About this title: The novel takes place in the course of one day (June 16, 1904) in the life of the city of Dublin, and follows the course of several interacting characters who embody a series of parallels to Homer's epic. The three main characters are Leopold Bloom, his faithless wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus of PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. The novel is a vivid picture of estrangement, alienation, and the disintegration of a society. Joyce uses the capaciousness of the novel as a vehicle for his ideas about art, literature, Ireland, and the nature of heroism, among other things, and its stream-of ...
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Description: Good. 2002-Paperback----Used-Good-Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available. read more
Edition: Reprint.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: The Modern Library/Random House, New York
Date Published: 1961
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Signed by previous owner. Clean tight binding, the book and dust jacket are in very good condition. 783 p. This edition has torquoise cloth covering with gilt publisher's logo on front. gilt title & publishers logo with royal blue accents on binding. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Fair. 0679600116 NOTE PLEASE READ BEFORE PURCHASE! ! NOTE! Has marks in the margins, notes, Different printing hardcover-earlier modern library printing, same content. No writing or highlighting in the text. But different cover. read more
"Whenever I dip into this I always wonder why I'm not reading it all the time. Shakespeare is the only other writer who can make me feel that way. My first reading was probably the headiest literary experience of my life. The crotchety professor of a freshman year Russian Lit survey course followed his comparison of the narrator of Babel's Red Cavalry to Leopold Bloom with a taunt that went something like: "but who of you know who Leopold Bloom is?" So challenged, I started out, on a reading that would take about 3 months, with Nabokov's lecture and Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (and later, Gifford's "Annotations to Ulysses") along for help. I will always associate the first three episodes with the hum of dorm basement driers (come to think of it, I associate 'The Master and Margarita' and 'The Defense' with that laundry room in which I first read them). Senior year I devoted two months of luxurious attention to it in class whose syllabus also included 'Lolita' and 'Herzog,' thus making it the most enjoyable fiction class conceivable. I go back it occasionally, to re-read my favorite episodes ("Hades," "The Wandering Rocks" and "Nausicaa"), but I need to do it all again.
Some things I cherish:
--Mrs. Daedalus's "tasselled danccards, powdered with musk."
--"A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him moved slowly frogwise his green legs in the deep jelly of the water."
--Stephen's and Dilly's exchange at the bookcarts.
--Bloom's thoughts during Digman's funeral.
--The Man in The Macintosh.
--The part in Nighttown when the Nymph whose image Bloom had torn from a picture magazine comes alive thanks him for rescuing her from the vile company of advertisements and cheap stories."
"You can always tell a book will be timeless when it's got a story all of its own:
Joyce first tried shopping the colossal Ulysses manuscript around Paris in 1920, but was turned down by nearly everybody. Then 1922 came along and an adventurous young entrepreneur named Sylvia Beach--who owned a little bookshop called Shakespeare and Co., which attracted the likes of young Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and even our anti-Semitic poet-at-large, Ezra Pound--managed to have it published by taking the manuscript to some printers in Dijon, "the capital of the French printing press," according to Joyce.
The book was exported to Britain and the U.S., but was seized by customs at New York and Folkestone. Thence all copies were literally burned due to its ostensible obscenity--after all, when "Part 11" of the novel was published in the Little Review in 1920, two writers were prosecuted and even fingerprinted just for writing favorable reviews of the excerpt. From that point on, Ulysses was considered obscene and therefore unfit for American readers.
It wasn't until 1933, when the Honorable John M. Woolsey, a U.S. District Judge, managed to pick up a copy of Ulysses and actually read it (something the American censors before him had failed to do--they were only going on hear-say), that the ban was officially overturned and Joyce's masterpiece was allowed to be published in the U.S.
This actually plays a big part in the history of U.S. law since it was the first "liberalization" of the censorship law. Were it not for Judge Woolsey's decision, we might not have Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer or Tropic of Capricorn (and we would therefore also not have that great episode of Seinfeld, "The Library"), or much of anything from D.H. Lawrence.
And that's just the story of the novel's publishing.
Perhaps the reason censors have always had such a hard time with Ulysses is the fact that it is a no-holds-barred depiction of life, complete with hunger (both stomached and sexual), eating, the sly case of masturbation, reading and thinking whilst defecating, being jealous of just about everybody, the plethora of feelings on both sides of an extramarital affair, an extramarital affair, and--perhaps most damning--the depiction of how and why we alienate one another.
There is young Stephen Dedalus, the hero from A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and the seed from Stephen Hero, who is gloomy, angry with the British rule of his country, who feels both indifference and hate for himself at the death of his mother (who supposedly died after he refused to kneel and pray by her bedside), who is alienated by his boisterous and spend-thrift father (and who is therefore looking for a worthy father-figure) and also his jovial but uber-aggressive friend and roommate, Malachi "Buck" Mulligan, and by just about everyone else he comes in contact with. He spends a lot of his time in the novel thinking about his existence, existence in general, his family, his attempts to be a poet, and the servile state of Ireland. Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique was definitely perfected by the time he got to writing Stephen's part of the novel.
Then there is the ostensible hero of the novel, Leopold Bloom, the son of a deceased but still guilt-inducing Jewish father, the husband to a beautiful--and apparently oversexed (and not by him)--wife, and the father to a young but distant daughter and a dead son, who died while still a young boy. At the point of the novel (which takes place on one day, 16 June 1904), Bloom is no longer a Jew, having converted to Catholicism in order to marry his wife, Molly. His marriage is in fact something of a joke about Dublin since he is so quiet, neat, mild-mannered and a little effeminate and she is a social and probably sexually-straying singer who is popular with all sorts of men (and women, it seems) throughout Ireland. But his Jewish ancestry (in an excruciatingly anti-Semitic country) and laughable marriage are just the start of Bloom's alienation: he always seems to be the odd-man-out, and his peers make no efforts to prevent this. Perhaps this is why, when seeing how negligent and insensitive young Stephen's father is, that he decides to step in and look after the young man for a while (which nicely fulfills one of Stephen's needs, too). As he goes about Dublin that day, thinking about life, having an affair of his own (albeit literarily--he only conducts the affair through letters, and freaks out when his recipient suggests a meeting; and the nom-de-plum for our quiet, mild-mannered, and slightly effeminate hero? Henry Flower), he shows us who and what we humans really are--how we think about things, how we do things, and why. I think this is what most gets under the skin of those who have problems with this novel.
The novel takes its title from Homer's ancient epic hero, who is by all means forward, aggressive, and uber-masculine--all the things that Leopold Bloom--aka Henry Flower--is not. And yet, while Bloom lacks the personality of Ulysses--aka Odysseus--he most definitely shares the epic hero's status as an "everyman." Ulysses/Odysseus is everything men aspire to be; Leopold Bloom/Henry Flower is everything we actually are, whether we'd like to believe it or not.
And women? How do they fit into Ulysses? On the one hand, you could just say that they are depicted negatively, as many have before, since the main female character conducts an extramarital affair behind her husband's back and the majority of other women in the novel are badgering old shrews. But Joyce does something at the end of his masterpiece that frankly throws a monkey wrench into the works of that line of thinking: he concludes the novel with a 45-page stream-of-conscious rant conducted not by Bloom or even Stephen but Molly, Bloom's supposedly unfaithful wife. In this extremely dense section of the novel (there is absolutely no expository narrative here telling us what is going on outside Molly's head--we only get her reactions), we come to understand that Molly sought out her affair only because she suspected her husband of having an affair first, or at least of falling out of love with her (the real reason, we learn from Bloom, is his fear of making--and losing--another child like his son, Rudy). We also see how vulnerable she is, how much she hates having to deal with the afore-mentioned old shrews and all of the drooling, salacious men who can't look her in the face because they're too busy looking about a foot south. And as Molly's thoughts come to their climax--just as she's falling asleep--she remembers how and why she fell in love with Leopold, how he proposed, and how sensitive and romantic he is and always has been.
So in a sense, by giving us the varying perspectives of young Stephen, middle-aged Bloom, and on-the-cusp-of-middle-aged Molly, Joyce gives us not so much a depiction of just an "everyman," but of an "everyhuman." We see the inner-workings of our minds and the reasons for our motives.
Honestly--what more could we ever possibly ask from a novel?"
"I Can't do it, It fell in my toilet and didn't dry well, and I'm accepting it as an act of god. I decided against burning it, and just threw it out. Yes, I am a horrible person."
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