BLOOMSDAY CENTENARY: After the fanfare of the Bloomsday 100, it's a good time to reflect on some recent publications of interest to those whose curiousity has been roused to take a stab at Joyce's epic novel, writes PJ Mathews
A Boomsday Postcard By Niall Murphy Lilliput Press. 322pp. €20
Over a 25-year period Niall Murphy put together a collection of pictorial postcards which were posted in Dublin and its environs in 1904, more than 1600 in all. In so doing he managed to bring together two of his life's fascinations - the social history of Edwardian Dublin and Joyce's Ulysses. In this book a selection of 250 of these postcards forms the basis of a truly remarkable and innovative reader's guide to Joyce's classic. This reader was pleasantly surprised by the stunning variety of postcards that survive. The early 20th century was a golden age for the picture postcard in which the sending, receiving and collecting of postcards had become "a well established part of Edwardian life in Dublin". The fad was, no doubt, helped by the fact that there were as many as six mail deliveries a day.
Murphy's postcards form a wonderful double archive. On the one hand, the pictures record details of places, personages, politics, fashions, leisure activities, advertisements and quirks of the day. On the other, the inscriptions provide fascinating snapshots of ordinary Dublin lives in 1904. Murphy judiciously selects those postcards which most usefully illustrate aspects of Ulysses and provide helpful contexts for the reader. For example, one postcard bears a photo of the famous actor, Martin Harvey, to whom Leopold Bloom is compared in appearance in Joyce's novel.
The reproduced postcards are accompanied by chapter summaries and character sketches which will be useful to readers in need of some guidance through the intricacies of Joyce's text. Perhaps unavoidably, the "version" of Ulysses provided here is determined to a large degree by the serendipitous material which Murphy has unearthed, but given the nature of Joyce's book this may be entirely appropriate. This volume is beautifully produced by Lilliput Press and will be of immense interest to novices and aficionados alike.
An Aid to Reading Ulysses By David Butler The James Joyce Centre. 56pp. NPG
David Bulter's An Aid to Reading Ulysses is a more conventional study guide. In this accessible booklet he makes available much useful material on the actual form of the novel. This contrasts with Murphy's book, which is more concerned with the context of Ulysses. Not surprisingly, we find useful information here about the parallels with Homer's Odyssey and about Joyce's famous schema for the novel in which each episode is assigned a colour, a symbol, an art and so on. There are also useful notes on Joyce's biography and on what Joyce was reading. An Aid to Reading Ulysses will provide a solid if brief introduction to the Dublin epic. It does not overwhelm the reader with "annotation-overload" and neatly illustrates the point that sometimes less is more.
The Joyce We Knew Edited by Ulick O'Connor Brandon. 126pp. €11.99
This Boomsday centenary year has also seen the re-publication of a number of Joyce-related books. Ulick O'Connor's The Joyce We Knew has been revised and expanded since its original publication in 1967. In this book O'Connor gathers together various reminiscences of Joyce by his friends and contemporaries. William G. Fallon and Eugene Sheehy recall in some detail their schooldays with Joyce. Here they recount many of the incidents which would find their way into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Padraic Colum remembers his meetings with Joyce in Dublin literary circles. While Arthur Power and Sean Lester write of their encounters with him abroad, and his undying fascination with the city he left behind.
Faithful Departed: The Dublin of James Joyce's Ulysses By Kieran Hickey and Des Hickey. Lilliput. 82pp. €15
Faithful Departed: The Dublin of James Joyce's Ulysses, first published in 1982 by Kieran and Des Hickey, also makes a re-appearance. This book features photographs from the National Library's Lawrence Collection in an attempt to document turn of the century Dublin. Many of the photos have a familiar feel to them - trams, cobbled streets, Edwardian gentlemen - and have been widely reproduced as iconic images of "Dublin in the rare ould times". There are also occasional darker images of the squalor of tenement life. If these hold a certain fascination, the accompanying narrative has fared less well since first published. The tone adopted is one of unabashed sentimentality. June 16th, 1904 is recalled fondly as a day when "time stood still" and when "nothing much was happening in Dublin" despite evidence to the contrary in Joyce's masterpiece.
The Scandal of Ulysses By Bruce Arnold. Liffey Press. 3
Finally, for those interested in the, at times, bizarre world of editorial scholarship and copyright disputes, Bruce Arnold's revised edition of The Scandal of Ulysses has just been published. As Arnold notes, Joyce's book "has been the subject of scandal from first publication in 1922". The first part of the book deals comprehensively with early controversies about its alleged obscenity and the accuracy of early editions. Part two deals in some detail with the fallout from the publication of the Gabler text in 1984 and the Rose text in 1997, and the more recent legal wranglings over copyright involving the James Joyce Estate. To read through the details of these disputes is to encounter a cast of characters worthy of the attention of any fine novelist.
PJ Mathews lectures in English at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra. He will direct this year's Parnell Summer School on the theme "Ireland, Real and Ideal" on August 15th to 20th at Avondale, Co. Wicklow (01-2852113 . www.parnellsociety.com).