ABSTRACT
When I first began teaching Ulysses in the late 1970s, I would give my students the following handout:
Don’t panic.
Don’t panic if after the first episode you haven’t understood much.
Don’t panic if you don’t know if you’ve come to the end of the first episode.
Everything comes to those who wait.
Everything will be revealed by Linati and Gorman-Gilbert.
Everything comes in twos or threes.
If time permits, read Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There you will find a portrayal of Stephen Dedalus’s childhood, adolescence, early manhood. The novel closes with Stephen as a recently qualified graduate about to go to Paris.
If further time permits, read Homer’s Odyssey. This epic underlies Joyce’s. Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus looking for his spiritual father (not his real father, who is Simon Dedalus). You may not recognise him in the bath but Leopold Bloom is our hero Ulysses, while his wife, Molly Bloom (ah, sweet Molly), who is being courted and bedded by suitor ‘Blazes’ Boylan, is Homer’s Penelope, if a little more sensual and lascivious (Mother Earth in fact).
If further time permits (after time permitting and further time permitting), read Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’. This book will fill in the gaps (or the gaping craters) in your early attempts at reading the novel.
Time is of the essence as it happens. All the events take place on one day, 16 June 1904: ‘Bloomsday’ to later devotees.
The novel begins twice, once with Stephen’s early morning and once with Bloom’s.
The novel ends twice, once with Stephen and Bloom having ‘found’ each other and once with Molly’s soliloquy in bed.
The novel’s space also matters. Dublin is the centre, though not the ‘centre of paralysis’ (as it is in Dubliners).
The Blooms live at number 7 Eccles Street on the north side of Dublin; Stephen is staying at the Martello Tower 9 miles south of Dublin on the coast at Sandycove (where the novel begins).
Bloom is an advertising agent, Stephen for the time being a schoolteacher. Dublin is where they meet.
Consult the Linati schema and the Gorman-Gilbert plan. There are three episodes or chapters in Dawn, three in Morning, three at Noon, six in Day, three at Midnight. Eighteen episodes in all. This is enough to be going on with.
Begin now.
I will. Yes.
