I this book because...
Despite its main title, this collection isn’t actually about ‘everything’, in the way that Douglas Adams’s Life, the Universe and Everything (the third volume of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) claimed to be. It’s the subtitle that says it all – well, almost everything.
Joyce’s modernist masterpiece was first published in Paris in 1922, the author by then well removed from his native Ireland. I’m a Classicist (trained in ancient Greek and Latin languages and Greek and Roman culture) and a specialist ancient Greek historian and archaeologist.
Joyce’s Ulysses occupies a very special, indeed unique place in what’s now routinely – and centrally – labelled ‘Classical reception’. (Ulysses is the Latin near-transliteration of Greek Oulixes, an alternative to Odysseus.) It’s a famously ‘difficult’ text, not so much in its underlying and structuring leitmotif – a transposition in every sense of the original Homeric epic hero Odysseus’ 10-year nostos, return journey, from Troy to Ithaca, into a single day in the life of a very un-epic ‘ordinary’ Dubliner of Jewish ancestry, Leopold Bloom – as in its multilingual linguistic expression and multiplex cultural allusion and allusiveness.
Last year my University’s Press (Cambridge) published a centenary facsimile edition of the 1922 original – but in a modestly priced, bumper edition, afforced with helpful explanatory footnotes. For this is a text that, like my own source texts from Antiquity, from Aeschylus to Zosimus, demands as well as repays annotation. A footnoted ‘edition’ is one way to access Ulysses for the first time, or anew. Another is by way of the collection I’ve selected here. Like all collections, it’s uneven both in treatment and insight, but it has several singular merits.
The Table of Contents by itself reveals just how closely Joyce’s version can be mapped onto the Greek original via its ‘episodes’ named after principal ancient characters – from Telemachus (Odysseus’ only son) to Penelope (his only wife – though his ‘dalliance’ with the divine Calypso did occupy a staggering seven of those ten years of, er, return). Another bonus is that the volume is kickstarted by foremost Dublin-based Irish Classicist, John Dillon. And it is tailended (pun intended) by Marina Carr’s brilliant envisioning of Molly Bloom’s riposte to Joyce for betraying her innermost bedroom secrets.
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