Here on Open Culture, we’ve often featured the work of gallerist-Youtuber James Payne, creator of the channel Great Art Explained. Not long ago we wrote up his examination of the work of René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist painter responsible for such enduring images as Le fils de l’homme, or The Son of Man. Payne uses that famous image of a bowler-hatted everyman whose face is covered by a green apple again in the video above, but this time to represent a literary character: Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It is that much-scrutinized literary masterwork Payne has taken as his subject for his new channel, Great Books Explained.
Indeed, few great books are regarded as needing as much explanation as Ulysses. It was once described, Payne reminds us, as “spiritually offensive, anarchic, and obscene,” yet “in the hundred years since, the book has triumphed over criticism and censorship to become one of the most highly regarded works of art in the twentieth century.”
The strength of both this acclaim and this condemnation still today inspires a mixture of curiosity and trepidation. But as Payne sees it, Ulysses is ultimately “a novel about wandering, and we as readers should feel free to wander around the book, dip in and out of episodes, read it out aloud, and let the words wash over us like music.” It’s also “an experimental work, often strange and sometimes shocking, but it is consistently witty, and packed with a tremendous sense of fun.”
That latter quality belies the seven years of literary labor Joyce put into the book, all of it distilled into the events of a single day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, as experienced by Bloom, an “ordinary advertising agent” and a Jew among Catholics; the “rebellious and misanthropic intellectual” Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter-ego and the hero of his previous novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and Leopold’s “passionate, amorous, frank-speaking” wife Molly. (Payne represents Dedalus with Raoul Haussman’s The Art Critic and Molly with Hannah Höch’s Indian Dancer.) In this framework, Joyce delivers kaleidoscopic detail, from the quotidian to the mythological and the sexual to the scatological, all with a formal and linguistic bravado that has kept the reading experience of Ulysses fresh for 101 years and counting.
Related content:
James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download as a Free Audio Book & Free eBook
Why Should You Read James Joyce’s Ulysses?: A New TED-ED Animation Makes the Case
Everything You Need to Enjoy Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloomsday
The Very First Reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “A Work of High Genius” (1922)
Read the Original Serialized Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
For anyone interested in reading Ulysses, I highly recommend the ebook from the Joyce project, which has neither too few annotations, nor too many (and yes you absolutely need annotations!): https://www.joyceproject.com/pages/ebook.htm
As I’ve written elsewhere:
Ultimately, the book seems to be an attempt at exploring the whole of a single human being — the public, the private, and the unwitnessed. Though we get the complete picture only with Bloom, we also see a number of characters from different vantage points, including right inside their still-percolating thoughts. This is where Joyce demonstrates his mastery not just of language, but of writing — he is capable of making an egotistical 22-year-old artiste, a humble 38-year-old ad-man, and an earthy 33-year-old adulteress all entirely separate, entirely authentic, and entirely real. It’s true that Ulysses is most famous for its countless learned allusions and language games — and indeed they are seemingly innumerable — but I think the real heart of the book, and where Joyce’s genius truly lies, is in how precisely he understands the ways of thought and how perfectly he can model them. His prose is perhaps the most successful attempt at capturing the ineffability of thought that has ever been attempted. His characters, who experience real and searing emotions — loneliness, uncertainty, love, longing — elevate the book above the procession of boast and pretension that characterizes so many self-consciously avant-garde works.
And did I mention the book is funny? I love that an advertisement for “Plumtree’s potted meat” is, to Bloom’s great consternation, placed right under the obituary section. I love how Bloom’s name is misprinted in the paper as “L. Boom.” I love Bloom’s musings on animals: “Dogs at each other behind. Good evening. Evening. How do you sniff? Hm. Hm. Very well, thank you.” The entire book is surprisingly light-hearted and even optimistic, with the overall effect that it seems to embody a unique kind of playful erudition. Puzzling out the allusions and literary tricks becomes a kind of game that you play with Joyce — one that is both charmingly amusing and rewarding.
And yes, the book is also unflinchingly explicit, even crude depending on your tendency to clutch at your pearls, but in making room for nearly every human bodily function — from menstruation to defecation to eructation to seminal emission — right alongside all its deepest emotion — the aching moments of despair and the breathless flashes of delight — Joyce is also faithful to the actual experience of living. He is never malicious, but always human and humane — even humanist. He is the rare author who is willing to meet us where we actually are. And it is characteristically Joycean that, after a long hard look at our unvarnished selves, he finds in our meager frames that which is most beautiful.
I’m putting this in a separate comment in case links like this aren’t allowed here, but if anyone’s interested in my complete introduction/guide to reading Ulysses, you can find it here: https://sayohsay.substack.com/p/ulysses-a-users-guide
They say his books are full of possibly countless references and allusions. I’ve read *Portrait* and a few chapters of *Ulysses*. Even on the very first page of Ulysses it is absolutely full of Dublinisms. Both my parents were from Dublin—and not even from town. I recognised many of their sayings and phrasings¹ in his writing. Loads of them. He used them straight and sometimes playful and sometimes perverse. I don’t know how people would get this if they were not steeped in Dublin culture. I know that I missed half of the Dublin stuff, never mind all his other references from his polyglottal prose and classical education. I do get the idea that you can dip your toe, or sip your Beaujolais, without the need to drown yourself in either the water or the wine. But diving into Joyce is just so intimidating. There’s just too much on the surface, never mind the unfathomable depths beneath.
¹it’s also probably that Joyce added some of these sayings and phrasings to the language himself