On the question of landscape, Joyce is particularly (maybe uniquely) unhelpful: in place of the nineteenth-century novelist’s orienting panoramic, he gives us only highly stylized microdescriptions filtered through the overlapping cheesecloths of Stephen’s consciousness.

Reading Ulysses at home, from the geographical irrelevance of a desk in New York, I could never quite picture Sandymount strand.

Books of annotations-those finely printed, pragmatically bound, vaguely shameful volumes of academic pornography-become necessary. Stephen’s memories are treated as immediate experience dialogue is ambiguously imagined obscure medieval philosophy shares the stage with a urinating dog language becomes a hash of morphemes flipped vigorously with a spatula (“contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality”). The episode’s opening phrase, “Ineluctable modality of the visible,” is one of the best-known moments in the world’s least-read best-known novel-most likely because it’s the last thing most people see before giving up on Ulysses forever, the point at which the balance between the accessible and the arcane tips decisively in the wrong direction. We had been reenacting, accidentally, the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus’s morning beachwalk: probably the most famous moodybrooding in world literature since Hamlet’s soliloquies. A sophisticated modernist shiver, dressed in a bow tie and a bowler hat, with a pince-nez and a small mustache, sauntered up and down my spine. One dubiously sunny Irish summer day in Dublin I was walking along the city’s eastern beach-rim when my friend told me that this wasn’t just any eastern beach-rim-the kind of place in, say, Barcelona or Sydney where you might casually toss Frisbees-but in fact literary holy ground: Sandymount strand.

Prodeus old world ledge stone