He’s quite unlike DH Lawrence – in order to succeed as a hero in Lawrence’s fiction, you have to be a very considerable sexual athlete. ‘Joyce doesn’t expect people to be heroic in the ordinary sense. With their moribund sex-life and respective infidelities, the couple’s situation is far from ideal, yet this imperfection is crucial to Ulysses’s theme, as Norris explains: Joyce shies away from nothing in this snapshot of Leopold and Molly’s life together. Part of what makes Ulysses different to the novels which preceded it, is that it shows the entire physical reality of what it means to inhabit a human body – eating, sweating, urinating, defecating, masturbating, copulating, etc. At the heart of the hero’s experience of love is his thoroughly imperfect marriage to Molly, which is depicted with unflinching candour. Joyce somehow managed to cauterise these personal wounds, and out of that unpromising material, gave us one of the great celebrations of the human spirit.’īloom’s defence of love against the forces of brutality is integral to the overall message of Ulysses. The father had drunk them into abject poverty, so life was very painful. – to linger around Dublin while she died in great distress of cancer of the liver. He’d been summoned home by his father’s famous telegram – Mother dying. As Norris explains, this was directly connected with Joyce’s life in 1904: ‘He was at the nadir of his experience in 1904. Norris refers to the characters of Ulysses as ‘down-at-heel Dubliners’.
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