Ulysses 2022: a centennial experiment
- johnlev91
- Aug 17, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 1, 2022
These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. (Stephen Dedalus)
This haiku-like thought from Episode 3 of Ulysses is a fitting epigraph for the novel and its creator. Like the novel, it's a thought exquisitely balanced between dismay and exultation. When all is said and done, it's a "yes" thought.
Not one word of Joyce's novel has been changed in Ulysses 2022 . Thirty-seven thousand of its 265,000 words have been carefully removed. A century into its life, in the spirit of Molly's ever-helpful husband Leopold, Ulysses has been partly dredged.
Joyce's poetic idiom and narrative strategies continue to electrify writers and readers. But the novel also defeats many a serious would-be reader. To mark the centenary of the book, Ulysses 2022 carefully leans back to its more proportional first published form, as serialized in The Little Review in 1918-1919. The resulting hybrid of the two visions is being posted here in its entirety.
While the authorities blocked publication of further episodes than the 14 already published in The Little Review, Joyce parachuted 22,000 more words into those fourteen. The additions come mainly in episodes 6 through 13.
Episode 14, "Oxen of the Sun", the last of the serial episodes, was already enormous even in The Little Review. As Joyce composed the final four final episodes with no serial deadline looming, he produced an even greater effusion of wind and tide.
And so the ideal insomniac reader faces three difficult choices: Stop reading, pass over multiple pages or settle helplessly in for better or worse.
The narrative sandstorms inflicted by Joyce on Episode 14, "Oxen of the Sun", were especially untimely. A century on, this episode is the quintessence of Joyce’s vision of the book -- character colour, narrative exuberance, highest spirits, darkest epiphanies. When a quarter of the episode's words are removed in Ulysses 2022, its beauty comes clear.
The deepest cuts in Ulysses 2022 are from episode 10 onwards. Episode 15, "Circe", has shrunk from 38,000 to 22,000 words. Probably the most conspicuous cut is the removal of the newspaper-style subheads from episode 7, "Aeolus". They did not appear in The Little Review version of the episode and were retrofitted by Joyce.
At no point in the editing process did Joyce try to temper the effects of his enlargements (especially in "Cyclops", "Oxen of the Sun" and "Circe") on the book's overall proportions.
In a 1919 letter to Harriet Weaver, his early champion and patron, Joyce complained: "You write that the last episode sent [11: 'Sirens'] seems to you to show a weakening or diffusion of some sort. Since the receipt of your letter I have read this chapter again several times. It took me five months to write it and always when I have finished an episode my mind lapses into a stale of blank apathy out of which it seems that neither I nor the wretched book will ever more emerge… If the 'Sirens' have been found so unsatisfactory I have little hope that the 'Cyclops' or later the 'Circe' episode will be approved of: and, moreover, it is impossible for me to write these episodes quickly. The elements needed will only fuse after a prolonged existence together. I confess that it is an extremely tiresome book but it is the only book which I am able to write at present. . . .”
A century into their existence, the novel's many elements are further fused in Ulysses 2022 . Joyce's novel is a tale for the ages. Ulysses 2022 removes 37,000 words but takes nothing away.
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