Ulysses

Background

Joyce first encountered the figure of Odysseus/Ulysses in Charles Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses, an adaptation of the Odyssey for children, which seems to have established the Latin name in Joyce's mind. At school he wrote an essay on the character, titled "My Favourite Hero". Joyce told Frank Budgen that he considered Ulysses the only all-round character in literature. He considered writing another short story for Dubliners, to be titled "Ulysses" and based on a Jewish Dubliner named Alfred H. Hunter, a putative cuckold. The idea grew from a story in 1906, to a "short book" in 1907, to the vast novel he began in 1914.

Locations

The action of the novel moves from one side of Dublin Bay to the other, opening in Sandycove to the south of the city and closing on Howth Head to the north. The plot of the first three chapters, along with chapter 12, "Nausicaa", takes place on the shores of Dublin Bay, off the map.

Leopold Bloom's home at 7 Eccles Street is the setting of episode 4 ("Calypso"), episode 17 ("Ithaca"), and episode 18 ("Penelope").

The post office on Westland Row is a setting of episode 5 ("Lotus Eaters").

Sweny's Pharmacy on Lincoln Place, where Bloom purchases soap, is also a setting of episode 5 ("Lotus Eaters").

The Freeman's Journal on Prince's Street North, off of O'Connell Street, is the setting of episode 7 ("Aeolus").

Davy Byrne's pub serves as the setting of episode 8 ("Lestrygonians").

The National Library of Ireland is the setting of episode 9 ("Scylla and Charybdis").

Ormond Hotel at Ormond Quay on the banks of the Liffey is the setting of episode 11 ("Sirens").

Barney Kiernan's pub serves as the setting of episode 12 ("Cyclops").

The Holles Street Maternity Hospital is the setting of episode 14 ("Oxen of the Sun").

Bella Cohen's brothel on 82 Tyrone Street Lower is the setting of episode 15 ("Circe").

A cabman's shelter at Butt Bridge is the setting of episode 16 ("Eumaeus").

Structure

Ulysses is divided into the three books (marked I, II, and III) and 18 episodes. The episodes do not have chapter headings or titles, and are numbered only in Gabler's edition. In the various editions, the breaks between episodes are indicated in different ways; in the Modern Library edition, for example, each episode begins at the top of a new page.

Joyce seems to have relished his book's obscurity, saying he had "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring [sic] one's immortality". The American judge who decided that Ulysses was not obscene, John M. Woolsey, admitted that it "is not an easy book to read or to understand", and advised reading "a number of other books which have now become its satellites". One such book available at the time was Herbert Gorman's first book on Joyce, which included his own brief list of correspondences between Ulysses and the Odyssey. Another was Stuart Gilbert's study of Ulysses, which included a schema of the novel Joyce created. Gilbert was later quoted in the legal brief prepared for the obscenity trial. Joyce had already sent Carlo Linati a different schema. The Gilbert and Linati schemata made the links to the Odyssey clearer and also explained the work's structure.

Joyce and Homer

The 18 episodes of Ulysses "roughly correspond to the episodes in Homer's Odyssey". In Homer's epic, Odysseus, "a Greek hero of the Trojan War ... took ten years to find his way from Troy to his home on the island of Ithaca". Homer's poem includes violent storms and a shipwreck, giants, monsters, gods, and goddesses, while Joyce's novel takes place during an ordinary day in early 20th-century Dublin. Leopold Bloom, "a Jewish advertisement canvasser", corresponds to Odysseus in Homer's epic; Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce's earlier, largely autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, corresponds to Odysseus's son Telemachus; and Bloom's wife Molly corresponds to Penelope, Odysseus's wife, who waited 20 years for him to return.

The Odyssey is divided into 24 books, which are divided into 3 parts of 4, 8, and 12 books. Although Ulysses has fewer episodes, their division into 3 parts of 3, 12, and 3 episodes is determined by the tripartite division of The Odyssey. Joyce referred to the episodes by their Homeric titles in his letters. The novel's text does not include the episode titles used below, which originate from the Linati and Gilbert schemata. Joyce scholars have drawn upon both to identify and explain the parallels between Ulysses and The Odyssey.

Scholars have argued that Victor Bérard's Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée, which Joyce discovered in Zurich while writing Ulysses, influenced his creation of the novel's Homeric parallels. Bérard's theory that The Odyssey had Semitic roots accords with Joyce's reincarnation of Odysseus as the Jewish Leopold Bloom.

Ezra Pound regarded the Homeric correspondences as "a scaffold, a means of construction, justified by the result, and justifiable by it only. The result is a triumph in form, in balance, a main schema with continuous weaving and arabesque." For T. S. Eliot, the Homeric correspondences had "the importance of a scientific discovery". He wrote, "In manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity ... Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him." This method "is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history".

Edmund Wilson wrote, "The adventures of Ulysses ... do represent the ordinary man in nearly every common relation. Yet I cannot but feel that Mr. Joyce made a mistake to have the whole plan of his story depend on the structure of the Odyssey rather than on the natural demands of the situation. ... His taste for symbolism is closely allied with his extraordinary poetic faculty for investing particular incidents with universal significance, nevertheless ... it sometimes overruns the bounds of art into an arid ingenuity which would make a mystic correspondence do duty for an artistic reason. The result is that one sometimes feels as if the brilliant succession of episodes were taking place on the periphery of a wheel which has no hub."

Joyce and Shakespeare

After Homer's Odyssey, the literary work Ulysses parallels most closely is William Shakespeare's Hamlet. The play is mentioned in "Telemachus". Hamlet is a symbol in the Linati schema. In the Library episode, Stephen Dedalus puts forth a theory of Hamlet based on 12 lectures, now lost, that Joyce gave in Trieste in 1912. Chief among the implied parallels with Ulysses are Shakespeare and Joyce, King Hamlet and Leopold Bloom, and Prince Hamlet and Stephen.

According to Stephen, Shakespeare has a double presence in Hamlet. The king is the mature Shakespeare; the prince is Shakespeare as a young man. Stephen's insistence on Shakespeare's double presence in Hamlet hints at Joyce's double presence in Ulysses. Bloom is the mature Joyce; Stephen is Joyce as a young man. Other parallels with Hamlet include Gertrude and Molly Bloom, Claudius and Buck Mulligan, and Claudius and Blazes Boylan.

Like Shakespeare, Dante was a major influence on Joyce. It has been argued that the interrelationship of Joyce, Dedalus, and Bloom is defined in the Incarnation doctrines Stephen lists in "Telemachus".

Plot summary

Part I: Telemachia

At 8 a.m., Malachi "Buck" Mulligan, a boisterous medical student, calls an aspiring writer, Stephen Dedalus, up to the roof of the Sandycove Martello tower, where they live. There is tension between Stephen and Mulligan: Stephen overheard Mulligan make a cruel remark about Stephen's recently deceased mother, and Mulligan has invited an English student, Haines, whom Stephen dislikes, to stay with them. The three men eat breakfast and walk to the shore, where Mulligan demands from Stephen the key to the tower and a loan. The three make plans to meet at a pub, The Ship, at 12:30pm. Departing, Stephen decides that he will not return to the tower that night, as Mulligan, the "usurper", has taken it over.

Stephen is teaching a history class on the victories of Pyrrhus of Epirus. After class, one student, Cyril Sargent, stays behind so that Stephen can show him how to do a set of algebraic exercises. Stephen looks at Sargent's ugly face and tries to imagine Sargent's mother's love for him. He then visits unionist school headmaster Garrett Deasy, from whom he collects his pay. Deasy asks Stephen to take his long-winded letter about foot-and-mouth disease to a newspaper office for printing. The two discuss Irish history and Deasy lectures on what he believes is the role of Jews in the economy. As Stephen leaves, Deasy jokes that Ireland has "never persecuted the Jews" because the country "never let them in". This episode is the source of some of the novel's best-known lines, such as Dedalus's claim that "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" and that God is "a shout in the street".

Stephen walks along Sandymount Strand for some time, mulling various philosophical concepts, his family, his life as a student in Paris, and his mother's death. As he reminisces he lies down among some rocks, watches a couple whose dog urinates behind a rock, scribbles some ideas for poetry and picks his nose. This chapter is characterised by a stream of consciousness narrative style that changes focus wildly. Stephen's education is reflected in the many obscure references and foreign phrases employed in this episode, which have earned it a reputation for being one of the book's most difficult chapters.

Part II: Odyssey

The narrative shifts abruptly. The time is again 8 a.m., but the action has moved across the city and to the second protagonist of the book, Leopold Bloom, a part-Jewish advertising canvasser. The episode opens with the line "Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." After starting to prepare breakfast, Bloom decides to walk to a butcher to buy a mutton kidney. Returning home, he prepares breakfast and brings it with the mail to his wife Molly as she lounges in bed. One of the letters is from her concert manager Blazes Boylan, with whom she is planning to begin an affair. Bloom reads a letter from their daughter Milly Bloom, who tells him about her progress in the photography business in Mullingar. The episode closes with Bloom reading a magazine story titled "Matcham's Masterstroke", by Mr. Philip Beaufoy, while defecating in the outhouse.

While making his way to Westland Row post office Bloom is tormented by the knowledge that Molly will welcome Boylan into their bed later that day. At the post office he surreptitiously collects a love letter from one 'Martha Clifford' addressed to his pseudonym, 'Henry Flower'. He meets an acquaintance, and while they chat, Bloom attempts to ogle a woman wearing stockings, but is prevented by a passing tram. Next, he reads the letter from Martha Clifford and tears up the envelope in an alley. He wanders into a Catholic church during a service and muses on theology. The priest has the letters I.N.R.I. or I.H.S. on his back; Molly had told Bloom that they meant I have sinned or I have suffered, and Iron nails ran in. He buys a bar of lemon soap from a chemist (Sweny's Pharmacy). He then meets another acquaintance, Bantam Lyons, who mistakenly takes him to be offering a racing tip for the horse Throwaway. Finally, Bloom heads towards the baths.

The episode begins with Bloom entering a funeral carriage with three others, including Stephen's father. They drive to Paddy Dignam's funeral, making small talk on the way. The carriage passes both Stephen and Blazes Boylan. There is discussion of various forms of death and burial. Bloom is preoccupied by thoughts of his dead infant son, Rudy, and the suicide of his own father. They enter the chapel for the service and subsequently leave with the coffin cart. Bloom sees a mysterious man wearing a Mackintosh raincoat during the burial. Bloom continues to reflect upon death, but at the end of the episode rejects morbid thoughts to embrace "warm fullblooded life".

At the office of the Freeman's Journal, Bloom attempts to place an ad. Although initially encouraged by the editor, he is unsuccessful. Stephen arrives bringing Deasy's letter about foot-and-mouth disease, but Stephen and Bloom do not meet. Stephen leads the editor and others to a pub, relating an anecdote on the way about "two Dublin vestals". The episode is broken into short segments by newspaper-style headlines, and is characterised by an abundance of rhetorical figures and devices.

Part III: Nostos

Bloom takes Stephen to a cabman's shelter near Butt Bridge to restore him to his senses. There, they encounter a drunken sailor, D. B. Murphy (W. B. Murphy in the 1922 text). The episode is dominated by the motif of confusion and mistaken identity, with Bloom, Stephen and Murphy's identities being repeatedly called into question. The narrative's rambling and laboured style in this episode reflects the protagonists' nervous exhaustion and confusion.

Bloom returns home with Stephen, makes him a cup of cocoa, discusses cultural and linguistic differences between them, considers the possibility of publishing Stephen's parable stories, and offers him a place to stay for the night. Stephen refuses Bloom's offer and is ambiguous in response to Bloom's proposal of future meetings. The two men urinate in the backyard, Stephen departs and wanders off into the night, and Bloom goes to bed, where Molly is sleeping. She wakes and asks him about his day. The episode is written in the form of a rigidly organised and "mathematical" catechism of 309 questions and answers, and was reportedly Joyce's favourite episode in the novel. The deep descriptions range from questions of astronomy to the trajectory of urination and include a list of 25 men that purports to be the "preceding series" of Molly's suitors and Bloom's reflections on them. While describing events apparently chosen randomly in ostensibly precise mathematical or scientific terms, the episode is rife with errors, many or most of them intentional on Joyce's part.

The final episode consists of Molly Bloom's thoughts as she lies in bed next to her husband. The episode uses a stream-of-consciousness technique in eight paragraphs and lacks punctuation. Molly thinks about Boylan and Bloom, her past admirers, including Lieutenant Stanley G. Gardner, the events of the day, her childhood in Gibraltar, and her curtailed singing career. She also hints at a lesbian relationship in her youth with a childhood friend, Hester Stanhope. These thoughts are occasionally interrupted by distractions, such as a train whistle or the need to urinate. Molly is surprised by the early arrival of her menstrual period, which she ascribes to her vigorous sex with Boylan. The episode concludes with Molly's remembrance of Bloom's marriage proposal, and of her acceptance: "he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Reception

Censorship

Written over a seven-year period from 1914 to 1921, Ulysses was serialised in the American journal The Little Review from 1918 to 1920, when the publication of the "Nausicaa" episode led to a prosecution for obscenity under the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it illegal to circulate materials deemed obscene in the U.S. mail. In 1919, sections of the novel also appeared in the London literary journal The Egoist, but the novel itself was banned in the United Kingdom until 1936. Joyce had resolved that the book would be published on his 40th birthday, 2 February 1922, and Sylvia Beach, Joyce's publisher in Paris, received the first three copies from the printer that morning.

The 1920 prosecution in the US was brought after The Little Review serialised a passage of the book depicting characters masturbating. Three earlier chapters had been banned by the US Post Office, but it was Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice John S. Sumner who instigated this legal action. The Post Office did partially suppress the "Nausicaa" edition of The Little Review. Legal historian Edward de Grazia has argued that few readers would have been fully aware of the masturbation in the text, given the metaphoric language. Irene Gammel extends this argument to suggest that the obscenity allegations against The Little Review were influenced by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's more explicit poetry, which had appeared alongside the serialisation of Ulysses. At the trial, in 1921, the magazine was declared obscene, and as a result Ulysses was effectively banned in the United States. Throughout the 1920s, the United States Post Office Department burned copies of the novel.

In 1932, Random House and lawyer Morris Ernst arranged to import the French edition and have a copy seized by Customs. Random House contested the seizure, and in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey ruled that the book was not pornographic and therefore could not be obscene, a decision Stuart Gilbert called "epoch-making". The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling in 1934. The U.S. thus became the first English-speaking country where the book was freely available. Although Ireland's Censorship of Publications Board never banned Ulysses, a customs loophole prevented it from being allowed into Ireland. It was first openly available in Ireland in the 1960s.

Critical reception

In 1922, Ezra Pound wrote, "All men should 'Unite to give praise to Ulysses'; those who will not, may content themselves with a place in the lower intellectual orders." He claimed that in writing Ulysses, "this super-novel", Joyce surpassed Gustave Flaubert, Miguel de Cervantes, Henry James, and Marcel Proust, concluding that, besides François Rabelais, he "can think of no other prose writer whose proportional status in pan-literature is not modified by the advent of Ulysses".

In a 1922 review in The Outlook, the British novelist Arnold Bennett expressed his lack of admiration for Joyce detailing one day in 700 pages. He wrote, "Given sufficient time, paper, childish caprice, and obstinacy, one might easily write over seven thousand pages about twenty hours of life." Bennett also opposed Valery Larbaud's view that Joyce elaborately planned and organized the day he wrote about. He wrote that Joyce "apparently thinks there is something truly artistic and high minded in playing the lout to the innocent and defenseless reader. As a fact, there isn't ... After all, to comprehend Ulysses is not among the recognized learned professions, and nobody should give his entire existence to the job." Bennett acknowledged that Joyce's "verbal method can be justified" since he is "trying to reproduce the thoughts of personage", but called the details "trivial and perfectly futile in the narrative".

In April 1922, writing in The Nation and Athenaeum, English writer John Middleton Murry called Joyce "a genius of the very highest order, strictly comparable to Goethe or Dostoevsky…Ulysses is, fundamentally (though it is much else besides), an immense, a prodigious self-laceration, the tearing away from himself, by a half-demented man of genius, of inhibitions and limitations which have grown to be flesh of his flesh…Mr. Joyce has made the superhuman effort to empty the whole of his consciousness into it…[But he has become] the victim of his own anarchy….[Joyce] is the man with the bomb who would blow what remains of Europe into the sky…This transcendental buffoonery, this sudden uprush of the vis comica into a world where in the tragic incompatibility of the practical and the instinctive is embodied, is a very great achievement."

The next month, in the Sunday Express, newspaper editor James Douglas called Ulysses "the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature. ... All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ—blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass."

Publication history

The publication history of Ulysses is complex. There have been at least 18 editions, and variations among different impressions of each edition.

According to Joyce scholar Jack Dalton, the first edition of Ulysses contained over 2,000 errors. As subsequent editions attempted to correct these mistakes, they would often add more, due in part to the difficulty of separating non-authorial errors from Joyce's deliberate "errors" devised to challenge the reader.

Notable editions include:

Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922: The private, first edition published in Paris on 2 February 1922 (Joyce's 40th birthday) by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company. Beach commissioned Maurice Darantiere in Dijon to print 1,000 numbered copies consisting of 100 signed copies on Dutch handmade paper (350 francs), 150 numbered copies on vergé d'Arches paper (250 francs), and 750 copies on handmade paper (150 francs), plus an extra 20 unnumbered copies on mixed paper for libraries and press.

London: Egoist Press, 1922: The first English edition published by Harriet Shaw Weaver's Egoist Press in October 1922. For legal reasons the book was printed on behalf of Egoist Press by John Rodker using the same printer, Darantiere, and plates as the first edition. This edition consisted of 2,000 numbered copies on handmade paper for sale plus 100 unnumbered copies for press, publicity and legal deposit libraries. A seven-page errata list compiled by Joyce, Weaver and Rodker was loosely inserted and contained 201 corrections. The U.S. Post Office reportedly burned up to 500 copies, as noted in later Shakespeare and Company editions.

New York: Two Worlds Publishing Company, 1929: The first U.S. edition of the novel was pirated by Samuel Roth without Joyce's authorisation, and first published serially in Roth's Two Worlds Monthly, then later in a single volume in 1929. It was designed to closely mimic the 1927 Shakespeare and Company 9th printing but many errors and corruptions occurred during reproduction. Reportedly 2,000–3,000 copies were printed but the majority were seized and destroyed by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice after a raid on Roth's offices on 4 October 1929

"Joyce Wars"

Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 edition was the most sustained attempt to produce a corrected text, but it has received much criticism, most notably from John Kidd. Kidd's main theoretical criticism is of Gabler's choice of a patchwork of manuscripts as his copy-text (the base edition with which the editor compares each variant).

In June 1988, Kidd published "The Scandal of Ulysses" in The New York Review of Books, charging that not only did Gabler's changes overturn Joyce's last revisions, but in another 400 places Gabler failed to follow any manuscript whatever, making nonsense of his own premises. Kidd accused Gabler of unnecessarily changing Joyce's spelling, punctuation, use of accents, and all the details he claimed to have been restoring. Instead, Gabler was actually following printed editions such as that of 1932, not the manuscripts. Gabler was found to have made genuine blunders, such as his changing the name of the real-life Dubliner Harry Thrift to "Shrift" and cricketer Captain Buller to "Culler" on the basis of handwriting irregularities in the extant manuscript. (Gabler undid these "corrections" in 1986.) Kidd said that many of Gabler's errors resulted from his use of facsimiles rather than original manuscripts.

In December 1988, in "The New Ulysses: The Hidden Controversy", Charles Rossman revealed that some of Gabler's own advisers felt that too many changes were being made, but that the publishers were pushing for as many alterations as possible. Then Kidd produced a 174-page critique that filled an entire issue of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, dated the same month. Kidd's James Joyce Research Center at Boston University published this "Inquiry into Ulysses: The Corrected Text" the next year in book format and on floppy disk.

Gabler and others, including Michael Groden, have rejected Kidd's critique. In his 1993 afterword to the Gabler edition, Groden writes that Kidd's lists of supposed errors were constructed "with so little demonstrated understanding of Gabler's theoretical assumptions and procedures ... that they can point to errors or misjudgments only by accident". The scholarly community remains divided.

Gabler edition replaced

In 1990, Gabler's US publisher, Random House, after consulting a committee of scholars, replaced the Gabler edition with its 1961 version, and in the United Kingdom the Bodley Head press revived its 1960 version (upon which Random House's 1961 version is based). In both the UK and US, Everyman's Library also republished the 1960 Ulysses. In 1992, Penguin dropped Gabler and reprinted the 1960 text. The Gabler version remained available from Vintage International. Reprints of the 1922 first edition have also become widely available since 2012, when it entered the public domain under US copyright law.

In 1992, W. W. Norton announced that it would publish Kidd's much-anticipated edition of Ulysses as part of "The Dublin Edition of the Works of James Joyce" series. This book had to be withdrawn when the Joyce estate objected. For a period thereafter the estate refused to authorise any further editions of Joyce's work. This ended when it agreed to allow Wordsworth Editions to bring out a bargain version (a reprint of the 1932 Odyssey Press edition) in 2010, ahead of copyright expiration in 2012.

Media adaptations

Theatre

Ulysses in Nighttown, based on Episode 15 ("Circe"), premiered off-Broadway in 1958, with Zero Mostel as Bloom; it debuted on Broadway in 1974.

In 1960, London's Unity Theatre staged Bloomsday, an adaptation by Allan McClelland (who also directed) with sets and lighting by Sean Kenny. Joe MacColum played Bloom, with Helen Gold as Molly, Denys Hawthorne as Dedalus, and Michael Gambon as Mulligan.

In 2006, playwright Sheila Callaghan's Dead City, a contemporary stage adaptation of the book set in New York City, and featuring the male figures Bloom and Dedalus reimagined as female characters Samantha Blossom and Jewel Jupiter, was produced in Manhattan by New Georges.

In 2012, an adaption was staged in Glasgow, written by Dermot Bolger and directed by Andy Arnold. The production first premiered at the Tron Theatre, and later toured in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, made an appearance at the Edinburgh Festival, and was performed in China. In 2017 a revised version of Bolger's adaption, directed and designed by Graham McLaren, premiered at Ireland's national theatre, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, as part of the 2017 Dublin Theatre Festival. It was revived in June 2018, and the script was published by Oberon Books.

In 2013, a new stage adaptation of the novel, Gibraltar, was produced in New York by the Irish Repertory Theatre. It was written by and starred Patrick Fitzgerald and directed by Terry Kinney. This two-person play focused on the love story of Bloom and Molly, played by Cara Seymour.

Film

In 1967, a film version of the book was directed by Joseph Strick. Starring Milo O'Shea as Bloom, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In 2003, a movie version, Bloom, was released starring Stephen Rea and Angeline Ball.

Television

In 1988, the episode "James Joyce's Ulysses" of the documentary series The Modern World: Ten Great Writers was shown on Channel 4. Some of the novel's scenes were dramatised. David Suchet played Leopold Bloom.

In September 2022, the episode "James Joyce's Ulysses" of the documentary series Arena, was shown on BBC.

Audio

On Bloomsday 1982, RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, aired a full-cast, unabridged, dramatised radio production of Ulysses, that ran uninterrupted for 29 hours and 45 minutes.

The unabridged text of Ulysses has been performed by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan. Naxos Records released the recording on 22 audio CDs in 2004. It follows an earlier abridged recording with the same actors. Both recordings were directed by the composer Roger Marsh, who has also produced an unabridged audiobook of Finnegans Wake.

On Bloomsday 2010, author Frank Delaney launched a series of weekly podcasts called Re:Joyce that took listeners page by page through Ulysses, discussing its allusions, historical context and references. The podcast ran until Delaney's death in 2017, at which point it was on the "Wandering Rocks" chapter.

BBC Radio 4 aired a new nine-part adaptation dramatised by Robin Brooks and produced/directed by Jeremy Mortimer, and starring Stephen Rea as the Narrator, Henry Goodman as Bloom, Niamh Cusack as Molly and Andrew Scott as Dedalus, for Bloomsday 2012, beginning on 16 June 2012.

Comedy/satire recording troupe The Firesign Theatre ends its 1969 album "How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All?" with a male voice reciting the final lines of Molly Bloom's soliloquy.

Music

Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) is an electroacoustic composition for voice and tape by Luciano Berio. Composed between 1958 and 1959, it is based on an interpretative reading of the novel's "Sirens" chapter, as sung/voiced by his then wife Cathy Berberian. Umberto Eco, a lifelong admirer of Joyce, also contributed to its realisation. Berio's Epifanie (1961/65) also includes texts from Ulysses.

References to Molly's infidelities with Boylan and Bloom's sleeping posture, as related in her monologue in the "Penelope" chapter, appear in Grace Slick's song "Rejoyce", the last track on Jefferson Airplane's 1967 album After Bathing at Baxter's.

Anthony Burgess composed the operetta Blooms of Dublin in 1982, as a very free interpretation of Joyce's text. It was televised by the BBC, to mixed reviews.

The Radiators from Space released a song Kitty Ricketts on their album Ghostown (1979), in which the ghost of one of the prostitutes from Bella Cohen's brothel haunts modern Dublin.

Kate Bush's 1989 song "The Sensual World" (the title track of her album of the same name) is based on Molly Bloom's soliloquy and uses several phrases such as "mmm yes". Bush wanted to use the soliloquy's actual words, but the Joyce family refused her request. While preparing Director's Cut (2011), an album of re-recordings, she again asked the Joyce family for permission to use the soliloquy, and her request was granted. She renamed the song "Flower of the Mountain" and used sections of the soliloquy.

The James Joyce Society in Dublin released the album Classical Ulysses for the Bloomsday100 celebrations in 2004. It contains recordings of the classical music mentioned in the book.

Prose

Jacob M. Appel's novel The Biology of Luck (2013) is a retelling of Ulysses set in New York City. It features an inept tour guide, Larry Bloom, whose adventures parallel those of Leopold Bloom through Dublin.

Comics

A comic-book adaptation by Nicolas Mahler was published in German in 2020 and in English translation in 2022.

The Ulysses Project

In 2020, during COVID-19 pandemic in the Republic of Ireland, actor and filmmaker Laoisa Sexton created The Ulysses Project, a work of digital theatre shot entirely during lockdown. A low-tech retelling of Ulysses, The Ulysses Project featured an ensemble of over 85 actors who filmed themselves on phones or webcam, while being directed via WhatsApp. The cast included Gina Costigan, Olwen Fouéré, Shane MacGowan, Paula Meehan, and Barry Ward. The Ulysses Project was later screened by the Irish Film Institute as part of their Bloomsday Centennial celebration.

List of editions in print

Facsimile texts of the manuscript

Ulysses, a three-volume facsimile copy of the complete, handwritten manuscript. Introduction by Harry Levin; bibliographical preface by Clive Driver. Philip H. &. A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation (now known as the Rosenbach Museum & Library). New York: Octagon Books (1975).

Serial text published in the Little Review, 1918–1920

The Little Review Ulysses, edited by Mark Gaipa, Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, Yale University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-300-18177-7

Facsimile texts of the 1922 first edition

Ulysses, The 1922 Text, with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson, Oxford University Press (1993). ISBN 0-19-282866-5

Ulysses: A Facsimile of the First Edition Published in Paris in 1922, Orchises Press (1998). ISBN 978-0-914061-70-0

Ulysses: With a new Introduction by Enda Duffy – An unabridged republication of the original Shakespeare and Company edition, published in Paris by Sylvia Beach, 1922, Dover Publications (2009). ISBN 978-0-486-47470-0

The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes, edited by Catherne Flynn, Cambridge University Press (2022). ISBN 9781316515945

Based on the 1932 Odyssey Press edition

Ulysses, Wordsworth Classics (2010). Introduction by Cedric Watts. ISBN 978-1-840-22635-5

Based on the 1939 Odyssey Press edition

Ulysses, Alma Classics (2012), with an introduction and notes by Sam Slote, Trinity College, Dublin. ISBN 978-1-84749-399-6

Based on the 1960 Bodley Head/1961 Random House editions

Ulysses, Vintage International (1990). ISBN 978-0-679-72276-2

Ulysses: Annotated Student's Edition, with an introduction and notes by Declan Kiberd, Penguin Twentieth Century Classics (1992). ISBN 978-0-141-18443-2

Ulysses: The 1934 Text, As Corrected and Reset in 1961, Modern Library (1992). Foreword by Morris L. Ernst. ISBN 978-0-679-60011-4

Ulysses, Everyman's Library (1997). ISBN 978-1-85715-100-8

Ulysses, Penguin Modern Classics (2000). Introduction by Declan Kiberd. ISBN 978-0-14118-280-3

Based on the 1984 Gabler edition

Ulysses: The corrected text, edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior; preface by Richard Ellmann, Vintage International (1986). This follows the disputed Garland Edition. ISBN 978-0-39474-312-7