The House of "Ulysses": A Novel by Julián Ríos (review)

The Odyssey is the archetype of a journey: a story of traveling and a traveling story, moving though literary epochs and genres, once sung by Greek aoidoi all over the Peloponnese, then flickering in Dante's Divine Comedy, recollected by its hero in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem, and finally retold in modern form by Joyce in his monumental epic. Now this nomadic narrative has moved into The House of "Ulysses," duly subtitled A Novel, retold once more by a Spanish writer, Julián Ríos. After his Larva: A Midsummer Night's Babel, which draws many inspirations from Finnegans Wake,¹ Ríos's latest book appears as another homage to Joyce and a token of love from one of the most interesting and innovative contemporary novelists to his literary forefather.

The subtitle of The House of Ulysses indicates that Odysseus's classic story has once more been comfortably accommodated by the modern novel, a contemporary incarnation of the ancient genre. One feels tempted to paraphrase—it rests; it has travelled (U 17.2320)— but it is clear that Ríos's "novel" entails a paradox. In English, the name of the genre derives from the word "new," containing a promise of an original tale and a fresh way of telling.² The Spanish author uses the term tongue-in-cheek, however, since there is nothing new in his house of fiction, either in terms of its content or its form. It consists entirely of "happy returns" to "[t]he seim anew" (FW 215.23). This is brought home to the reader from the very beginning. Rather than trying to be "novel," the anonymous narrator of The House of "Ulysses" follows familiar routes, taking the readers on a guided tour of the Ulysses museum and attempting to domesticate for them the elaborate monument of Joyce's fiction.

The narrator wants the reader to feel at home in Joyce's book and facilitates this by providing an "ABC" of reading—or, rather, he introduces A, B, and C, which are three types of Joyce fans: "a lanky gent with a white-flecked beard" (the mature reader called A), a slender dark-haired girl in an indigo "Ulysses Museum" T-shirt (the young female reader labeled B), and a "tiny old man with white locks and crackling breath, sucking on an extinguished pipe" (an old critic referred to as C), accompanied by the staple figure of the Joyce industry: a fifty-year-old American Professor Jones "with a Yankee nasal drawl" (4, 5). There is, of course, a Cicerone to guide the group: a prestidigitator-conductor waving his magic wand to orchestrate A, B, and C's banter. Finally, there is also a mystery man in a macintosh.

The tour begins ab ovo, that is, from a very basic summary of Homer's epic, though some of the visitors object to what they see as unnecessary repetition and point out other, equally important, sources of inspiration and schemes underlying Joyce's book. Three keys—the classical, local, and mythical-Semitic—are offered by A, B, and C, who use them to unlock subsequent enigmas of each episode. Then the group visits each episode, the Cicerone introducing the basic "where, who, what, why, and how," while the others explain, comment, add, dialogue, swap jokes, and contribute wordplays in the Joycean spirit, and the man in the macintosh displays slides of Carlo Linati's table of Homeric correspondences and symbols for each episode.³ He remains silent throughout the whole book but bien visible,⁴ since his presence is conspicuously marked by macintosh print-screens. When the Cicerone remarks that Bloom's itinerary in "Lotus-Eaters" forms a huge question mark, he promptly provides the readers with the appropriate image (73).

While Joyce's Ulysses still puzzles and provokes questions, Ríos's book provides us with a few answers to them. For seasoned Joyce readers, the experience...