Ulysses In 80 2026: In Conversation with Daragh O'Connell

What about the kind of Dantean presence in Ulysses? Unlike Homer's presence, which is a structuring one and gives itself to the kind of episodic nature of the work, or indeed Shakespeare's influence, which is signalled throughout Ulysses, Joyce's Dante is, if you like, it's harder to pin down because, in essence, it is both everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

You get hints of it, but you know it's there.

Dante and Joyce are, if you like, can best be described, I think, as the two great gamblers of world literature.

And by this, I mean that they both set themselves the task of utterly breaking with tradition and paradoxically renewing that very same tradition in the process of breaking with it.

They take the canon, they give it a good shake.

and then reconfigure it with their own work, if you like.

Joyce drags the whole of the English literary tradition into his novel and then spits it out again.

And Dante, if you like, does indeed the same thing.

Indeed, Dante even has the Roman poet Virgil, and we mentioned this last year, as his guide through two of the three realms of the afterlife, through Inferno and in Purgatorio.

And then he discards Virgil completely in the final section of the poem, The Paradiso.

One might even say, and many indeed have said it, that through the course of the poem, the Dante character surpasses the Virgil character, i.e. Dante the poet surpasses Virgil the poet, and all in the process of the poem itself.

He shows himself to be the superior poet, and Joyce essentially is doing the same thing in the genre of the novel.

In Dante, alongside the narrative and journey of the protagonist, fashioned Dante himself, There is another journey that is the evolution of the text itself, the very poem that you're reading.

And the two go hand in hand.

And Joyce, I think, is doing something comparable.

We need only to look at the figure of Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

By the time we get to Ulysses, Joyce's poetics are utterly transformed.

And Stephen, this Telemachus of our story, is surpassed.

His posturing and his intellectualizing are in part parodied by Joyce.

But his real interest is in this other character, Leopold Bloom, by far the most interesting character of 20th century literature and the most all-round of Joyce's imagination.

Joyce doesn't completely discard Stephen, but the shift to Bloom is, to my mind at least, the most crucial aspect of Joyce's Ulysses.

And it is done, and we looked at this passage last year, in kind of Dantean terms.

Think back to Proteus, and I have text in front of me, so I...

And we'll read it just to kind of give you a sense of it.

The final passage approaches.