Paris publisher Sylvia Beach crowed about her proposal to commit a novel to print, which she considered a tour de force, springtime of 1921; it would be numbered as a classic of English letters.
Beach went on to predict that the novel would make her bookshop celebrated. James Joyce’s hailed and demanding novel took seven years to write across three cities while portraying happenings of a solitary day in Dublin.
Beach’s prediction did not go in vain, as the novel very much did become celebrated.
The first edition of Ulysses was published a hundred years ago on February 2, 1922, coinciding with the writer’s 40th birthday.
It narrates the tales of a troika of main characters – Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his spouse, Molly. Though dramatically impenetrable at various places, the book is now renowned as one of the most authoritative works ever.
However, the route to it eventually seeing the light of day was not a straightforward one. The book fuelled a cause célèbre and was met with loathing by a lot of people – including readers and literary critics.
Virginia Woolf dismissed the novel as “tosh”.
The American journal ‘Little Review’ published portions of the novel in 1920, leading to an immorality lawsuit, which ended with the editors being penalized and decreed to stop future editions. The novel was also condemned in the United Kingdom.
The bookseller Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare and Company in Paris, resolved to have the novel printed in a single volume, the effort being successful, partially financed by her own savings upon the assurances of donors.
She literally had to save down to the last cent to remunerate the novel’s printers. This act made her something of a literary champion among the bohemian crowd.
The writer and his publisher had their maiden encounter a couple of years ago, shortly after the former had shifted to the French capital.
Joyce had exiled himself from his beloved city since long, preferring to reside in Trieste, Zurich and Paris.
The publisher was swayed by the sheer power of the encounter with her author.
They began well but as a result of contention over copyright, their association became embittered and the publisher eventually relinquished the book’s copyright.
After the US prohibition on the novel was rescinded in 1933, Ulysses was published a year later by Random House.
This promoted the novel among a larger readership, but it would still take two decades for the literary community to initiate “owning” Joyce as one of their own.
Though Joyce was annoyed by the treatment his masterpiece had been subjected to, he stuck to his guns.
Joyce could not stomach making the smallest change in the text to be palatable to the reading public, since he revelled in the controversy Ulysses had created.
Interestingly despite being embargoed on both sides of the Atlantic, the novel was never officially banned in Joyce’s own homeland.
The Irish government thought that the novel would have such a slim audience that there would be no requirement to cease its publication.
Though acclaimed as a masterpiece in the latter half of the last century, Joyce’s émigré perspective into his native country in the novel was created serious bitterness as to how come the writer had been bold enough to critique circumstances in Ireland circa 1922, the peculiar shape of Irish nationalism at that point, as well as the isolated government that had been established and clerical ascendancy over it, while settled abroad.
Joyce had a tricky association with his native land; one could also in fact state that the opposite was the case.
He went abroad in his early 20s in 1904, and only returned four times, choosing not to do so after 1912.
Despite this, his books are inseparable from Ireland and his beloved city Dublin.
The writer wanted to transform his native country by transforming Irish conception of its own identity.
He could only perform this feat while being safely distant from Ireland.
But not everyone questioned Joyce’s loyalty to his Irish roots.
An Irish minister even met Joyce in Paris and suggested his nomination for the Nobel Literature Prize.
However, the antagonism against Joyce carried on till his passing away in 1941, so much so that there was no formal Irish delegation present at his last rites.
Recognition for one of Ireland’s proudest sons has been slow in coming.
At the moment, on the occasion of the publication centenary of Joyce’s most well-known work, the writer is championed both within Ireland and around the world.
The novel virtually has a fad following, in addition to notoriety for being a daring and often dense perusal.
However, despite the slow recognition for Joyce and Ulysses, both have unfortunately been victimized by consumerism, thus deleting and whitewashing the subversive undertones in what Joyce wrote about Ireland.
Ulysses was groundbreaking for its time. Thus the novel should not be seen as a mirror into an enchanted Dublin of yore here everything was all hunky-dory.
In fact, Joyce portrays a really contrary and very wretched and parochial Dublin.
Ulysses is a testament to the human comedy. It has outlived banning, becoming a cause célèbre and lawsuits, as well as being considered sacrilegious, but it is still an innovative classic: relentlessly creative, chatty, comic, sad, obnoxious, musical and in the final analysis, prophetic. It verifies Joyce’s faith that literature ‘is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man’.
So on the 140th birthday of James Joyce and the 100th anniversary of Ulysses the only advice one can give the reader is to be bold: read, enter, admire, learn and enjoy. In short, ReJoyce!
