Page 15 - summer 22

style was too revolutionary, too demanding, for all but the most serious and

informed readers. Ulysses has no narrator, no plot and an encyclopaedic range of
allusions; the first paragraph alludes to Homer’s Odyssey (the first nine words mimic
the rhythms of a Homer hexameter), the rituals of Irish Catholicism and the Mass,
and through allision to the Hebrew Psalms draws a parallel between the Jews
(Bloom, the main character, is Jewish) as a captive chosen people) and the Irish, with
Britain as the Egyptian captives.

The whole novel, 24 hours in the Bloom’s life, is woven together by such allusions,

likely to be missed by the usual reader, who has to take the word of learned literary
experts like Hugh Kenner (author of Ulysses, 1982, a detailed guide for readers) that
it is one of the masterpieces of Modernist, and indeed world, literature. These (to
nearly all of us) obscure allusions enable cultural connections and parallels to be
drawn with the present. They also create simultaneity: which mirrors the rush of
images, speed and fragmentation of urban metropolitan living after 1900, one of the
inspirations for Modernism.

This is a million miles from the traditional Realist novel, which prides itself on having
a logical, serial plot, well drawn, rounded characters and a reassuring, authoritative
narrator as our guide. Instead, we get 24 hours of Dublin city life through one man’s
meandering stream of consciousness. While Joyce’s technical virtuosity and
encyclopaedic allusions are greatly admired - novelist Virginia Woolf was also drawn
to using stream of consciousness – a few critics feared he had brought the novel to
an end by exhausting its possibilities. Was the focus of Joyce’s Modernism too much

on the technique of the art, rather than its purpose? Or should we welcome that fact
that our culture can produce masterpieces which make heavy demands upon us?

3. T.S. Eliot
Eliot was well into the Modernist swing by 1914. See how he begins The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock (begun 1910, published 1915; Prufrock is probably himself as a

young American finding his way in London):
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table
Let us go , through certain half-deserted streets
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent