Ulysses

A Reader's Odyssey

Daniel Mulhall

• Publisher: New Island
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781848408302
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Marking the centenary of Ireland's – and possibly the world's – most famous novel, this joyful introductory guide opens up?Ulysses?to a whole new readership, offering insight into the literary, historical and cultural elements at play in James Joyce's masterwork.

Both eloquent and erudite, this book is an initiation into the wonders of Joyce's writing and of the world that inspired it, written by Daniel Mulhall, Ireland's ambassador to the United States and an advocate for Irish literature around the world.

One hundred years on from that novel's first publication, Ulysses: A Reader's Odyssey takes us on a journey through one of the twentieth century's greatest works of fiction. Exploring the eighteen chapters of the novel and using the famous structuring principle of Homer's?Odyssey?as our guide, Daniel Mulhall releases?Ulysses?from its reputation of impenetrability, and shows us the pleasure it can offer us as readers.

EPISODE 1, ‘TELEMACHUS’:

A Stately, Plump Martello Tower

he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!

– Buck Mulligan to Stephen Dedalus

Here we are. On the opening page of the first of the novel’s eighteen episodes, we get a reminder from a jaunty Buck Mulligan that there is more to Ulysses than the comings and goings of an ordinary Dublin day. Who’s the ‘ancient Greek’? I will come back to this classical dimension, but first to the assessment of someone who is mentioned here and there in the pages of Joyce’s novel, Ireland’s national bard, W. B. Yeats. I have had a lifelong enthusiasm for the poet’s work, and as I am currently Honorary President of the Yeats Society, I am happy to begin this journey by quoting his opinion of Ulysses: ‘It is a work perhaps of genius’.¹¹ ‘Perhaps’ is an interesting word. I would say that it is essentially a work of genius, with an accent on the word ‘essentially’, but I will get back to that later. Let the show begin.

Wake up! It’s eight o’clock on 16 June 1904 and we have a long day ahead of us, roaming through ‘the heart of the Hibernian metropolis’ with James Augustine Joyce as our guide. As we explore the first page of Ulysses, we’re in Sandycove on the south side of Dublin Bay, looking out over the ‘scrotumtightening sea’. To our left as we gaze across the bay, we can see ‘the mailboat clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstown’ (whose name was changed to Dún Laoghaire two years before Ireland became independent in 1922, the year in which Joyce’s magnum opus was published).

The opening chapter of Ulysses dwells on the acti- vities of the three residents of the Martello tower at Sandycove as they rise to face the day. Martello towers were defensive fortifications built across the British Empire throughout the nineteenth century. Around 50 towers were erected in Ireland, mainly during the Napoleonic Wars, with 29 of these located around Dublin.

Stephen Dedalus, a young poet, will be one of the three main characters in Ulysses, the other two being Leopold and Molly Bloom. Readers familiar with Joyce’s earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, will recognise Dedalus, that novel’s principal character. He is clearly Joyce’s alter ego, a budding writer of lofty aesthetic ambition and with an aloof manner.

Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan, one of ‘the brood of mockers’, is a carousing medical student who, by his own account, is ‘tripping and sunny’. An ebullient character (‘I remember only ideas and sensations’), Buck Mulligan is based on the writer Oliver St John Gogarty. Mulligan will reappear a number of times in subsequent episodes of Ulysses. Joyce depicts Mulligan as a loquacious, cocksure personality. Mulligan makes most of the running in this opening episode, as if he were the novel’s main character. Gogarty was furious about what he saw as Joyce’s unflattering portrayal of him. He described Joyce as ‘Dublin’s Dante’ who had ‘to find a way out of his own Inferno’,¹² and dismissed Ulysses, in his typically feisty manner, as ‘a book you can read on all the lavatory walls of Dublin’.¹³ Gogarty, whom Yeats once described as a writer of ‘heroic song’ and ‘one of the great lyric poets of the age’,¹⁴ went on to have a successful career as a medical doctor, an Irish senator and a successful writer who spent the last two decades of his life in the United States, dying in New York in 1957.

The third character is Haines, an Englishman, who is an enthusiast for the Irish literary revival and ‘a ponderous Saxon’. According to Mulligan, Haines thinks that Stephen is not a gentleman. For his part, Stephen is resentful of Haines, with his ‘smile of a Saxon’. Haines is based on Richard Samuel Chenevix Trench (1881–1909), a graduate of Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, who had taught himself to speak Irish. In the novel, Haines had alarmed Stephen by raving in his sleep about a black panther. In reality, Joyce ended his brief stay at the Martello tower in understandable alarm after Trench discharged a gun during the night. Trench ended up committing suicide, shooting himself in the head while described as temporarily insane.¹⁵

The novel opens with Buck Mulligan strutting around the roof of the tower in a yellow dressing-gown breezily jousting with Stephen who is ‘displeased and sleepy’ because his night’s rest has been disrupted by Haines’s nocturnal antics.

We are in early twentieth-century Dublin, but there is a sense in which we are also brushing up against classical Greece. Although Ulysses can be enjoyed without any knowledge of its parallels with Homer, an awareness of a few key points can enhance a reader’s enjoyment of the novel. It is worth noting that the book’s main character, Leopold Bloom, a Dublin advertising salesman of Hungarian-Jewish background, is Joyce’s equivalent of Homer’s protagonist Odysseus from the Odyssey (‘the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel’¹⁶). Here, I have used Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the Odyssey which I bought during my most recent visit to Greece. The best-known translation is by Robert Fagles (the Odyssey, Penguin Classics, 1999), in which this passage is rendered more poetically: ‘Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy’. Both translations – ‘the man of many ways’ and ‘the man of twists and turns’ – seem to me to capture the intricate character that is Leopold Bloom. Odysseus – or Ulysses, as he is known in the Latin version of that mythic tale – is the main character in Homer’s epic, which recounts its hero’s lengthy journey home from the Trojan War.

This first episode of Joyce’s novel is known as ‘Telemachus’, named after Odysseus’s son in the Odyssey. He awaits his father’s return home to the island of Ithaca after the Trojan war. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is presented by Joyce as akin to Telemachus, while Molly Bloom is our Penelope, wife of the Homeric hero. In this opening salvo of the novel, we are introduced to Stephen, who is the central character in the novel’s first three episodes. After that we come into contact with Leopold Bloom, who dominates most of the rest of its pages.

One way of understanding Joyce’s novel is to see Bloom’s journey home through the streets of Dublin, and his urge to find a substitute for his deceased son, as symbolic of Odysseus’s journey home to Ithaca in the Odyssey. This is coupled with Stephen Dedalus’s more or less unwitting search for a father figure – much like Telemachus’s quest to find the absent Odysseus. Those familiar with Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen is the budding artist at its heart, will recall that Stephen’s own father, Simon Dedalus (based on Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce), was an improvident character and a neglectful father. By the time James Joyce entered university, the family’s fortunes had declined to the point where he listed his father’s occupation as ‘entering competitions’. In A Portrait, his father is described by Stephen as ‘a praiser of his own past’.

Bloom and Stephen finally discover each other in the book’s sixteenth and seventeenth episodes, but there are references in these opening pages to the father-son theme. Mulligan refers to Stephen as Japhet (Noah’s son) ‘in search of a father’. Referring to Stephen’s theories about Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mulligan jests that ‘he proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father’. Haines recalls reading a theological interpretation of Hamlet, ‘The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.’ In ‘Telemachus’, however, it is Stephen’s recently deceased mother who hauntingly occupies his thoughts.

For a book of such linguistic and conceptual daring, Ulysses begins in a fairly conventional vein. Its opening lines – ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a razor and a mirror lay crossed’ – could be drawn from any nineteenth-century novel; its opening pages are a lively, enjoyable read. In all of the Bloomsday readings I have organised over the years across three continents, these pages of the novel have always featured. Together with its closing passage, this must be the best-known part of Ulysses.

‘Telemachus’ contains little enough of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique (also known as an ‘interior monologue’) through which Joyce gives us direct access to the characters’ thoughts and impressions of the world around them. This is something the reader needs to get used to as they progress through many of the 750-or-so pages that follow. Here is an example of a sudden shift within a single paragraph from the third person ‘he’ of the narrator’s vantage point to the first person ‘I’ of Stephen’s inner world: ‘It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus’s song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the dark chords.’ Warning: it gets more difficult to spot these transitions later on in the book. By the time we get to the closing episode, ‘Penelope’, the narrative has shifted entirely to ‘interior monologue’.

This particular literary device puzzled some of the novel’s early readers and gave Ulysses a reputation for difficulty and obscurity that it has never managed to shed. My advice to readers who encounter passages they struggle to understand is not to be deterred, but to move on. This is not a novel with a plot in which everything needs to be fully grasped. Most of its ‘action’ takes place within the minds of its three main characters.

If you’re a reader who wants to become acquainted with Ulysses but do not feel you have the stamina to read the entire book, you could do worse than to read this episode, together with Episodes 2 (‘Nestor’), 4 (‘Calypso’), 6 (‘Hades’), 8 (‘Lestrygonians’), 12 (‘Cyclops’) and 18 (‘Penelope’). Taken together, they will give the reader a flavour of what it has to offer and of the feat of writing it represents. After being exposed to the more accessible and immediately compelling parts of Ulysses, readers may be encouraged to tackle its more taxing portions. One of my aims throughout this book is to allow my readers to do some tasty sampling of Joyce’s work. The eighteen episodes of Ulysses can be read as more or less self-contained short stories or, in the case of the longer episodes, novellas, and in one case a full-length play!

In this opening episode, the writing is descriptive and contains quite a lot of dialogue. There are plenty of examples of Joyce’s mastery of prose style. Take for example, ‘They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale’, ‘Warm sunshine merrying over the sea’ or ‘Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea … Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.’

As the critic Edmund Wilson puts it, the early chapters of Ulysses are ‘as sober and clear as the morning light of the Irish coast in which they take place’.¹⁷ For W. B. Yeats, the pages set in the Martello tower were ‘full of beauty’.¹⁸ He thought that those early episodes he had read in The Little Review in 1918 were ‘an entirely new thing – neither what the eye sees or the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time.’¹⁹ Even before Ulysses was fully published, Yeats was spot on in his understanding of what Joyce was attempting.

Although Ulysses concentrates on the private thoughts of its principal characters, it is interesting to see how much of the public life of early-twentieth-century Ireland butts int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Prologue, A Diplomatic Odyssey: Representing Ireland with James Joyce as a travelling companion
• An Introductory Tour of James Joyce’s Ulysses
• The Episodes of Ulysses
• Episode 2, ‘Nestor’: History Men
• Episode 3, ‘Proteus’: Stephen’s Beach Walk
• Episode 4, ‘Calypso’: Cat and Mouse at Eccles Street
• Episode 5, ‘Lotus Eaters’: Walking into Eternity via Windmill Lane
• Episode 6, ‘Hades’: All the Living and the Dead
• Episode 7, ‘Aeolus’: Blowing in the Winds
• Episode 8, ‘Lestrygonians’: Food for Thought and a Moral Pub
• Episode 9, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: Shakespeare and All That Jazz
• Episode 10, ‘Wandering Rocks’: Dublin in the Rare Old Times
• Episode 11, ‘Sirens’: Music, Music Everywhere
• Episode 12, ‘Cyclops’: Argy-Bargy on Little Britain Street
• Episode 13, ‘Nausicaa’: Those Girls, Those Girls, Those Lovely Seaside Girls
• Episode 14, ‘Oxen of the Sun’: ‘In Woman’s Womb Word is Made Flesh’
• Episode 15, ‘Circe’: All the World’s a Stage
• Episode 16, ‘Eumaeus’: Skipper Murphy Sails Again
• Episode 17, ‘Ithaca’: Joyce’s Universal Catechism
• Episode 18, ‘Penelope’: Lots and Lots of Yesses – and One Full Stop!
• A Parting Glass: Last Words on Ulysses
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Notes