Bloomers On The Liffey

The winding streets of Leopold Bloom's Dublin have always challenged the reader's orientation. Heavy critical traffic has often made matters worse: a surprising number of scholarly guidebooks can lead one astray with demonstrably incorrect readings. In Bloomers on the Liffey, Paul van Caspel sets off "to follow some of the routes mapped out by those guides and to put up warnings of [his] own at dangerous crossroads," perhaps even "to uproot a misleading signpost or two. "Van Caspel examines the ways in which various annotations, summaries, translations, and critical studies misapprehend key passages of Ulysses. Many elaborate explications, he finds, are founded on factual errors, irrelevant associations, and inaccurate or "selective" quotations, all of which deviate from "what actually happens" and result in misdirected exegesis. Bloomers on the Liffey provides an episode-by-episode eisegesis-taking the reader back into Joyce's work. Van Caspel compares distorted readings to the text itself, not to add to the mass of interpretation but to clear the way for more accurate appreciation. Throughout, he quotes the definitive new Gabler edition, with references to both Gabler and the 1961 Random House edition. Readers encountering Ulysses for the first time will find skillful assistance through the inevitable textual pitfalls and interpretive difficulties. More experienced Joyceans will relish the even-handed but pointed reappraisals of enduring controversies.