Ulysses Unbound

Why does a book so bad it "defecates on your bed" still have so many admirers?

Tim Cavanaugh from the July 2004 issue

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"The paradox is that the book is a giant fart joke," says Diana Wynne, producer of Joyce to the World (ill-advised puns are an unavoidable fact of Joyce fandom), a new documentary about Bloomsday celebrations in Kobe, San Diego, Melbourne, Trieste, Toronto, and several score other cities. "There's this huge vocabulary and complex technique, references to English literature and all kinds of obscure learning. But at the story level there's a lot of low humor, base jokes, and a celebration of ordinary people."

Ordinary people are at the heart of the film Wynne and partner Fritzi Horstman have made. If the amateur criticism, re-enactments, and allusions share anything, it's an inclination to participate in a culture, even if you haven't done the reading. "There's a strange phenomenon," says Robert Spoo, a Tulsa-based Joyce scholar turned intellectual property lawyer. "People will tell you out of one side of their mouths, 'I will never read this book; it's the hardest book in the world.' And then out of the other side they'll say, 'I'm on my way to this Ulysses reading; do you want to come?' It has crossed over in a way that other modernist work hasn't crossed over."

Which is not the same as saying the book's appeal has no relation to academia; sharp-eyed readers will note how many of the sources for this story are college professors. Kevin Dettmar, professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and editor of the book Marketing Modernism, says one of Joyce's cleverest career moves was recognizing the long-term importance of getting your work into the university system. Ironically, though, one of the first negative critiques of Ulysses was not that it was too highbrow but that it was not highbrow enough. The reliably stuffy Virginia Woolf called it the "illiterate, underbred book...of a self taught working man."

The comparison with Woolf (who paid Joyce the more sincere tribute of attempting to ape his technical innovations) is interesting. Eighty years later, the dichotomy between the two remains remarkably intact. Woolf and her Bloomsbury cohorts remain favorites of what remains of the cultural hierarchy: fodder for mid-list novels, frequent subjects of literary histories, an easy Oscar ticket for Nicole Kidman, and so on.

The Joyce industry, by comparison, continues to scrape by. Sean Walsh's no-budget Bloom is playing in Ireland and at some of the Bloomsday events in the U.S. but has no American distributor*; Ulysses' entombment atop so many best-of lists is the sort of tribute that ensures nobody will ever have to read it or think about it again; even the Republic of Ireland has only recently begun to embrace Joyce, after decades of scrupulous neglect, and largely as a means of capitalizing on Bloomsday tourism. The book's academic reputation waxes and (at the present time) wanes, but its more durable appeal among fans is largely a DIY phenomenon. "The fan phenomenon has become a form of carnival," says Michael Groden, a professor of English literature at the University of Western Ontario. "It's a sign of how far the book has gotten into the culture."

Which raises an interesting question: Does high literary reputation put off more readers than it attracts? "The book's academic standing does cut both ways," says Dettmar. "In class, the one thing people know about Ulysses is that it's incredibly difficult. There's a compelling case to be made that that's Joyce's fault, that he set it up that way. But that's also part of the continuing appeal."

It also gives an odd power to nonacademic readers. Sean Latham, editor of the James Joyce Quarterly and author of Am I a Snob?, a study of modernism's exclusivity, notes that difficult texts are by their nature participatory, inviting the reader to complete the book's meaning with his or her own input. "Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in some ways deny snobbery, because nobody reading them has a privileged reading. That's why amateurs are attracted to these works."

On the other hand, people may just like dressing up in costumes and acting out funny scenes from a comical book -- an attraction even scholars admit to in their less guarded moments. "Nobody ever talks about this," says Latham, "but one of the fixtures at Joyce conferences is where people gather around the piano and sing songs from Ulysses. There's also a tradition of playing Ulysses charades and acting out scenes from the book." Wake Forest's Klein concurs: "Some of the people at these conferences you'd say look more like Gilbert and Sullivan fans than Joyce scholars."

While it's pretty much impossible to plan fun, an appeal to the book's more entertaining aspects is a shrewd promotional move. Walsh gave his film a title that specifically avoids the book's literary pedigree because, he said, "if you say [Ulysses], people will think they need a degree in English to watch this film." One of the least noted aspects of Ulysses is that it contains jokes on nearly every page. The climactic "Nighttown" chapter puts poor Bloom through a hallucinatory ordeal in Dublin's red-light district, including a mock trial for assorted sexual peccadilloes, a mayoral coronation, and an elaborate incident in which he is humiliated and sex-changed by a mustachioed madam. While this stuff has been studied by Freudians, gender theorists, and others, it's also pretty damned funny.

At the moment, the role of lead Ulysses killjoy is being played by Joyce's last living heir, the issueless, irritable grandson Stephen James Joyce. Thanks to European Union copyright extensions, Stephen Joyce regained control of the author's published works in the mid-1990s. Since then, he has alienated most of his grandfather's fans by charging exorbitant rates to anthologists and artists, putting the kibosh on a host of adaptations he considered inappropriate (including Groden's "Digital Ulysses" annotation project), and reportedly stating that Ulysses is meant to be read, not performed or adapted to other media. (The copyright situation is considerably more nebulous in the U.S. While Random House operates on the premise that Ulysses remains under American copyright, attorney Spoo argues that because of its tangled publishing history, which includes having been banned as obscene in every English-speaking country for its first 12 years in print, the book is now in the public domain. The public domain reprint house Dover Publications has come out with a facsimile version of the original 1922 Paris edition -- the most enjoyable edition in terms of layout and design.)

The Joyce estate's protectionist approach shows little understanding of how contingent literary reputation can be. John Donne and Dante were both at various times forgotten by literary history and only came back thanks to various champions. Fifty or even 20 years ago it would have seemed crazy to predict that Jane Austen would one day loom larger than the Romantic poets who were her contemporaries -- or that Colin Firth's hunky turn as Mr. Darcy in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice would play at least some part in that reversal. To believe that even a great work of literature can survive through only one distribution channel is nutty. "Ulysses was a gamble that Joyce could bridge high and low culture," says Latham. "It's a gamble that initially failed, but you'd have to say these Bloomsday fans are the return....These people who develop such a passion for the book are what we should all hope for as scholars, even if they're channeling their passion in ways that wouldn't fit with scholarly decorum."

And even if all their ancillary products are not equal. The cultural universe is certainly big enough to contain Donal Donnelly's agile, hilarious book-on-tape reading of the unabridged Ulysses, Peter Costello's 197-page biography The Life of Leopold Bloom, the dance hit "Yes" (in which Dutch chanteuse Amber does Molly Bloom's soliloquy over a driving beat), and anything else the book's oddball fans can dream up. I have reservations about Walsh's movie -- Strick's underrated 1967 version, I think, gets a better flavor of the book -- and I avoid Bloomsday festivities like the plague.

But I salute a fellow fan. May Walsh be the first term in a new series of fan/entrepreneurs, and may a thousand Blooms flower.

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* Since this article was published, Walsh has secured distribution for Bloom, which will be handled by Paragon Film Group and CineMuse (theatrical) and MTI Video (DVD).