Ulysses

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Cover of the first edition (1922)

Ulysses (English for Odysseus , from Latin Ulixes ) is considered the most important novel by the Irish writer James Joyce and a trend-setter for the modern novel.

In Ulysses , Joyce describes in 18 episodes one day, June 16, 1904, in the life of Leopold Bloom , an advertising buyer at a Dublin daily newspaper. Based on Homer 's Odysseus' wanderings , he lets the reader participate in the (misguided) walks of his protagonist through Dublin.

Joyce not only describes the external events, but also the thoughts of his protagonists with all their associations, scraps of memory and ideas. The language is used in a disorderly and fragmentary manner, "as the person is thinking about it". This stylistic element known from authors such as Arthur Schnitzler , the so-called stream of consciousness , becomes the central design element of a novel for the first time.

The complete work was first published in 1922, in German in 1927.

emergence

The novel was originally intended to be the 13th story in the Dubliner volume , but Joyce changed his mind and began an epic adaptation in 1914.

From 1918 excerpts appeared in several parts, first in the American magazine Little Review . The United States Post Office has repeatedly confiscated the relevant issues for obscenity . In 1919 a further five sequels appeared in the English magazine Egoist by avant-gardist Harriet Weaver .

On February 2, 1922, his 40th birthday, the first edition of Ulysses appeared, in accordance with a deadline that Joyce had set himself . Working on the work had so exhausted him that he did not write for more than a year. The complete first edition was published by Sylvia Beach , owner of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company ( 12 rue de l'Odéon ) in Paris , albeit abridged by passages considered obscene at the time. The first complete German translation by Georg Goyert , authorized by Joyce, appeared in 1927. Originally, the chapters of the novel had titles referring to the Odyssey; in the version finally published, Joyce omitted them.

The manuscript of Ulysses is in the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia .

overview

In analogy to Homer's Odyssey , Ulysses can be divided into three main parts:

Each of the 18 chapters can be assigned to an episode from the Homeric epic (which itself has 24 cantos). The respective topic is not only presented in terms of content, but also through the stylistic composition.

For a whole day, Joyce lets the reader participate in the (misguided) wanderings of his protagonist Leopold Bloom through Dublin, which finally culminates at night in his encounter with the young teacher Stephen Dedalus , after both of them have met several times during the day. In this way, an intense and realistic picture of the city of Dublin on June 16, 1904 emerges:

" I want to create an image of Dublin so complete that if one day the city suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth, it could be completely rebuilt from my book. "

– James Joyce

Stephen Dedalus is also the protagonist of the first three chapters (Telemachy). This is also the main character in Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , which he began at the same time but was published as early as 1916 (see under James Joyce ). In the Telemachus character Stephen Dedalus, Joyce has portrayed himself. The first three chapters in particular contain numerous allusions to Joyce's life. Richard Ellmann goes into this in his Joyce biography.

The Gorman-Gilbert scheme

The novel as published by Joyce after many revisions has no chapter headings. However, the author has left some of his friends with schemes that assign an organ, a scientific discipline, a color, a symbol, a technique to each chapter and assigns the respective protagonists of the plot to mythical and literary people.

The best known and most extensive version of this "key to the novel" is the so-called Gorman-Gilbert scheme. Stuart Gilbert and Herbert Gorman published it in 1930 to defend the novel against accusations of obscenity.

The keywords given by James Joyce in 1921 for Gilbert in the scheme as a reading aid are usually not self-explanatory from the text of the respective chapter. Individual assignments and encryptions are still the subject of controversial discussion in literary studies.

Features of the novel

stream of consciousness

The stream of consciousness is not James Joyce's invention, but it was consistently maintained for the first time in Ulysses . In this way, Joyce achieved the closest possible proximity to the characters in his novel, even if this approach initially made access to the story difficult.

Analogous to how consciousness works , the literary “speech flow” is not linear. Words and sentences are incomplete, the subject changes mid-sentence. As sounds from the outside world enter the consciousness, so the descriptions of them snippet into the reader's mind - the associations seem to flow completely freely. The thought content of different people can merge into one another, so that only the characteristic level of language in each case allows a distinction to be made between the people. In this way, Joyce could fit as many allusions and puns into the novel as he later proudly explained:

"I put so many riddles and mysteries into it that it will keep professors arguing for centuries as to what I meant, and it is the only way to ensure immortality."

– James Joyce on his novel Ulysses

Frequently, especially in the (tenth) "Irrfelsen" chapter, the thoughts of several people who meet fleetingly overlap and overlap, street noises penetrate briefly into consciousness or stop just on the threshold . Events happening simultaneously in different Dublin locations interpenetrate, stand side by side or blur into a single impression.

language

Depending on which person Joyce synchronizes the stream of consciousness with, the text of the book adapts exactly to the person. If Stephen Dedalus, the intellectual, acts or thinks, the language level rises, Latin quotations are inserted, the sentence structure is complicated. When attention is focused on three girls, the text takes on the form of a late Victorian love smack .

In the 14th chapter ("The Cattle of the Sun God") the growth of a child in the mother's womb is linguistically symbolized by the text gradually developing from Old Saxon to modern Hiberno-English colloquialism . With the help of changing language styles, the text completes the “ ontogeny ” of the English language, so to speak, from the earliest Anglo-Saxon documents such as the Beowulf via Jean de Mandeville , Daniel Defoe , Laurence Sterne , Edward Gibbon , Thomas Carlyle , John Ruskin , Oscar Wilde to modern Irish - English colloquial language. With the birth of the child (“Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!”), street language saw the light of day (literary) at the same time.

The seventh chapter (“ Aeolus ”) is written entirely in the form of short newspaper articles.

The final chapter, Bloom's wife Molly's famous closing monologue, nicknamed " Penelope , " consists of eight long, unpunctuated sentences that allow the reader to experience Molly's stream of consciousness .

Subjective time and the phenomenon of encounter

Time doesn't just flow in a straight line at the Ulysses . At some points in the novel, the point in time can be determined objectively, for example by inserted clock chimes, church bells or the midday cannon salute .

In its course, as a continuous process, the novel period, on the other hand, is subjective and determined by individual experience. At best, a few individuals spend a period of time together. In this case, the objective duration of the collective experience becomes blurred. In extreme cases, events in the novel that are spatially far apart but occur at exactly the same time can “take place” in a sentence or text section and penetrate one another, i.e. be related to one another. Temporal congruence makes it impossible to determine the exact location.

In contrast to the linearly coherent time structure of the classic realistic novel, in Ulysses Joyce dares to adapt time to the respective individual experience of the novel characters as inner time or "lifetime". The literary means for this is the technique of the inner monologue . When individuals meet, the time levels briefly touch. The monologues of consciousness merge, only to separate again immediately afterwards. The novel succeeds in reproducing this short-term synchronization of the individual's experience of time and levels of consciousness with the utmost linguistic precision.

Narrative attitude, role of the reader

The accuracy with which the everyday encounters and the thoughts of the protagonists are reproduced does not allow for explanations by a narrator . The distance between the narrator and the reader is largely eliminated (unless the narrative technique is subject to the genre conventions , as for example in the 13th chapter Nausicaa ). The reader has to arrange the events and people himself, he "lives with" the acting people. The author leaves the reader directly to the events and the characters and (at first glance) steps back completely.

The complete abolition of any distance between the novel characters and the reader, which superficially allows the narrator and the idea of ​​an author (cf. implied author ) to disappear into nothingness, is one of the most fascinating things that Ulysses can offer its readers. But since the author, Joyce, alone determines what aspects of June 16, 1904 to bring to the attention of the reader, the reader is thus present to the utmost, in every word. For the duration of the reading, the author controls the consciousness of the reader, who has to engage with it to an extent that has never been thought possible from a literary and technical point of view.

The novel requires a new type of reader to navigate the book without the narrator's guidance and commentary. The reader "walks in the book" like a real wanderer through a real city.

At the end of the book, the reader who gets involved with Joyce has experienced a real day in Dublin in 1904, with all the impressions that a day of life brings with it. Joyce said Dublin could be completely reconstructed from his book. Nevertheless, this everyday life is only authentic insofar as it corresponds to the subjective experience of its novelist.

Even more than the book's supposedly “ pornographic ” passages (which are hardly offensive to today's readers), Joyce's radically new way of writing disturbed his readers. Understanding of James Joyce and his work developed only slowly.

related to the Odyssey

Parallel to Homer 's epic poem The Odyssey , Ulysses is divided into three major parts: Telemachy, Odyssey, and Nostos. These in turn are assigned 18 (3+12+3) episodes from the epic. Originally, the novel's chapters had headings referring to the Odyssey; in the version finally published, Joyce omitted them.

Motifs from the respective cantos of the Odyssey play into the Ulysses chapters. In Joyce, however, the Homeric parallels are often mirrored, broken and changed. An example of this is the 14th chapter "The cattle of the sun god": In the Odyssey , Odysseus and his companions end up after a long journey on an island where the cattle sacred to the sun god Helios graze. Despite all warnings, the hungry Greeks slaughter some cattle, whereupon the enraged god drives them back to sea as punishment. Joyce understands the cattle as a symbol of fertility . The chapter also deals with fertility, the difficult birth of a child. The language formally traces the birth and development of the child based on the temporal development of the English language (see above on language). The medical students who get drunk in the hospital make fun of fertility and sexuality with their dirty jokes and, in the eyes of Leopold Bloom, they sin against fertility, against life . Bloom, then, takes on the role of the sun god, who at this moment just happens to look like an Irish ad salesman of Jewish descent.

contents

telemachy

Chapter 1 - Telemachus

June 16, 1904, it's about eight o'clock in the morning. Stephen Dedalus goes to the parapet of the Martello Tower in Sandycove, about 14 km from Dublin city centre, to join his roommate Buck Mulligan. In fact, it was in this fortified tower that Joyce stayed for about a week in 1904 with medical student and amateur writer Oliver St. John Gogarty (1878–1957), who was the model for Buck Mulligan. Joyce had hopes of rekindling Gogarty's friendship in this tower, as an artist community in the spirit of a renaissance of Irish free spirit. But the first chapter bears witness to the broken relationship. Stephen responds to Mulligan's constant narcissistic taunts with an even more sullen introspection .

Martello Tower, Sandycove, now the James Joyce Tower & Museum. Reconstructed living room and bedroom

Still touched by his mother's recent death, Stephen complains to Mulligan about the nightly antics of the elitist Englishman Haines (similar to the French haine , hate ), who is also staying there at the time. The character of Haines also corresponds to a real person: the student Samuel Chevenix Trench from Oxford , who is used here as a symbol for an arrogantly friendly British colonialism - or as Joyce puts it - "horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon .' Trench was courted by Gogarty, so Joyce uses this duo as emblems of usurped Ireland: Mulligan as a traitor to Ireland and a petty rhymer, Haines as the indulgent, rich Englishman who views Ireland with the overbearing eye of a tourist.

After a meager breakfast, Haines announces that he is going to the library . Mulligan wants to take a dip in the sea first. After everyone has left the tower, they talk for a few more minutes, then Stephen sets out on his own. He realizes that he will not return to his domicile in the evening. Like Telemachos in the Odyssey, he sets off in search of – figuratively speaking – his missing father, whom he will later find in Leopold Bloom.

  • Location: Martello Tower, Dublin
  • Time: 8 a.m
  • Organ: –
  • Science: Theology
  • Colour: white, gold
  • Icon: heritage
  • Technique: narration (young)
  • Correspondence:

Chapter 2 - Nestor

In this chapter, Stephen follows his work as an assistant history teacher . There are also autobiographical backgrounds here. In 1904 Joyce was teaching at the Clifton School in Dalkey . Headmaster Francis Irwin is the character of the patriotic Mr. Deasy in Ulysses .

Stephen comes into closer contact with two people in the course of the chapter. At the end of the lesson, when the students hurry off to play hockey , it is the shy Cyril Sargent who asks him for help with math problems. Stephen sees himself in the student: "My own childhood bends over there beside me." Finally he goes to Mr. Deasy's study to collect his salary. There he has to listen to exclamations about the rampant cattle disease , about thrift and the meaning of life . Mr. Deasy as Nestor is not to be understood here in the figurative sense of a wise man and adviser, but quite analogously to the Odyssey: There Telemachus seeks out old King Nestor to obtain information about his father. But Nestor does not know anything about his whereabouts and only stops him with his eloquence.

The letter to the editor that Mr. Deasy gave Stephen in connection with foot-and-mouth disease so that he could pass it on to well-known editors of the daily press refers to the political background that was current at the time. Thus, in 1912, Joyce himself wrote an essay on "Politics and Cattle Disease." England used isolated cases of cattle disease to embargo a confident Ireland, which depended on exports to England. Ireland should be put in its place.

Some motifs from the Telemachus chapter are taken up again. Like Haines, Mr. Deasy proves to be an open anti-Semite : The “Jewish merchants have already begun their work of destruction. Old England is dying.” The Irish fight for freedom from England also comes up a number of times in conversation with Mr Deasy, with references to Daniel O'Connell and the Orange Lodges , for example . The mother motif is also addressed: First, in that nonsense riddle that Stephen presents to his school class in the form of a poem – the fox who buries his grandmother is ultimately Stephen himself, who is still hurting at the loss of his mother. And Cyril Sargent makes Stephen think of his mother: "And yet one woman had loved him, carried him in her arms and in her heart."

  • Location: School, Dublin
  • Time: 10 a.m
  • Organ: –
  • Science: History
  • Color: brown
  • Icon: horse
  • Technique: Catechism (personal)
  • Correspondence:

3rd Chapter - Proteus

The sea god Proteus is a master of transformation . When Menelaus approached him for prophecy, he transformed himself into a variety of beasts and forms before finally, exhausted by his patience, gave him an answer.

In the Proteus chapter of Ulysses it is a dog that undergoes these transformations - but in the imagination of Stephen, who watches the dog as he walks along the beach at Sandymount . The dog's romping around until it finally encounters a dog carcass ("Oh, you poor dog carcass, you! Here lies the poor dog carcass carcass." - And it is not entirely coincidental that Buck Mulligan also called Stephen "dog carcass"), describes Joyce in a furious, powerful and metaphorical prose .

The chapter is shaped by Stephen's stream of thoughts. The change between the real and the imagined occurs unannounced and the reader often only becomes aware of it afterwards. The walk obviously has no destination - a return to Martello Tower is out of the question and Stephen has no other home. He wonders if he should pay a visit to his aunt, but while he's pondering, he misses the way to see her ("I've already passed the turnoff to Aunt Sara. Don't I go there? Apparently not."). Eventually he settles down and writes a few lines of poetry . Towards the end of the chapter he glimpses a three -master , 'a silent ship', sailing 'homeward, upstream' - an indication that Stephen no longer sees Dublin as home .

Odyssey

Chapter 4 - Calypso

At the same time as Mulligan, Leopold Bloom was preparing breakfast for his wife Molly and then for himself at his home at 7 Eccles Street. The reader is introduced to Bloom's world of thought. The external actions and impressions mix with his personal feelings and thoughts. He buys a pork kidney from the butcher Dlugacz in the neighborhood , which he then roasts: “Smell the fine vapor of tea, steam from the pan, hissing butter. Being close to her swelling bed-warm flesh. Yes, yes.” In so doing, Bloom violates Jewish dietary laws from the first appearance . He brings Molly to bed with breakfast and the morning mail, which contains a letter from her lover , Blazes Boylan ("As he half-raised the blind in gentle jerks, his rear eye noticed her glance at the letter and then find it under her pillow stuck."). His kidney almost burns out - at breakfast he reads his daughter Milly's letter in the kitchen.

Then Bloom takes the newspaper to the outhouse in the yard to relieve himself: “He read the first column calmly, still suppressing his urge, and began, already yielding, but still with reluctance, the second. Reaching mid-point, he gave up his last dread and allowed his bowels to clear, quite as leisurely as he read, and still reading patiently, yesterday's slight constipation all gone. Hopefully it's not too big, otherwise the hemorrhoids will start again. No, just right. Ah! In case of stubbornness, a tablet of cascara sagrada .” His thoughts also revolve around an upcoming funeral he has to attend. Before he enters the outhouse, he makes sure not to get his pants dirty. At the end of the chapter, he tries to figure out what time the funeral will take place.

The title of the chapter refers to Molly, associated here with the nymph Calypso abandoned by Odysseus. In the evening, when Bloom returns, she will be Penelope .

  • Location: home
  • Time: 8 a.m
  • Organ: kidney
  • Science: Economics
  • Color orange
  • Icon: Nymph
  • Technique: narration (adult)
  • Correspondence:

Chapter 5 - Lotophages

Bloom begins his wanderings through Dublin. In this chapter, which Joyce assigned to narcissism , body care and odor are the dominant themes, and the flower ( lotus ) motif runs through the text. In a roundabout way, Bloom goes to the post office and picks up a letter. We learn that he corresponds with a certain Martha under the pseudonym "Henry Flower", which reinforces this connotation of his name. The letter contains a crushed yellow flower: “He tore the flower out of the needle-stitching with seriousness, smelled its almost odorless smell and put it on the pocket of his heart. flower language. They like them because no one can hear them.” The postscript of the letter (“PS: Tell me what kind of perfume your wife uses.”) occupies him all day.

Sweny's Drugstore in May 2007

Bloom buys the famous lemon soap (“sweet lemony wax”) in Sweny's drugstore, the scent of which will also accompany him throughout the day – and thus throughout the novel. Even the chemist's body odor plays a role in Bloom's mind during the purchase: “The chemist flipped back page after page. Sandy-yellow shriveled, that's how it smells too." Then Bloom meets a casual acquaintance ("Bantam Lyons' black-nailed fingers unrolled the staff. Also needs a wash. So that at least the coarsest dirt comes off."). Through a misunderstanding, he thinks Bloom gave him a tip for the afternoon horse race.

The chapter ends with the anticipation of his bath in a public bathhouse, a calmed, narcissistic contemplation of his body in the water: "In his mind he saw his pale body lying in it, stretched out and naked [...] and saw the dark, tangled curls of his tuft flowing […], a limp, flowing flower.”

Chapter 6 - Hades

After Bloom has freshened up for the funeral, he takes the carriage to the funeral. Also in the carriage is Stephen's father, Simon Dedalus. Bloom sees Stephen – their paths cross for the first time that day – and calls Simon's attention: 'A friend of yours just passed by, Dedalus, he said. - Who then? – Your son and heir.”

The conversation of the passengers revolves around death, ways of dying and funerals – in addition to everyday things like the tram. Accordingly, this theme dominates the thoughts of Bloom, for whom it is unconsciously linked both to the death of his father, who took his own life, and to the death of his first child – his son Rudy, who died as an infant. His reflections in the cemetery are therefore always about father-son relationships, but also about the first years of his marriage, pregnancy and the mother-child relationship: "Only mother and stillborn child are buried together in one coffin. See the point. Clearly. Protection for the little one as long as possible, even in the ground.”

After the coffin is lowered into the ground, Bloom roams the cemetery and thinks about death for a long time: "Mine is over there towards Finglas, the grave site I bought. Mama, poor Mama, and little Rudy.”

The title of the chapter refers to Hades , the place of the dead in Greek mythology.

Chapter 7 - Aeolus

In the newspaper's typesroom , Bloom then tries to place an ad in the afternoon edition. After leaving his manager's office, Stephen comes in to deliver Mr Deasy's letter to the editor. He tells the newspaper people a Dublin story about two spinsters.

The chapter is actually written as continuous text , but is optically structured by providing section-by-section headings that summarize the content. This creates the impression of newspaper articles. For example, a paragraph describing the mail truck might be titled "THE WEARER OF THE CROWN" or when Bloom is busy with the lemon soap in his pocket it might be titled "ONLY ONCE MORE THAT SOAP.

The titles are chosen in such a way that they could actually take up journalistic and feuilletonistic topics, the content of the chapter is thus broken up ironically. Towards the end, the headlines are turned absurd, doubled and tripled: "DIMINISHED DIGITS PROVE TOO TITILLATING FOR FRISKY FRUMPS. ANNE WIMBLES, FLO WANGLES - YET CAN YOU BLAME THEM?'

  • Location: newspaper office
  • Time: 12 p.m
  • Organ: Lungs
  • Science: Rhetoric
  • Red color
  • Icon: Publisher
  • Technique: enthymemic
  • Correspondence:

Chapter 8 - Laestrygones

"Pineapple rock, lemon flat, butter Scotch", June 2009

Bloom gets hungry, but is disgusted by the greed of the customers ( the Odyssey 's Laistrygones are man- eating giants) and the haze at "Burton's Restaurant" and leaves without stopping to go to Davy Byrne's for a gorgonzola sandwich with mustard .

Accordingly, this chapter is also about “eating” on all linguistic levels. Not only - as right at the beginning - food is constantly named ("Pineapple rock, lemon flat , butter scotch . " Given the dominance of the Catholic Church and priests in Ireland, he uses the appropriate terminology: "They'll eat your hair off your head. No family to feed yourself. Living on the fat of the land.” And even the narrator picks up the theme: “His eyes […] beheld a rowing boat […] bobbing its paved board on the syrupy swell.”

At the end of the chapter, Bloom accidentally notices Blazes Boylan, his wife's lover. His stream of thoughts breaks off abruptly and he flees to the library.

  • Location: Lunch
  • Time: 1 p.m
  • Organ: esophagus
  • Science: Architecture
  • Color: -
  • Icon: Policemen (Constables)
  • Technique: peristaltic
  • Correspondence:

Chapter 9 - Scylla and Charybdis

This chapter takes place in the National Library. The main focus is on the work of Shakespeare , which is brought to life in the conversations between Stephen, Mulligan and some scholars. Contrary to a purely aesthetic interpretation (“I [Russell] think, when we read the poetry of King Lear , what do we care how the poet lived?”), Stephen presents his biographical interpretation. This culminates in the thesis about Hamlet - which Stephen himself did not take seriously - that the ghost of King Shakespeare himself and Prince Hamlet represent the embodiment of the poet's unknown son, Hamnet, who died at the age of eleven: "As far as his family is concerned, Stephen said , so lives his mother's name in the forest of Arden. Her death brought him the scene with Volumnia in Coriolanus . His Boy's Son's Death is young Arthur's death scene in King John . Hamlet the Black Prince is Hamnet Shakespeare.”

However, the chapter is also about book knowledge on a larger scale. Famous names of world literature ( Plato , Boccaccio , Cervantes , Goethe , Maeterlinck , Dumas ) such as English ( Wordsworth , Coleridge , Tennyson , Shelley ) and Irish literature ( Yeats , Shaw ) are called upon.

The books are related to each other – which also refers to the procedure that Joyce himself uses in his Ulysses : “Today, of course, we would no longer combine a Nordic legend with a novel excerpt by George Meredith […]. He [Shakespeare] moves Bohemia to the sea and has Odysseus quote Aristotle .”

Although Bloom is also in the library, he and Stephen do not meet, however, as Bloom prefers to take a closer look at the buttocks of a statue of Venus Kallipygos . The title of the chapter refers to his attempts not to meet anyone directly and to the theses and antitheses with which Stephen and his interlocutors conduct their dialectical dispute.

Chapter 10 - Symplegades

In the chapter "Irrfelsen" Joyce deviates from his literary guide: The "Irrfelsen" (αἱ συμπληγάδες Symplegaden ) are only mentioned in the Odyssey and do not form a separate episode. On the contrary, Odysseus avoids them, warned by Circe, and takes the path between Scylla and Charybdis . Rather, the Random Rocks—small islands that sway and threaten to crush ships trying to navigate between them—are traversed both by the Argonauts on their voyage and by Aeneas on his way to Italy.

In 19 episodes, experiences of different citizens of Dublin are told, partially overlapping and permeating these events as well as the consciousness of the protagonists. 'Misguided Rocks', moving rocks, frame the chapter: at the beginning we see Father Conmee, representing the 'spiritual rock' of Ireland, the Catholic Church, seeking to secure the son of the late Paddy Dignam a place at the Jesuit College of Artane. At the end of the chapter, the Irish Viceroy, driving with his escort to the opening of a bazaar, stands as the 'worldly rock' of power. The Liffey - which can be interpreted as the Bosporus - separates east and west. Between two "foreign" powers (church, Great Britain), Ireland is in danger of being torn apart as if between the craggy rocks and losing itself.

In the Irregulars chapter, the novel leaves Bloom and Stephen Dedalus for an hour; only rarely does Bloom's black suit or an educated thought of Stephen appear in the tangle of consciousnesses. The chapter is dedicated to the other citizens of Dublin and their everyday lives.

  • Location: streets
  • Time: 3 p.m
  • Organ: blood
  • Science: Mechanics
  • Color: -
  • Icon: citizen
  • Technique: maze
  • Correspondence:
    • Bosphorus: Liffey
    • European Bank: Viceroy
    • Asian bank: Conmee
    • Symplegades : Groups of citizens

Chapter 11 - Sirens

Bloom dines with Stephen's uncle Richie Goulding at the Ormond Hotel while Blazes Boylan, who is on his way to Molly's, passes by. Bloom's thoughts are shaped by his jealousy, which is why he only partially perceives his surroundings and the charms of the barmaids Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy.

In this chapter, the music is in the foreground and background: there is singing in the bar, the gentlemen ask the barmaids to "sonner la cloche" - "let the bell ring" - one of the ladies does them the favor and lets her Snap the garter belt onto the thigh. The characters talk about musical themes - the gossip about Molly here relates primarily to her work as a singer - scraps of song and melody appear in their consciousness. The structure of the chapter is musically formed: The first pages can be described as an overture , because here a series of sentences - initially incomprehensible to the reader - are exposed, which are only carried out later and thus receive their meaning in the plot structure, then repeated and be varied. For example, the first "sentence" reads "Bronze at Gold heard the horseshoes, ringing with steel." Two pages later it is meaningfully expanded: "Bronze at Gold, Miss Douce's head next to Miss Kennedy's head above the cross-fascia of the Ormond bar, heard the viceroyal." Hoofs clattering by, clinking steel.” – which is taken up again in fragments towards the end: “Near bronze from near, near gold from far away”.

The language itself is rhythmic. Sometimes she imitates the rhythm of certain songs. This can be interpreted as another attempt by Bloom to suppress the thought of Molly's adultery by remembering or humming certain melodies. In doing so, Joyce not only uses musical terms (“A duodenum of bird sounds chirped a bright discant answer”), but also uses musical symbols, such as the repeat symbol “:”, which indicates Bloom’s circling thoughts. Various noises are represented onomatopoeic ("Tap. Tap. A youth, blind, with a tapping cane, tap-tap-past Daly's window").

The characters and their actions are described by the narrator with terms and numerous quotations from musical works, with the spectrum ranging from (mostly Irish) folk songs to great stage works such as Mozart's Don Giovanni . Among others, Meyerbeer , Handel , Mozart , Verdi , Offenbach , Donizetti and Bellini are quoted. Allusions to more than 150 musical works have been discovered.

The eponymous sirens are represented by the barmaids (behind a "bar riff"), whose seductive arts Bloom, like Odysseus, can face without danger.

  • Location: Concert Hall
  • Time: 4 p.m
  • Organ: ear
  • Science: Music
  • Color: -
  • Icon: barmaids
  • Technique: Fuga per canonem
  • Correspondence:
    • Sirens: barmaids
    • Island: bar

Chapter 12 - The Cyclops

For this chapter called " The Cyclops " Joyce chose different forms of reporting . On the one hand, it is told from the perspective of a nameless man who meets Hynes on the way, goes to the pub with him and there encounters Alf Bergmann and the so-called "Bürger". Bloom later arrives to wait for Martin Cunningham. A brash slang imitating the oral style of speech is used for these text passages: “Yuck! And it goes on and on, the faxing about giving paws and Alf all the time trying not to slide off that damn bar stool and that damn old dog on top, and all the while he's talking all sorts of nonsense about nurturing by kindness and purebred dog and intelligent dog: You could have gotten scabies.”

These passages are contrasted with others in an elaborate style that mimics and parodies the writing of high-end newspaper reports (a literary technique that Joyce himself called “ gigantism ”): “The last goodbye was immensely poignant. From the bell towers far and near the death knell rang incessantly, while around the dark district rolled the ominous warning of perhaps a hundred muted drums, reinforced by the roar of numerous artillery pieces.”

The subject of the chapter is the anti-Semitism to which Bloom is exposed. The commoner turns out to be a narrow-minded Irish nationalist and begins harassing Bloom. His anti-Semitic views quickly emerge and the atmosphere grows more and more tense. When Martin Cunningham finally arrives, he takes Bloom with him, since he has just started verbally defending himself against the attacks. The screaming and raging citizen throws a biscuit tin after him – like Polyphemus throwing a rock at Odysseus.

Towards the end, the sophisticated writing style leads to an imitation of the proclamation tone of the prophecies of the Old Testament . "And then we just see the damn carriage whizzing around the corner and Old Sheepface waving on top" is translated into: "And there came a voice from heaven and cried, ' Elias ! Elias!' And he answered her with a mighty cry: ' Abba ! Adonai !' And they saw Him, yea Him, Ben Bloom Elias, ascending amid clouds of angels to the glory of brightness at an angle of forty-five degrees over Donohoe in Little Green Street." This is another way in which Judaism is addressed in this chapter.

  • Location: pub
  • Time: 5 p.m
  • Organ: muscle
  • Science: Politics
  • Color: -
  • Symbol: Fenians
  • Technique: gigantism
  • Correspondence:

Chapter 13 - Nausicaa

Three young girls are walking along the beach at Sandycove, where Bloom is staying. The girls tease each other and are about to head home when fireworks begin. Two of them go a little further to have a better view, the third, the - symbolizing Nausicaa - disabled Gerty MacDowell, from whose perspective the first half of the chapter is told, remains. She and her world are linguistically portrayed in the form of sentimental Victorian light novels : "Gerty MacDowell, sitting not far from her playmates, lost in thought, gazing far off, was really and truly a paragon of lovely young Irish womanhood... . The waxy pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivory purity, though her rosebud mouth was a true cupid's bow, Greek perfect."

She sits on a rock, lifting her skirts to excite Bloom. She stylizes this come-on to a romantic-wild great love : "She would have liked to have him, almost suffocating, would have liked to stretch out her snowy arms for him to come, that she could feel his lips on her white forehead, a young girl's love cry .”

Bloom, from whose point of view the second part of the chapter is told, had come to the beach to get some rest. He responds to the come -on, whereby in his thoughts the young girl – in order to get excited – becomes a “cunning bitch ”: “ They 're devils when it comes to them. Dark, devilish appearance.” – He masturbates in his trouser pocket, whereby – to what extent consciously, it is difficult to say, as is so often the case in this novel – associations with Molly and her lover run through his mind: “Maybe that was just him Moment where he, she?/ Oh, he hats it. In her. she has it. Done/ Ah!/ Mr. Bloom adjusted his wet shirt with a careful hand. My god, that little limping devil. It's starting to feel cold and clammy. The aftermath isn't exactly pleasant. Still, one has to get rid of it somehow.” Bloom's orgasm is portrayed through the description of the fireworks taking place at the same time.

Towards the end of the chapter, Bloom is still dealing with Martha's letter, which - together with his voyeuristic experience on the beach - is given the status of a small revenge on his wife, who is constantly cheating on him.

  • Location: The Rocks
  • Time: 8 p.m
  • Organ: eye, nose
  • Science: painting
  • Color: gray, blue
  • Symbol: Virgo
  • Technique: swell, swell
  • Correspondence:
    • Phaeacia : star of the sea
    • Gerty: Nausicaa

Chapter 14 - The cattle of the sun god

Mina Purefroy, a friend of Bloom's, is in labor at Dublin Women's Hospital. Bloom wants to visit her, but is not allowed to see her. Instead, he goes to the doctors' lounge and meets Stephen, who is having a drinking session with Buck Mulligan and other medical students. Later they all head off to have a drink at a pub and then on to the Bella Cohen's brothel.

This is the famous chapter in which the evolution of language style and language itself, from Old English to contemporary Dublin slang, reflects the growth of the embryo in the womb . Joyce imitates the prose style of different epochs and creates suitable scenarios. The heroes of our novel act in sections like typical characters of these texts.

For example, our protagonist goes through the following metamorphosis in the course of the chapter:

  • “A man aldo stant the farensman waz at the hvs gate da night nider nu came. From Israel's volc dise man waz vn haert changed vil vnde fell vf earth."
  • "And Childe Leopold opent sin helmevenster umb daz he was gevellic to him and he did a lützel zoc under ougen uz vriuntschaft then he never otherwise nit tranc iender a met",
  • "But Sir Leopold was very gloomy now [...] and he thought of his good wife Marion, who was born a human child who died on the eleventh day of his life and could not be rescued by any human being, so fate is dark."
  • "Leop. Bloom was there because of a bad accident he had, but now he felt better, namely that his lady Mrs. Moll had a strange face that evening with red slippers and Turkish breeches, which connoisseurs took to be a sign of the change."
  • “Now, to return to Mr. Bloom, he had noticed many a shameless mockery as soon as he came in, but endured it as the fruits of that age which is generally supposed to know no pity. The young Spunte were, it is true, as full of pranks as big children: the words of their noisy debates were difficult to understand and often not very sweet.”
  • "[Thus] a lively quarrel of tongues soon broke out [...] and by mutual consent the difficult question was put to Mr. Bloom, the collector of advertisements, with instructions to submit it immediately to Mr. Coadjutor Deacon Dedalus. Hitherto silent, whether from the reason of unfolding that strange dignity of demeanor which was his own through supernatural earnestness all the better, or from obedience to an inner voice, he quoted briefly and, as some thought, quite superficially, the ecclesiastical rule , which forbids man to separate what God has joined together.”
  • "No longer is Leopold, as he sits there musing, ruminating on the fodder of memory, that sober publicity agent and bearer of a modest packet of bonds . He is young Leopold, as if in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror in a mirror (hey, presto !), looking at himself.”
  • "[T]he watchful wanderer [...], which latter was still covered with the dust of journeys and battles and stained with the feces of an indelible wickedness, from whose steadfast and steadfast heart, however, no enticement, nor danger, nor threat, nor humiliation ever could the image of a lustful one loveliness, which the gifted pen of Lafayette recorded for all time to come."
  • "Out our lord Stephen rushes with a cry, and Krethi and Plethi after him, the whole club, daredevils, muzzles , gamblers , pill-doctors, Bloom the Punctual at their heels, amid a general grope for headgear, ash-sticks, swords, panama hats , and Epee sheaths, Zermatt-Alpenstocks and whatnot.”
  • "Bravo, Isaacs, you always take them out of the fucking limelight. Come with me, dearest? But how intrusive, not in life. Bloom is a very good man himself.”
  • "Lives not far from Mater. goes also in the sweet yoke of marriage. Do you know his lady? Yes, of course, I do that. Janz floats plants. Have you ever seen in the Näcklischee . So something nice comes out when the skin falls off.”
  • "Who actually gave you the tip for the stuffing? […] From Master Iste , her trusted husband. No crap from old Leo. […] Such a bastard of a hypocritical liar. […] Yes, well, I say, if that isn't the typical Yiddsche mloche , yes, then I want to have a misse meschune . […] What? Wine for the slime Bloom. What am I hearing, what are you talking about onions? Bloo? Are ads scrounging together? From the photographer the little papapi, look at that!”

Chapter 15 - Circe

In this chapter, the content of which resembles a single fantastic hallucination , both Bloom and Stephen - still unaware of the other's presence - visit Bella Cohen's brothel in Monto , Dublin's red-light district , referred to in the novel as Nighttown . In a sort of "dream play," Joyce revisits the theme of fatherhood and parodies it to the extreme, allowing Bloom to become a woman, conceive, and give birth. In a sado-masochistic sequence, he is tormented by the dominatrix Bella for mutual lust: Just as Circe turns Odysseus' companions into pigs in the Odyssey , the lowest, dirtiest layers of the soul of the people involved are turned up here by the power of the madam. In the end, Stephen, accompanied by Bloom, flees the brothel. After Stephen is knocked out by a soldier outside, Bloom - here again in a caring father role - takes care of the unconscious man.

Psychoanalytic comparisons have often been used to interpret this chapter. Since Circe is already portrayed as a sorceress in ancient myths , it also seemed obvious to add the subject areas " witch ", " hell " and " devil ": This chapter is described as " Satan's mass of the released unconscious" or as "depth psychological Walpurgis night ". been.

This is the longest chapter of Ulysses and is written in the form of a drama . The content and style are also reminiscent of Antonin Artaud's surreal theatre.

  • Location: brothel
  • Time: midnight
  • Organ: musculoskeletal system
  • Science: Magic
  • Color: -
  • Icon: Whore
  • Technique: Hallucination
  • Correspondence:
    • Circe: Bella

nostos

Chapter 16 - Eumaeus

Bloom and Stephen go to the Cabman's Shelter for something to eat and meet, among other things, a drunken sailor who talks about his sea voyages. Bloom - also here in the father role - takes care of the drunken Stephen, and gradually his sympathy for the young Dedalus grows. At the end of the chapter, Bloom offers Stephen to stay the night.

  • Location: The Shed
  • Time: 1 a.m
  • Organ: nerves
  • Science: Navigation
  • Color: -
  • Icon: Sailors
  • Technique: Narration (old)
  • Correspondence:
    • Skin the Goat: Eumaeus
    • Sailor: Ulysses Pseudangelus
    • Corley: Melanthius (the goatherd of the Odyssey who mocks Odysseus disguised as a beggar and is castrated and murdered for doing so)

Chapter 17 - Ithaca

It's about two o'clock in the morning. Bloom takes Stephen home with him. Bloom forgot his key. He climbs into the house through a window and unlocks the door from the inside for the waiting Stephen. Bloom offers Stephen a place to stay at 7 Eccles Street.

"Has the proposal to grant asylum be accepted?"
"It was promptly, inexplicably, graciously, with thanks rejected."

They urinate together in the yard against the fence and Stephen leaves. Bloom does one or the other action and then goes to bed.

If the chapter in which father and son – related to the Odyssey : Odysseus and Telemachus – met, “ Ithaka ” takes up the episode in which Odysseus reveals himself to his son. Accordingly, the topics of this chapter are, on the one hand, recognition and cognitive processes, and on the other hand, father-son relationships. The plot is told - laboriously and laboriously - in the form of pseudo-scientific questions and answers. Joyce uses the catechism to do this. This technique, which breaks up the scenes rather than depicting them, is an ironic detachment from the warm, friendly feeling that develops between the two men. That Bloom forgot his key sounds like this:

"What action did Bloom perform upon arrival at her destination?"
"On the stoop of the 4th of the equidifferent odd numbers, number 7 Eccles Street, he mechanically put his hand in the back pocket of his pants to take out the apartment key."
"Was it there?"
"It was in the appropriate pocket of the trousers he had worn the day before."
"Why was he doubly angered by this?"
"Because he had forgotten, and because he remembered that he had reminded himself twice not to forget."
"What alternatives were now offered to the intentionally and (respectively) keyless couple?"
"Pure or not. To knock or not to knock.”

The exact analysis of the situation as a question game also refers to the psychoanalytic method according to Sigmund Freud , in which a missing father figure can be evoked – as corresponds to Stephen’s psychological situation – by the psychoanalyst establishing a therapeutic relationship with his patient in the form of questions and answers builds up.

  • Location: home
  • Time: 2 a.m
  • Organ: skeleton
  • Science: Science
  • Color: -
  • Symbol: Comet
  • Technique: Catechism (impersonal)
  • Correspondence:

Chapter 18 - Penelope

It's night time in Dublin. Leopold Bloom has gotten into bed at Molly's feet. This only half awakens from sleep, her thoughts flow freely. The day with all its impressions, experiences, noises takes place again in her consciousness. As in a dream or half asleep, memories and associations play into the stream of thoughts. Childhood memories, erotic thoughts, memories of her youth in Gibraltar , thoughts of the children and her husband Leopold, of earlier places of residence stream through Molly's and the reader's brain in eight long sentences without a period or comma.

As she falls asleep, Molly thinks about how she finally accepted Leopold Bloom as a partner: "And I thought well, he's as good as anyone else and I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me if I wanted to Yes, say yes, my mountain flower, and I first put my arms around his neck and pulled him down to me so that he could feel my breasts, how fragrant they were, and his heart was beating like crazy, and I said yes, I want yes."

Molly's "yes" closes the novel. Ulysses/Odysseus has arrived home after a long journey. The day is over, the hero again rests with his wife. The great work of a common day of life is done, " and behold, it was very good. "

Homer
“But Eurynome led the king and his wife
to the prepared camp, and carried the shining torch;
When she reached the chamber, she hastened. climbed those
Happy her old bed, sanctified to chaste love.”
  • Location: bed
  • Time: -
  • Organ: meat
  • Science: -
  • Color: -
  • Icon: Earth
  • Technique: monologue (female)
  • Correspondence:
    • Penelope: Earth
    • Net: movement

reception history

Plaque on the Rue de l'Odéon in Paris

Individual episodes from Ulysses were published in a US magazine from 1918 and in a British magazine from 1919. The work was banned in both the UK and US for what was then perceived as obscenity . The novel was first published on February 2, 1922 (the author's 40th birthday) by Sylvia Beach in Paris. The first German translation of the novel authorized by James Joyce was provided by Georg Goyert in 1927 . In the 1930s the novel was also published in the USA and Great Britain.

Goyert's translation is said to have inspired the German writer Alfred Döblin , who was then working on his urban novel Berlin Alexanderplatz , published in 1929. In fact, there are striking parallels between the two novels in the modernity of narrative technique. However, Döblin always denied having taken over anything from Joyce.

The idea of ​​making a novel span a single day has found a number of imitators in 20th and 21st century literature, such as Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano , Don DeLillo 's Cosmopolis , or Ian McEwan 's Saturday .

Kurt Tucholsky , who had to review a still very flawed translation in the Weltbühne , compared the novel to meat extract : You can't eat it. But many more soups will be prepared with it.

In 1975, Hans Wollschläger again translated the novel into German in a version that was highly praised by critics at the time. For the hundredth Bloomsday 2004, the Wollschläger translation was published in an extensively annotated version. In 2018, the publication of a revision of the Wollschläger translation was prohibited by Wollschläger's heiress Gabriele Wolff .

Virginia Woolf disdainfully described the novel as the work of a hypersensitive student scratching his pimples . However, her work was not unaffected by the technique and style of Ulysses , which is particularly evident in her "experimental" novel Mrs. Dalloway . Woolf's novel The Waves also uses the stream of consciousness.

Since 1954, writers, literary scholars and readers have celebrated June 16 as Bloomsday .

Ulysses was included in the ZEIT library of 100 books . The book was ranked among the 100 most important works of world literature of the 20th century by both the French Le Monde and the British BBC .

To celebrate the centenary of the first publication of Ulysses , the Irish Post issued two postage stamps in January 2022.

text editions

English original

English revised version

German translations

  • Ulysses . German translation by Georg Goyert (1927), authorized by the author. Rhein-Verlag, Basel (revised edition 1977, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main). Newly published in 2014 by Anaconda Verlag, Cologne, ISBN 978-3-7306-0157-0 .
  • Ulysses . German translation by Hans Wollschläger (1975). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-518-39051-1 .
Hans Wollschläger reads an excerpt from the Ulysses chapter "Oxen of the Sun - Rinder des Sonnengotts" in his translation
  • Penelope. The Last Chapter of 'Ulysses' . English-German Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-518-11106-X (contains the Molly monologue in English and in the German translation by both Goyert and Wollschläger).
  • Ulysses . Annotated edition with maps and index of persons, in the German translation by Hans Wollschläger. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-518-41585-9 .
  • Ulysses . Revision of Hans Wollschläger's translation by Harald Beck with Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller . Advisory participation Fritz Senn . Foreword by Harald Beck. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018. Due to an objection by the rights heir, the revision was only published in the form of a non-sale offprint.

See also

secondary literature

Other media

audio books

  • Ulysses. 22 audio CDs. English. Naxos Audiobooks. ISBN 962-634-309-5 .
  • Ulysses. 3 mp3 CDs. English. RTÉ Radio Drama Production. RTÉ Radio 1 . 1982. Repeated in 2020 on RTÉ Radio 1 extra. – archive.org .
  • Ulysses . Radio play. 23 CDs (approx. 1290 min.) + booklet. Radio play adaptation, direction and music: Klaus Buhlert . Translated from the English by Hans Wollschläger. Dramaturgy: Manfred Hess. SWR2 , Deutschlandfunk . The Hörverlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-86717-846-4 .
  • Ulysses . 31 audio CDs (2289 min.). Read by over 40 speakers. Directed by Ralph Schaefer. Translated from the English by Hans Wollschläger. The Hörverlag, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-86717-875-4 .

radio play

illustrations

  • Richard Hamilton : Imaging Ulysses was completed around 1995 and first shown at the British Museum London in 2002.
  • Saul Field and Morton P. Levitt: Bloomsday - An Interpretation of James Joyce's Ulysses. New York Graphic Society, 1972.
  • Viktor Nono: Ulysses - A graphic interpretation. Klaus Noack, Wegberg 2010, ISBN 978-3-00-030213-8 .
  • Robert Berry : Ulysses "seen". The novel as a graphic novel on the James Joyce Center Dublin website . Project start was 2012, estimated completion is 2022.
  • Nicolas Mahler : Ulysses. The novel as a graphic novel, with the action relocated from Dublin to Vienna . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-518-47006-0 .

film adaptations

musical discussion

  • Luciano Berio : Theme (Omaggio a Joyce) for mezzo-soprano and tape (1958) (adapting text passages from the Sirens chapter).
  • Hans Zender : Stephen Climax , opera (1979–84, premiered 1986).
  • Michael Heisch : Brouillage/ Bruitage . Cycle of instrumental and vocal solo compositions related to individual chapters of the novel (1999, work in progress). The following have been realised: Proteus for double bass (1999, revised 2002), Hades for piano (2000, revised 2003), Eumaeus for actress (2002), Penelope for alto flute (2003) and Scylla and Charibdis for accordion (2008).

Maps of "Ulysses"

web links

Wikisource: Ulysses  – sources and full texts (English)

itemizations

  1. ↑ Bulson, Eric: The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce . Cambridge University Press, 2006, page 14.
  2. ↑ The Rosenbach: James Joyce's Ulysses
  3. ↑ See en:Stuart Gilbert .
  4. ↑ Kurt Tucholsky under the pseudonym Peter Panter : Ulysses [review]. In: Die Weltbühne , 22 November 1927, No. 47, p. 788. ( full text ), retrieved 1 February 2016.
  5. ↑ Jonathan Landgrebe, Andrea Gerk: New "Ulysses" transmission prohibited. Ten years of translation work for free. Deutschlandradio Kultur , February 28, 2018, retrieved March 5, 2018 .
  6. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung , February 28, 2018
  7. ↑ Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger , March 1, 2018
  8. ↑ Stamps mark 100 years since publication of James Joyce's Ulysses , rte.ie, 27 January 2022, accessed 28 January 2022.
  9. ↑ a b For examples see David Pierce James Joyce Ireland. Bruckner & Thünker, Cologne, Basel, 1996, ISBN 3-905208-26-1 .
  10. ↑ Ulysses "Seas" .
  11. ↑ Discussion and video excerpts in the media art network .