Ulysses - A Reader's Edition [Paperback]

James Joyce (Author), Danis Rose (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1998

The text of "Ulysses" has been in dispute since its first publication in 1922, and debates about the authenticity of different editions have become legion. This edition makes use of all the criticisms of earlier texts.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Review

The end section of Ulysses is one of the most fascinating and important-pieces of literature ever written.-Molly Bloom's-episode is essential for anyone with an interest in literature to read.

-The final episode, which also uses the stream of consciousness technique seen in Episode 3, consists of Molly Bloom's Soliloquy: eight enormous sentences (without punctuation) written from the viewpoint of Bloom's wife.

In her eighth sentence, Molly thinks of her husband's strange habits, how he never embraces her, instead kissing her bottom, like he did earlier. Molly speculates that the world would be much improved if it consisted of Matriarchal Societies, run exclusively by women. She thinks again of Stephen, and of his mother's death, and that of Rudy's death, she then ends this line of thought as it is making her depressed. Molly thinks about arousing Bloom in the morning, then revealing the details of her affair Boylan to make him realize his culpability. Molly then decides to procure some flowers, in case Stephen Dedalus decides to come around. Thinking of flowers, Molly thinks of the day she and Bloom spent at Howth, his marriage proposal, and her response, reaffirming her love for Leopold, even during a period of turbulence within the marriage.

The concluding period following the final words of her reverie is one of only three punctuation marks in the chapter, the others being after the fourth and eighth "sentences." When written this episode contained the longest "sentence" in English literature, 4,391 words expressed by Molly Bloom. (Wikipedia)

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 826 pages
• Publisher: Picador (December 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 033035230X
• ISBN-13: 978-0330352307
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (525 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,903,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

697 of 739 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Okay. Is it really worth it?, April 26, 2000

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"lexo-2x" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ulysses (Gabler Edition) (Paperback)

Ulysses is one of those big, mad bellwethers of a book that X will tell you is the biggest, best, most important blah blah blah and Y will tell you is a load of badly written tripe. Neither X nor Y tend to notice that the book consciously encourages both responses...but, well, I'll get back to the academic riffing in a minute.

I first tried to read Ulysses aged about 14 (I was an annoying little boy that way) and didn't get very far. The first three chapters are set in and around the mind of Stephen Dedalus, one of the most ridiculously clever and over-educated characters ever conceived, as he takes breakfast with some friends, teaches in a school some miles south of Dublin and walks along a beach. Along the way, his mind ruminates on subjects as diverse as 16th century underworld slang, his dead mother, and something he calls "the ineluctable modality of the visible" which I'm still struggling with. But he's a curiously ambiguous character, this Stephen; he fancies himself as a poet and rebel but when, on the beach, he picks his nose, he has a quick look around to see that nobody's watching before he smears the snot on a rock. (Joyce likes to poke fun at pretension this way - although he doesn't suggest that Stephen's ideas or rebel stance are completely hollow, either.)

The 14-year-old me didn't get that far. I gave up. It wasn't until I was 19 or so that I got as far as chapter four and encountered a Mr. Bloom, pottering around the kitchen making breakfast, that I started to get a grip. Bloom is one of the most likeable characters in fiction. He's a quiet, rather shy, oddly intelligent advertising salesman married to a voluptuous siren of a wife, Molly. Either you're prepared to go the distance with Bloom, or else cast the book aside with a hollow oath, because he's about to spend the entire day walking around Dublin. Nothing will happen except that a man will be buried, a baby will get born, and Bloom will help Stephen when the latter gets into a drunken fracas with some British soldiers. (Ireland was still part of the Union in 1904, and Dublin was a garrison town. Many non-Irish readers concentrate on Joyce's innovation or wit or technical whatever, but Joyce is extremely historically aware, and Ulysses, like all his other books, is riddled with the traces of English domination. These add to the book, rather than diminish it.)

Readers who like those clanky, tinpot contraptions known as "plots" may get a tad frustrated. Leaving aside Joyce's gifts for parody (a _tad_ too indulged, in my opinion), the, if you like, human interest in Ulysses is in the details of the to-ing and fro-ing between the characters. A quite banal conversation turns out to have all sorts of fascinating undercurrents; Bloom, who is Jewish and therefore even more of an outsider than Stephen, is extremely good at detecting the hints and shifts in the tones of the people he meets. He keeps running into two things that cause him particular discomfort: anti-Semitic remarks, and reminders that his wife is about to sleep with another man.

Ulysses is about language, but that makes it sound like it's some godawful lumbering doorstop written by an English professor. (John Barth, come on down!) It doesn't feel abstract at all; it's full of sights (the band of old sweat inside Bloom's hat), smells (restaurants, horse urine, flowers) and especially sounds (cats, printing presses, trams). I can't think of any other book which transports you so completely to a different place and time. (It might've helped that I grew up in Dublin and knew most of the places that Joyce is writing about.) Borges described Joyce's prose style, at least in the earlier half of the book, as "strong and delicate" and that's a good description.

As the day wears on, the book starts to rumble at the foundations and it lurches with increasing unpredictability from style to style. Joyce is making a point about language; that things are altered by the manner in which we describe them. This can get a bit wearisome after a while, but when it works well - as in the chapter where the doings of a young girl on a beach are narrated in the style of a girl's magazine story - it can be very funny and rather touching. The book closes with a mighty tour de force as Molly Bloom sits up and thinks about her life and her curious husband.

Okay, that's the beginner's guide. My personal opinion? It's the best Irish book, a constant wonder, irritation and delight to read, and a stunning effort of imagination and intelligence by the most significant and most lavishly talented Irish writer. 20th and 21st century Irish culture is unthinkable without it. I'm grateful that it's there. What else is to be said?

221 of 233 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Missing pieces of text, December 27, 2009

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Brittany A. Sweet (NY, USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ulysses (Kindle Edition)

I picked this up for a group read of Ulysses. I figured it would be convenient to have it on the computer so I could look up all the references I didn't understand, and the price was certainly right. Unfortunately, as I came to realize, this edition of the book is missing pieces of text. I probably wouldn't have noticed this, except that when I googled one of the references that I didn't get, I came up with a preview of a book called Ulysses Annotated, which describes in detail the meaning of all the references. As I read, I noticed that in several places there were references noted that I hadn't seen in the text. Finally, I got annoyed and googled the exact line that preceded an area of missing text, and found that some lines of verse had been omitted from my edition of the book. It's a shame, since I was enjoying the clear formatting and the ease of use that the Kindle edition was giving me, but since it's not really a book that I want to spend money on, I guess I'll be giving Project Gutenberg's version a try.

80 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Missing the Ballad of Joking Jesus, August 31, 2010

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Nate_1234567890 "Nate" (Las Vegas, NV USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ulysses (Kindle Edition)

The eBook is missing text. I also have a print edition, but I wanted a copy I could read on my phone when i had the time. The part I noticed is missing is the Ballad of Joking Jesus. It's probably missing other text as well.