When the human character changed

James Joyce and his publisher Sylvia Beach, who ran the legendary 'Shakespeare and Company' bookstore in Paris and published 'Ulysses'. Photo: Getty

Great avalanche of texts on the centenary

of Joyce's Ulysses, even in our country

Everywhere it is proclaimed that 1922 was "the year that changed literature."

In November Proust died.

And in February the

had appeared in Paris “stacked in the Sylvia Beach bookstore, like dynamite in a revolutionary cellar”, wrote Cyril Connolly.

For his part, Eliot—the poet who accomplished the most difficult thing in the world: impersonating an Englishman—published his masterpiece,

.

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A century reading 'Ulysses'

But Christopher Domínguez Michael in

reminds us that Virginia Woolf placed the change 12 years before

: "By December 1910, the human character changed." In the same way that Palaeolithic art changed our minds, Woolf seems to suggest that the "new fiction" was changing everything. His phrase would be subscribed by many, and more so now that, at the speed of the shadow, everything changes more than ever and it does not even leave us stunned anymore. Moreover, in view of the general chaos, one thinks that a similar phrase could now be coined saying that this January 2022 the human character has changed again, although in this case to sink into a setback.

If we wanted to forget, even for a moment, this downhill, it could suffice to rescue any sentence from

, by Andrei Biely, the revolutionary novel that was six years ahead of

. Published on Russian soil in 1916,

, with its desire for absolute literary transformation, was circulating as a legend among European readers for 50 years, although it only began to be read in 1967 thanks to an excellent translation into French and also, of course, to that in 1975 Nabokov placed it among “one of the four prose masterpieces of the century”.

Biely writes in

that man is a vestige of something else and that the visible is nothing but a remnant of the invisible, which would explain why we have seen that man more than once change his character and also that

(Akal, 2018) is a novel that is open to many interpretations: mystical, metafictional, psychoanalytic, a proposal for the spiritualization of life, the story of a parricide and a police and political novel, with dynamite in the cellar as well.

The plot introduces us to the young Nikolai Apollonovich whom the Party, taking advantage of the hatred he has for his father, the tsarist senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, induces him to put a bomb in his office, an artifact hidden in a can of sardines (humor Cervantes). And, from that moment on, the

of the bomb unravels the suspense and horror emitted by the real protagonist of the novel, Petersburg, infernal city, cracked metropolis, mouth of sibylline shadow through which the abyss speaks. As Pedro B. Rey says, the presence of the city, that palpitating and anonymous monster, is what seems to link

with Joyce, although later he wonders, we wonder, if it isn't the other way around. The Biely artifact cannot owe anything, of course, to an

that was yet to come.

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