Episode notes
A book about one ordinary day, a funeral, a cat, a gorgonzola sandwich, and a bar of lemon soap, was seized by the U.S. Post Office and burned in government incinerators. This episode decodes James Joyce's 1922 modernist novel Ulysses, following Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus through Dublin on June 16, 1904, the date now celebrated as Bloomsday. We explain how Joyce mapped Homer's Odyssey onto an advertising canvasser, his wife, and a young writer across 18 episodes, and why that structure argues that surviving everyday modern life is its own heroic epic.
The conversation then turns to the book's real revolution: stream of consciousness, the technique that dumps readers into the sensory overload of a character's mind. We tour the Oxen of the Sun chapter that mimics the evolution of English prose, the nightmarish play script of Circe, and Molly's nearly unpunctuated monologue in Penelope. From there we cover the 1921 obscenity trial sparked by the Nausicaa episode, the 1933 ruling by Judge John M. Woolsey that lifted the ban, and the so-called Joyce Wars of the 1980s, when Hans Walter Gabler's corrected edition was attacked by John Kidd over thousands of disputed errors.
- How Bloom's grief for his son Rudy, his father's suicide, and the Citizen's biscuit tin translate Homeric trials into modern life
- Why the Comstock Act made serializing Ulysses in The Little Review a federal crime
- Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, and the French typesetters behind the error-riddled first edition
- Joyce's deliberate puzzles, including impossible Roman numerals, and his boast about keeping professors busy for centuries
- Reactions from Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and Karl Radek