It’s time for Dubliners to reclaim Ulysses from the academics
New book argues that 1922 classic, not just references The Oddyssey but also Helen of Troy
IT’S THE most famous novel of the past 100 years, but most of us still haven’t got around to reading it.
Now Dublin journalist Senan Molony has written a new book which he says can help us understand James Joyce’s Ulysses more easily – and he’s urging Dubliners to make this the year they finally tackle the masterpiece, first published a century ago in 1922.
The book’s reputation for being impenetrable is unfounded, said Mr Molony, formerly a political journalist who also wrote a bestseller about the Titanic.
‘The academics appropriated this book,’ he said. ‘They built increasingly
‘The pub is a great place to read it’
complex ideas about it, pulling up the ladder into their ivory towers and helping to create the myth of its incomprehensibility.
‘Read it in this, its centenary year. Don’t see it as a chore. Skip bits you don’t understand.
‘Lots of the novel has rich Dublin dialogue and parts are extremely sarcastic and funny.
‘We get plenty of pub scenes for instance. In fact, the pub is a great place to read it. Ordinary Dubliners need to reclaim this book in force, because it was written for them, like the title of his previous short stories.’
James Joyce himself said of Ulysses, published on February 2, 1922, that he had ‘put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant’.
A hundred years on, he has been proven correct, and Mr Molony’s book lands with an entirely fresh interpretation of Joyce’s layered magnum opus.
Along with the long-established parallels with Homer’s Odyssey, Mr Molony argues that Ulysses equally mirrors other Greek classics the Iliad and Aeneid, which tell the story of the Trojan war prior to the events of the Odyssey.
According to Mr Molony, Ulysses, first published in its entirety on Joyce’s 40th birthday, is ‘a wooden horse itself in that it is made of wood pulp and it has a secret garrison of jokes and parallels between its covers’.
‘A Trojan horse has come to mean anything secretly deadly that is innocently swallowed,’ he said.
‘Here’s Joyce’s trick: Modernism is seen as writing with everyday detail thrown in randomly, because that’s how we live our lives. A tram ticket gets mentioned, a passenger taking off their gloves. But Joyce is so sophisticated that he is actually using modernism itself as a way of disguising his symbolism and allegory. So there is a hidden reason for lots of the stuff that appears to be churning in the Ulysses mix.’
Details of Joyce’s life and times have helped convince Molony his interpretation of Ulysses is legitimate.
‘Joyce would have known the Odyssey and Iliad backwards. He had top marks at Belvedere for Latin and Ancient Greek. He had two copies of the Iliad in his Trieste flat, but only one of the Odyssey.
‘The book was also written against the backdrop of the Great War and the Dardanelles misadventure, involving thousands of Irish troops, happened just across the water from ancient Troy.
‘Joyce actually wrote that the modern tank is just a new form of the wooden horse, so it all falls into place.’
Author and Joyce scholar Lucy Brazier told the Irish Mail on Sunday that, although Mr Molony’s theory ‘flies in the face of accepted academic interpretation, it also makes a lot of sense’.
She said: ‘You get the unsettling feeling that you’ve been missing something obvious all along, and that is a joy to any Joyce enthusiast. Molony reminds us of something so easily forgotten when labouring through the density of Ulysses – that Joyce is in fact having a laugh a lot of the time and humour plays a huge part in his work.’