ago because they're so sort of scatological. Yes, you're absolutely right. And that was on. So there's a lot going on.

I think we should put that in the mix, because that's part of what was going on when Newlysses was written. Yes, well, you're absolutely right. It's very very important. It's also important, I suppose, to remember that those letters were written when Joyce was back on a trip to Dublin,

leaving Nora in Trieste. He was actually back in Dublin for a very interesting reason because he'd been asked to set up the first cinema, would have been the first cinema in Dublin by a group of triestean businessmen. There he was in Dublin, Nora, who he'd eloped with,

left in warm Trieste, and all of a sudden that contrast between the northern European city and its gloomy memories for Joyce and the warm, sunny south of Trieste came to his mind. I think that they were mad about each other in the most far as you could go,

and it did change his life. Now that's simple, it may be, but I don't think anything you've said contradicts it. No, absolutely not. Did he have a, when he started Ulysses, did he lay out an agenda? Because he spoke about it very grandly all the time. This was going to be a 20th century masterpiece. His confidence is quite wonderful.

Where did he get that from? This was going to be the greatest book written to the 20th century. So he knew from the beginning what exactly wanted, what he wanted to do with this book, did he? I'm not so sure about that. I think it's a book which makes a lot more sense if you think about it as being written over a long period of time, as you've said, in a variety of different places around Europe

and with a changing agenda and a complicating agenda as he works through it. The first written account we have of the book is him referring to a story about somebody called Hunter in Ulysses, a man rumoured to have a wife who was being unfaithful, and that story was to be called Ulysses and he says in a letter it never got farther than the title. Well, perhaps in some ways, because it's such an interesting title,

it never got farther than the title. It did continue to return to that title. But certainly the novel changed and developed during that time so that by the time Joyce finished the novel, he was having to enlist a group of contemporary critics and intellectuals to explain to them quite how complex his various intentions were. Can we turn to him once more, maybe the last time, the influences on him while he was going around

these European cities. We talk about literature. I think one of the two great influences, he is the biggest influence on himself, is plundering his life all the time and his life in Dublin. And also, I'm sorry to pray this, Nora is a massive influence.

Putting that aside, what are the literary influence, things we can talk about nicely. What are they on about? Yes, his own life and his experience with Nora, his love experience with Nora, of those things are absolutely embedded in the experience. I hate God and death, but I love Nora.

Exactly. Beautiful letter, wonderful, powerful letter. And yet, of course, all of literature somehow or other gets subsumed in Ulysses. So what's you reading in these seven years? Well, almost everything. When he arrives in Rome, for example, works at Bank clerk, he finds himself passing by Shelley's house in Rome. So the English literary tradition is there when he's in. Trieste, everything played into Joyce's hands.

One of his first students was interesting students in Trieste was Italo Svavo. The writer who's terribly interesting, interested in Joyce's writing and himself a medium for important intellectual movements in Europe like psychoanalysis at the time. Trieste was the place where the Italian futurists celebrated what they were doing for them. Venice was Passet. Trieste was a new city of the future. So Joyce's exciting connection with new avant-garde movements in art

really reinforced by him being there. And his interest in European literature, which, let us say, began, didn't really, but anchored in Ibsen when his young man continued with Huffman and various European writers he was read. Steve Conn, Stephen Conn, can you describe the outlines of the work for those listeners who might not know it, the plot and structure? So we have two central characters, Leopold Blancel. who's a middle-aged advertising canvasser,

so somebody who places adverts and takes commission in the newspapers, and Stephen Dedalus. It's a story of them both getting up, wandering around a bit, doing a bit of work, almost meeting each other, and finally actually meeting each other, that's it in capsule form. It's very important to remember that it's a Thursday,

and Thursday was a half-holiday. So hardly anybody is doing any work. There's plenty of opportunity for them to meet people. So there's a funeral. Leopold Bloom goes to the funeral of Patrick Dignam. Stephen Dedalus goes to work teaching in a school in the morning. They have a couple of near misses, one in a newspaper office, where Bloom has gone to place an advert.

Another in the National Library, where Bloom has gone to do some research on nude statues. And he wants to find out if they have, anuses. And they finally meet at the end of the day in of all places a maternity hospital from there they proceed increasingly drunk, Stephen

increasingly drunk, to a brothel, eventually wander home to Bloom's house where they have a cup of cocoa, they go out into the garden, urinate together and say goodbye. So it's quite a simple day in the life of two men really. Without being silly about it, it is. And on top of that, you've said it quite briskly and clearly, and not much was missed out in certain skeletal plot terms.

Now you've got a quarter of million words to describe that. There's Molly at the end of it. We can bring Molly Bloom in later. She does indeed come in later. So one of the things that the people say about the book is that he loaded it with so much difficulty that they find, much as they want to read it, they find themselves stop from time to time.

And he himself said, I'm going from your note, Stephen. He said, I put in so many enigmas and puzzles that he will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant. What did he mean by saying that in a way? I mean, it's obviously true, but do you want everybody to know this is for scholars only or did you want to give it a particular allure?

No, not a bit. Actually, the kinds of enigmas and puzzles are what come from when you don't edit things out in the way in which scholars edited things out and the way in which novelists previously had edited things out. One of the most puzzling episodes in the book when you read it for the first time is Bloom meets a character called Bantam Lions

and Bantam Lions says, can I have a look at your newspaper? I want to see who's running in the Ascot Gold Cup and Bloom says, yeah, you can have it, I was just going to throw it away. Bantam Lions looks at him and says, oh, chance it, and runs off. And you don't know until later in the book that he thinks Bloom is giving him a tip

for a horse called throwaway. A horse called throwaway did, in fact, win the Ascotts gold cup on the 16th. June, 1904, at odds of 20 to 1. So Bloom gets in a lot of trouble because everyone thinks he's made a lot of money on the race. That's not esoteric stuff. Well, it is in a way

but it's not the same kind of esoteric allusion that people are usually put off by. It's certainly true, you need a bit of help, but you would need a bit of help if you were engaging in the intricacies and the intimacies of

any ordinary person's life. And that's the kind of difficulties. The difficulty of the ordinariness that Joyce will not edit out. I agree then. I'm just reading in for this programme and it is wonderful. But I'm just trying to be on the side of quite of people who said looking forward to the program couldn't finish it. And one of the things is it does go on and on and on sometimes. But let's come back to that in a moment. Jerry Johnson, Udusis is the Latin name for Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem,

The Odyssey. How does that play into, how does Homer's Iliad play in? into, not the Eliad. The Odyssey. That's, thank you very much. Homer's Odyssey playing to Joyce's Ulysses. From very early age, Joyce adored Homer, as he puts it. He studied Homer at school, studied the Odyssey. He said, repeatedly, asked people who they thought the best character was in the whole of literature,

the best all-round man. That seemed to be Odysseus for Joyce. You saw him as a father, you saw him as a husband, you saw him as a warrior, you saw him as an adventurer, you saw him as a king, etc. So Joyce had this idea of working what T.S. Eliot calls a continuous parallel between antiquity and contemporaneity of using as a kind of ground plan, the Odyssey.

Joyce actually early on had read Charles Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses rather than the Odyssey itself, and that reconfigures the Odyssey into discrete tales, as it were. So Joyce takes 18... The Cyclops tale, for instance. The Cyclops, exactly. The Cyclops, Nossica, Calypso, Telemachus, so a narrative unit around an individual character of the Odyssey.

So Joyce takes that as a structural template, if you like. We have 18 episodes of Ulysses, paralleled with 18 episodes of The Odyssey. So each of them, though they were never published this way, has for Joyce a title corresponding to one of those episodes. He drew up graphs and maps about his film. He certainly did. He produced at least two, what we call schemata. Each episode has an hour of the day.

It has an organ of the body. It has a Ulyssian parallel. It has a whole cast of characters that are in their ways, elusive of these Odyssean or Homeric characters. And that's a powerful and a witty idea in every possible way. But if you look at Bloom and you look at the other Ulysses, Bloom is transparent, he's honest, he's careful, he's not slow, but he's extremely cautious, he goes through the day in what can only be called a pedestrian

in every sense manner, although he's interesting, kind of obviously, but Odysseus is this flaming sword going through the Mediterranean, he's the trickster, he's the here, now is it a way of saying, I will attach significance to this by the name, or is there a deeper significance there that we are supposed to take for granted. Is any man's day an odyssey?

Is that what he's saying? In one sense he is saying that, but Joyce always at the same time maintained that Odysseus was a good man and that his Leopold Bloom was going to be a good man. Well, that's easy, isn't it? I mean, that doesn't take you very far. That doesn't take you very far.

But he's also canny and he gets out of scrapes now and then and so on. But I agree with you that there's a way in which I've often thought that if Joyce had told us about this Homeric parallel that in reading the book, one would find it very difficult to find such parallels. That's an

honest thing to say. Stephen's got your hand. If so, where does that leave us with Joyce's sort of intention? Is this a bit of wonderful... Well, I just want to say that there's a reason why it's the Odyssey and not the Iliad, and that is because the Iliad is full of fighting and killing. The first word of the Iliad is Roth.

The wrath of Achilles. Let me tell you. And Joyce thought that, you know, Ulysses did what did through guile, through tricksiness, through storytelling. And Joyce... What does Bloom do that, Steve? Well, Bloom does. Bloom averts wrath in the chapter that's known as the Cyclops chapter. He averts the wrath of a very...

The man with a monocle. Bigoted. Yeah. Irish nationalist. And he doesn't, you know, avoid it, but he averts it. He confronts it, stands up to it and escapes from it. And I think the book is about those... forms of escape from various forms of temptations, seduction, the seductions of fantasy,

especially where those seductions of fantasy can lead to violence, which Joyce loathed. So this is the great book of peace. You want to come in, Richard? Well, I think the idea of Ulysses being a tricksy hero, Odysseus as being a trixie hero, as you mentioned, is a really important one for Joyce, not just for the character of Leopold Bloom in the book, but for the character of the book as a whole. There's a lovely letter that Joyce wrote with an illustration of Odysseus and Leopold Bloom, Leopold Bloom with a bowler hat on, and the first line from the Odyssey in Greek written above it.

And of course, that trickiness of Odysseus is the word polytropos. Well, for modern literary critics, the polytropism, if you like, the fact that the book is full of different literary tropes and styles makes it the book that it is. is. And of course that shifts our idea of the relationship between the book and the hero Odysseus, because it partly makes Leopold bloom the hero Odysseus, but I think also it makes the reader of the book, a kind of hero, on a voyage like the voyage of Odysseus through this complex textual adventure. Steve Conner, Stephen Conner, let's go into this very wide range of styles in the novel. Can you give a list of some idea of the range, briskly, and then pick out one bit that you?

you think exemplifies it at this most... This is not apparent really for the first six or so episodes. Not really. I mean, you could be reading realistic fiction. There are moves in and out of the internal and the external. In Bloom's first appearance, we have a sentence that goes jellied, warm sunlight filled his kitchen. But that's marvellous.

I mean, in a sense of old 19th century prose that it's most brilliant. But we move into Bloom's mind instantly, just made you feel a bit peckish. And then so, but that's not very, very surprising. Things really start, as we currently say, to kick off. In episode, I think it's seven, which is set in the news. You're currently say kick off to it. This is the news calling.

We're just kicking off once. Yes. Well, this is very joycian, because the joycean principle that we see emerged from about chapter seven onwards is that the context of any scene starts to have a voice in it. In other words, the chapter called the E-Less chapter set in the newspaper office, and it's set out like a newspaper with headlines. Thereafter, the styles of the chapter increasingly take on the character, not of the individual characters who feature in them necessarily,

but of Joyce's understanding of the entire context. So the Circe episode is written as a play. It's almost as long as a novel itself as about 150 pages in most editions. That's set out as a play precisely because it seems as though everything in the brothel where it's said. Everything is speaking.

Everything is, as it were, trying to muscle in on the action. It's as though Joyce wants to dramatize or display for us his own removal or withdrawal. So the book itself is somehow knitting itself or speaking itself together. Would you like to develop that, Joey? Well, there are different styles attached to different, as it were.

In some instances, the Homeric characters, so Cyclops, the one-eyed giant, is narrated by a single narrator, interrupted by gigantic prose bits. It's also the case, though, that for the first half of the novel, what I was talking about earlier in relation to portrait of the artist, is developed here so that what Stephen was describing as the interior bits, as what Joyce calls interior monologue. That means first person, present tense,

without any narratorial, external narratorial direction saying Bloom thought, Stephen thought, and so on. Lots of half sentences and stops and starts and one-word sentences. Absolutely, because we don't think, usually in complete sentences. We catch snippets of perception. We know we don't think in complete sentences. So that makes it difficult at times. Once you recognize that you're getting Bloom,

unmediated by an external numerator, then that becomes easy to develop. And it goes back to what I was saying earlier about style as connected to the character. So that there are various styles in the book, and halfway through, in fact, that device of interior monologue stops and the explosion of styles,

each of which is describing not merely a series of events, but is commenting on, you thought that was the way to tell a story? Well, here's a very different way. And think about the implications of this different mode of telling. Is it a sensible question?

If it isn't, let's get on with it. To ask if his determination, obsession, joy in many styles and doing the newspaper and doing the play and doing the sights and so and so forth and doing these long internal monologues, one of the problems which you can't... The sense of validity and veracity can go quite quickly

and a creeping slight bemusement can set in. It's a sense in which that is both the strength and a point of criticism about the novel. Well, it's certainly one of the points at which all of one students begin to say, what on earth is this about? How can I figure out what's really going on with Stephen and Bloom, for example?

Orkson of the Sun, which gives you the whole history of English prose style, most people come to a screeching hot there and think, oh my God, what's going on? So there can be that kind of frustration. But we go back to what Richard was saying, and Steve, both, that part of the adventure of this book,

and one of the reasons it is often cited as the great work of modernism, is that the adventure isn't just the human adventure, a very real adventure between Stephen and Bloom and in the end, Molle, but is that adventure of language. Joyce famously said, I've discovered I can do anything I want with language. And if you can't be delighted, at what language can do, then Ulysses may not be the book for you.

At least that second half of it. Well, there's a kaleidoscope of styles, but it's underpinned by this kind of bedding of actuality. I mean, this is a realistic book, ultimately. And I mean, the principle of what sometimes nowadays call conciliants often applies. That's to say you get the same thing seen from two different points of view. Sometimes something, you know, a cloud covers the sun.

and makes both Stephen and Bloom at different times in different chapters a little gloomy for a moment. So you get lots of moments of convergence or triangulation like that that happened, that, you know, that hold it all together. Richard Brown, can we return to the three main characters just for a moment, just to sort of, as it were, catch up? You have Leopold, who's Jewish-Irish, Irish. you have Stephen who's scholar

scholar as it were do you say failed Catholic or whatever it is I mean he never leaves him he never leaves it and then you have mollick can you just as it were tick those boxes again well as Steve just said

of course one of the exciting things about Ulysses is the way which it does give us these three quite distinct perspectives Bloom walking around the Dublin streets of the day with the experiences and the anxieties and anticipations.

And very accurate Dublin streets they are, aren't they? All very real Dublin streets. In fact, if you go to Dublin now you can see plaques embedded in the pavement at the place. Every paving stone is plaque. Almost. And it is, of course, absolutely fascinating the way in which

Bloom's experience of the city and that of the other characters, but particularly Bloom, unpacks an idea of a particular city at a particular time. It's another of the great strengths of the book. But Bloom, in his daily life, with his, if you like, fatherly, middle-aged man, kind of anxieties and responsibilities, the concerns that he feels during the course of the day, his weaknesses, but also the good things that he does.

Stephen, on the other hand, much darker in his mood in a way. A 22, 23-year-old, intellectual, as you say, his mum's, died recently, so he's in mourning, melancholic about that. Incredibly intellectually ambitious. We were talking about the styles earlier. I sometimes say to my students, what do you think about when you walk along the beach? And what Stephen thinks about when he walks along the beach

begins with this marvellous bit of intellectual prose, ineluctible modality of the visible. We'll leave that with the listener, and there's Molly. And of course there's Molly. and Joey was saying about the relationship between style and character in the book. We've got to get Molly on the map as soon as we can. Right. So Molly, in her 30s, married woman in her 30s,

with a daughter. She doesn't think so much about her daughter. But she's a singer. She's going to give a concert that afternoon. And she's going to have an affair. And she's going to talk about the affair and the massive end of the book, which a lot of people bought it for in the first instance. And at the end, we feel that, and you see, enormous non-stop, non-stop passage is one of the great set pieces of the book.

I think it's a great place to start the book. If you're a reader and you're not sure where to begin the book, then... Start at the end. There's a lovely picture of Marilyn Monroe in a playground in Long Island reading the end of Ulysses. So, yes, started at the end. And as you say, she's engaged in an activity which was unspoken, I think, in those terms in the literature of the time and which we now recognise, of course, as one of Joyce's

courageous triumph to be able to talk about. Stephen Conner, the novel, let's get to the reception of the novel and cause a scandal when it was published. What about it was thought shocking by that time Joyce has linked up with various people who are going to help him. Quite a few women are going to help him, women who have access to publishing, publishing, women who have money,

women who look after him onto that market as it were publishing a book. He's also encountered Ezra Pound, who is a great Elmila Favre of T.S. Eliot, so he's in the middle of an intensely erudite, very significant, although tiny, literary circle. So what caused the scandal? He seemed to be quite protected. In part, the scandal, I think, was just that Joyce let everything in. Not, I think, in any necessarily shocking way.

you know, there's a scene early on in the book that even Ezra Pound thought went too far where Bloom goes outside to the outdoor lavatory and sits there and sits on the Jakes and does his business while reading the most ordinary action, you know, that had never been described in literature before, though every reader of literature was doing it, you know,

once a day if they're lucky. And probably, you know, Joyce is making you think about reading Ulysses under those circumstances. So it's partly that kind of frankness. Lots of people when Ulysses came out in Dublin, they would go around saying, are you in it? Are you in it? Because there was something, I think,

disturbing, if not exactly offensive, although some publishers, early publishers of Joyce's work, were worried about it, about simply naming things, simply having living persons in your novel. I think it's still a ticklish area, actually. So there is that.

And I think there's also, it's some curious mixture of that combined with the challenge of the ways of writing. And also I think lots of early readers thought that this was a despairing vision of chaos and disintegration. They thought that there was nothing holding this world together. An extraordinary misreading, as it now seems to us. But it was back to the streaky bacon, wasn't of chaucer high and low, going hard for it.

It was saturated in parts by this sort of determined, in your face, sexuality, which I might have been seated. Seated in Nora. What do you think, Jerry Johnson, was the thing, you've talked to in your notes where I've read about it being funny, and can you just give listeners a notion of that element in the book? Well, it is very funny. It's attached again and again to the quirky things of human behavior.

So I think the funny, scene is also one of the most serious political scenes, which is the Cyclops episode, in which the, he's called the citizen, is attacking Bloom, he's attacking him for being Jewish, and Bloom simply comes back and says, you know, your God was a Jew, and his father was a Jew, hang on there, I'll bloody crucify anyone for calling, you know, and so on. So very irreverent in that sense, but Bloom comes back and insists, you know, force is not the answer, love is the answer, whole time. You get this wonderful running, abusive

patter of the xenophobic Irishman who will have everything his own way. So, humor is often attached to a revelation of politics and character and so on. But it is also very funny about sex. Bloom

perpetually over the course of the day every time he sees a woman, wants to follow her, hoping that the skirts will be lifted just a little higher. There's a woman who gets on the tram and he's waiting. He's waiting for the flash of stocking and then a tram comes in between and he misses the sight and it's gone

these kinds of wonderful little... And of course it's the episode on the beach which is very much to do with transparent stockings. It's the episode on the beach in which he's looking at Gertie McDowell and he masturbates. That's the episode that got him into trouble when the book was being published serially and caused the cessation of publication. And we're on our

beginnings or in endings because we read the wonderful council of the man in New York that said, no, this is. Can we just talk in the minutes we have left about the word modernism? And what, I know, but they are. This is a television program. It's not a quarter of a million.

It's a radio program, come to think of it. Obviously, I'm very excited having read Ulysses in a rush. What do you three mean by modernism and how did this, as it seems, be one of the works define modernism. Start with you. Do I get that first? You get that first. Thanks, Melvin.

Well, it's certainly modernism is certainly about complicating ideas of form. So the fact that you raise the question about Ulysses exciting us in that way, is absolutely right. Ulysses is a book about form. It's a book where the content and the form jostled

together in important ways. But it's not just that. I think we've been talking about its sexual outrageousness and its humor. And of course, those are also important aspects of modernity. the relationship to the city, the understanding of a world of consumerism, shopping, advertising, domestic life as it's made up in the early 20th century.

All of these things are absolutely vital to Joyce's modernism. But then ask Orwell, you know, he said about Ulysses, that Joyce discovered the America that was under everybody's nose of everyday life. That's a key part of it too. Joyce had a word for it. Chaosmos, he invented this word. So the modern is chaos. It's things that don't add up. Wasn't the chaos before the modern?

Well, there was always chaos before the one. There were always things that couldn't be assimilated. But somehow those things seemed to everybody to be pressing in on you. Joyce said, how could you form a cosmos that would allow for that complexity rather than filtering it out? And for these writers, whether we're talking about Joyce or Wolf in particular, the form of the novel had to reflect the individual subjective experience of that chaos. Can you just say a bit more about that, Jerry?

Certainly. If we think about the great realist novels of the 19th century, think about George O'Leod. You have a third-person narrator who interprets the world without any problem. It may be a complicated world, it may be a difficult world for Dorothea, it may be a difficult world later for Gwendolyn and so on. But that narrator has no problem sorting it out. For Wolf, for Joyce, reality is something to be read, to be interpreted, and to be presented by the novelist as filtered through those kinds of different perspectives. Back to what Stephen was saying earlier about conciliation or the different perspectives that are given.

So the form of the novel is having to reflect that individual experience of trying to apprehend this chaos. Did this have a great influence? Has this had a great influence, Stephen? Well, I think Ulysses is a kind of pheasaurus of possibilities still. I don't think there is any novel that has come close to doing all of the things that Ulysses does all at once. But I think a novelist like Saman Roshty in Midnight's Children, Thomas Pynchon in a Gravity's Rainbow, most recently David Foster Wallace in his wonderful infinite jest, have something of that ambition and inclusiveness and that attempt to make language come alive on a vast, precisely epic scale.

Anything to that? Well, I think there's a huge range of influence that has to be taken into consideration from Joyce's contemporaries, Virginia Woolf, Elliot, Samuel Beckett. Yes, I hadn't realised how much energy was influenced by Joyce. It was sort of as if Joyce had permitted him, influenced by him, as if Joyce had permitted him,

one of the sentences, I can't remember it now, as if Joyce had given him permission to be modern. That's right. Yes, so, and as, as, as Steve has said, if you think about what's exciting in post-modernity or in contemporary writing, then that traces back to Joyce. Well, I'm sorry we have to come to an end very, but we haven't come to an end. It's going to be over Radio 4, and it's in bookshops.

We don't sell anything on this very much first time we've ever done it. Anyway, never mind. Thank you, Richard Brown, Steve, Connor, Jerry Johnson. Next week, Annie Besson, thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to this Radio 4 podcast. If you've enjoyed it, you might like to try others like it, such as Start the Week or Thinking Aloud, which are both available from the Radio 4 website.