Book: Ulysses is 100 Years Old

James Joyce's Ulysses turned 100 yesterday. That is a long time to be a scary book.

The BBC put up Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece:

While Joyce was deeply frustrated by the reception Ulysses had received, he was equally unrelenting, adds Prof McCourt.

"He wouldn't change a comma to make it more acceptable to whatever public taste deemed was OK.

"He saw himself becoming a cause celebre and played it for all it was worth."

The BBC also provided Tips for reading (or attempting to read) Ulysses.

Salon published Heeding the lessons of James Joyce's "Ulysses," a century later:

"To come to this conclusion Joyce had to see joined what others had held separate: the point of view that life is unspeakable and to be exposed, and the point of view that it is ineffable and to be distilled," Ellman continued. "Nature may be a horrible document, or a secret revelation; all may be resolvable into brute body, or into mind and mental components. Joyce lived between the antipodes and above them: his brutes show a marvelous capacity for brooding, his pure minds find bodies remorselessly stuck to them. To read Joyce is to see reality rendered without the simplification of conventional divisions."

Quillette.com has A World of Waste, Stripped of Transcendence: James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ at 100 :

This purification of the dialect is the very thing that Stephen sets out to do at the end of Portrait: “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Bloom also longs for this same distillation. Through both of them, we see that the wandering hero, the wandering Jew, the poet, the waste manager, and the purifier are all the same thing. Purification of dialect is what novels and poetry do. Great works manage to achieve this, and in doing so, they climb above the waste of history and into posterity. The avant-garde arose partly against the insidious middlebrowing of all culture. It was a violent reaction to kitsch, to a world of junk. Many artists attempted to discard this. Joyce embraced it, he swallowed it all, on a scale that only the culture itself can. Ulysses is a realization of Mallarmé’s remark that everything in the world exists to end up in a book. For that reason alone, it is the most important novel of the modern era.

 LitHub collects various pieces under Ulysses Turns 100!

On the Los Angele Review of Books I found Deadline “Ulysses" which delves more into the actual writing of yhe novel:

...If, as we approach the centenary of Ulysses’s publication, we topple this myth of a necessary armature that gives a coherent structure to the seeming linguistic chaos on the page, then we’re forced to consider other common assumptions about Joyce’s mastery of his materials. This route of inquiry leads to bigger quandaries, such as: What is the nature of a finished work of art? And when does a writer knows that a book is complete? The story of how Joyce finished Ulysses so he could have a printed copy in hand on his 40th birthday provides some possible answers.

***

...This note hints at the eventual circularity of the novel — Molly Bloom is analogous to both Calypso and Penelope — but Joyce didn’t know what book he was writing until much later in Ulysses’s composition process than we might suppose, indicating that his development of the novel was primarily one of discovery rather than a preplanned undertaking.

***

Joyce’s process was accretive, and he radically transformed Ulysses in 1921, while the manuscript was in proofs. During this late stage of production, he added one-third of the novel’s text in the margins of the typeset pages. But Joyce wasn’t adding text for the sake of length or difficulty, though these undeniably are effects of the additions; rather, fundamental characteristics of the novel’s episodes were bolstered at this stage. Joyce was no longer subject to deadlines and restrictions associated with serial publication.

***

...Joyce initially follows his standard drafting practice of writing on the right-hand pages of the notebook while leaving the left-hand pages empty for further insertions and elaborations. This practice lasts a single page before he begins to fill the left-hand pages with blocks of text and further insertions.

I do not know about you but it is reassuring to know that Joyce did not create his novel out of whole cloth. He seems more human.

I found Joyce when I was a teenager. I thought once upon a time I would take a year off between high school and college to roam about and read Ulysses. I did neither. Not until prison did I take the time. I thought it a great resd, not at all terrifying, but also certain it needs re-reading. Give it a try.

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