Fact-Checking ‘Ulysses’

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2023

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Armed with Thom’s Directory, James Joyce strove to recreate 1904 Dublin as accurately as possible, down to the last solicitor and street railing. But, as Colm Tóibín explains in a recent piece, the novel is pockmarked with errors, only some intentional. Colm joins Tom to discuss Joyce’s deliberate and accidental mistakes, Trieste’s essential influence on the novel, and why a queer reading of Ulysses really does hold water. Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/factcheckingjoyce Subscribe to Close Readings: In Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones.
0:16.0	Today I'm talking to Column Tobin about James Joyce's Ulysses.
0:19.7	Column's 10th novel, The Magician, came out in 2021.
0:23.0	A book of essays, a guest at the feast, is out now in paperback.
0:27.1	He's a contributing editor at the LRB, and his piece in the current issue of the paper
0:30.4	is a review of annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses by Sam Sloat, Mark Mamagonian and John Turner,
0:37.4	which, column writes, shows Joyce as both systematic in his approach to fact and at times struggling and often failing in his effort to avoid error.
0:46.7	Hello, Colin, and thank you very much for joining me.
0:49.0	Hi, Tom, how are you?
0:50.4	I'm fine, thank you.
0:52.1	Near the beginning of the piece, you quote Joyce's remark that imagination is memory.
0:57.0	Do you agree with that?
0:58.0	I think it's a spur to, I mean, memory is a spurred to imagination, but obviously Joyce's
1:06.0	creation of, say, Leopold Bloom can come from memory to some extent, but it really is an invention,
1:12.5	it really is imagined. But I suppose the city he's writing about and that he really deals in
1:18.3	such a detail with is from memory. In other words, that the people who figure in Ulysses
1:24.2	are not Joyce's friends or imagined figures, but Joyce's father's friends.
1:30.7	And it's the Dublin of 1904.
1:32.8	It's the Dublin Joyce left.
1:34.0	He was 22 when he left.
1:36.2	But the sort of stray figures that really make such a difference to the book that are
1:40.7	always wandering the city, the chancers, the losers, the guys down on their luck,
	...

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