Yareah Magazine

Charles Cave

T. S Eliot, poet and literary critic, described Ulysses as the most important book of the 20th Century. In 1994 I read Ulysses to see why. The text was difficult to understand and I wondered what all the fuss was about.

 Joyce had described his work as containing "so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant". He certainly was right about that!
The turning event for my understanding of Ulysses was attending a Bloomsday event in Sydney, and hearing the text read out loud. For further assistance, my local libraries stocked many useful guidebooks which helped me appreciate Joyce's Dublin.
Ulysses is an immensely rich text giving much pleasure with the richness and depth of the language. Each of the 18 chapters of the book has an assigned theme and style, and my favourite is the last chapter with its stream of consciousness technique. We read Molly Bloom's thoughts as she lies in bed waiting for her husband Leopold to return. I highly recommend listening to the The Naxos Audiobooks recording of this last chapter. It is hard to believe that this chapter contains only six sentences.
I wonder what Joyce would have thought of the World Wide Web and hypertext? I have been fascinated by the allusions in Ulysses to people, places and other literature. In one of my many re-readings of Ulysses, I read Don Gifford's Annotations along with the text. I feel that I have lived in a virtual Dublin of 1904 experiencing the songs, culture, politics and geography of Dublin. Many scholars have longed for the ultimate hypertext of Ulysses to record all the allusions,
historical references and songs.
Before Ulysses I had read some large novels – Lord of the Rings and the epics of James Michener, but never had I read a book like Ulysses.
It is a celebration of life in one day and night in Dublin, 1904.

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BIOGRAPHY

Charles Cave

Charles Cave is a Technical Communicator working in the software industry. His understanding of James Joyce was helped by an email subscription to the James Joyce email group where he met (in cyberspace) such academics as Ruth Bauerle, Charles Rossman, Morris Beja and Fritz Senn. The email list created a global community of Joyce fans and an opportunity to ask questions and discuss Ulysses.
Charles created a James Joyce web site (no longer operational) and was active in the Sydney James Joyce Foundation for several years where he created a multimedia presentation on the Wandering Rocks chapter for a Bloomsday event. His favourite Joycean web site is the Modern Word (http://www.themodernword.com/joyce/)