Guides Through Ulysses

Book Reviews Even here, though, to be thoroughly convinced by the argument, one has to be willing to accept that oscillations and ruptures within a sequence may simply mean that the story the sequence tells is about "a divine operation of mind" or the alternating nature of consciousness . This is a good story of transitions in Lawrence's poetic canon. But better ones have been—and will be—written. Ross C Murfin University of Miami Guides Through Ulysses Robert Nicholson. The Ulysses Guide: Tours Through Joyce's Dublin. New York: Routledge, 1989. 160 pp. Paper $9.95 Harry Blamires. The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses. Revised 2nd ed. Keyed to the Corrected Text. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. 345 pp. Paper $13.95 BECAUSE OF HIS POSITION as curator of the James Joyce Museum south of Dublin in the Martello Tower, Sandycove, Robert Nicholson enjoys access to various rare historical documents and visual resources concerning Joyce and Dublin. Nicholson is also unusually well informed about the city's current restoration projects and cultural life. His knowledge of Ulysses is deep, broad, and current; he knows, for example, that "the full stop [in "Penelope"] on page 624 was in fact, only 'discovered' in the Corrected Text, and the appropriate thesis about its significance has still to appear." All these considerable advantages are brought to bear on The Ulysses Guide: Tours Through Joyce's Dublin. An excellent compendium of local history, literary scholarship, and wry critical commentary, the guide is designed to accommodate the ever-increasing number and variety of Joyce pilgrims. Arranged on an area-by-area basis rather than by episodes, its eight tours juxtapose, for example, "Nausikaa" with "Proteus" (Tour 2), and "Penelope" with various sections of "Wandering Rocks" (Tour 3). Although such episode juggling may dismay the new student attempting to get the order of Bloomsday straight, Joyce himself surely would have approved such an exercise in relativity. Furthermore , the atypical arrangements may provide scholars fresh insights about the relationships among and transitions between the times and places of Stephen's and Bloom's wanderings. The list of episodes and times of their occurrences provided before the first of the tours helps 253 SLT: Volume 33:2, 1990 offset any confusion caused by the unusual placement of Ulysses episodes within the Guide. The breakdown into eight tours also makes it convenient to visit all the settings of Ulysses, even the most obscure, during a week's visit to Dublin. "The eight itineraries, which vary in length from one to two hours, occasionally overlap, and indications are given of how to link one route with others nearby." All tours—except the funeral procession and viceregal cavalcade—may be followed on foot. Thus, the student following one or more itineraries per day can savor and digest the morsels of history, scholarship and local gossip that accompany the topographical directions, and still have time to attend a lecture, a play, or visit a pub. Nicholson orients the student to his text by providing appropriate excerpts from Ulysses. Surrounding these extended quotations may be bits of past and recent history, information about bus or DART routes, local gossip, and scholarly critiques. For example, sandwiched between two excerpts from the opening of "Proteus," which takes place on the strand, is the following information: The strand itself has been subject to a great deal of change since 1904. Then, it was bounded to the north by the Pigeonhouse Road and to the west by the main drainage embankment along the edge of Ringsend Park, which was at that time in the process of construction. Now, the nearest sand is a good hundred yards away to the southeast, where a standing stone on the shore, designed by Cliodna Cussen and erected in 1983, is dedicated to James Joyce. A smaller stone aligned with it points in the direction of sunrise on the winter solstice. The nearby strand was investigated by Danis Rose, who used the evidence of its seawrack, seaspawn, shells and shingle to plot the course of Stephen's walk. Nicholson's Guide is not only keyed to the 1986 edition of Ulysses: The Corrected Text, but, in an appendix, it...