Ulysses E-Book

Daniel Mulhall

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

DANIEL MULHALL was born in Waterford. He has spent more than forty years in the Irish diplomatic service, and is currently Ireland’s ambassador to the United States, having previously served as ambassador in Kuala Lumpur, Berlin and London. In 1998 he was part of the Irish Government’s delegation at the negotiations that produced the Good Friday Agreement. Over the years, he has written and lectured extensively on Irish literature, including the writings of James Joyce. Throughout his diplomatic career, he has drawn on literature to help tell Ireland’s story internationally, and has worked tirelessly to increase the impact and reach of Irish writing around the world. He is President of the Yeats Society, Sligo. Married to Greta, they have two children, Tara and Jason.

ULYSSES: A READER’S ODYSSEY

First published in 2022 by

New Island Books

Glenshesk House

10 Richview Office Park

Clonskeagh

Dublin D14 V8C4

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Daniel Mulhall, 2022

The right of Daniel Mulhall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-829-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84840-830-2

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The images featured in this book are reproduced by kind permission of The Rosenbach library of Philadelphia, The University at Buffalo Libraries Special Collection, and The National Library of Ireland, respectively. The map of Dublin featured on the inner cover is a 1900 Ordnance Survey map © Government of Ireland.

New Island received financial assitance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland.

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

To my wonderful grandchildren,Alice, Jessica, Liam and George

CONTENTS

Prologue, A Diplomatic Odyssey:Representing Ireland with James Joyce as a travelling companion

An Introductory Tour of James Joyce’s Ulysses

The Episodes ofUlysses

Episode 1, ‘Telemachus’: A Stately, Plump Martello Tower

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

PROLOGUE

A DIPLOMATIC ODYSSEY

Representing Ireland with James Joyce as a travelling companion

in the east: early morning: set off at dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day’s march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically. Walk along a strand, strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there […] Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet shops […] Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read: in the track of the sun.

– Leopold Bloom, imaginary world traveller,from Ulysses, Episode 4, ‘Calypso’

Like Leopold Bloom (in his imagination), I set off at dawn one day (it was 10 March 1980, to be precise) headed for somewhere in the East, New Delhi in my case. While there, I often wandered through the awned streets of Old Delhi and other cities across the subcontinent, saw plenty of turbaned faces and even bought a carpet or two during the years I spent there.

My forty-year journey ‘in the track of the sun’ means that I have indeed walked along strands in ‘strange’ lands, for every land is strange to us in its own way, even our native shores. And yes, I have grown much older and not just ‘technically’, as in Bloom’s imaginative reckoning. When I set out on my journey as a diplomat, I had few possessions besides my clothes, vinyl records and a collection of books I had assembled during my student days; works on Irish literature, history and biography for the most part, reflecting my academic interests. The volumes I had shipped to join me in New Delhi included a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses and, after the passage of four decades during which that volume has been one of my figurative travelling companions, and from which I have learned a great deal, I decided to write a book about that great book. As I look in my rear-view mirror, I realise that I have been in dialogue with Irish history and literature ever since my student days. The pages that follow are a product of that dialogue.

I am part of a fortunate generation of Irish people who benefited from sustained and substantial investment in education. As the first member of my family to go to university, I owe much to those in government from the 1960s onwards who chose to prioritise education as a means of enabling Ireland to fulfil its potential. During my lifetime, I have witnessed Ireland’s transformation as it progressed from being an outlier in western European terms to a fully developed country at the heart of the European Union. The national transformation that has occurred has not been purely economic. It has also led to a more open and tolerant society in whose present condition, albeit of course not a perfect one (and with no sense of complacency), I take genuine pride. And we have developed a more expansive attitude towards our culture, including a keener appreciation of James Joyce and his work, which is now a focal point for Dublin’s Museum of Literature Ireland, MoLI. As we approach the centenary of the publication of Ulysses, it is time to have another look at that great Irish, European, and indeed global, novel.

WHY ME?

My justification for undertaking this venture derives from the fact that I have spent four decades travelling the world with Irish literature as part of my diplomatic baggage, actual and intellectual. My copy of Ulysses, purchased in 1974, and my edition of Yeats’s Collected Poems, acquired in January 1976, have both criss-crossed the globe with me. I have used those two books, and many others besides, in order to present Ireland to people of different backgrounds whose interest in my country often stems from an affinity with our literature and our history. I wrote this book during my time as Ambassador of Ireland to the United States, where part of my role is to tell the story of modern Ireland to Americans across that vast country. I also strive to connect with Irish America and to promote Ireland’s considerable economic interests in the USA. In the course of this assignment, and during earlier ones in Scotland, Malaysia, Germany and Britain, I have sought to use the lure of our literature as a resource for creating vital affinities with Ireland. Many people across the world who have no ancestral connection with us often engage with Ireland, initially at least, through our writers and their works.

James Joyce’s writing has been part of my life going back to my student days, and I have returned to it again and again throughout my decades of diplomatic service. His work, and that of other major Irish writers, has helped shape my thinking about the country I have been privileged to represent internationally for more than four decades now.

In writing this book, I have read a lot of academic literature on Joyce and Ulysses and, wherever I have come across insights I found helpful, I have made use of those in the chapters that follow. Frankly though, much of the expert analysis I consulted would be of no value to the regular reader, often serving to complicate instead of clarifying, entangling Joyce’s text rather than elucidating it. In saying this, I am not being critical of the Joyce industry, for I fully appreciate that scholars and students need to subject works of literature to a deeper level of analysis. My efforts, however, have a different purpose, and my audience is a different one. What follows is not a paragraph-by-paragraph explainer of Ulysses, but rather a series of personal reflections on its eighteen episodes.

It so happens that Ireland enjoys the advantage of having a literary tradition that attracts international attention and admiration. The reach of our literature is such that I can recall being at the National Library of Vietnam in Hanoi in 2004 to launch a Vietnamese translation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Germany in 2011, the expiry of copyright on Ulysses led to two German radio stations producing separate dramatised readings of the novel, which drew positive attention to Ireland at a time when our national reputation was still recovering from the fallout from the economic and financial crisis of 2009/10. During my time in Washington, I have paid repeated visits to Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum, home to the original manuscript of Ulysses, where, through the celebration of Joyce’s work, Ireland’s literary heritage is cherished and treasured. My diplomatic career has been peppered with such experiences that testify to the profile of Irish literature and its value in boosting international appreciation of our country. ‘Soft power’ diplomacy is the current buzzword used to describe this phenomenon, which is a very real asset for Ireland.

CULTURAL DIPLOMACY

During my first diplomatic assignment in New Delhi (1980–3) – in the course of which I met and married Greta, who has partnered me in everything I have done since then – I came to know the distinguished Indian novelist and academic Chaman Nahal. At that time he was Professor of English Literature at the University of New Delhi. Nahal was involved in organising the All-India English Teachers Conference and invited me to participate. At that conference in 1982, I delivered two talks, one on ‘Yeats and the Idea of a National Literature’ and another on ‘James Joyce’s Ireland’.

My Yeats lecture was delivered in a huge theatre, and to the largest audience I have ever addressed at an indoor venue, for there were 1,500 delegates to the conference. Virtually all delegates seemed to have turned up for the conference’s opening session. They had come not to see me, but because the other keynote speaker was Karan Singh, the titular Maharajah of Kashmir, and a wonderful public speaker who could recite by heart large chunks of Yeats’s poetry. In my speech, I drew out those elements of Yeats’s work that I expected would be of interest to an Indian audience, namely his nationalism, his insistence that Irish literature could be written in the English language, and his interest in Indian philo­sophy and religion.

In my presentation on Joyce, which was delivered in the year of the centenary of his birth, I cited his determination, expressed in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to fly the ‘nets’ of ‘nationality, language, religion’ that he believed sought to hold the soul back from flight in the Ireland of his youth. Those so-called nets were pertinent in India in the 1980s, at least as much as they were in Joyce’s Ireland seventy years earlier.

My experience in India taught me an important lesson about the value to Ireland of our literary heritage. There I was, thousands of miles from home, in the world’s second most populous country, where our literature was the focus of attention and enthusiasm. What other country of our size could hope to have such a following for its literature? The English language, acquired – or imposed – as a consequence of conquest, had given us visibility in faraway countries where our great writers were read and admired. This gave us a profile in the world that we could never otherwise have expected to achieve.

I doubt that our literature would have been of such interest had it not been allied to our national story, which was seen in the India of the early 1980s as comparable in some respects with their own national struggle. When I arrived in New Delhi, the British Raj, which came to an end in 1947, was still well within living memory. There was considerable awareness of the extent to which Ireland’s example had impacted on India’s subsequent effort to assert its independence.

Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was in her early eighties when I met her through her granddaughter, Gita Sahgal. Pandit’s brother, Jawaharlal Nehru, had led the Indian National Congress during the last years of the Raj, and became India’s first prime minister in 1947. His sister had a distinguished career of her own as an Indian diplomat and while serving as Indian High Commissioner in London she had also been accredited as Ambassador to Ireland.

I was invited to lunch at her New Delhi home and, when she discovered I was Irish, she immediately launched into word-perfect recitations of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and ‘When You Are Old’. Mrs Pandit told me she had memorised those great poems when she was interned with her brother during the country’s struggle for freedom. Yeats, she said, had been a favourite, his nationalism giving him a special appeal for her family.

I have never forgotten the lessons I learned in India about the value of our history and literature to Ireland’s international standing. I have carried them with me through diplomatic postings in Vienna, Brussels, Edinburgh, Kuala Lumpur, Berlin, London and Washington. Thus, my genuine interest in Irish history and literature has combined quite neatly with my professional responsibility to promote Ireland around the world.

This has encouraged me to prioritise cultural diplomacy and to avail of the opportunities provided by the widespread interest in our literature in order to get a hearing for other aspects of Ireland’s story. An example of this was when I arrived in Germany in October 2009 just as the economic clouds were darkening for Ireland. Early in my time in Berlin, the Embassy participated in an open day, when the public were invited to visit diplomatic missions. I was struck by how many of our visitors that day stopped to view a poster of Ireland’s major writers that hung on a wall in the Embassy’s reception area. I heard a number of our visitors remark to each other how they had not known that Shaw, Swift, Wilde, Yeats and Joyce were Irish. This encouraged me to believe that we could draw on Irish literature so as to help soften Ireland’s image in German eyes at a time when we were viewed primarily in the light of the then ongoing economic and financial crisis.

Armed with a small exhibition on the life and work of W.B. Yeats, we declared ‘A Year of Yeats’, during which I travelled to German universities to open the exhibition and lecture on Yeats. I would always preface my remarks with a comment to the effect that ‘Ireland is in the spotlight at the moment on account of our economic and financial difficulties, but here is how things are with us. Our economy, while undermined by problems in our banking sector, is fundamentally sound, based as it is on competitive, export-oriented businesses. We will recover strongly from our current travails.’ Thus, our literature became a door-opener for me, allowing me to spread the message about Ireland’s performance and recovery prospects.

ULYSSESAND ME

I arrived in Washington in August 2017. The United States is a marvellous assignment for an Irish Ambassador on account of the warmth of welcome there is for Ireland’s representatives across the USA, something that, to the best of my knowledge, does not exist anywhere else in the world. Everywhere I have been, I have encountered individuals and groups who are deeply proud of their Irish heritage, even when the people in question may be several generations removed from Ireland.

One of our calling cards in America is the appeal of our culture, including the work of our great writers. I have lost count of the number of Irish literary treasures I have seen at American universities and libraries, including many first editions of Ulysses. Three places stand out for me – the Burns Library at Boston College, the University at Buffalo’s fabulous collection of Joyce material and Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum. In 2018 and 2019, I read at the Rosenbach’s Bloomsday celebration, for which they close the street outside their building and put on a ten-hour feast of readings and songs from Ulysses.

In 2018, I began posting blogs on Ulysses on our embassy website. This was aimed at elucidating Joyce’s great novel for American audiences. It also encouraged me to re-engage with this monumental Irish book, arguably our greatest modern cultural treasure. I did so out of a conviction that you cannot fully come to terms with the origins of modern Ireland without grappling with its most complete depiction in literature. And, as a corollary, it is not possible to understand Ulysses without being properly acquainted with the country and the era that produced it.

The blogs I have written on the eighteen episodes of Ulysses – which went on to inform the chapters of this book – represent an exercise in what I call public diplomacy, an increasingly important element of what modern diplomats do. The chapters that compose this book – while imbued with decades of engagement with Joyce and his work – are not intended to be scholarly. They are the fruits of considerable research on Joyce in preparation for this book, combined with the knowledge I have accumulated over the decades by dint of reading Joyce and speaking and writing about his work during my various diplomatic assignments. For the most part, they were written late at night or at weekends, when I could snatch an hour or two from my busy schedule of official engagements and family commitments. They represent a turning of the sod on Ulysses rather than a deep academic excavation. I hope that this sod turning will be of value to readers who may be thinking of attempting to scale this modern Mount Parnassus, especially those who wish to read it in connection with the centenary of Ulysses’s publication in Paris in 1922.

Upon reflection, I realise that this book is not just about James Joyce and his famous novel. It is about Ireland too. That is because it is the Irishness of Joyce’s work and the Ireland he depicts that really tickles my fancy. I approach Ulysses with the eyes of a historian, and with the instincts of someone who – even while having lived overseas for much of my adult life – has always operated in an environment supercharged with all things Irish. As a representative of Ireland, I have spent my career thinking about Ireland, talking about Ireland and surrounded by Irish people and Irish concerns. I also recognise that this book is, on one level, an exploration of the things I looked at in my Master’s thesis all those years ago: twentieth-century Ireland as seen through the lenses of our leading writers. It has always intrigued me how a country of Ireland’s size and population produced such a deep well of literary achievement in the opening decades of the twentieth century, at a time when it was undergoing a profound political transformation.

Harry Levin, an early scholar of Joyce’s work, captured the uniqueness of early-twentieth-century Ireland when he wrote about John Millington Synge’s Preface to The Playboy of the Western World:

In Irish life and language, he [Synge] indicated, writers would find both a vital theme and an expressive medium. With the Irish literary movement – with the achievement of Synge himself in the drama, of Yeats in poetry and Joyce fiction – these indications have been filled out. It would be hard to find a comparable body of writing, without going all the way back to the Elizabethans, in which the qualities of highly imaginative expression and closeness to familiar experience are so profusely intermingled.1

The combination of ‘a vital theme and an expressive medium’. This raises the question, did Irish history and Irish literature play mutually supportive roles in the pursuit of artistic and political achievement in the decades between the fall of Parnell in 1890 and Joyce’s death in 1941? Ulysses provides at least part of the answer to that puzzle.

I have long been intrigued by the fact that the publication of Ulysses coincided with the emergence of the independent Irish State that I have represented for more than forty years. Joyce wanted his novel to be published on his fortieth birthday, 2 February 1922. That date happened to fall just a couple of weeks after the keys to Dublin Castle were handed over to Michael Collins, in what was the first symbolic moment in the formal establishment of an independent Irish state. Thus, perhaps the first great modernist novel was published at the same time as the emergence of what I have come to view as the first modern state, one which set a pattern that was followed by the many countries that obtained their independence during the decades following the Second World War.

Our achievement in prising our independence from one of the victors of the First World War, which occurred while Joyce was busy writing Ulysses, became an inspiration for many African and Asian nations who had to extract their independence from their initially uncooperative colonial masters. In my experience, our position as a trailblazer has given Ireland a degree of international cachet that we retain to this day.

This book is also about my personal odyssey, a life spent in ten different countries across the globe. Rome-based Joyce expert John McCourt has argued that Trieste, where James Joyce spent so many years of his life, is ‘surreptitiously present as a continental perspective in the Irish world and worldview of Ulysses’.2As someone who has spent many years in multiple countries, I feel that each of them has maintained a continued presence, often surreptitious, in my own life, providing an external perspective on my personal Irish world view, and on my understanding of the wonder that is Ireland.

AMERICA, 2021

On 20 January 2021 – eighty years after the death of James Joyce in January 1941, shortly after he had met with Seán Lester, an Irish diplomat based in Geneva – I attended the inauguration of America’s forty-sixth President, Joseph R. Biden Jr. His election in November 2020 had been widely welcomed in Ireland. That was due to the manner in which President Biden has consistently highlighted his Irish heritage. He is the most Irish president of the USA since John F. Kennedy, and has a reputation for frequently quoting Irish poets. President Biden has often said: ‘I don’t quote Irish poets because I’m Irish. I quote them because they are the best poets.’ He released a powerful campaign video of his reading of Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Cure at Troy’, which served further to highlight the president’s affinity with Ireland as well as the enduring appeal of our literature. Speaking on arrival in Britain as part of his first overseas trip, President Biden quoted those memorable lines from Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

When then President-elect Biden left his home in Delaware on 19 January to travel to Washington for his inauguration the following day, he quoted James Joyce’s comment to the effect that when he died, Dublin would be written on his heart. President Biden remarked that in his case Delaware, where he had lived for most of his life, would be written on his heart. At such an emotional moment in his life, when he was on the verge of entering into the highest office in the land, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr quoted James Augustine Joyce. Enough said!

Daniel Mulhall

Washington DC, July 2021

AN INTRODUCTORY TOUR OF JAMES JOYCE’SULYSSES

of two races (Israelite and Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day … It is also a sort of encyclopedia.

– James Joyce on Ulysses3

James Joyce’s encyclopaedic description of Ulysses gives us an idea of just how much is going on within its covers. There are many streams running through this hundred-year-old book that can be explored for a fuller understanding of its hidden depths. My aim is to be helpful to readers who are journeying into Joyce’s book by providing a commentary on its content and on the manner in which it is written. I will be quoting freely from the novel so that even those who do not make it to the starting line will get a flavour of one of the twentieth century’s premier works of literature. This is not a Ulysses encyclopaedia, more a personal sketchbook offering what I hope will be a palatable taster rather than a full-scale scholarly banquet. I am, like most explorers of Ulysses, a learner and a searcher rather than a master, but, as a reader, I have been learning and searching for quite a store of years. I finished Ulysses for the first time many years ago, but have continued to go back for more.

Palm Beach may seem like a strange place in which to begin a journey through James Joyce’s Ulysses, but you need to start somewhere. Diplomatic journeys have taken me to all kinds of places. During my time in our foreign service, I have been to villages in India, to an Irish development aid project in the mountains of Lesotho, to the ‘Bangkok Hilton’ to visit prisoners, and to Krabi in Thailand searching for Irish people caught up in the Asian tsunami of 2004.

But diplomacy also brings its practitioners to locations like, in my case, the Habsburg Palace in Vienna for an East-West Conference in the late–1980s, Frankfurt for the annual Book Fair during my time as ambassador in Germany, the City of London, where I was made a Freeman during my assignment in Britain, Silicon Valley in California with a visiting Taoiseach, and Palm Beach in February 2019 for the annual Ireland Funds winter gathering. While there, I came across Raptis Rare Books, an exclusive bookshop full of expensive volumes. Although the books on show in the window were well beyond my reach, I entered the shop to take a peek. Inside the door, in the first locked display case I gazed into, what should I see but a first edition of Ulysses, signed by the author, that was on sale for $150,000! I chatted with the shop’s owner and agreed that, when I next returned to Palm Beach, I would come to the shop to talk about Ulysses. I did so the following year on one of my last journeys outside of Washington before the coronavirus shut everything down.

I wanted to pitch my talk in a way that would connect with my audience, which was made up of well-to-do local residents and some Irish people living in the vicinity. Many were customers of this upmarket bookseller, but I figured they might not necessarily be fully familiar with Joyce or Ulysses. I decided that it might be helpful to offer my audience a guided tour, as if they were visitors to an exotic land. In some respects, everyone who sets out to explore Ulysses is undertaking a demanding but ultimately, I believe, rewarding journey. My aim at that bookshop in Palm Beach was to be their tour guide and that is my goal with readers of this book. My remarks in Raptis Books, which I structured as a Q&A session much like Joyce’s in ‘Ithaca’ – the penultimate episode of his masterwork – went down very well with that evening’s attendance. With that experience in mind, this strikes me as a good way to begin our odyssey through Ulysses. Here goes.

WHO IS YOUR TOUR GUIDE?

When you take a tour, the first thing you need to learn is the identity of your tour guide and what their qualifications are for conducting this tour. Full disclosure: I do not have a doctorate on James Joyce or his novel Ulysses. I have, however, maintained a lifelong engagement with Irish history and literature, including James Joyce and his writings. This stretches back to my days as a student in the 1970s, when I became interested in the fact that what I call ‘the age of Yeats and Joyce’ (1880–1940) coincided with an era of political transformation in Ireland marked by the advent of independence in 1922.

I have spent my professional life in Ireland’s foreign service and, during four decades of serving Ireland overseas, I have talked a lot about Irish literature, including of course its greatest individual achievement, Ulysses. I hope that this experience will qualify me to act as a tour guide for those who are not steeped in the subject, first-time visitors looking for an introduction to the novel, or those returning to its pages in search of a deeper understanding. I hope too that Joyce scholars and students of his work will find something of value in the observations I have to offer.

IS THERE SOMEONE ELSE GUIDING OUR TOUR?

Yes, there certainly is. In fact, the mainstay of this tour is James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. I am his helper and my role is to act as an explainer. Mr Joyce, the author, is a brilliant man, but can – when he puts pen to paper – sometimes get a little carried away. His sparkling contributions may need a bit of elucidation on my part.

James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882, the son of John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane ‘May’ Murray. The family lived at quite a number of Dublin addresses as its financial standing went into steady decline. Joyce attended two Jesuit schools in the Dublin area, Clongowes Wood and Belvedere College, before studying English, French and Italian at University College Dublin. After graduating in 1902, he spent a short time in Paris before being called back to Dublin to be with his dying mother. He left Ireland for good in 1904, accompanied by the Galway-born Nora Barnacle, whom he had, to use the idiom of Joyce’s time, first ‘stepped out’ with on 16 June of that year. He only returned to Ireland three times after 1904. The couple, who had two children, Giorgio and Lucia, spent the rest of their lives in a number of continental cities, Pola, Trieste, Rome, Zurich and Paris. Joyce died in Zurich on 13 January 1941 and is buried in the city’s Fluntern Cemetery.

During his lifetime, he published two volumes of poetry, Chamber Music (1907) and Pomes Penyeach (1927), a collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), a play, Exiles (1918), and three novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). As one source puts it, ‘More than any other writer his adult life and his work are inseparable, and he might be said to have lived merely to translate his adolescent impressions of Dublin into literature.’ He saw himself as an ‘interpreter of Ireland to itself’,4 and that’s how I see him also.

WHAT’S THE TOUR ABOUT?

It’s about a book, 783 pages long in my American edition (1934), and its characters, real and fictional, its author, and the city in which it is set. The book was published originally in Paris on 2 February 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday. Ulysses is written in a great variety of literary styles, some of them innovative and daring for their time. It is one of the world’s most famous books, but certainly not the most widely read. I hope that this tour will encourage new readers to dip into it, or to give this century-old literary warhorse another go. At a minimum I want to provide an insight into what the literary fuss surrounding Ulysses is all about.

WHERE IS OUR TOUR’S LOCATION?

That’s quite straightforward, or is it? In one sense, we are in Dublin on the 16th of June in the year 1904. But in another sense we are also in the three European cities – Trieste, Zurich and Paris – where this novel was written. Each of them holds its own significance, for Ulysses was composed during and after the First World War, at a time of great upheaval across Europe, including as a result of the 1918–19 flu pandemic. It is, therefore, a European novel, albeit one with a forensic focus on early-twentieth-century Dublin. Its ‘European’ character was highlighted in early reviews of Ulysses.

Another location Joyce had in mind when working on Ulysses was classical Greece, as he used Homer’s Odyssey as part of his inspiration when he sat down to write his novel. Some explorers of Ulysses may find the classical parallels a bit off-putting, but not to worry. When you visit an art gallery, you can appreciate a painting without knowing all there is to be known about the artist and the background to the painting. The same is true with reading Ulysses. Background knowledge about its Homeric parallels is an aid and an advantage to readers, but not a prerequisite to their enjoyment of the novel.

Palestine also plays its part, for Leopold Bloom – the novel’s protagonist – is acutely conscious of his Jewish heritage, and is made to feel an outsider by many of his fellow Dubliners. Someone with Bloom’s background would have been something of a rarity in turn-of-the-century Dublin, which had fewer than 2,200 Jews in its population of 450,000 in 1901, although the size of the Jewish community had been on the increase in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The idea of investing in a plantation on the shores of Lake Tiberias takes his fancy early in the novel, and recurs a number of times throughout the day.

WHAT KIND OF A TOUR IS THIS?

It’s a book tour – and a walking tour. The book is a colossus of modern literature that has fascinated and frustrated readers for more than a century now. It is much like a big city, with lots of nooks and crannies to be explored. The book’s main characters spend the day – and the novel’s eighteen episodes, as its chapters are usually called – wandering around Dublin, mainly on foot. There are references to the city’s many tramlines, which are used occasionally, as when two of the novel’s main characters travel from the National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street to the city’s nighttown, where the fifteenth and longest episode of the novel takes place. There is also a carriage ride in the ‘Hades’ episode, which takes us through the streets of Dublin from Sandymount to Glasnevin Cemetery.

Our tour starts in Sandycove on the south side of Dublin Bay, where we meet Stephen Dedalus for the first time in the book’s opening episode. It continues in the nearby suburb of Dalkey, where Dedalus is employed as a temporary teacher, and then moves on to Dublin’s city centre, where the novel’s dramatis personae spend most of their day.

It will end at Howth at the north end of Dublin Bay, although none of the book’s characters actually go there during the day. Our last tour stop will be in Molly Bloom’s bedroom on Eccles Street, from where her thoughts ramble, ultimately to Howth and her first intimate tryst with her future husband, Leopold Bloom.

WHO ARE THE MAIN PERSONALITIES INVOLVED?

Like most cities, early-twentieth-century Dublin had a host of notable characters, many of whom flit in and out of the narrative, but our tour will focus on three main figures.

The first is Leopold Bloom, who inhabits the bulk of the novel’s pages. He is a not-especially-successful advertising salesman. A man in his late thirties in 1904, Bloom is the son of a Hungarian Jew, Rudolph Virag. Rudolph moved to Dublin in the 1860s, married a local woman named Ellen Higgins (whose father’s original name was Karoly), changed his name to Bloom and converted to Protestantism. Bloom senior died by suicide in a hotel room in County Clare, an event that is alluded to quite a few times in the pages of Ulysses.

The second is Stephen Dedalus, who is modelled on James Joyce himself. He is an aspiring writer and a young man of precocious intelligence. He comes from a troubled family. His father, Simon Dedalus, who is based on Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, is a sharp talker and a man about town, but someone who provides poorly for his family. Stephen has been staying with Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan, a wise-cracking medical student and would-be writer.

The third of our main characters, Marion ‘Molly’ Bloom, is Leopold’s wife, who was born in Gibraltar, and was a talented concert soprano under her maiden name, Marion Tweedy. She is the daughter of a British officer, Major Brian Tweedy, and his Spanish wife, Lunita Laredo, whose ‘lovely’ name Molly envies. In the novel’s fourth chapter, we get a glimpse of the Blooms’ relationship. Leopold fusses over Molly, bringing her breakfast in bed, whereas she is impatient with her husband’s convoluted personality. When she asks him to define the word ‘metempsychosis’, his elaborate definition boggles her: ‘O rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.’ Molly is planning an amorous rendezvous later the same day with her concert promoter, but more of that a little later.

The Blooms had two children, Milly, their daughter, and Rudy, a son. Rudy’s death when he was less than two weeks old weighs heavily on Bloom, and on his relationship with his wife. This brings into play a father-son theme, which runs through the novel, culminating in Bloom fleetingly finding in Dedalus a version of the son he has lost. Milly, fifteen years old, has left the family home and is working at a photographic shop in Mullingar, County Westmeath, where she is evidently enjoying herself and attracting attention from a friend of Buck Mulligan’s there.

ARE THERE ANY VILLAINS WHO WILL CROP UP ON OUR TOUR?

Yes, there are two that I want to mention. The first is a fictional character, Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan, a concert promoter and man-about-town, who is having an affair with Molly Bloom that her husband knows about. Boylan is due to visit her that afternoon at four o’clock, supposedly to discuss her concert programme. Bloom is aware of their appointment, and the looming encounter obsesses him all day. Understandably, he regards Boylan as a disreputable character, describing him as the worst man in Dublin. Over the course of the novel, Boylan keeps crossing Bloom’s path and cropping up in conversation. Some of those Bloom meets are evidently aware of Molly’s secret.