Literature

The centenary of "Ulysses" by James Joyce: the origins of modernity in literature

James Joyce and his Parisian publisher Sylvia Beach, Paris, 1921-2.

Bettmann Archive - Bettmann

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

10 mins

Ignoring the censorship that weighed on the novelist James Joyce in the Anglo-Saxon world, a Parisian publisher published a hundred years ago, in Paris, the complete version of

in English, the novel by the Irishman index.

Inspired by Homer's

, this book depicts the events of a day in the life of its hero, in a dreamlike language that brings the reader into the consciousness of the characters.

revolutionized Western fiction.

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A simple commemorative plaque on the facade of a Parisian building, in the heart of the French capital, recalls that “ 

 Ulysses

(1)

 ”.

Sylvia Beach then ran

, one of the first English brands in Paris.

The address of this historic bookstore was well known at the time to English-speaking expatriates in the French capital.

Among these were some of the great figures of the Anglo-American literary avant-garde of the early 20th century:

, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein.

Literary history has united these writers under the name of " 

 " recalling the tragedy of this youth who saw their ideals and their dreams swept away by the Great War and its atrocities.

This tragedy that some of these authors lived in their flesh did not however prevent them from making love and celebrating.

The Irish novelist was one of those eminent and talented revelers, who knew each other, admired each other and met in Gertrude Stein's very popular salon or Miss Beach's bookshop to share their latest literary finds.

On February 2, 1922, Sylvia Beach, director of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, located at 12 rue de l'Odéon, published the novel "Ulysses" by James Joyce, © Creative commons/David McSpadden

Trieste-Zurich-Paris

It was only at the end of the war that

landed in Paris.

Of a rebellious temperament, he had voluntarily exiled himself in 1904 from his native country, to escape the constraints imposed by his family, and the omnipresent Church.

In 1920, he settled in France, after passing through Trieste, then Zurich, a wartime refuge.

It was in exile that the man made a name for himself by publishing a particularly promising work: a collection of poems (

, 1907), short stories (

, 1914), an autobiographical account (

, 1916) and the theater (

, 1918), closer to the Ibsenian and continental current than to Irish literature.

Ulysses

, which will become his

, Joyce had begun to write it in Trieste in 1914 and he will not finish it until Paris, after seven years of hard work and insomnia.

Before his death in 1941, the writer will deliver a last text,

(1939), an experimental novel which tells the story of Mr. Toulemonde, in a final effort to go beyond the human condition through myth and language parody.

The editorial adventure of

began even before its writing was completed.

It was on the recommendation of the poet Ezra Pound that the first chapters of the novel were serialized in 1917-1918 in an American avant-garde magazine.

But very quickly the work caused a scandal because of its passages considered scatological and accused of obscenities.

They are worth to the author to be prosecuted before American justice.

The judges prohibit the distribution of the book in the English-speaking world.

Issues of the

 containing the offending chapters of the novel are even burned, lest they " 

 "!

In France, where the author now lives, the expatriate intelligentsia is moved by this censorship.

Admirer of Joyce, whose talent she appreciated and aware of the literary value of

, the first chapters of which she had read, Sylvia Beach offered to publish it, to the great relief of its author, who was then immersed in endless legal disputes.

It is in this context that

appeared in Paris on February 2, 1922, which also happened to be the day of the author's fortieth birthday.

The event was historic.

The first complete edition of the novel, with a blue cover and apparently full of typos (5,000 according to specialists because the French printer did not speak a word of English), will be sold by subscription, before the English publishers Saxons only seize the work, when the censorship will be finally lifted, in 1934 in the United States and in Great Britain two years later.

First post-colonial novel

The Parisian edition of

had a thousand copies and was followed by a dozen reprints to meet demand, especially readers across the Channel who had heard of this scandalous work, but could not obtain it in their country.

According to legend, George Bernard Shaw and the future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who knew the author by reputation, were among the first subscribers.

Still, initial reviews were indignant if not horrified to say the least, such as that of the

, which called

a hodgepodge of " 

 ".

Even Virginia Woolf, high priestess of literary salons across the Channel, speaks of 

 ”, a “ 

 ”, “ 

 ”, before changing her mind.

For specialists, these scandalized criticisms are explained by the profoundly innovative character of the writing of James Joyce, who was, as the poet TS Eliot wrote, “ 

 ”.

The resolutely modernist imagination at work in

, its original narration which appeals to the " 

 " to bring together sensory experience and currents of consciousness, above all killed the art of fiction of the Dickensian type, told by an omniscient narrator and inherited from the Victorian era.

Let's not forget that

was also in a way the first

.

It appears in volume two months after the signature in December 1921 of the treaty of autonomy between the British crown and the Irish nationalists.

Admittedly,

, whose action takes place in downtown Dublin on June 16, 1904, does not contain a political message as such, but how can we not make the link between the Dublin that the novelist tries to resurrect from background of his exile and his country in the grip of a civil war of the colonial type, opposing the British occupying forces and the Irish separatists?

In the years 1910-1920, when Joyce was working on his book, the capital of the future independent Ireland was devastated by independence attacks and by incessant guerrillas and counter-guerrillas opposing the police and Irish patriots.

After the bloody repression of the Easter Rising of 1916, Ireland's exit from the empire now seemed inevitable.

The debate raged on the announced partition of the country according to religious bases and the nature of the independence to come.

Dublin's Central Post Office (GPO) devastated during the bloody Easter Riots of 1916. © CC/Keogh Brothers Ltd., photographers

According to Colm Toibin, author of a beautiful article published in the

on the occasion of the centenary of

, the greatness of Joyce's novel is to take the opposite view of the nationalist tendencies of the time to affirm through the character center of Léopold Bloom, free-thinker and Jew, a certain cosmopolitan vision of emerging Ireland.

The Joycien opus, " 

 ", constitutes, in the eyes of Toibin, " 

This debate comes down to a minimal definition of the nation that the author puts in the mouth of his hero 

 ”.

The wanderings of Leopold Bloom

Dialogs with broken sticks, followed by scenes of banal life, reflections, feelings and recollections of the past captured with the sharp one, sometimes under the innovative form of interior monologues of the characters, such is the basic structure of

.

The plot is reduced to a minimum: a couple on the verge of breaking up, the husband, Leopold Bloom, is a broker in Dublin, his wife, an artist, cheats on him with his manager, while he masturbates while contemplating a naked woman on the beach, but these infidelities and betrayals do not prevent them from remembering the tenderness of yesteryear and cherishing the community of destiny born of tragedies experienced together.

This minimalist intrigue is told over more than 700 pages, through the wanderings of the hero in the Dublin of 1904, a city such as the author knew it before his departure in exile.

The narration extends over one day, that of June 16, celebrated today by the Irish and all admirers of Joyce as “Bloomsday”.

The Parisian edition of "Ulysses" with its blue cover and the title in white letters to evoke the Greek flag.

© Public domain

Unit of place, unit of time.

The unity also of actions, divided into 18 episodes inspired by Homer's Odyssey, which allows the author to raise the banality of an ordinary day to the level of mythology and epic.

Neither Protestant, nor Catholic, nor Unionist, nor Nationalist, Joyce's hero is a contemporary version of the Wandering Jew whose tragic figure merges, on the way, with that of Ulysses, sailing across the Mediterranean-Dublin towards his home where his wife Molly-Pénélope prepares, despite her infidelity, to say "yes", a word with which the novel ends.

More than the modernity of this rereading of an ancient epic, which made the success of

is his handwriting.

In addition to the fact of mixing all the narrative registers, from legend to scholastic treatise, passing through farce, drama, parody and reportage, the great originality of Joyce here is perhaps to have been able to exploit with talent innovative storytelling techniques such as the interior monologue, making it possible to bring to the surface the unspoken thoughts, the dreams, the images that cross the interior landscape of the characters.

Molly Bloom's final soliloquy, with its twenty thousand words and without punctuation, is a fascinating illustration of this.

All the more fascinating, as Joyce's feat opened a breach in Western novel writing that had hardly changed since the 18th century and in which some of the greatest writers have immersed themselves body and soul:

Thank you Miss Sylvia Beach.

We would probably not be celebrating the centenary of

today  without the literary insight of this unusual editor!   

(I) "Ulysses" is the English version of the Homeric hero's name and the title of James Joyce's novel.

For the French version, the last translation, published by Gallimard editions, dates from 2004: Ulysses by James Joyce, Gallimard edition.

New translation under the direction of Jacques Aubert, 981 pages, 34 euros.

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