![]() ![]() Beach offered to publish the novel privately, avoiding censorship. Joyce, who was now living in Paris, had met Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of Shakespeare & Company, a celebrated left bank bookshop. By 1920, this first serialisation was over, and The Little Review was no longer publishing monthly instalments. From the first, the text ran into difficulties with the authorities on the grounds of alleged obscenity. ![]() The first appearance of pages from this astonishing new novel occurred in 1918, in The Little Review, whose foreign editor was Ezra Pound. In Rome, when I had finished about half of the Portrait, I realised that the Odyssey had to be the sequel, and I began to write Ulysses." "When I was writing Dubliners," Joyce told Georges Borach, one of his language students, "I first wished to choose the title Ulysses in Dublin, but I gave up the idea. Yet it had all begun so modestly, in about 1907. By some calculations, there are no fewer than 18 separate editions of this book. To a Joyce scholar, however, that is like working on Shakespeare exclusively from the First Folio. For instance, I have referred to the 1922 edition published by Sylvia Beach, an edition I have owned for years. The textual history of Ulysses, first published on 2 February 1922, is every bit as complex as the novel itself, and what follows is a necessary over-simplification of an editorial cat's cradle. But always meeting ourselves." A Note on the Text We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. As Stephen Dedalus remarks: "Every life is many days, day after day. One of the best ways to encounter the novel is through any good audiobook recording. Joyce's word-play, rivalling Shakespeare, whose teeming vocabulary he surpasses, is intoxicating, and deeply Irish. Ulysses is often said to be "difficult", but really it is not. The theme of The Odyssey, he said in 1917, while working on his novel, was "the most beautiful, all-embracing theme… greater, more human than that of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust". Joyce himself revered the book that had inspired his masterpiece. The connection to The Odyssey is informal (Bloom is Odysseus, Stephen matches Telemachus and Molly is Penelope) and the chapters roughly correspond to episodes in Homer ("Calypso", "Nausicaa", "Oxen of the Sun", etc.). On "Bloomsday", the reader follows Stephen Dedalus (the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Leopold Bloom, a part-Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife Molly. The action of the novel, famously, occurs on a single day, 16 June 1904, coincidentally the date of Joyce's first outing with Nora Barnacle, later his beloved wife. Ulysses began as a discarded chapter from Joyce's first collection, Dubliners (1914) and for all its length it retains the fierce intimacy of a great short story. Occasionally, it is said that English-language fiction since 1922 has been a series of footnotes to Joyce's masterpiece. Today, novelists writing a hundred years after the composition of Ulysses still write in the shadow of this extraordinary achievement. He wrote: "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning." His answer to the challenge of the 20th century was to declare independence. Earlier, in his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he had made an unforgettable declaration of artistic intent. By then, James Joyce had already seen Ulysses, a text of approximately 265,000 words, privately published in Paris by Sylvia Beach, the philanthropic proprietor of the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, after a tortuous gestation in which his novel had been prosecuted for obscenity, and almost hounded into oblivion. TS Eliot's The Waste Land appeared, first in magazine and then in volume form towards the end of the year. ![]() 1922 is one of those extraordinary years in the history of English literature – the moment when Modernism came of age, and after which nothing would ever be the same again.
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