Ulysses unbound: why does a book so bad it "defecates on your bed" still have so many admirers?

Reason, July, 2004 by Tim Cavanaugh

More intriguingly, the book's popular reception grows as its standing declines in both the academy and the wider literary culture. Since the 1970s, modernism's usual gang of idiots--Joyce, Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and a handful of others--has been largely displaced from the position of cultural dominance it enjoyed through most of the 20th century.

To be sure, the bear market in modernists is not complete: Virginia Woolf's stock continues to hold steady, or even climb, and wider studies of the modernist period and movement have made a comeback in the past decade. But the virtue of difficulty, the notion that being hard to understand was a badge of literary honor, has fallen into serious and perhaps irreversible disrepair, and some once-major figures (Blast editor Wyndham Lewis springs to mind) are all but forgotten.

At the same time, studies such as Lawrence Rainey's Institutions of Modernism examine literary abstruseness as a response to specific market conditions rather than (as Eliot and others argued at the time) an indispensable tool for comprehending the chaos of the modern world. The defining aesthetic of the modernist movement--a refusal to compromise with the tastes of the masses--now looks like a liability and a historical accident.

But for all its difficulty, Ulysses is oddly immune to the anti-snob criticism--though you wouldn't know it from most of the verbiage about the book. Of the many wrong things T.S. Eliot said in his day, one of the silliest was his argument that Ulysses' "mythical method" (each incident in the book's 18-hour time frame mirrors, on a microscopic scale, an episode in Homer's Odyssey), is "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."

It would be hard to find a writer less inclined than Joyce to see the modern world in such tragic terms, or more enchanted by the disreputable cultural products the market produces. Bloom and his faithless wife Molly are enthusiastic consumers of middlebrow erotica (such as the novel Sweets of Sin by M. Paul deKock), popular songs (Harry B. Norris' "Lovely Seaside Girls," among countless others), works of general-interest science and self-improvement (Sir Robert Ball's The Story of the Heavens, and Physical Strength and How To Obtain It by the strongman Eugen Sandow). Nor are these plebian tastes presented to us as ironic class identifiers. They are, along with Joyce's storied "cloacal obsession," the book's lifeblood.

"The paradox is that the book is a giant fart joke," says Diana Wynne, producer of Joyce to the World (ill-advised puns are an unavoidable fact of Joyce fandom), a new documentary about Bloomsday celebrations in Kobe, San Diego, Melbourne, Trieste, Toronto, and several score other cities. "There's this huge vocabulary and complex technique, references to English literature and all kinds of obscure learning. But at the story level there's a lot of low humor, base jokes, and a celebration of ordinary people."