“Ulysses” Explained: How Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare Inform Joyce’s Modernist Vision by David Weir (review)

David Weir prefaces his “Ulysses” Explained with two apparently simple yet truly ambitious goals: to explain Ulysses to the general reader and to offer new food for thought to specialists and scholars (ix). It is one of the many pleasures of the book to find out that, right to the very end, the author has remained faithful to his promise. Weir’s main tenet is that Homer, William Shakespeare, and Dante are not only utterly central in Joyce—nothing new here—but they are vitally and inextricably interlocked: Homer supplies the narrative, Shakespeare—or, rather, Joyce’s original interpretation of Shakespeare’s life—the plot, and Dante the design. It is only in this systemic inter-authorial togetherness that Joyce’s masterpiece can materialize in its unique complexity, and this is why an interpretative framework that includes and assigns Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante their own specific roles needs to be invented. This is Weir’s task in “Ulysses” Explained.

The introduction offers an impressive survey/assessment of the most significant texts on Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante published so far in Joyce studies. The Homer section begins with Valéry Larbaud, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound and finishes with Michael Seidel’s James Joyce: A Short Introduction.¹ By and large, Weir writes (with the welcome exception of Seidel’s book), the tendency has been to play down the importance of the Homeric arch-text. As for Shakespeare, according to Weir, it is Maud Ellmann’s chapter in the volume edited by Adrian Poole in the Great Shakespereans series that gets the gold medal as the best Shakespeare/Joyce assessment.² It is nevertheless surprising that Harold Bloom’s chapter on Shakespeare and Joyce in The Western Canon does not even get a mention, given that the quotation Weir includes echoes so clearly Bloom’s own opening of his “Joyce’s Agon with Shakespeare” (“James Joyce, who rarely lacked audacity, conceived of Shakespeare as Virgil to himself as Dante”).³

Chapter I, “Homeric Narrative,” is an episode-by-episode detailed guide to Ulysses, “explained” here by virtue of its Homeric parallels, be they simple correspondences, disseminated identities, or meaningful divergences. This is a very useful tool for new readers and students of Ulysses, as are Appendix A (“Synopsis of Ulysses”), B (“Consolidated Schemata”), and C (“The Odyssey and Ulysses: Episode and Chapter Comparison”). There is also space for original interpretations in the pages where Weir explains the triadic structure he sees at work in Ulysses. The eighteen episodes are divided into six triads, each generating Homeric meaning by following different paths. Sometimes the paradigm forces Weir to struggle in order to adjust certain episodes to his pattern, but it is this very effort that successfully pushes him towards really original insights, such as when he compares the “Aeolus” headlines to the words spoken by the gods on Mount Olympus or when he sees “Circe” working within the powers of witchcraft since characters and images of previous sections reappear here in “‘hallucinated’ form” (53).

The Shakespeare chapter gives ample space to “Scylla and Charybdis,” and hence to the inevitable Hamlet, but Cymbeline and Troilus and Cressida are also mobilized to account for politics and satire (109). The Bard contributes via both his creative work and his own life as interpreted by Joyce. So, Stephen is Telemachus modernized by Hamlet’s self-consciousness, and Bloom is a composite Odysseus through the association with the Bard himself, for both Bloom and Shakespeare facilitate, if not orchestrate, the betrayal of their partner by picking a wooer (Blazes Boylan, the M. H. of the Sonnets) for whom the lady will fall. Molly is both Ann Hathaway and the Dark Lady, unfaithful in practice, yet faithful in that she colludes with Bloom’s desire to see her in bed with another man.

Weir is a first-class philologist who makes sure that every piece of interpretation he...