50 Fun Facts About Ulysses

Ulysses began as an idea for one more short story in which earlier James Joyce collection?

Dubliners was to have had a last story called 'Ulysses', about a Dublin man named Hunter; Joyce never wrote it, and over the next fifteen years the idea swelled into the novel.

Ulysses was published in full on 2 February 1922, a date chosen because it was what?

Joyce's 40th birthday was the day he had resolved the book must appear, and his publisher had the first copies from the printer in her hands that very morning.

Ulysses is the Roman name for which hero of Homer's epics?

Odysseus took ten years to sail home from Troy; Joyce shrinks the voyage to one ordinary day's walk around Dublin.

In the 'Ithaca' episode of Ulysses, what drink does Bloom make for Stephen when he finally brings him home?

Cocoa, shared at the kitchen table, is as close as the two men come: after a whole day of converging, Stephen turns down the offer of a bed and walks off into the night.

In Ulysses, what is Leopold Bloom's job?

Advertising canvasser: he spends part of the day trying to place an ad for the merchant Alexander Keyes in the Freeman's Journal, only for the editor to turn it down.

The first words spoken aloud in Ulysses, intoned over a shaving bowl, are in which language?

Latin: a medical student, razor and mirror crossed on his bowl, intones the opening words of the Catholic Mass in mockery, and the book begins with a parody of a sacrament.

Ulysses opens on the roof of a Martello tower in which Dublin suburb?

Sandycove's tower was built in 1804 as a defence against Napoleon; since 16 June 1962 it has been a museum to the novel that opens on its roof.

Ulysses' famous first sentence introduces which character coming from the stairhead with a bowl of lather?

Buck Mulligan, 'stately, plump', is a medical student who has made the tower his own; by the end of the first episode Stephen has decided he will not sleep there that night.

Which Dublin wit, a friend Joyce fell out with in 1904, was the model for the medical student who opens Ulysses?

Oliver St John Gogarty leased the real tower and paid the rent himself, hoping to give the penniless Joyce a place to write; in the novel Joyce has Stephen pay it.

Joyce himself stayed in the Martello tower where Ulysses opens, in September 1904, for how long?

Six nights was all: by his host's later account he left abruptly after a housemate, startled awake by a nightmare, brandished a loaded revolver, a scene the novel turns into the Englishman's dream of a black panther.

In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus's surname alludes to the mythical craftsman who built what?

The Labyrinth was the work of Daedalus, who then escaped his island prison on wings of his own making; Joyce's young artist, set on flying free of Dublin, is teased for his 'absurd name, an ancient Greek'.

In the 'Nestor' episode of Ulysses, headmaster Garrett Deasy asks Stephen to place a letter in the newspapers about what?

Foot-and-mouth disease: Stephen duly carries the long-winded letter to a newspaper office, and foresees the nickname it will earn him, 'the bullockbefriending bard'.

In the 'Calypso' episode of Ulysses, what does Leopold Bloom go out to buy for his breakfast?

A pork kidney: he likes mutton kidneys best, but Thursday is a bad day for them at his usual butcher, so he buys pork at Dlugacz's for threepence, fries it in butter and nearly lets it burn.

In Ulysses, the Blooms' home, the setting of the 'Calypso', 'Ithaca' and 'Penelope' episodes, is at what address?

7 Eccles Street was a real Dublin house; when it was demolished its front door was rescued, and it now hangs in the James Joyce Centre.

In Ulysses, under what pseudonym does Leopold Bloom collect a love letter from 'Martha Clifford' at the post office?

Henry Flower is a play on his own surname, and Martha joins in by pinning a flattened yellow flower inside her letter; he reads it in the street and tears up the envelope in an alley.

In Ulysses, Bloom buys a bar of what scented soap at Sweny's pharmacy in the 'Lotus Eaters' episode?

Lemon: Bloom takes the fourpenny cake on credit, meaning to call back for a lotion he has ordered, then carries it in his pocket all day and never returns to pay.

In Ulysses, Bantam Lyons wrongly thinks Bloom is tipping him a racehorse with what name?

Throwaway: Bloom only says he was going to throw his newspaper away, but a 20-to-1 outsider of that name wins the Gold Cup that afternoon, and a pub full of drinkers decides he has cleaned up.

Whose funeral does Bloom attend in the 'Hades' episode of Ulysses?

Paddy Dignam's burial draws a stranger in a mackintosh; the reporter listing the mourners mishears Bloom and writes the man down as 'M'Intosh', and the book never says who he was.

In Ulysses, Bloom lunches at Davy Byrne's pub on a glass of burgundy and a sandwich of which cheese?

Gorgonzola: he had just walked out of the Burton restaurant, revolted by the sight of men bolting their food like animals, and settled for the quieter pub instead.

In Ulysses, Stephen expounds a biographical theory about which Shakespeare play in the National Library?

Hamlet, he argues, grew out of the adultery of Shakespeare's wife; asked at the end whether he believes his own theory, Stephen promptly answers no.

Which Ulysses episode crosses Dublin in nineteen short scenes, ending with the viceroy's cavalcade?

Wandering Rocks is the one adventure Homer's hero is warned about and steers clear of; Joyce writes it anyway, opening with a priest's walk and closing with the viceroy's carriage.

In the 'Cyclops' episode of Ulysses, the bigoted 'Citizen' is thought to satirise a founder of which organisation?

The Gaelic Athletic Association's co-founder Michael Cusack is the model; when Bloom reminds him that his Saviour was a Jew, the Citizen hurls a biscuit tin at his head and misses.

Which episode of Ulysses, with Gerty MacDowell on Sandymount Strand, set off the 1920 US obscenity prosecution?

Nausicaa ran in an American magazine in 1920; its two editors were found guilty and fined, the serial stopped, and the novel was in effect banned in the United States for more than a decade.

The 'Oxen of the Sun' episode of Ulysses, set in a maternity hospital, parodies the history of what?

The English language grows up on the page, from Anglo-Saxon alliteration through Malory, Bunyan and Dickens to modern slang, a development thought to match the nine months of a pregnancy.

The 'Circe' episode of Ulysses, set in Bella Cohen's brothel in Nighttown, is written in what form?

A play script, stage directions and all, lets the hallucinations run: Bloom is crowned ruler of 'Bloomusalem', then turned into a woman while the brothel-keeper becomes the bullying 'Mr Bello'.

The 'Ithaca' episode of Ulysses, reportedly Joyce's favourite, is written entirely in what form?

A catechism of 309 questions and answers reports the homecoming with mock-scientific precision, down to the route of the tap water from its reservoir, yet many of its facts are wrong, apparently on purpose.

Molly Bloom's unpunctuated soliloquy, and with it Ulysses, ends on which word?

Yes closes eight unpunctuated paragraphs in which she drifts from that afternoon's lover back to the day Bloom proposed, and to the answer she gave him then.

In Ulysses, where was Molly Bloom born?

Gibraltar, where her father was an Irish officer in the garrison, colours the book's last pages: her closing soliloquy drifts back to her girlhood there before it reaches Bloom's proposal.

In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom's father, Rudolf Virág, emigrated to Dublin from which country?

Hungary: his fictional birthplace, the town of Szombathely, has taken the novel to heart and has held Bloomsday celebrations of its own since 1994.

In Ulysses, Bloom's son Rudy, whose death still haunts him, lived for how long?

11 days: Rudy died in January 1894, and at the end of the brothel episode, ten years on, Bloom sees a vision of him as a fairy boy of eleven.

Italo Svevo, a model for Bloom, was the pen name of a businessman Joyce taught English in which city?

Trieste is where Joyce, a Berlitz tutor, met his pupil Ettore Schmitz in 1907; years later he championed the businessman's neglected novel Zeno's Conscience in Paris and made his name.

Joyce set Ulysses on 16 June 1904, thought to be the day of his first outing with whom?

Nora Barnacle, a Galway woman working as a hotel chambermaid in Dublin, left the country with him that autumn; they raised two children together before finally marrying in 1931.

The first Bloomsday pilgrimage in 1954 was led by publican John Ryan and which novelist?

Flann O'Brien, the pen name of Brian O'Nolan, set off with Ryan and four friends in two horse-drawn cabs, each man cast as a character from the book; they gave up halfway, the worse for drink, at Ryan's own pub.

Sylvia Beach published Ulysses from her Paris bookshop, which was called what?

Shakespeare and Company closed in 1941 under the German occupation, and Beach was interned for six months; Ernest Hemingway turned up to 'liberate' the shop in 1944, but it never reopened.

Which singer's 1989 song 'The Sensual World' was inspired by Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses?

Kate Bush wanted to sing Joyce's own words, but his estate refused and she wrote lines of her own; permission came in 2011, and she re-recorded the song as 'Flower of the Mountain'.

In which film by Joel and Ethan Coen does George Clooney play an escaped convict named Ulysses Everett McGill?

O Brother, Where Art Thou? gives its hero the name because it loosely retells Homer's epic in 1930s Mississippi: he breaks off a chain gang to get home before his wife, Penny, marries someone else.

Which publisher engineered a US Customs seizure of Ulysses in 1932 to force a test case?

Random House had tipped off Customs, yet the parcel was waved through and delivered; the firm's lawyer had to carry it back unopened and insist that it be seized so the test case could begin.

Which judge ruled in 1933 that Ulysses was not obscene, calling it 'somewhat emetic' but nowhere 'aphrodisiac'?

John M. Woolsey read the whole book before ruling; its American publisher then printed his opinion in its copies of the novel, and it has been said to be the most widely distributed court opinion in history.

In Ulysses, which member of the Bloom household greets Leopold at breakfast time with the word 'Mkgnao'?

The cat gets a new spelling each time she asks for milk, 'Mkgnao', then 'Mrkgnao', then 'Mrkrgnao', growing louder until Bloom fills her saucer.

Which new version of Ulysses set off the 'Joyce Wars' of the 1980s?

A corrected edition, issued by Hans Walter Gabler in 1984, claimed to mend some 5,000 errors; the scholar John Kidd replied that it had made new ones, such as turning a real man named Thrift into 'Shrift'.

On Bloomsday 1982, which national broadcaster aired an unabridged dramatised Ulysses lasting almost 30 hours?

RTÉ, the Irish state broadcaster, marked the centenary of Joyce's birth by running its full-cast production on radio without a break for 29 hours and 45 minutes.

Joseph Strick's 1967 film of Ulysses was banned in which country until 2000?

Ireland banned the film twice as 'subversive to public morality', though it had never formally banned the novel; the ban was lifted in 2000 at the director's own request.

Which novelist ranked Ulysses first among the masterpieces of 20th-century prose, ahead of Kafka and Proust?

Vladimir Nabokov called the book 'a divine work of art' in a 1965 interview; decades earlier, when he reminded Joyce of its debt to Homer, Joyce had waved the whole scheme away as 'a whim'.

Tennyson wrote 'Ulysses' in 1833 after the death of which friend?

Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly at 22; Tennyson said the poem gave his feeling about 'the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life', and he spent seventeen years on In Memoriam for the same friend.

Besides Homer, on which later poem did Tennyson base the restless old voyager of his 'Ulysses'?

Dante's Inferno puts Ulysses in hell among the false counsellors, for the Trojan Horse and for chasing knowledge beyond human bounds; Tennyson turns the same restlessness into something close to heroism.

The ESA-NASA Ulysses probe, launched in 1990, studied which body from above its poles?

The Sun was its target, yet the probe could not run on sunlight: to climb over the solar poles it first had to swing out past Jupiter, so it carried a nuclear generator instead of solar panels.

At which military academy did a congressman's paperwork error turn Hiram Ulysses Grant into 'Ulysses S. Grant'?

West Point enrolled him under the name his congressman had written by mistake, and he gave up trying to correct it; classmates read the initials as 'Uncle Sam' and called him Sam.

Which author's Adventures of Ulysses, a retelling of Homer for children, gave the young Joyce his hero?

Charles Lamb's retelling led the schoolboy Joyce to write an essay on Ulysses called 'My Favourite Hero'; he later called him the only all-round character in literature.

Which novelist described Ulysses in 1923 as 'a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster'?

Virginia Woolf called it a catastrophe, yet her own next novel, Mrs Dalloway, shows its influence, following its characters' thoughts through a single June day in one city.

Which American magazine was prosecuted in 1921 for serialising Ulysses?

The Little Review had been running the novel in instalments since 1918; its editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were found guilty of obscenity and fined, and the serial stopped before the book was finished.