Don’t read Ulysses; listen to it

Dublin. 16 June 1904. A little after 8 a.m. Two men – both annoying, one stung with grief and ambition – are having an argument. One is pierced by thoughts of his late mother. ‘Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart.’ She has come to him in a dream smelling of wax and rosewood. ‘Dedalus,’ the other calls up to him. ‘Come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready.’

Ireland. 16 June 1982. 6:30 a.m. Radios all over the country emit the words ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan’, and don’t stop broadcasting until they have read out every word of Ulysses, down to its last, heart-stopping syllable. There was no abridgement and no explanation: just the text, entire. At a moment when contemporary arts coverage, where it exists, is broad but shallow, oversimplified, overexplained and broadcast in 15- or ten-minute bursts that preclude complexity, it’s hard not to feel jealous. Who would attempt the same today?

Ulysses is 100 this year. To celebrate, I’ve spent the past month or so listening to Irish national broadcaster RTE’s adaptation of Joyce’s epic. I can’t praise it enough. It is a masterpiece, a rare, enduring example of radio drama as art. ‘Kyrie!’ As someone cries about 14 hours in. ‘The radiance of the intellect!’

Or perhaps not, since it’s precisely that sense of monolithic, radiant intellect this dramatisation dissolves. Which might come as a relief to people who remember their first reading, perhaps an abortive one, with a sense of being made to feel stupid (‘mind’s darkness, a sloth of the underworld’) or tortured (‘agenbite of inwit’) or imposed on by an author who, even an evangelist would admit, could often be boring – and who went on to write a book so inconceivably boring that it has dwindled, unread, into a byword for things pointlessly difficult and dull.