“I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a ‘novel’; and if you call it an epic it will not matter”, said T.S. Eliot of Ulysses. There’s also an argument for calling it a collection of spectacularly detailed short stories. Joyce said that it began as an idea for one of the tales in his debut, Dubliners (1914): a man wanders the city streets in a way that echoes The Odyssey. This eventually gave Ulysses its episodic structure, which plots the day of Leopold Bloom on 16 June 1904 onto the adventures of Odysseus. Epic as the later episodes are, they all technically take place inside an hour, and at their heart have the same mundane encounters that inspired Dubliners. What Ulysses adds is an amazing sort of colorization technique, whereby the black-and-white cinema of Joyce’s early realism suddenly engages all the senses simultaneously. In the virtually perfect “Calypso” — Joyce used the Homeric titles for magazine publication, but removed them from the final book — Bloom goes out to the butcher’s to buy breakfast, cooks and serves it to his wife in bed, then heads to the loo at the bottom of the garden. Its mouthwatering sentences make rich poetry of domesticity: “Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray”. I would happily re-read them every morning forever.
First published in The Little Review, June 1918, and revised and expanded for Ulysses, Shakespeare and Company, 1922. Available to read here
A Personal Anthology 