The pub is warm and beery. Grog
glasses—drained, foam stained—scatter sticky veneer. Red-wine lips,
hoppy breath, a slurry of slurring; laughter like gunfire, craic-ing off
the wood panels, mirror walls and ranks of whiskey bottles. Bar talk is
of theology and adultery, literature and death, soap and sausages.
Everything and nothing, discussed or daydreamed over a quick cheese
sandwich. A nothing old day. But the stuff of life—infinitesimal yet
essential—all the same . . .
James Joyce’s Ulysses—variously considered the most
momentous, accomplished, infuriating and unreadable book in the English
language—is the ordinary made extraordinary. It’s a modernist reworking
of Homer’s Odyssey, but while the Ancient Greek poem tells of
Odysseus’ incident-packed return from the Trojan War, Joyce makes an
epic out of a single, unremarkable day.
Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom, a Jewish ad canvasser for The Freeman’s Journal,
as he wanders around Dublin on June 16, 1904. He attends a funeral,
goes to the pub, ducks into a museum (to avoid the man sleeping with his
wife), pleasures himself by Sandymount Strand, enters the red-light
district. The novel is a chaotic stream of consciousness, performing
stylistic acrobatics to try to render the human experience. But it is
grounded in the streets of Dublin. Joyce, writing from self-exile in
Paris, slavishly researched the physicality of the city. Though he
seldom returned, he remained tethered: “When I die,” he once said,
“Dublin will be written in my heart.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/james-joyces-dublin-a-microcosm-of-the-world/
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