Ignoring the censorship that weighed on the novelist James Joyce in the Anglo-Saxon world, a Parisian publisher published a hundred years ago, in Paris, the complete version of Ulysses in English, the blacklisted Irishman’s novel. Inspired by The Odyssey of Homer, this book depicts the events of a day in the life of its hero, in a dreamlike language that brings the reader into the consciousness of the characters. Ulysses revolutionized Western fiction.
A simple commemorative plaque on the facade of a Parisian building, in the heart of the French capital, recalls that ” in 1922, in this house, Miss Sylvia Beach published “ Ulysses » (1) by James Joyce “. Sylvia Beach then directed Shakespeare and Companyone of the first English brands in Paris.
The address of this historic bookstore was well known at the time to English-speaking expatriates in the French capital. Among these were some of the great figures of the Anglo-American literary avant-garde of the early 20th century: Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein. Literary history has united these writers under the name of ” lost generation recalling the tragedy of this youth who saw their ideals and dreams swept away by the Great War and its atrocities.
This tragedy that some of these authors lived in their flesh did not however prevent them from making love and celebrating. The Irish novelist was one of those eminent and talented revelers, who knew each other, admired each other and met in Gertrude Stein’s very popular salon or Miss Beach’s bookshop to share their latest literary finds.
Trieste-Zurich-Paris
It was only at the end of the war that James Joyce landed in Paris. Of a rebellious temperament, he had voluntarily gone into exile in 1904 from his native country, to escape the constraints imposed by his family, and the omnipresent Church. In 1920, he settled in France, after passing through Trieste, then Zurich, a wartime refuge.
It was in exile that the man made himself known by publishing a particularly promising work: a collection of poems (Chamber music1907), short stories (Dublin people1914), an autobiographical account (Portrait of the young artist by himself1916) and theater (The exiled1918), closer to the Ibsenian and continental current than to Irish literature.
Ulysseswhich will become his magnum opus, Joyce had begun to write it in Trieste in 1914 and he would not finish it until Paris, after seven years of hard work and insomnia. Before his death in 1941, the writer will deliver a last text, Finnegan’s Wake (1939), an experimental novel that tells the story of Mr. Toulemonde, in a final effort to go beyond the human condition through myth and the parody of language.
The editorial adventure of Ulysses began before his writing was even completed. It was on the recommendation of the poet Ezra Pound that the first chapters of the novel were serialized in 1917-1918 in an avant-garde American magazine. But very quickly the work caused a scandal because of its passages considered scatological and accused of obscenities. They are worth to the author to be prosecuted before American justice. The judges prohibit the distribution of the book in the English-speaking world. Numbers of the Little Review containing the offending chapters of the novel are even burned, lest they might ” corrupt the youth and incite it to vice !
In France, where the author now lives, the expatriate intelligentsia is moved by this censorship. Admirer of Joyce whose talent she appreciated and aware of the literary value of Ulysses of which she had read the first chapters, Sylvia Beach offered to publish it, to the great relief of its author, who was then plunged into endless legal disputes. It is in this context that Ulysses appeared in Paris on February 2, 1922, which also happened to be the day of the author’s fortieth birthday.
The event was historic. The first complete edition of the novel, with a blue cover and apparently full of typos (5,000 according to specialists because the French printer did not speak a word of English), will be sold by subscription, before the English publishers Saxons did not seize the work, when the censorship was finally lifted, in 1934 in the United States and in Great Britain two years later.
First post-colonial novel
The Paris edition of Ulysses numbered a thousand copies and was followed by a dozen reissues to meet demand, particularly from readers across the Channel who had heard of this scandalous work, but could not obtain it in their country. According to legend, George Bernard Shaw and the future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who knew the author by reputation, were among the first subscribers.
The fact remains that the initial criticisms were at least indignant, if not horrified, like that of the Sunday Expresswhich qualified Ulysses of collection of ” leprous and scabrous horrors… a bible for exiles and outcasts “. Even Virginia Woolf, high priestess of literary salons across the Channel, speaks of ” self-taught book », of « reel of indecency », « coarse “, before changing his mind.
For specialists, these outraged reviews can be explained by the profoundly innovative character of James Joyce’s writing, which was, as the poet TS Eliot would write, ” the man who killed the 19th century “. The resolutely modernist imagination at work in Ulyssesits original narration which appeals to the interior monologue to bring together sensory experience and currents of consciousness, above all killed the art of fiction of the Dickensian type, told by an omniscient narrator and inherited from the Victorian era.
do not forget that Ulysses was also in a way the first truly post-colonial novel. It appears in volume two months after the signature in December 1921 of the treaty of autonomy between the British crown and the Irish nationalists. Certainly, Ulysses whose action takes place in the city center of Dublin, June 16, 1904, does not include a political message as such, but how not to make the link between the Dublin that the novelist tries to resurrect from the depths of his exile and his country in the grip of a civil war of the colonial type, opposing the forces of British occupation and the Irish separatists?
In the years 1910-1920, when Joyce was working on his book, the capital of the future independent Ireland was devastated by independence attacks and by incessant guerrillas and counter-guerrillas opposing the police and Irish patriots. After the bloody repression of the Easter Rising of 1916, Ireland’s exit from the empire now seemed inevitable. The debate raged on the announced partition of the country according to religious bases and the nature of the independence to come.
According to Colm Toibin, author of a fine article published in the FinancialTimes on the occasion of the centenary of Ulyssesthe greatness of Joyce’s novel is to take the opposite view of the nationalist tendencies of the time to assert through the central character of Leopold Bloom, a free-thinker and Jew, a certain cosmopolitan vision of emerging Ireland.
The Joycien opus, characterized by the generosity and fullness of its style, the manifest sensuality of its characters, its impiety and its irreverence towards authority », constitutes, in the eyes of Toibin, « a contribution to the ongoing debate at the time about the future of Ireland”. This debate comes down to a minimal definition of the nation that the author puts in the mouth of his hero : “a nation is the same people who live in the same place (…) or who live in different places “.
The wanderings of Leopold Bloom
Random dialogues, followed by scenes of banal life, reflections, sensations and recollections of the past captured vividly, sometimes in the innovative form of the characters’ interior monologues, such is the basic structure of Ulysses. The plot is reduced to a minimum: a couple on the verge of breaking up, the husband, Leopold Bloom, is a broker in Dublin, his wife, an artist, cheats on him with his manager, while he masturbates while contemplating a naked woman on the beach, but these infidelities and betrayals do not prevent them from remembering the tenderness of yesteryear and cherishing the community of destiny born of tragedies experienced together.
This minimalist intrigue is told over more than 700 pages, through the wanderings of the hero in the Dublin of 1904, a city such as the author knew it before his departure in exile. The narration extends over one day, that of June 16, celebrated today by the Irish and all admirers of Joyce as “Bloomsday”.
Unit of place, unit of time. The unity also of actions, divided into 18 episodes inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, which allows the author to raise the banality of an ordinary day to the level of mythology and epic. Neither Protestant, nor Catholic, nor Unionist, nor Nationalist, Joyce’s hero is a contemporary version of the Wandering Jew whose tragic figure merges, on the way, with that of Ulysses, sailing across the Mediterranean-Dublin towards his home where his wife Molly-Pénélope prepares, despite her infidelity, to say “yes”, a word with which the novel ends.
More than the modernity of this rereading of an ancient epic, which made the success of Ulyssesis his handwriting. In addition to the fact of mixing all the narrative registers, from legend to scholastic treatise, passing through farce, drama, parody and reportage, the great originality of Joyce here is perhaps to have been able to exploit with talent innovative storytelling techniques such as the interior monologue, making it possible to bring to the surface the unspoken thoughts, the dreams, the images that cross the interior landscape of the characters. Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy, with its twenty thousand words and without punctuation, is a fascinating illustration of this. All the more fascinating, as Joyce’s feat opened a breach in Western novel writing that had hardly changed since the 18th century and in which some of the greatest writers have immersed themselves body and soul: from Faulkner to Samuel Beckett, via Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Dos Passos, Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Burgess, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, to name but a few.
Thank you Miss Sylvia Beach. We would probably not be celebrating today the centenary of Ulysses without the literary insight of this unusual editor!
(I) “Ulysses” is the English version of the Homeric hero’s name and the title of James Joyce’s novel. For the French version, the last translation, published by Gallimard editions, dates from 2004: Ulysses by James Joyce, Gallimard edition. New translation under the direction of Jacques Aubert, 981 pages, 34 euros.