In the particular is contained the universal.” Every now and then there comes a time when the world has changed so much that art must remake itself to keep up. “I always write about Dublin,” he wrote to a friend, “because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. Joyce, who researched Dublin in great depth before writing his masterpiece, made no apology for his small city. The novelist Anne Enright argued recently that the latter has been more strongly felt by Irish women such as Edna O’Brien, Eimear McBride and Mary Costello.

Ulysses broke open the novel, and writers ever since (Irish ones in particular) have found themselves reckoning, whether they like it or not, with the anxiety of his high modernist influence – or with the permission Joyce’s heresy gave to break free of convention. Ulysses was written by an immigrant (from Ireland to mainland Europe) about the son of an Austro-Hungarian immigrant (Leopold Bloom) the deliberate variousness of Joyce’s approach can be seen as an ongoing enactment of sympathy and diversity. representation of a woman anyone has written in English”. That famous monologue, argued one critic recently, is “the funniest, most touching, arousing, and truthful. This applied to women too, though perhaps too much so, as some feminists have complained, noting that Molly Bloom, and especially her final silent stream of consciousness – “yes I said yes I will Yes” – is all body, at the expense of mind. It is famously hard to read, and many never finish it.īodies were a central part of Joyce’s argument for ordinariness as a fit subject for serious art. He “pounded language to jelly”, as the novelist Elizabeth Bowen put it, but also made it sing. In Ulysses, Joyce remade the English language, over and over again (“ The scrotumtightening sea”, for instance). It insists on the mundane – lavatory visits, smelly cheese sandwiches – while being extraordinary in its methods: different styles from different literary periods jostle for control. Ulysses, a novel of ordinary lives, is organised around Homer’s Odyssey – advertising agent Bloom being Odysseus to Molly, his Irish Penelope.

Ulysses novel