Saturday was Bloomsday, 16th of June, the day on which Ulysses is set. This year BBC Radio 4 broadcast a new abridged version of the book. It featured Henry Goodman as Mr Bloom, Andrew Scott as Stephen Dedalus, Niamh Cusack as Molly Bloom and Stephen Rea as the Narrator.
Ulysses has so much to it, it is effectively a different book every time you approach it. The early chapters were very heavily abridged. While this makes sense in terms of getting the book down to a digestible size, I thought it did lose out of some of Bloom's poetry. Almost from his very first page, Joyce took care to show Bloom's rich inner life, which is contrasted with his outward failure to connect with his wife, Molly, to be emphasised by the events of the coming day. The opening segments of the broadcast showed Bloom as baffled and sad at his predicament, unable to see the greatness inside him. Lots of "she chose me... she kissed me": he is simultaneously pathetic but endearing.
The broadcast came into its own in the second half, the later chapters, where the prose really gets wild. The Oxen of the Sun chapter, set in the hospital, where Bloom and Stephen finally meet, was an actual improvement on the book I thought. In print it is an impressive but difficult chapter, the style obscures the fact that both Bloom and Stephen finally realise what they each have been looking for in each other. The second to last chapter, Ithaca, was superb, showing the beautiful meeting of their minds, poetic and moving.
Henry Goodman was an odd choice for Bloom, especially as Stephen Rea had already played the role (albeit in a straight to DVD film). Andrew Scott, who plays Moriarty in the TV series Sherlock, was excellent as Stephen, a perfect, charismatic role for an engaging ham actor.
As for the social dimension, there was, quite rightly, an emphasis on Bloom's personal struggle against anti-semitism. Joyce was firmly anti-colonial but kept his distance from the reactionary parts (political and artistic) of the movement for Irish liberation. Prejudice toward Jews is shown coming from all sections of Dublin society, displayed in turn by an Englishman (Haines), an Anglo-Irishman (Deasy) and a Fenian (the Citizen). Bloom, for all his travails, was intended by Joyce as a model for the renewal of Irish society: the open-minded, progressive and eloquent new man.
One last observation, both the book and the broadcast shows the general applicability of Permanent Revolution, in particular the odd privilege of social backwardness. Ulysses was written at a point when an oral culture was being transformed, but at the dawn of visual media (James Joyce was a cinema pioneer in Dublin) skipping the literate, linear stage. This is what gives Ulysses it's spark, a most aural, visual, social, performable novel. It deserves a proper film made of it.
