Ulysses at 100
Visiting Joyce's Dublin in 2022
Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…
James Joyce, Ulysses
I. Longest Way Round is the Shortest Way Home
Like Odysseus himself, Ulysses (1922) has come home after a long exile. Its author James Joyce never did. Born in 1882 in Dublin, then part of the United Kingdom, Joyce left for continental Europe in 1904 and returned once, briefly, in 1909. “I will tell you what I will do,” Joyce’s alter ego Stephen Dedalus says in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916),
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.
Living and writing in Trieste, Paris, Rome and Zurich, where he is buried, Joyce never set foot in the modern Republic of Ireland, founded as the Irish Free State in 1922. Thus both Joyceans and the Irish nation as a whole celebrate an important centennial this year. The first great retelling/creative reinterpretation of Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, was commissioned by the emperor Augustus as a national epic for the then-new Roman Empire, a mythic origin of both the city of Rome and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Ulysses, released the same year as the founding of modern Ireland, has become a kind of national epic in its own way.
Joyce’s work sparked controversy in his home country since the beginning of his career. He wrote the short stories collected in Dubliners between 1904 and 1907 but could not find a willing Irish publisher; the book was finally published by London-based Grant Richards in 1914.
Ulysses, serialized in magazines between 1918 and 1920 and first published as a novel by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in 1922, was banned in the United States until 1934 and in the United Kingdom until 1936. Deciding United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, district Judge John M. Woolsey read the entire novel — 1,088 pages in a modern Oxford University Press edition — and concluded that Ulysses was not pornography but instead an “honest effort to show exactly how the minds of his characters operate.” Joyce’s use of ‘dirty’ words, he argues, reflects a commitment to realism which encompasses the “preoccupation with sex in the thoughts of his characters,” not an appeal to readers’ prurient interests. “Ulysses may therefore be admitted into the United States,” as Judge Woolsey famously ends his decision.
In Ireland, however, the novel attracted the ire of the ‘Committee on Evil Literature’ whose agitation led to the creation of the Censorship of Publications Board in 1929; key member William Magennis argued that Ireland needed to protect its youth from “the debasing influences of evil literature” such as Ulysses, which he once described as “moral filth.” (Magennis, who taught at University College Dublin while Joyce was a student, is actually mentioned in the novel’s 7th chapter, “Aeolus.” Struggling young lawyer J.J. O’Molloy tells struggling young writer Stephen Dedalus that “Professor Magennis was speaking to me about you,” hinting that Dedalus’ own poetry may be attracting unwanted attention from censors-to-be.)
“The book was simply kept out of the country,” Liz Evers writes in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. “It was neither imported nor printed here and thus was not widely available in the country until the 1960s.” While Ulysses the novel became available in the sixties, Irish audiences could not see the Oscar-nominated 1967 film adaptation until 2001, when the government finally lifted a 33-year-long ban.
Ireland has embraced Joyce decades after his death, not least because Joycean Dublin has taken its place as a major tourist attraction alongside the Guiness Storehouse and the Book of Kells. Before the switch to the Euro, for instance, Joyce’s portrait adorned the Irish ten pound note. Bloomsday, the celebration of the single fictional day — June 16th, 1904 — chronicled in Ulysses has become a multi-day, citywide festival in Dublin involving retracing the steps of the novel’s characters, dressing up in period clothing, reciting passages of Joyce’s prose and consuming food and drink mentioned in the novel. In the words of the Visit Ireland website’s 2022 Bloomsday Guide, “there’s a dizzying array of events both free and ticketed, and something to suit everyone from the literary aficionado to Joycean newbies.”
In addition to the James Joyce Centre and James Joyce Museum (two separate institutions), a variety of Dublin cultural spots celebrated the 100th anniversary of Ulysses, including the National Gallery of Ireland, The Abbey Theatre and the Museum of Literature Ireland. During my stay I visited Lincoln’s Inn pub, which celebrates its historical connection to the author with three exclusive Joycean beers, including Bloomsday Lager and Joyce’s Stout, and Davy Byrne’s pub, which was visited by fictional protagonist Leopold Bloom in Ulysses and still serves the lunch he ordered: a gorgonzola sandwich. (Of course I ordered it.) One can buy copies of Joyce’s books, Joyce greeting cards, coffee mugs, 100th anniversary pins, a variety of t-shirts and even a handmade “James Joyce Decoration,” or stuffed doll. Like Elvis, Joyce has inspired a cohort of impersonators, who don copies of his hat, glasses, eyepatch and walking stick every Bloomsday.
“They’ll be serving Joyce Happy Meals next,” in the words of Irish writer Roddy Doyle.
II. I Fear Those Big Words
Readily available, Ulysses remains controversial a century later, the current charge being obscurity rather than obscenity. (Judge Woolsey himself called it “not an easy book to read or understand… brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure, by turns.”) “Is James Joyce’s Ulysses the Hardest Novel to Finish?” asks the headline of a 2016 Guardian article.
As of November 2nd, 9,617 Goodreads users have given Ulysses 1/5 stars, with various reviews calling it “a grim cavalcade of stupefying boredom,” “pretentious and unreadable drivel,” and “the worst book ever written.” They have voted it the most difficult novel of all time, with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) second and Portrait of the Artist 22nd.
A newer edition of an older novel often begins with an introduction giving historical context and background information on the author. A novel frequently assigned in high schools or colleges will have a SparkNotes or CliffsNotes guide, or both. But Ulysses has spawned an entire cottage industry of guides for the curious reader. I myself read one of the most recent examples, Patrick Hastings’ The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses, but there are many others: Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey by Daniel Mulhall (advertised as “an initiation into the wonders of Joyce’s writing”), A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce by William Tindall, Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses by Terence Killeen, The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses by Harry Blamires and Romping Through Ulysses by Maite Lopez-Schroder, to say nothing of libraries of scholarship aimed at academic audiences.
In the words of Joyce himself, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”
So, what is Ulysses, and is it worth the time, effort, and background research necessary to read it? Well, the answer to the latter question will of course differ for each reader; reading challenging modernist fiction is just not a priority for most people, in 1922 or 2022, now even less so because books are such a smaller slice of the cultural pie.
As to the former, Ulysses is a loose retelling of Homer’s Odyssey that compresses Odysseus’s decade-long homeward journey into a single day in Dublin: ‘Bloomsday,’ June 16th, 1904. Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Portrait of the Artist, takes the place of Telemachus. The Odysseus analogue is Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Dublin ad agent whose Jewish heritage makes him the target of snide comments and outright antisemitic harassment. (Joyce once referred to Ulysses as the story of two nations, Ireland and Israel, and draws parallels between Irish nationalism, Zionism, Exodus, the travels of Odysseus, Bloom’s wanderings and the far-flung diasporas of both groups.) Molly Bloom, the novel’s version of Penelope, is, unlike her Homeric counterpart, unfaithful to her husband; much of Bloom’s wandering is motivated by a desire to stay away from home and thus avoid an awkward encounter with his wife’s lover.
Joyce identifies many more parallels in the two ‘schemas’ he sent to early readers of the novel. In the first chapter, for instance, the character of Malachi “Buck” Mulligan corresponds to Penelope’s ill-fated suitor Antinous while the milkmaid corresponds to Mentor, a guise taken by the goddess Athena on earth.
Each chapter of Ulysses evokes a specific book of Homer’s epic poem and is written in a different style. For example, the third chapter, “Proteus,” reflects the mythical sea god’s shapeshifting ability through a stream of consciousness internal monologue that constantly shifts from visual stimuli to memory to philosophical reflection to daydream to mundane thoughts of toothache and financial hardship, incorporating multiple languages and prose, poetry and imagined dialogue. The 16th chapter, “Eumaeus,” retells the long-awaited reunion of Odysseus and his son Laertes in the swineherd Eumaeus’s hut; Joyce sets the scene in a Dublin cabman’s shelter (an alcohol-free restaurant open all night) and writes it in what he calls “narrative (old),” or almost entirely in cliches.
As “Proteus” makes abundantly aware, Ulysses often puts the internal process of thought (and of remembering, regretting, hoping, fearing, planning) in the foreground and actual incident in the background. The external, physical action of “Proteus” is a young man walking on a beach; “Aeolus” is about a handful of newspapermen, admen and others talking in a newspaper office; the last chapter “Penelope” has no external action at all but is the punctuationless interior monologue of Molly Bloom laying in bed and falling asleep.
While we remember it as the “stream of consciousness novel,” it is important to reiterate its stylistic diversity. Other chapters unfold as a series of newspaper headlines and articles, a play complete with stage directions, and a catechistic series of questions and answers. It is, in other words, a book that lives up to, if not epitomizes, all of the critics’ descriptions that attract a certain reader and repel many more: experimental, groundbreaking, avant-garde, ahead of its time, a novel about the English language itself, etc.
The truth is that, yes, reading Ulysses is a significantly more time consuming and mentally taxing process than reading pretty much any other book. It makes demands on the reader that other books do not. Speaking personally, it is one of the two most difficult (English-language) books I’ve ever read, the other being Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), a work largely composed — and not written directly but dictated to a secretary — while Coleridge was in the throes of opium addiction. Like the reader of a novel in a second or third or fourth language, the reader of Ulysses must accept not understanding everything and must refrain from pausing to look up every unfamiliar word or reference. Contrary to popular perception and Joyce’s own talk of puzzles and enigmas, this a book to be experienced, not decoded, and sometimes the best option is to put down the guide or online annotations and just let it wash over you.
Fortunately, reading Ulysses on the occasion of its 100th anniversary —and visiting Ireland on the occasion of its centennial — was not my first encounter with Joyce’s writings, and I am as thankful that I begin in the Joycean wading pool of Dubliners as I am that I came to Moby-Dick having read Melville’s short stories, novellas and first three novels. If you’re interested in reading Ulysses I would recommend starting with Dubliners and then moving on to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to which Ulysses is a direct sequel.
We are, to a greater extent than I think any of us realizes, the products of the specific collection of books on our parents’ bookshelves. I recall two gigantic, forbidding old paperbacks of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that my father had bought long before my birth, books that even unread had a real presence, offered a real challenge. I first actually read James Joyce when I was assigned the short story “Araby” in a community college English class.
High school and college students never tire of complaining about the boring, ‘outdated’ and ‘irrelevant’ books assigned to them in class, sometimes doing so years after they’ve graduated, but these books have survived for a reason and can still be the right book at the right time for some readers. “Araby” was that and more for me. It is, in retrospective, the perfect introduction to Joyce for someone aged 18 or 19 because in very few words it captures the complexity of a teenaged infatuation: all the at times conflicting emotions involved.
I brought a copy of Dubliners with me to Ireland and when I revisited “Araby” it seemed almost like an embryonic version of Ulysses: a 20th century retelling, not of Homer but of the medieval knight’s quest, set during one evening and night in Dublin, taking up five or six pages. Revisiting the story in Dublin itself I also discovered that it had retained its emotional power. Rereading more than a decade after first discovering it was almost like traveling back in time to 2010, or, perhaps more truthfully, certain passages were able to transport that young community college student and his emotional life into the present. I could, after all those years, vividly remember reading and reacting to it and remains one of the perfect short stories in my mind.
My love of that one story got me to read the rest of Dubliners but the forbidding reputation of Joyce’s novels made me neglect them until the big anniversary this year. (I have not read Finnegans Wake but then again I’m not sure if anyone else has. Joyce himself famously said that it took 17 years to write and should take 17 years to read.) We too often rely on secondhand impressions of books and sometimes the best thing to do is to ignore both the worshippers and detractors and read it for yourself.
III. Looking Back Now in a Retrospective Kind of Arrangement
I recommend that you proceed or accompany reading Ulysses with a translation of Homer’s Odyssey. One of the joys of this 20th century retelling of the Odyssey is that the influence goes both ways — Ulysses, shaped by the Odyssey, will also shape your reading of the Odyssey, bringing to light facets of it that you may not have otherwise noticed or appreciated.
“Each writer creates his precursors,” Jorge Luis Borges writes in his 1951 essay “Kafka and his Precursors.” Borges uses the example of Franz Kafka, whose writing allows readers to see a Kafkaesque affinity between otherwise unrelated writings from different countries and historical periods. In Eliot Weinberger’s translation, “Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say it would not exist.”
I can give you two examples from my own experience with Joyce and his precursors. Stephen Dedalus, the Telemachus analogue in Ulysses, is a struggling young writer fascinated with Hamlet in large part because he sees so much of his own grief and difficult relationships with his parents in Shakespeare’s play. “Wait till you hear him on Hamlet,” Buck Mulligan remarks to a mutual acquaintance in the novel’s first chapter. “It’s quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.” The novel’s 9th chapter, “Scylla and Charybdis,” is devoted almost entirely to Stephen’s lecture on Hamlet at the National Library.
Earlier this year I alternated between reading one book of the Odyssey and one chapter of Ulysses and doing so allowed me to see so much of Hamlet’s melancholy, impatience and need to prove himself as a man in Telemachus, deeply enriching the experience of reading Homer’s poem. Telemachus’ rebuke of his mother in Book 1, for instance, appeared to me like an embryonic version of Hamlet’s “I will speak daggers to her” speech in III.2 and subsequent confrontation with Gertrude in III.3. (In his ‘schema’ Joyce identifies the meaning of the first chapter of Ulysses as the “dispossessed son in struggle,” a description that applies to all three characters.)
Because of Stephen Dedalus I discovered a Shakespearean quality in Homer’s Telemachy that I would not have otherwise seen, and because of Stephen Dedalus I will find a Homeric quality — previously unknown to me — in Hamlet the next time I read it.
Second, the Odyssey, like all great books, greatly surprised me, giving me something completely different than what millennia of adaptations led me to expect. Almost all of the scenes that immediately come to mind when we think of the Odyssey — the island of the Lotus-Eaters, the escape from the cyclops Polyphemus’ cave, the men turned to pigs by Circe, Odysseus listening to the sirens’ song while tied to the mast, the killing of the sacred cattle of the sun — come from just four of its 24 books, a section near the middle where Odysseus recounts his adventures to the Phaeacians.
The other books of the Odyssey do not resemble Bronze Age equivalents of a Ray Harryhausen movie or even Moby-Dick but are, to a much larger extend than I ever could have expected, concerned with banqueting; a surprisingly small percentage of the book takes place on the rough waves of the “wine-dark sea” while a surprisingly large percentage involve actually drinking wine. Penelope’s suitors feast and feast and feast upon the herds and stores of the absent Odysseus, Telemachus feasts at the house of Nestor at sandy Pylos, Telemachus feasts at the court of Menelaus at Sparta, Odysseus tells tales of his voyages during a feast at Scheria and Odysseus disguised as a beggar crashes the suitors’ feast at Ithaca.
In Robert Fagles’ translation, slight variations on the couplet “a staid housekeeper brought on bread to serve him,/ appetizers aplenty too, lavish with her bounty” appear six times, and variations on “they reached for the good things that lay at hand,/ and when they’d put aside desire for food and drink…” appear 14 times. (These repeated phrases reflect the Odyssey’s origin in oral tradition, serving as mnemonic devices like rhymes in our songs.)
Thus Henry Fielding aptly described the Odyssey as “the eatingest epic.” (It is perhaps the drinkingest as well — the word “wine” occurs no fewer than 233 times in Fagles’ translation.)
Whether intentionally or by the accident of being born in a specific time and place and 'writing what you know,” Joyce landed on the perfect modern parallel for these Bronze Age scenes of eating and drinking: the Irish pub with its mix of generous hospitality, drunken self-aggrandizing, drink-lubricated social interactions, camaraderie, passionate conversation, tall tale telling, and macho one-more-round one-upmanship. Reading Joyce’s pub scenes, hopefully accompanied by visits to actual Irish pubs, will help bring these ancient scenes to life.
IV. Am I Walking into Eternity on Sandymount Strand?
I stayed in a Joycean location in Dublin: Sandymount, the scene of the novel’s third chapter, “Proteus.” About twenty minutes south of the city centre by car or public transport, it is a place of contrasts, with some of Dublin’s most expensive neighborhoods right across the water from an industrial area of smoking factory chimneys. It must have already been an industrial or at least polluted area in Joyce’s day, as Stephen Dedalus walks past “unwholesome sandflats… breathing upward sewage breath.” (As you can see above, those unwholesome sandflats are still there.)
As it turns out, my immediate vicinity had at least one other Joycean connection — my nearest Dublin Area Rapid Transit (DART) stop was Sydney Parade station, the site of a pivotal scene in the Dubliners short story “A Painful Case.” Furthermore there is, near the men’s bathroom of what became my temporary local pub, Ryan’s of Sandymount, a framed newspaper article about a local eccentric and Joyce impersonator. (If you’re interested in visiting Dublin and finding your temporarily local pub once you’re there I would highly recommend the Dublin Pubopedia, a collection of hundreds of compulsively readable pub reviews.)
The area has other literary associations. James Joyce never won the Nobel Prize in Literature — one of biggest snubs in the history of the award — but two of his Nobel Prize-winning countrymen, the poets William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney, both hailed from Sandymount and are commemorated with busts in Sandymount village green.
Stephen Dedalus’ Bloomsday begins south of Sandymount in the Sandycove Martello Tower, an obsolete defensive fortification that Joyce himself rented with two other students in 1904; in both reality and fiction the abandoned tower was an affordable student accommodation because its draftiness, lack of running water and inconvenient location meant that no one else wanted to live there.
I visited the Sandycove Martello Tower, now the James Joyce Museum, and walked up the narrow, slippery spiral staircase to the parapet, following the footsteps of “stately, plump Buck Mulligan” in the novel’s first sentence. While Mulligan looks out at what he describes as “the snotgreen sea,” I saw much cleaner dark blue water. (As I write this it occurs to me that this phrase is a pun on Homer’s famous “wine-dark sea.”) At the end of the first chapter Mulligan and English roommate Haines go for a swim in the chilly waters off Sandycove and indeed I saw a group of people doing just that on my visit.
Later that morning Stephen Dedalus walks north to central Dublin on Sandymount Strand in “Proteus,” a chapter that intersperses his thoughts with sights and sounds of the beach that one can still experience in 2022: the sound of boots on “crackling wrack and shells;” Sandymount’s “nipping and eager airs;” the “boulders of the south wall” which in Stephen’s eyes resemble “piled stone mammoth skulls;” a dog walking “about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides;” “the tide flowing quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sand quickly, shellcocoacoloured.”
V. IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS
“Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub,” Leopold Bloom reflects while walking around his neighborhood in the novel’s fourth chapter, “Calypso.” An only slightly less difficult puzzle would be to cross Dublin without passing a place mentioned in Joyce’s fiction.
Within a ten minute walk of the James Joyce Centre on Great George’s Street, for instance, are the Jesuit-run private school Belvedere College, attended by both Joyce in real life and his alter ego in Portrait of the Artist; St. George’s Church, whose bells are heard in both Ulysses and the Dubliners short story “The Boarding House;” the building which once housed that both real and fictitious boarding house; 7 Eccles Street, the Blooms’ fictional address and now a hospital marked by a Joyce plaque; Eccles Townhouse on the corner of Eccles and Dorset, once the site of Larry Rourke’s Bar where Bloom smells “the flabby gush of porter” and “whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush;” and the Gresham Hotel, site of the haunting final scene in “The Dead”, the last story in Dubliners.
I visited all of these places on the James Joyce Centre walking tour. (Not on the tour but just 15 minutes away is Trinity College Dublin, passed by Stephen Dedalus in chapter 5 of Portrait of the Artist — “the grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring.” A few minute’s walk from Trinity is Lincoln’s Inn, a pub frequented by Joyce in real life and passed by Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, as well as Sweny’s pharmacy, where Bloom buys soap.)
One of my fellow tourgoers made an observation that has stuck with me ever since. We think of Joyce, he said, as the quintessential 20th century modernist writer, a writer on the cutting edge of the avant-garde, but his fictional world ends in 1904. Indeed, Joyce, who died in 1941, never wrote a story or a novel about World War I, the Easter Uprising, the Irish Civil War, the Great Depression or the rise of the Axis Powers. His stories never leave Ireland, either, and all of Dubliners and Ulysses and most of Portrait of the Artist take place within Dublin. Instead, Joyce spent his career as a short story writer and novelist minutely reconstructing the Dublin of his youth in all its beauty and ugliness; the majority of Joyce’s fiction takes places within two or three square miles.
His fiction is less fictional than one might think, as every single location and most characters have a direct real-life counterpart. My James Joyce Centre tour guide mentioned two interesting examples of Joyce’s attention to minutia. (Incidentally, he also mentioned that someone has solved Bloom’s puzzle — there is a single route through Dublin that does not involve passing by a pub.) One reason behind the reluctance to publish Dubliners in Ireland came from this passage in the short story “Clay:”
She went into Downes’s cake-shop but the shop was so full of people that it was a long time before she could get herself attended to. She bought a dozen of mixed penny cakes, and at last came out of the shop laden with a big bag. Then she thought what else would she buy: she wanted to buy something really nice. They would be sure to have plenty of apples and nuts. It was hard to know what to buy and all she could think of was cake. She decided to buy some plumcake but Downes’s plumcake had not enough almond icing on top of it so she went over to a shop in Henry Street.
The real-life proprietors of Downe’s cakeshop objected to Joyce’s depiction of their cakes as having insufficient icing and threatened legal action. Of course, he could have had his character visit a fictitious cakeshop instead, but even as a young, unestablished writer he was committed to realism in the smallest detail. While writing Ulysses he bombarded his aunt — then still living in Dublin — with letters about these details. “Is it possible,” he asks in a letter,
for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of no 7 Eccles street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself down from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 of the ground and drop unhurt?
She answered in the affirmative and Leopold Bloom, who forgot his key, does just that to let himself and Stephen into his house in the book’s penultimate chapter, “Ithaca.”
In Joyce’s own words, “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”
In a famous 1816 letter to her nephew, Jane Austen compares the small scale, intimacy and close observation of her novels to miniature painting: “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush.” In Dublin I learned just how small James Joyce’s own ivory tablet was, how fine his brush was.
VI. Can’t Bring Back Time. Like Holding Water in Your Hand
While reading Ulysses at home in California my mind returned again and again to the novel’s central conceit, the Odyssey in a day, the way that the accumulated weight of history, memory, nostalgia, fears, hopes, regrets, departed loved ones, anxieties, everyday joys and brief glimpses of beauty can give everyday places the strangeness of the Cyclopes’ island and transform a single day and night into a true voyage. “Every life is many days, day after day,” Stephen Dedalus says during his extended lecture on Hamlet. “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”
After visiting Dublin I see it as almost as much a work of memory — I’m tempted to say “autobiography” — as a work of fiction, as 1904 Dublin preserved from the ravages of history.
“A picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” Joyce’s Dublin did not suddenly disappear from the earth but had significantly changed by the time Ulysses came out in 1922. Dublin became a warzone during the 1916 Easter Rising and contemporary photographs of the city look like nothing so much as London after the Blitz. It has of course changed even more over the past century. Nelson’s Pillar, mentioned several times in Ulysses, became a symbol of British Imperialism and was destroyed by a probable IRA bombing in 1966. The spire of Dublin has taken the place of Nelson’s Pillar; its location, known as Sackville Street when Joyce wrote Ulysses, was renamed O’Connell Street in 1924. Dublin’s skyline is now dominated by tall buildings built decades after Joyce’s death.
But because of a now century-old novel, a certain kind of reader — who not only endured but enjoyed ploughing through its thousand challenging pages — comes to Dublin to see the remnants of 1904, to see the places haunted by both Joyce himself and his characters.
Odysseus returns to Ithaca after fighting in the Trojan War and sailing through seas disturbed by the gods, containing islands inhabited by monsters and witches. Leopold Bloom returns home to 7 Eccles Street after a long, trying day marked by many regrets and travails but also by his own acts of kindness. In Dublin I discovered that the trilogy of Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses represents another homecoming, James Joyce’s.
I love it.
I wonder if you have a take on a choice of Homer's English translation?
> “Every life is many days, day after day,” Stephen Dedalus says during his extended lecture on Hamlet. “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”
This made me think of your Necessary Monsters series.