Ulysses at 100

100 years ago today, on February 2nd 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses was published in Paris by Shakespeare & Co. It was promptly banned in many places, including in the UK and the US, as it was considered to be obscene. It was not banned by the Irish Censorship Board, not a sign of an enlightened interlude in the early Free State, but there was an assumption that it would be banned anyway so no attempt was made to import it, much less publish it in Ireland.?

Writing in 2019, current Irish Ambassador to the US, Daniel Mulhall, wrote that “there is no doubt that James Joyce wanted Ireland to become more European. This makes me conclude that he would have been happy with Ireland’s more recent evolution as a dedicated member of the European Union, and that he would, like the vast majority of Irish people, be supportive of Ireland’s continued EU membership.”

I couldn’t honestly make the case that Joyce would have been a supporter of the EU although he was certainly a great European. He was a disrupter and couldn’t tolerate the asphyxiating atmosphere of religion and nationalism in the Ireland of the time.

In his late teens while a student in UCD, he was learning French and Italian as well as Norwegian because of a passion for the work of Ibsen. He also worked on a translation from German of the work of Gerhard Hauptmann.?

His first published work was a review of a play by Ibsen. Ibsen himself wrote to the 18 year old Joyce and according to Richard Ellmann (Joyce’s biographer), “before Ibsen’s letter Joyce was an Irishman; after it, he was a European”.

As many people will know, Joyce left Ireland in 1904 to return only very briefly thereafter. He spent the rest of his life in various cities across Europe but had certainly not turned his back on Ireland.?

When he left Ireland, he was 22 and spent many of the years that followed in relative poverty. He took up all sorts of jobs across Europe including bank clerk (Rome), shipping agent, cinema proprietor (Mary Street) and teacher (Paris, Dalkey).

Unlike so many intellectuals of his time, Joyce was not anti-Semitic. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is a Jewish man and an everyman. The Citizen is an extreme nationalist and portrayed as intolerant.?

Trieste was his and his wife Nora’s home for 11 years. It was a melting pot of languages and ethnicities. At the time, Trieste was part of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire. He would have heard Italian, Serbo-Croat, Magyar and German in the streets of the city. There was even a local dialect he knew, Triestine.?

Just prior to settling in Trieste, Joyce spent some unhappy months in Pula which is in modern day Croatia. Of Pula, Joyce wrote to his aunt, “I hate this Catholic country with its hundred races, thousand languages governed by a Parliament that can transact no business”. He may have been trying to entertain his aunt with his outrageous opinions.?

He was I would say European by temperament. Britain obviously loomed very large in Irish political and cultural consciousness. He was attracted to continental Europe not just because of its sounds, but because of its rich culture.?

Whatever about the relative attractions of Britain or continental Europe, he was certainly motivated by push factors to leave Ireland - religion, nationality and language although he strongly supported Irish independence.?

My grandfather bought a copy of Ulysses which had been published in 1932 in Hamburg at which time it was still banned in the UK and the US. My father still has it. It is a treasured family heirloom full of pencil marks and embossed on the front with my grandfather’s initials.

The first 200 pages look well thumbed - the remaining 600 pages, less so.