Ulysses and the novel of the future

The difficulty for any contemporary reader in reading Ulysses is symptomatic of the greater challenges which face literature in the late twentieth century and which will continue to do so in the beginning of the twenty-first century: that is, the dissolution of the canon. It appears, from the reactions of readers when Ulysses was first published, that the reading of Ulysses, though it has always been considered a demanding novel, was not originally seen as being the arduous task of constant reference to secondary materials. The comparative ease of reading this novel in 1922 to a more current attempt is a result of the smaller size of the canon in 1922. To a late twentieth century reader the intertextuality of Ulysses seems impossibly immense, but a catalogue of these allusions will reveal that their sources are very specific. Ulysses primarily references Homer, Plato and Aristotle, the Bible, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. This is by no means a definitive list, but it contains all the most prominent works, and it is quite short. These were naturally the books which were well-known in detail to anyone well-educated in the English speaking world, and so to a reader educated in this period, the references would have been far more accessible. On the other hand, today education is no longer so standardized; these works remain, but interest in them has waned. New canons have arisen to accompany this more traditional one. Colonial and post-colonial writers, women writers, feminist writers, African-American writers, writers of queer theory, to name only a few, have all been recognized and added to various canons, until education in the English-speaking world no longer guarantees a detailed knowledge of the same very specific canon. So many of the great works of literature require a detailed knowledge of the canon that attempting a great novel in the late twentieth century, when this knowledge can no longer be relied upon, becomes uncharted territory. It may be that Ulysses, which so much exemplifies the reliance of great literature on the canon, also will provide some clues into the way literature is to proceed in the future.

Part of the difficulty and convenience of Ulysses is the density of the text; in just one short paragraph, we will be able to examine the three primary ways the text creates meaning.

His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering, druid's alters. Elijah is coming. Dr John Alexander Dowie restorer of the church in Zion is coming. (8.10-14)

This short passage, which, taken out of context, seems to be a meaningless list of tropes, is fraught with meaning for the reader of Ulysses. We read passages like "All are washed in the blood of the lamb," and "Elijah is coming," and we find clear unmistakable references to the Bible, arguably the most important text of the canon in the extent of the influence it has had on all the following works of western literature. Naturally, this is the first and simplest of the ways the text uses reference to create meaning, as well as the most traditional. Yet, the text corrupts this traditional form of meaning-making. These Biblical references occur within the context of what is basically a cult pamphlet. It is difficult to read this corruption, is Joyce debunking the Bible? The practice of Biblical allusion? The way popular culture employs the Bible? Is what Joyce is doing a debunking at all? The net effect is that though we may be hard pressed to determine what exactly Joyce is saying by this corruption, we will certainly mistrust the reference in some way.

This corruption however brings up the second way Ulysses uses allusion to create meaning. The cult which is the corruption, led by the mentioned Dowie and involving Zion and the foundation of the temple, is a reference to world news. It is a reference which must again be looked up by the contemporary reader, for the occurrence is beyond our ken. The text is rife with references to the world of 1904, the fads, the events, the way things were, and most of these are so trivial as to have been all but forgotten by history. Yet again, this type of reference collapses as well. These references would probably be quite familiar to anyone in the time-frame of the novel, 1904, and yet the novel did not appear until 1922; it is difficult to believe that most readers&emdash;especially since the Gifford was not yet published&emdash;would have any way of knowing who Dowie was. We must ask whether we were ever supposed to understand this reference, and if we are not, where are we to go from there? Again, we find ourselves mistrusting.

The final method to Joyce's madness in found in those moments of the passage which, out of context, are the most obscure, but within context are the easiest. The mention of birth and hymen bring up for the reader the enormous meaning which the text has accrued around women as sexual icons and as mothers. We see immediately Bloom and Molly's respective infidelities as well as the birth and death of their son&emdash;which are of course connected in that the death of their son brought about their current infidelities. Moreover, we cannot read the reference to the hymen without thinking of the later scene in which Bloom participates in the taking of a young girl's virginity at least metaphorically. Further we can't meet martyr's and women without thinking of Stephen and from there we cannot help noticing the prominence of the water in this passage as well. At the same time, the mentions of the "blood victim" and the "kidneys burntoffering" bring up the Bloom's jewishness, and so his otherness, as well as all the religious tensions of the novel: catholic vs jewish; catholic vs atheist; druid vs christian and so on. We find that this last method of referentiality, i.e. reference of the text to itself, is much more trustworthy, it brings up issues of the novel as well as themes of the canon and the news of 1904, but in a way which is quite easily comprehensible to any intelligent reader and presupposes little but a general knowledge of turn-of-the-century Ireland and the canon itself.

We find that Ulysses, working according to a kind of associative logic, becomes a law unto itself, relies primarily on its own construction of tropes to produce reliable meaning, rather than relying on the supposed present or on references to the canon. In fact, it becomes a blueprint for literature in the twenty-first century as it actually discredits the practice of creating meaning by reference to real-world events any less than the grand, as well as the practice of borrowing the meaning of the canon. Ulysses postulates that in a world without a small and easily defined canon the only way to successfully create great literature is for a text to become a canon of its own, in and of itself.