Chris Hedges: Heeding James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’

By Dilip -

One hundred years ago this week, Sylvia Beach, who ran the bookstore Shakespeare and Company on 12 rue de l’Odéon in Paris and nurtured a community of expatriate writers that included Richard Wright, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, placed in the bookstore’s front window a 732-page novel she had published, “Ulysses” by James Joyce. “Ulysses” had been rejected by numerous publishers in English speaking countries.

The book, which was banned in the United States and Great Britain because of its “obscenity” until the 1930s, takes place during a single day in Dublin, June 16, 1904. It would swiftly become one of the most important novels of the 20th century, drawing its inspiration from Homer’s “The Odyssey.” “Ulysses,” which I have read three times accompanied by a book of annotations by Don Gifford to catch the literary and historical references, is timeless. It captures the dazed, unresolved wanderings all of us take between birth and death, calling us to a life of compassion and understanding, and cautioning us to eschew the seductive calls to trample over others to worship idols.

The mythical figures in Homer’s epic – Ulysses is the Latin name for Homer’s hero Odysseus – are reincarnated in the lives of the Irish working-class. Ulysses, the Greekking of Ithaca, whose ruse of the Trojan Horse made him the architect of the victory against Troy, who spent ten years trying to get home after ten years at war and slaughtered the suitors who besieged his wife and ravaged his court during his absence, becomes in Joyce’s hands Leopold Bloom, a 38-year-old ad canvasser for the nationalist newspaper Freeman’s Journal. Leopold, whose father was an observant Hungarian Jew, throughout the novel mourns his infant son Rudy, who died over a decade earlier, a loss that severed his sexual relations with his wife Molly. Ulysses’ son Telemachus, who grew up without his father and who, when he reached manhood, left Ithaca to search for Ulysses, becomes Stephen Dedalus, a fictionalized version of Joyce’s precocious younger self. Penelope, the loyal wife of Ulysses, is reinvented as Molly, the wife of Leopold Bloom, who during the day has a tryst with her lover, Hugh “Blazes” Boylan, and whose approximately 22,000-word monologue, one of the greatest in literature, affirming the sanctity of love and life – along with graphic descriptions of digestion, orgasms, and farts – concludes the book. …

https://scheerpost.com/2022/01/31/hedges-heeding-james-joyces-ulysses/


A pre-history of post-truth, East and West. By MARCI SHORE


"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever" - George Orwell’s Final Warning


George Orwell: Literature and Totalitarianism (1941)


George Orwell - Freedom of the Park (1945)


Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)


George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)


J.K. Rowling asks us to remember George Orwell


George Orwell statue 'too left-wing' for the BBC


Are we Trapped in Orwell’s ‘1984’? By Robert Hassan


What Orwell Saw - and what he missed - about today’s world By THOMAS E. RICKS


Ignorance is Strength-Freedom is Slavery-War is Peace (George Orwell, 1984)


Book review - George Orwell: A Life in Letters


A Final Warning by George Orwell

                        

Dorian Lynskey - Nothing but the truth: the legacy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four                                                                             

                                                              

Orwell in China: Big Brother in every bookshop




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