The present book is a small-format but substantial paperback containing "Hades" (based on Gabler) interleaved with Wollschläger's translation, and extensive notes. The text and the notes are sandwiched between three brief introductory essays (one on the literary status of Ulysses, another giving a synopsis of chapters 1 to 5, the third summarizing the textual debate), and five longer essays dealing, respectively, with the death motif, Homeric allusions, Joyce's technique of incremental proofreading, prospective and retrospective intra- and crosstextual correspondences. The text is supplemented by a generous amount of photographic material, an itinerary map, Gilbert's Schema, and a select bibliography.
The businesslike quality of this outline shows the hand of an expert, and, in fact, the initial smirk of condescension is quickly wiped off the reviewer's face by the fact that the project's editor, presenter, annotator and commentator is none other than Fritz Senn. Senn has eagerly embraced the concept of a user-friendly approach; he actually seeks the communication with that fabled animal, the common, or ordinary, reader. Consequently, the first thing Senn does is explicitly promise to bypass joyless Literaturwissenschaft and avoid scholarly jargon. Laying his cards on the table, he disarmingly announces that his aim is to set an insidious trap, get the readers hooked, tempt them to catch the inspiration of the text. This is a smart move in several respects. For one thing, it is difficult to imagine anything more infectious than Senn's own obsession with Ulysses and its author. And since it is in the nature of an obsession to know no bounds, nothing will ultimately stop him (or his readers) from gaining access to the treasures hidden in the libraries of the academic industry.
Despite Senn's own initial misgivings about the excerpta classica framework (he elegantly dismisses these on the strength of the pars-pro-toto principle, which arguably is a foundation stone of Ulysses itself), the book works extremely well, mainly because he is such a singularly gifted and perceptive annotator and commentator, but not least also because "Hades" turns out to be an excerpt to end all excerpts. It provides a moving view of the city of Dublin, presents wonderful character vignettes, and shows the major figures in typical and idiosyncratic interactions. Sombre moods and passages are perfectly balanced by irrepressible humour, and Senn, knowing that this will score well with uninitiated readers, unobtrusively provides the necessary background detail to fully appreciate the jokes. In addition, the chapter's narrative technique is both attractive and reasonably [End of p. 775] negotiable - indeed, Wollschläger's translation does its bit here by bridging the more extreme associative leaps and discontinuities of Bloom's interior monologues. "Hades" is in fact one of the last chapters in which Joyce uses the initial style, and surface cracks are already beginning to show. For the first time, the textual focus begins to leave the main focalizer's point of view, and although the style ultimately reverts to focalization through Bloom, these brief excursions, duly pointed out by Senn, are clear anticipations of the more radical fugues to come in "Aeolus", "Wandering Rocks" and "Sirens".
It turns out that to find fault with Senn, one has to resort to a bit of pedantry. To begin with, the quality of the proofreading is disappointingly poor (particularly in view of the textual debate) - one encounters errors such as "I except" [expect], "thum[b]s" (112), "Maede's" (170), runaway italics (292), etc. Secondly, granting that a select bibliography necessarily rests on personal judgment and preference, it is nevertheless a pity that two excellent introductory texts, viz. Ellmann's James Joyce's Tower and Hayman's The Mechanics of Meaning have not been included. Incidentally, JJQ is not listed either. Also, given the intended readership, perhaps the 1993 Oxford Ulysses might be considered a more suitable follow-on version than the Gabler edition recommended by Senn (no criticism intended here, as the Oxford edition postdates Senn's book). Lastly, although Senn's personal style is as refreshingly natural and unacademic as promised, there are occasional lapses into Joysprick. For instance, at one point Senn speaks of "Geschmack saurer Trauben" and "Literatur . . . mit dem großen 'L'" (8). Such phrases will simply baffle the targeted audience, not only because in German "literature" is always spelled with a capital L, but also because no German reader who needs a translation to follow "Hades" will be able to retrieve the English kernels ("sour grapes", "literature with a capital L") that underlie these cross-lingual intertextualities. However, prospective Joyce readers need to learn to take the rough with the smooth, and none of the foregoing points seriously detract from the overall appeal and usefulness of the book.
[21 Aug 2000]