02 Feb 2022
Books, On This Day, Reading
2 February 2022 Cheryl

2 February 1922: Ulysses is published in full

Ulysses by James Joyce

The date featured in the book wasn’t chosen randomly. In fact it was the date of James Joyce’s first encounter with his future wife, Nora, who also serves as the template for Leopold’s wife Molly. Nora and Joyce had an encounter on a park bench on their first date, and as their love letters attest, their ardour for one another never waned. [1]

Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce who started work on it in 1914. Initially, it was serialised in an American journal, The Little Review between March 1918 and December 1920, causing scandal and controversy when the editors were found guilty of publishing obscene material.

The novel was finally published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach, owner of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company in Paris on 2 February 1922, Joyce’s 40th birthday.

Chronicling the adventures and encounters of Leopold Bloom during the course of an ordinary day in Dublin on 16 June 1904, we access his unfiltered thoughts on the people and places. Bloom eats, shops, posts a letter, frets about the faithfulness of his wife, attends a funeral, masturbates, helps a friend, dines, and goes to bed.

The 18 episodes of the book roughly correspond to the action of Homer’s Odyssey (Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus). There are fascinating parallels between the classic poem and the modern novel, and between the characters in each.

Few novels published in the 20th century have been as influential, ground-breaking, and controversial as has James Joyce’s Ulysses. It has been heralded as the best novel of the century and yet is also considered one of the hardest books in the world to read. In Ireland a whole tourist industry exists around the novel; there are museums in Joyce’s name, and the 16th of June, the day on which the events of the novel take place, is internationally celebrated as Bloomsday. Joyce himself said that were the city of Dublin to be obliterated, it could be reconstructed from the pages of his book.