Preface

Responding to Carl Jung's uncomprehending assessment of his epic, Joyce famously lamented, "He seems to have read Ulysses from first to last without one smile. The only thing to do in such a case is to change one's drink." William Brevda's "The Ha in Hat" is a witty and illuminating corrective to any humorless reading of the novel. Brevda notes that headgear proliferates in Joyce's Dublin and reflects the character and temperament of the wearer, from the trickster Mulligan's panama to the posturing Stephen's Latin Quarter chapeau. Joyce thus "epiphanises hats" in the novel, illustrating his theory that "the commonest object can become revelatory." Bloom's bowler, Brevda demonstrates, is a consistent source of revelation in the tradition of Jewish humor wherein a sudden material manifestation (Haha) becomes a sudden spiritual manifestation (Ahah). Joyce's repeated references to Bloom's "high grade ha" embed the onomatopoeic word for laughter in a sweat-altered object that is freighted with psycho-social significance: The bowler is an expression of bourgeois gentility and aspiration, a marker of modernity (echoing Chaplin's Little Tramp), and a Freudian symbol of male genitals. Brevda allows that "not all of Joyce's hat humor is high grade," invoking Bakhtin's concept of carnivalesque in his discussion of the novel's Rabelaisian "toilet bowler humor." Bloom's own comic sense is rich and diverse: He is a collector of jokes and a "Borscht belt dreamer" who laughs at his own expense and finds amusement even in the interment of Paddy Dignam's corpse. The one emotion Bloom can't convert into what Freud terms "the control of humor" is the threat posed by Blazes Boylan. Discussing the novel's "cuckold comedy," Brevda notes Molly's contrasting thoughts about her adulterous lover, with his rakish straw boater, and Bloom, who "is always and ever wearing the same old hat." She reflects that Bloom, too, wore a straw hat in the memories of Howth lovemaking that the two share. Rather than trying to reclaim this "season" of his youth when he returns home, however, Bloom reconciles himself to loss by rejecting jealousy in favor of the "broken humor" of "equanimity." In doing so, Brevda concludes, "Bloom's seasoned hat represents his seasoned wisdom."

As readers of Ulysses can attest, a deepening familiarity with the novel can condition one's view of the world, and especially of the city that Joyce describes with such abundant exactitude. In his comic memoir, "How I met Ulysses," Robert Seidman recounts his first experiences in Dublin as a young man conducting research for Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated. Following in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom, Seidman feels he has "been here before" and that he is "walking pages" of the novel as he tracks down obscure references. He drinks a pint in an ancient pub of dubious hygiene, sees a "bent crone" dressed in black near Glasnevin Cemetery, follows a red-haired siren to her storefront lair, and is abruptly dismissed by the woman's cyclopean father with his nose of "Brodingnagian pores" and "blowholes." Seidman confides that a tab of mescaline he ingested upon arriving in the city lent a "logic-waffling," Circean hilarity to all of his Dublin impressions. Yet this initial immersion in the Irish capital also heightened his understanding of Joyce's scrupulously realistic depiction of a colonial city so small and cohesive that the recurrent appearances and collisions of the novel's characters are inevitable.

The soundscape of Ulysses is as mimetic as its urban landscape. Exploring the presence of popular music in the minds of Joyce's characters, Patrick Reilly observes that the novel "is full of hidden melodies"—specifically, the lyrics to ballads such as "Waiting" and "In Old Madrid." These recur in remembered fragments in Bloom's thoughts in "Sirens" and in Molly's interior monologue, where they are identified as parts of her professional repertoire. Drawing on the semiotician Yori Lotman's concept of heterogeneous "texts with the text" and what Denis Donoghue terms the "auditory imagination," Reilly conceives of Joyce's reader as a musical "detective." Looking back from "Penelope...