This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/viewdocId=ft896nb5qw&chunk.id=d0e399&toc.id=&bran. The second was published athttps://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/value-of-james-joyce/significance-of-the-ordinary-in-dubliners-portraitulysses/4836CF07CB1A395BC09701A9ACAFD050. The third was published at https://ezrajames.medium.com/james-joyce-and-the-meaning-of-ulysses-22d8ca1857b7
Although we may be unable to define in any doctrinal manner Joyce's politics, we can at least set the contours of his political consciousness from the evidence of the books he wrote. Of course, we must content ourselves less with specifics and more with the general tone and direction of his political thinking. From such an overview, I believe we must concur with Lionel Trilling's judgment that Joyce demonstrates in Ulysses in particular sympathy for progressive social ideas. Joyce ought to be seen as a political liberal: tolerant, democratic, pacific, nonideological, protective of individual liberties, yet, committed to social and familial responsabilities. He was an attentive, sympathetic follower of developments among anarchist and socialist thinkers. His diffidence on the subject may be attributable to his distrust of political solutions to complicated social problems, a distrust wrought of the years of violence and frustration experienced by political movements in his own country. He may have avoided political theorizing for the very reason that he could not accept the bluntness and oversimplification that so often accompanied it. His own work demonstrates a fondness for the oblique and the ambiguous that, I believe, predisposed him against black and white theorical pronouncements. For many American critics, Joyce posed peculiar problems. In some respects, he was the paradigmatic European modernist: exiled, disengaged, seemingly indifferent to politics. Moreover, Joyce was the consummate stylist, adding elaborate allusive structures to his novels. Experimentation with language and the stream of consciousness technique were his artistic trademarks. At the same time, however, Joyce was a modernist with a difference. He had a distinctive naturalist strain in his writing and was quite capable of rendering a scene or a portrait with an exactitude reminiscent of Flaubert or Zola. In addition, Joyce's Irish background was petit bourgeois, and the subjects of his stories and novels belonged to this same class: lower-middle class Dubliners, poorly educated, generally unself-conscious and manipulated by prejudice or illusion. Joyce could exhibit a special sympathy for victims of prejudice or exclusion. He was interested in the life of ordinary people, their culture, their fears and aspirations. Richard Ellman said it best: "Joyce's discovery, so humanistic that he would have been embarrassed to disclose it out of context, was that the ordinary is the extraordinary." In a 1920 letter to Carlo Linati, Joyce called Ulysses "the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life)." The representation of the ordinary thereby becomes one of the most important elements of Joyce's democratic impulse. By giving the figures of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses a keen specificity with respect to the banal activities and feelings of their everyday lives, he intensifies the vitality of what it means to be human. The ordinary therefore plays a number of roles in Joyce's fiction, nonwithstanding its complication by the perspectives produced by narration and the thoughts of its characters. Its most external manifestation can be found in the intimate connection between many of the settings in the work and their prototypes in the historical world of late 19th and early 20th century Dublin. What makes Ulysses, first published on February 2nd, 1922, the innovative masterpiece that it is has more to do with Joyce's conception of history and humanity than nay other meaning, turning into a more identifiable work of art. Every page becomes a scavenger hunt for purpose and references to more expansive ideas. In a way, they serve as a portal to the past. In Ulysses, Joyce was attempting to capture the history of both the world and literature as seen through the eyes of his alter ego, Stephen Daedalus, and Leopold Bloom. To explore his ideas further, he conceived of a story which takes place during the entirety of one day in the city of Dublin, Ireland, on the cloudy and gloomy day of June 16th, 1904. The day will become a representative of the structure of time, and through the small explorations of each waking moment. Despite its interesting structure and function, Ulysses remains a very difficult and patient endeavor. Behind ever sentence there is a hidden literary reference. Joyce's interest in history and language are extrapolated to countless facets of life, and each one carries an important meaning promptly tying them to the collective experience of a culture. There is much left to be uncovered and more questions left to find, however. This only scratches the surface of Ulysses's depths, an intention originating from the book's very conception. When Joyce proudly expressed his books will be dissected by professors and students for hundreds of years. More than a hundred years after originally publishing, Ulysses remains a gem for any avid literary fan to adore and interpret.
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