Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.
Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus
The present reprint of the critically edited reading text of Ulysses—first published as the so-called ‘Corrected Text’ in 1986—stands corrected, as it must, in two readings: ‘Buller’ at 5.560 and ‘Thrift’ at 10.1259. This is the net outcome of the massive onslaught on the critical editing of Ulysses in the New York Review of Books of 30 June 1988 and elsewhere. Beyond that, the scholarly debate (where it takes and accepts the Critical and Synoptic Edition of 1984 on its own terms) leads, or would lead, to very few changes indeed to the reading text. The procedures of establishing that text, which is the text as it appears realized in this reprint, are grounded and documented in the apparatus of the critical edition. A textual modification in the present reprint alone would be without such a foundation, and no editorial changes have therefore been made.
