Comparing Ulysses And American Beauty

Ulysses and American Beauty

In the "Nausicaa" chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, a virginal exhibitionist, Gerty McDowell, flashes her "knickers. . .the wondrous revealment, half-offered like those skirt-dancers" at Leopold Bloom, igniting his sexual fireworks on a beach in Dublin (366). In a film set almost 100 years later in an American suburb, another virginal seductress flips her dance skirt, giving admirers a peek at her panties, and inspires Bloom's modern incarnation, Lester Burnham, into a similar burst of auto-eroticism.

The "metempsychosis" of Leopold Bloom into Lester Burnham isn't the only astonishing similarity between Ulysses and American Beauty. When screenwriter Alan Ball accepted the 2000 Golden

Possibly because the book, which is the most universally owned novel by the reading public and thus, arguably, one of the most--if not the most--popular book in Western culture, is also the least read. As Joyce scholar Tom O'Shea pointed out at a recent James Joyce Conference, ownership of Ulysses is part of a syndrome which includes the buyer's pledge to read the book "eventually," "some day," "honest," followed by one or two abandoned attempts. The unread Ulysses on the shelf functions as an icon, a status symbol, and a future

Both the early Modernist novel writer and the contemporary screenwriter embraced the same aesthetic goal in depicting unorthodox and traditionally taboo sexual behaviors. In James Joyce and Sexuality, Richard Brown concludes that Joyce "is most keen to present his central characters with a variety of shades of sexual tastes as if to suggest that such varieties are intrinsic to human psychology" (83).

Ball echoes Joyce's thinking when he claims his film illustrates that "although the puritanical would have us believe otherwise, there is room for beauty in every facet of life" (114). That both Joyce and Ball probed and exposed the secret sexual lives of the full range of human characters while treating those characters with tolerance and love marks the most distinctive parallel between them as writers and social critics.

What's next for Ball? A film with characters corresponding to the pilgrims in Canterbury Tales? Actually, he says he's planning to take his unread copy of Joyce's famous book off the shelf. Faced with the long list of parallels between Joyce's novel and his script, Ball says, "I'm now inspired to read Ulysses." Honest.

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