What Did James Joyce Mean When He Wrote Ulysses Anyway ? Part II
close friends on whether his true intentions on writing Ulysses would ever be fully understood. People would read the book because it had been banned, they might apprectiate it as an important contribution to literature, but the true nature of the work might be lost. His sense of humor would never be grasped. His wit and use of the art of the pun would be lost in the cynical nature of a world that had grown to take itself way to seriously. Joyce had told the greatest literary joke in history, but the sound of the echo of this man clapping had been lost to the tone of deaf ears. James Joyce would later tell an old friend in a cafe in Paris about these reserves. Djuna Barnes remembers a conversation that she had with Joyce at the Cafe of the Deux Magots in Paris. He told her of his reserves and concerns.
"The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book---or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it."
"All great talkers have spoken in the language of Sterne, Swift, or the Restoration through a microscope in the morning and repeated it through a telescope in the evening."
"They are all great talkers then and and the things they forgot. In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does to what you Freudians call the subconscious----- but as for psychoanlysis it's neither more nor less than blackmail." (7)
Upon first hearing of the decision by the judge, Joyce replied with a joke wrapped in the wit and Irish sarcasm that had made him famous.
"Thus one half of the English speaking world surrenders. The other half will follow.....And Ireland 1000 years hence," (8)
A story had been told, one as old as the hills of Ireland, and Joyce was not only experimenting with a new genre in the form of modernism, playing with the art of satire and pun in a sort of literary joke; but also retelling an ancient Greek myth, the journey of Odysseus, and presenting it in a fresh new way for the modern world. The entire construction of the novel follows the internal framework of the mythic Grecian journey. Episode one corresponds to Telemacus, episode two with Nestor, episode three with Proteus, four with the tale of Calypso, episode five with the nightmare of the Lotus Eaters, the sixth part
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