Educational Media Reviews Online

First published in serialized form in the American journal The Little Review beginning in 1918, James Joyce’s Ulysses was recognized immediately by artists and literati of the era as an important work and a major contribution to English language literature. Depicting the life of its main protagonist Leopold Bloom in a single day, June 16, the novel’s fragmented structure and use of the narrative convention coined stream of consciousness revolutionized world literature and solidified Joyce’s place in the canon of modernist literature. But for many, reading Ulysses is akin to scaling Mt. Everest or joining the mile high club—it’s something one hopes to do in a lifetime but few actually accomplish. Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, the lengthy novel, which is said to contain a lexicon of some 30,000 words, is a difficult read. Filled with allusions, puns, side stories and lots of bawdy humor, the novel epitomizes the definition of modernism and has been called the greatest novel of the twentieth century, but reading it from cover to cover and understanding it can challenge even the most erudite reader.

Thankfully, In Bed with Ulysses, a clever and well-constructed new film by co-directors Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna, provides an intelligent visual primer for contemporary audiences and helps make accessible something that often can seem impenetrable. The film is constructed in two primary parts that continually intersect and overlap and feed off one another in clarifying who Joyce was and how his novel is constructed. The film vacillates between an inspired and spirited telling of Joyce’s life and marriage to his wife Nora with a staged reading of the novel in celebration of Bloomsday, the day the novel takes place. The filmmakers have mined rich archival sources in telling the narrative of Joyce’s life prior to the publication of the novel. The filmmaking is anything but conventional, with the camera moving and panning and images edited at a pace that keeps the viewer engaged as if this were a mystery tale. Traversing across Joyce’s native Dublin as well as continental Europe, the film documents locations that inspired Joyce and makes real for readers what Joyce himself lived. According to the film, Joyce poured his private life into Ulysses and this ability to see locations, such as the room Joyce lived in while writing, make the book come to life. It also tells the controversy surrounding the novel’s publication which lasted years and included numerous stops and starts, heroic publishers and battles with censorship boards. As a character in his own life, Joyce comes across as a trouble soul—a man who is at once a nomad, poor, tortured, alcoholic, nearly blind, continuously jealous and paranoid; he hardly seems “the genius” who wrote the greatest book of the past century. Throughout the legal troubles and personal battles and wars with Nora, what emerges most clearly is the human side of the man, warts and all. Works of great literature are written by real people, not machines, the film makes clear and the revelation of how various personal anecdotes found their way into the finished novel is further indication of the connection between art and life.

The second component of the film is a series of staged readings of the novel by a first-rate cast of seven performers lead by award-winning actress Kathleen Chalfant. Several recording of Ulysses have been produced over the years including one featuring Joyce himself, but the juxtaposition of Joyce’s life story with marvelous interpretations of the words from the novel by superb actors provides an opportunity for a richer appreciation of Joyce’s intent. Suddenly, one gets it. Hearing the words read aloud, the jokes are actually funny and make sense in a way they rarely did before. The film’s title is a reference to the long passage that concludes the novel—the main female character Molly Bloom’s thoughts while lying in bed next to her husband. In the novel, this section is notorious because it is written without punctuation, yet actress Chalfant’s performance manages to bring out the poetry and erotic tension and humor inherent in the writing Her performance makes the words melodious and rich and gets under your skin in a way very few literary passages can. Together, the historical story of the novel along with the staged reading combine to give viewers confidence that they can tackle this giant ocean that seemed impossible to cross. In Bed with Ulysses inspires viewers to want to read the novel and finally understand for themselves what all the fuss is about. Highly recommended, particularly for academic libraries.