Irish Examiner view: A Century of living in the Chaosmos

On the 100th anniversary of 'Ulysses', it is interesting to still recognise how relevant the epic tale has with everyday life in modern Ireland. 

'Ulysses', by author James Joyce, turns 100 today and has a familiarity that many in modern Ireland will still recognise.

Precisely 100 years ago today James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses was published for the first time, changing literature forever. Joyce was 40 on the same day and had escaped Dublin to Europe, where he lived in Zurich, the hugely fashionable city of Trieste, and then Paris, where he completed the 730-page hardback.

Joyce’s magnum opus, a highly innovative reworking of the Homeric epic The Odyssey, is without peer in the English language and he can be said, with the playwright Samuel Beckett, another Dubliner who moved to Paris to make his cultural mark, to have altered the way in which people think about the way they think, and established new forms of communication which have maintained to this day.

If Beckett was the father of the Age of Modernism then his friend Joyce, publishing 20 years ahead of him, was
the godfather. Or, as he might have represented it, the dogfather.

If Joyce and, later, Beckett represent the zenith of Irish intellectual accomplishment it was Ulysses that opened a door for others. TS Eliot’s iconic and polymathic poem The Waste Land appeared in December of 1922, but only after it had been reduced by half to its final 434 lines with the help and collaboration of his contemporary Ezra Pound.

Pound told Eliot to drop some stanzas because “Joyce has done them better”.

Ruling 

While Joyce’s scatology, sexual references, and widespread learning was disincentive enough for the censors, the shockable and the impatient, it was after a successful 1933 legal challenge in New York against its ban that his most famous work garnered worldwide acclaim. In a landmark ruling, Judge John M. Woolsey ruled it may be many things, brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure, honest and disgusting but it was not obscene.

“I am quite aware Ulysses is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take,’’ he wrote. ‘’But whilst in many places, the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. Ulysses may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.”

And no one can read his stream-of-consciousness study of everyday life in Dublin without recognising something familiar. The chapter known as Nestor emphasises that excessive stress on money has damaged Ireland; there is Cyclops, the aggressive Citizen nationalist with his passion for Gaelic sports; there are antics in Nighttown in Circe.

Joyce had a word, another invention, which continues to describe life even in 2022. Chaosmos, a permanently shifting boundary between disorder and order and liberty and rules. Who hasn’t seen some of that in the past few years?

Ulysses is famously a book that many people say they start but never finish but Anne Enright, the first-ever laureate for Irish fiction and an assiduous observer of the human condition, dealt with this observation elegantly when she said that such comments never bothered her.

The reason being that no one is ever “finished” with Ulysses anyway. Its thoughts and inspiration will be with us always.