24 The New York Review
Dubliners
Anne Enright
The centennial of Ulysses is in 2022,
and coming back to the book after a
gap of some years I remember the way
it makes me fall asleep somewhere in
the middle of Stephen’s walk across
Sandymount Strand. The first two ep-
isodes—all fine. Surprisingly easy.
What’s all the fuss about? Then the
book unlooses itself entirely in the
mind of Dedalus and starts to dream:
“He comes, pale vampire, through
storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying
the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.”
Hang on. Did Stephen actually visit
his aunt’s house, or just imagine that
he did? Is he still thinking of his moth-
er’s death? There is a dead dog on the
strand, and also a live dog called Tat-
ters, and this living dog is actually quite
funny, as he smells a rock and pisses on
it, then pisses at an “unsmelt” rock.
“The simple pleasures of the poor,” ac-
cording to Stephen, but is he also tak-
ing a leak? Or is he doing something
else now?
I have felt it before, the same swoon-
ing sense of complexity, the same de-
licious struggle not to allow my own
thoughts in. The attempt to make sense,
fill in blanks, tell the real from the
imagined, becomes tiring the way a pro-
found conversation is tiring, when the
subject is important but not clear. It is
a kind of strenuous dreaming, very like
writing fiction. Joyce has been in our
brains, playing in the place where mean-
ing is made, and this can feel disturbing
or delightful. Something has been done
to the act of reading itself. It seems as
though he is inviting us to write his book
for him, or with him, as we go along.
On June 16, 1904, Stephen Dedalus,
a young writer, is mourning his mother
and in need of a better father. Leopold
Bloom, an adman, is avoiding his un-
faithful wife and mourning a long- dead
infant son. They meet, drink, recognize
something in each other. Apart from
this, nothing much happens. There is
a funeral. People wander around Dub-
lin while thinking. Momentous events
(Molly Bloom’s adultery, the birth of a
baby) happen elsewhere. Meanwhile,
the reader is left with men blathering
on, singing, arguing, lapsing into rev-
erie, playing with themselves. Bloom
dodges the man who is heading uptown
in order to sleep with his wife. He is
subjected to anti- Semitism in a pub. At
dusk he masturbates, covertly enough,
on a beach.
The title may be taken from Ho-
mer’s great epic, but this is all very far
from heroic. Unless the book itself is
heroic; it keeps doing monumental
things—outlandish, never previously
attempted. The English language is
regrown from its historical roots in the
basement of a maternity hospital, the
whole caboodle goes completely mad
in a brothel. Bloom dusts himself and
Stephen down, and the prose comes
strenuously together in a great rhetor-
ical to- and- fro until, at last, it runs easy
and wild in the mind of Molly Bloom.
Perhaps it has been, after all, pretty
epic, though we are still not sure what
kind of journey we’ve been on. We
stalk the references, and this can be re-
assuring. Buck Mulligan “is” a real man
named Oliver St. John Gogarty; the old
woman who comes to sell him Sandy-
cove milk “is” Athena, from Homer’s
Odyssey. Many of the answers we find
to the questions that the book provokes
don’t, in fact, answer anything much. As
Molly says, “If I asked him hed say its
from the Greek leave us as wise as we
were before.” The Homeric correspon-
dences are so constantly disappointing,
they are a joke in themselves, and yet
they tell us that we are reading a story,
so we refer to the chapters—as Joyce,
finally, did not—by the titles of epi-
sodes from the Odyssey on which they
are obliquely based. And there we are,
writing the book for him again.
People say that they finished Ulysses
or that they could not finish it, as if ei-
ther outcome were some kind of big
deal. But I have never managed to fin-
ish Ulysses, even though my eyes have
seen all the words it contains. You can
finish it all you like; the next time you
pick the book up it will be different, be-
cause you are different. Ulysses invites
meaning, then throws it back at you,
multiplied.I bought my first copy for under a fiver
in a bookshop in Kinsale when I was
fourteen. This was, of course, a pre-
cocious thing to do, but—consider—
when Joyce was fourteen, he bought
his first sexual experience on the street.
If that happened today, we would call
social services. How much did he pay,
I wonder? Bloom remembers his own
first, Bridie Kelly on Hatch Street,
who could be had “for a bare shilling
and her luckpenny.” So perhaps that’s
how much loose change Joyce had inhis young pocket as he came back from
the theater, which in those days cost
as much as fifteen shillings or as little
as sixpence. Young James Joyce may
have asked the girl or woman her name
(but I do not think he did) and she
most certainly asked him for that extra
penny. In Paris, seven years later, he
was so destitute he wrote to his mother
complaining that, after starving for
forty- two hours, he had blown her res-
cue money on a single meal costing a
shilling.
A lot of energy has been spent
talking about the rudeness of Ulysses.
Now that I know more about the world,
I sometimes follow the money instead.
The book is set on a day when Deda-
lus, who owes money everywhere, gets
paid much less than he needs in order
to make good. The men who bump into
one another around Dublin are inter-
connected by debt—they are borrow-
ing and lending, buying drinks or, like
Bloom, failing to stand their round.
Bloom’s goodwill is patient and mate-
rial, however—he is a charitable man—
and when he sees Stephen’s sister in the
street, he is shocked at the state of her:
“Good Lord, that poor child’s dress
is in flitters. Underfed she looks too.
Potatoes and marge, marge and po-
tatoes.” This girl, Dilly, begs money
from her father, Simon, for food, also
in the street—“I’m sure you have an-
other shilling”—and she spends a
penny of what he gives her on a sec-
ondhand French primer. A girl who
burns old boots to keep warm wants to
learn French. These glimpses of hun-
ger and hopefulness are so pathetic
and shaming, you might think the fart-
ing and the frottage were just there to
distract us.
It was the bodily functions that
caused all the trouble. When the book
was published it was feted, vilified,
banned. Edna O’Brien said, however,that “what hurt Joyce most was the re-
sponse of his family,” which makes you
wonder what he thought he was doing
when he wrote all that. In fact, when his
relatives described the book they might
have been describing themselves. His
blackguard of a father looked at it
through his monocle and said that his
son was “a nice sort of blackguard.”
His brother Stanislaus, who could be
cold, said the novel “lacked serenity
and warmth.” Stanislaus also disliked
the way the book wants to get bigger as
it goes on and is so reluctant to close:
“As episodes grow longer and longer
and you try to tell every damn thing
you know about anybody that appears
or anything that crops up, my patience
oozes out.”
Nora said nothing. She read only
twenty- seven pages, including, Joyce
said bitterly, the title page. Where did
she stop?
Here’s a different question. Do you
read Ulysses in an intellectual fashion?
Does the challenge make you feel bril-
liant, pedantic, a little bit pretentious—
does it make you feel, that is, like
Stephen Dedalus? Or do you go with
the flow, read feelingly, sensuously, let
this gorgeous stuff work inside you as
if you were Leopold Bloom, a man who
pictures his penis floating in the bath as
a languid floating flower?
Reading Ulysses without notes—just
as it is, just as you are—is an act of ei-
ther arrogance or submission, both of
which are available to the very young.
For me, at fourteen, it was like main-
lining language, getting high on words,
just the pleasure of them, their intrica-
cies and density. I also read it one word
at a time, which is not a bad way, child-
ish as it may seem, to read a book that
is so disruptive of the sentence.
My Dublin aunts lived, in a slightly
Edwardian atmosphere, not far from
Bloom’s fictional home, so I’d had
glimpses of this world already. Here
on the page were their violet- flavored
cachous, which Bloom called “kiss-
ing comfits.” Here were their odd-
sounding religious “sodalities,” which
had nothing to do with turf sods, or
sodomy, or solidarity. “I declare to my
antimacassar,” says one narrator, and I
knew an antimacassar was not another
kind of auntie, it was a doily that aun-
ties put on the backs of chairs. I also
knew what a bowsy was and what was
a gusset. To these pleasures of famil-
iarity were added the headier delights
of Joyce’s linguistic violations and his
refusal to tell the inside of a character’s
head from the outside world. I did not
understand Ulysses, but I certainly un-
derstood (before it sent me to sleep)
the possibility that anything at all
might come to mind, and that this was a
deeply subversive, potentially filthy and
wonderful assertion to make about the
human soul.No wonder my mother was not pleased
to find me reading it. My copy was put
in the attic to wait until I was eighteen.
At which time I climbed the ladder,
took off its dusty newspaper wrapping,
and read the thing. It was my pass into
the adult world. This was some years
before the popularity of Bloomsday,Illustration by Paolo VenturaCopyright © 2022 by Anne Enright. This
essay will appear, in somewhat different
form, as the introduction to the Vintage
Classics edition of Ulysses, published in
January 2022 and edited by Hans Walter
Gabler.