Lefteris Vassilopoulos

DUBLIN: It is a blustery, overcast morning on the Irish coast. I am standing on the roof of the Martello Tower, looking down at bathers diving from a rock into the Forty Foot in Dublin Bay on the beach at Sandycove. I hold James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” With nothing but the wind to disturb me, I open the book. I read the first chapter, which Joyce — who lived briefly in this decommissioned coastal fortification — set in the tower. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came down from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” I read. “A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altare Dei.” The Latin translation is “I will go in to the altar of God,” the opening of Mass in the Catholic Church for centuries. There is the stench of corruption in the opening chapter, with Mulligan intoning a dark Mass to Stephen Dedalus, who has spurned his mother’s request to pray at her deathbed. Dedalus, cast out from his father’s house, is soon exiled from the tower to wander Dublin. His refusal to bow before authority, whether embodied in the Roman Catholic Church or the British colonizers, makes him an outcast, like the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom. We too are being orphaned in our own land. I cope with the savagery around me by reading. I retreat into past worlds and past lives. I revel in the lyricism and musicality of great writing. I heed the wisdom of our ancestors. Joyce detests what we should all detest. War. Violence. Nationalism, including Irish nationalism. Grasping capitalists. Fatuous pundits and journalists. Pseudo-intellectuals. Utopian dreamers. Pompous politicians. Bullies and brutes. He distrusts causes and noble ideals. Joyce knows the more inflated the rhetoric — “the big words that make us so unhappy,” as Dedalus says in the novel — the more the demand for human sacrifice. He chronicles the foibles, idiosyncrasies and struggles that define our lives. Like V. S. Pritchett — another writer I love — he reminds us that no one is ordinary. Joyce’s heroes do not adorn recruitment posters enticing young men to fight in the suicidal folly of World War I, underway when he wrote much of the novel. Bloom’s bodily functions, including defecation and masturbation, are described in detail, scenes that led to the book being banned for obscenity in the United States and Britain and in the Soviet Union for “not conforming to the policy of socialist realism.” But the point was to bring Bloom down to earth. Bloom is unmistakably human, yet filled with pathos, empathy and a desperate yearning for love. Heroism, Joyce shows us, is defined by the ability to endure suffering, rather than inflict it. There is much in this world, from the genocide in Gaza to the consolidation of fascism in the U.S., which warrants despair. But when it becomes overwhelming, there is the reassuring comfort of novels like “Ulysses,” which is set on one day, June 16, 1904. It improbably casts a Jewish advertising salesman as a hero, as a modern Odysseus, struggling to hold on to goodness and kindness in a world where the cruel and heartless triumph. Read the rest of my column — Reading Ulysses at the Martello Tower — at the link below.