Joyce’s Voices in Ulysses

Abstract

Joyce had contemplated Ulysses as a title as early as 1906, but only for a short story. Even then, however, the classical title foreshadowed a mock-epic, since his subject was a Dublin Jew. Ellmann (1982) traces an interest in the Greek hero back to Joyce’s schooldays at Belvedere, when he read Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses. He always regretted that he had never learned classical Greek, although he did try to learn modern Greek while he was living in Trieste, and was fascinated in the idea of its possible ancient relations with other languages like Hebrew. He began to work seriously on his novel in Trieste in 1914, and continued during the First World War in Zürich, and then in Paris from 1920. He worked on the Episodes chronologically at first, and in 1918 was much encouraged by the possibility of its serial publication in the American journal Little Review, thanks to the efforts of Ezra Pound. Its impact was sensational, in all sorts of ways. The Little Review was prosecuted in 1921 for the ‘obscenity’ in the thirteenth episode (‘Nausicaa’), and there were fears for the work’s publishable future. Joyce’s rescue by Sylvia Beach, who offered to publish it in book form, meant that Joyce was able to finish Ulysses and have it published in Paris within the year (1922). But almost up to publication day Joyce was continually revising the work, reworking episodes as far back as the seventh, ‘Aeolus’.