Joyce's "Ulysses": A Reader's Guide (review)

I have reason to believe that my own introduction to Ulysses might be indicative of how a number of readers first encounter the novel. Browsing among some old books the summer before my junior year in high school, I found a paperback whose well-worn cover still boldly proclaimed it to be James Joyce's "Ulysses." I had to see for myself what it was about this book. Some of the smartest people I knew revered it as an act of utter brilliance; others dismissed it as something utterly chaotic, incomprehensible, and better left alone. So with a blend of curiosity and trepidation, I took a chair and plunged right in.

Joyce's book turned out to be more elusive than I thought but not for my anticipated reasons of artistic sophistication or literary complexity. A few pages into the opening episode, I realized I was not reading the novel but the earliest mass-market guide to it. ¹ Looking again at the cover, I noticed an offset subtitle: "A Study by Stuart Gilbert." After a quick look around to be sure no one had witnessed my folly, I put aside James Joyce's "Ulysses" and looked for James Joyce's Ulysses. It had to be somewhere nearby. If someone had thought to trust in this guide, that person must have already invested in the real thing. Apparently though, I was mistaken about this as well. The Gilbert guide sat alone, estranged from any copy of the novel it was intended to explain. So I gave up the search and spent that summer in the company of Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats and F. Scott Fitzgerald; a few more summers passed before I tried reading Ulysses again for the first time.

I kept my shameful secret for over a decade, at last confessing it during the first meeting of a graduate seminar at Delaware. Asked to share initial encounters and perceptions of Joyce, I added my tale to the mix. I soon learned I was not the only reader to have made this mistake. Two classmates approached me at the break to admit they had done the same thing.

A few years later, I watched comedian and fake-news anchor Stephen Colbert make a humorous allusion to reading Joyce. The photograph that accompanied the segment showed Colbert on a park bench pretending to read a copy of Gilbert's guide. Known for his participation in Bloomsday performances, Colbert is clearly a reader who can make the distinction that I could not at seventeen. Because I was able to tell the real McCoy from its supporting text, I was pleased to be among those who could enjoy the added punch of the punch line.

As different as they are, these accidental and staged acts of mistaking the guide for the novel it explains underscore the unique role that readers' guides have played in the popular reception of Ulysses. It is regarded as a book that must be read with a strong supplement close at hand. The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, and Hamlet, for all their complexity, can be approached without intermediaries. Not so Ulysses. Venturing into the Joycean wild, most deem it essential to follow a good guide. Joyce seems to have recognized this when he collaborated with his friend Gilbert a little over a decade after the novel was first published in 1922. Gilbert's book has remained a staple, even as more critical guides, annotated notes, and other reading accessories have continued to appear (and disappear) over the decades. Like Richard Ellmann's biography, even with its flaws and lacunae, the Gilbert guide had the advantage of being first on the scene; any subsequent explanatory work tends to operate in its long shadow.

In Joyce's "Ulysses," Sean Sheehan provides a new generation of readers with an introduction to the novel. He incorporates episodic schema, plot summaries, and Homeric parallels that have previously been effective for so many readers. Atop these, Sheehan...