'Ulysses'

The novel presents a strong critique of a narrow form of nationalism prevalent in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century and of an understanding of the past as a litany of glorious deeds, which was in reality designed to shore up the political and racial prejudices of the present. Against this backdrop, in Chapter Three of Ulysses, a central character, Stephen Dedalus (himself named from Greek mythology), recoils from blatant anti-Jewish sentiment to express the belief that for him ‘History...is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’. His racist interlocutor, Mr Deasy, sees history as an inevitable form of progress, retorting that in his view ‘All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God’. The book’s hero, Leopold Bloom, is Jewish of Hungarian extraction, and antisemitism recurs as a theme in the narrative. Bloom’s cosmopolitanism and pacifism put him at odds with an increasingly nationalistic form of identity, with his ethic background rendering him an outsider in his own city and therefore providing a unique perspective from which everyday urban life could be analysed. Dublin, described as the ‘Hibernian metropolis’, can be read as representing any European city at the beginning of the twentieth century. Henri Matisse, who allegedly had not read Joyce’s novel, appears to ignore its modern setting, choosing instead to return to the original Homeric source for his illustrations of six episodes from the text, which also appear in the Illiad of Homer; Calypso, Aeolus, Cyclops, Nausicaa, Circe and Ithaca. -Kieran Burns

Signature James Joyce, Henri Matisse