Dedalus

by Chris McCabe

Chris McCabe playfully reclaims the inventive spirit of the founding text of Modernism; Ulysses. Tracing the same structure as the original, McCabe describes the events of the following day, 17th June 1904. Stephen Dedalus wakes up, hungover, with scores and debts to settle, unaware that Leopold Bloom is waking up in Eccles street with his own plans for him.

“Friday’s children would be fattening like seals across the sand, on their way to class. Black liquorice teeth. Loving and giving under the whalefeed of the clouds. He had to teach.”

Dedalus is shot through with cut and paste disruptions from the Digital Age. From ’80s Text Adventure gaming to Google maps and pop-ups. McCabe picks up the tradition of Laurence Sterne and B.S. Johnson, underpinning the paragraphs of his storytelling with concrete poetry.

This novel is haunted (by Hamlet). This novel has a subconscious. This novel has therapy. This novel gives right of reply to Joyce’s self-portrait and questions the foundations of narrative storytelling. This truly is a hotly anticipated moment in Fiction.

Genres: Fiction

238 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 2018

Reviews

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have just lost two drafts of this review to a new bug in the insert book/author function, so I am no longer in the right frame of mind to review such an extraordinary and complex book. So I apologise for the deficiencies. Fortunately there are already three excellent reviews from Neil, Gumble's Yard and Paul

Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019

This book is somewhat intimidating to a casual reader. Not only is it a sequel of sorts to a very difficult book in James Joyce's Ulysses, there is a lot of Hamlet in the mix, along with plenty of other references both classic and modern. McCabe imagines the events of the day after Bloomsday, with plenty of knowledge, wit and innovation. He shows much of Joyce's linguistic inventiveness and stylistic range, throwing in graphic innovation via a sort of 80s adventure game, some poetry and occasional overt authorial interventions. Another innovation is that the entire book is printed in dark blue ink, but this never affects its readability, or its sense of fun.

I have only read Ulysses once, I probably only understood parts of it, and I am no expert on Hamlet. I almost certainly missed many of McCabe's references, but I enjoyed reading this book greatly - for all the complexity and erudition, it is the exuberance and humour that shines most.

A worthy contender for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, for which it has been longlisted.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now shortlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize

Yesterday was an uneventful day. Today I have vomited on a dead man, been pursued by the ghost of my mother and experienced a married man trying to pair me with his wife in name of song. And fallen in love.

Yesterday: was 16th June 1904 – Bloomsday.

The married man and his wife: are Leopold and Molly Bloom

The pairing-in-song: an attempt by Leopold to provide an alternative to Molly’s tour with her lover “Blazes” Boylon.

And the first party narrator (I) : Stephen Dedalus – the eponymous hero of this book which is a sequel to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” set on the next day.

The author, the poet Chris McCabe has described on his blog the inspiration for this, his debut novel:

I was excited by the idea of what might have happened on the day after the now iconic 16 June 1904. Had Stephen had a secret punt on the Gold Cup and won? After leaving Bloom on Eccles Street does he do what he says he's not going to do and spend another night at the Martello Tower? Does he revisit the prostitute in Monto who he owes money to and pay her back? And despite his crippling hangover does he make it to teach in the boys' school, hitting the bottle again in the afternoon (it's a Friday after all)?.... Pursued by the ghost of his dead mother and of Hamlet, things kept happening to Stephen in ways that surprised me and made me laugh. It might also be that Stephen could fall in love on the day after Joyce had first gone out with Nora Barnacle.

The book is published by Henningham Family Press, which rather delightfully, describes itself as a “microbrewery for books”, who specialise in fine art printmaking and book binding and have recently moved into publication of fiction.

Of the nearly 200 books I read in 2018 – this must be the most beautifully produced – with Henningham clearly bringing their wider printing and binding skills to their fiction imprint. The interior of the book is litho printed and also includes a series of block maps which reminded me of a Spectrum computer adventure. The exterior is bound (by hand) in a yellow, gold foiled transparency.

And of all the nearly 200 books I read in 2018 this is one of the most playful and inventive – a seminal modernist novel reimagined for a computer and digital age.

The book has the same Part and Episode structure as “Ulysees” – and just as they consciously link to Homer’s “The Odyssey” each episode of this book clearly links to the corresponding episode in its forerunner.

Some examples, taken from the author’s blog:

In my Wandering Rocks section I used a ‘chain’ technique to bind the characters through language rather than time: specific word in each section is used to transitions the voice to the next character who picks up the same theme. In the way that the internet allows for both fictional and real – dead and living – to live side-by-side, I placed contemporary Dubliners alongside Joyce's characters and added comments found on Twitter. Joyce would have loved Twitter I think, it added to his notion of the litter in 'Litterature'

For my response to Sirens I created a series of sound poems that recycle the language of each section of Dedalus (my own novel) up until this point. The opening section is an overture of the corresponding section in Ulysses and captures the sound of Bloom urinating in a public toilet at Temple Bar. Each section then recycles the language of the sections of Dedalus, playing the sounds of: Bloom zipping up his trousers; whistling; coins rattling in his trousers; the sound of a trumpet; throwing cash to a busker; a literal gust of wind; the bells of the church sounding out Bloom’s relief that he’s spoken to Molly earlier that morning; a seagull over the Liffey and Bloom’s double-checking that he has Molly’s lotion in his pocket, which he's just collected from Sweny's.

In the Oxen of the Sun episode Joyce famously used George Saintsbury’s Specimens of English Prose Style to pastiche the history of literature up until he was writing his own book. In Dedalus I have continued this experiment using the first pages of fiction writers who wrote in the decades following Joyce, selecting one writer from each decade up to 2014: Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913); Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925); Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936); George Orwell, 1984 (1949); Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955); Williams Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959); Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963); Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973); Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985); Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (1996); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006) and Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013).

Some other observations of my own:

For The Circe, the playscript and subconscious imaginings are replaced by a session and dialogue between a therapist and a Stephen very aware of his existence as a fictional character living in, and shedding light on, Joyce’s own sub-consciousness.

And the 309 catechism questions/Socratic dialogue of ”Ithaca” is replaced by a set of author questions and answers with McCabe himself – in which McCabe explores his relationship with his own father and how that has influenced his reading of Joyce.

Most of the other chapters are in Ulysees stream-of-consciousness style – with settings and subject matters/preoccupations which mirror those of the original book, for example:

Nestor – Stephen chatting with Mr Deasy and teaching history;

Calypso - Bloom preparing breakfast and considering Molly’s affair;

Lotus Eaters - finishes with a modern day advert for skin cleanser;

Hades – Bloom revisits the graveyard where Paddy Dignam was buried;

Lestrygonians – Bloom muses on food and even invents an advertising slogan for Guinness-based Marmite;

Scylla and Charybdis – Stephen reveals his Dublin-based rewrite of any Danish references in Hamlet;

Cyclops – snatches of overheard pub dialogue;

Eumaes – set in a cab and finishing with a modern day traffic management scheme announcement.

Overall I found this a very good novel – one that gave me the excuse I needed to start engaging with Joyce’s classic.

I suspect that the novel though really would come into its own for those like the author who are very familiar with “Ulysses”.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now shortlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize

The judges’ nomination read:

Not June 16, 1904, but the day after. Much has happened in the last twenty-four hours, as we know. Yes, a sequel to Ulysses, and Chris McCabe earns the right to such hubris. A little easier, much shorter, but there are flashes of great beauty. And how delightful it is to take up with Dedalus and Bloom again.

The publisher here is Henningham Family Press, a new one for me:

Henningham Family Press is the collaborative art and writing of David and Ping Henningham. We are both Artists and Authors, and we are curious about every aspect of writing, printing and publishing. We complete and represent our writing through fine art printmaking, bookbinding and performance.

Dedalus by Chris McCabe is a tribute to Joyce’s Ulysses, and which speculated on what might have happened on 17 June 1904. As the author explains on his blog (http://chris-mccabe.blogspot.com/2018...

I was excited by the idea of what might have happened on the day after the now iconic 16 June 1904. Had Stephen had a secret punt on the Gold Cup and won? After leaving Bloom on Eccles Street does he do what he says he's not going to do and spend another night at the Martello Tower? Does he revisit the prostitute in Monto who he owes money to and pay her back? And despite his crippling hangover does he make it to teach in the boys' school, hitting the bottle again in the afternoon (it's a Friday after all)?

The publisher of the book, David Henningham, gave me the language for the ongoing joke in Dedalus: yesterday was an uneventful day, today something might happen. Pursued by the ghost of his dead mother and of Hamlet, things kept happening to Stephen in ways that surprised me and made me laugh. It might also be that Stephen could fall in love on the day after Joyce had first gone out with Nora Barnacle.

Although if anything Bloom and Stephen’s imagined activities on 18 June are close echoes of those on 17 June, which enables McCabe’s account to mirror the original, chapter by chapter, scene by scene.

Stephen, despite his protestations the previous day, indeed wakes again in the Martello Tower, with a terrible hangover, and wondering exactly why Bloom was so keen Stephen stay at his house and showed him a photo of Molly. And after another fractious conversation with Haines heads for another day teaching at Garrett Deasy’s boys school (it is a working day, Friday, after all - the narrator complains that Ulysses being set on a Thursday rather constraints the characters’ movements the next day).

And Bloom starts his day again serving breakfast in bed to Nora, despite his request the previous night that she return the favour to him, his attempt to gently raise the issue of Blazes Boylan countered by Molly who more directly reveals she knows of his secret letters to Martha. Bloom then goes to pick up the lotion for Molly at Sweny’s that he forgot to collect the day before and also returning to the cemetery to check how his name is recorded in the list of mourners for Digham, given that it was misspelled in the previous day’s evening Telegraph.

Each chapter attempts to use similar, but distinct, techniques as well as themes to the original. The author himself explains it best with some examples:

The idea of 'the day after Ulysses' led me to consider what Joyce might have experimented with in the era if the internet. In my Wandering Rocks section I used a ‘chain’ technique to bind the characters through language rather than time: specific word in each section is used to transitions the voice to the next character who picks up the same theme. In the way that the internet allows for both fictional and real – dead and living – to live side-by-side, I placed contemporary Dubliners alongside Joyce's characters and added comments found on Twitter. Joyce would have loved Twitter I think, it added to his notion of the litter in 'Litterature'

Each time I re-read Ulysses I'm surprised that the book is less visual than I remember it. I don't mean in terms of its ability to clearly depict character and scene and for its deep imagery (all of which is there with bells on), but that Joyce doesn't play around too much with typography or visual poetry. This may have to do with his near blindness which led to a much deeper interest in language as sound. When writing Dedalus I wanted to push my novel through the lens of concrete poetry, and to learn from novelists who've explored this area before, from Laurence Sterne to B.S. Johnson (both of whom are massive influences on Dedalus). For me the natural home for visual poetry is within the experimental novel and I didn't write the poetry sections separately from the others, they all poured down the same outflow into my imagine Liffey.

For my response to Sirens I created a series of sound poems that recycle the language of each section of Dedalus (my own novel) up until this point. [...]

In the Oxen of the Sun episode Joyce famously used George Saintsbury’s Specimens of English Prose Style to pastiche the history of literature up until he was writing his own book. In Dedalus I have continued this experiment using the first pages of fiction writers who wrote in the decades following Joyce, selecting one writer from each decade up to 2014.

Elsewhere for example in Eumaes, Bloom tries to speak straightforwardly to Stephen, in contrast to their laboured and confused conversation yesterday, only to be constantly interrupted by the cab driver (the jarvey.) Bloom is trying to propose his plan to thwart Blazes Boylan: that Bloom himself arranges a tour of the UK with Stephen accompanying Molly.

In Lestrygonian Bloom invents and devises an advertising slogan for Guinness flavoured Marmite:

Bloom looked closely at a poster on the wall. Marmite. Strange taste it has. Like metal and leather. Wonder if it would improve with Guinness? Could do a decent jingle on that. ‘Black by day. Black by...’

Cyclops consists of a few snatches of conversation from Barney Keirnan’s pub, which appear to be the Citizen still reflecting on the same scene yesterday (e.g. musing on Bloom’s stinginess given his presumed win (actually a misunderstanding) on Throwaway in the Gold Cup.)

And in Circe instead (in the book’s metafictional narrator’s words) of “being pissed on absinthe”, Stephen “accompanies a therapist on synth.” In the original the subconscious of Stephen and Bloom seem to merge. Here Stephen becomes aware, under therapy, that he is a fictional creation of Joyce designed to work through some of the author’s own psychological issues.

Dedalus focuses even more on Stephen and Bloom than the original - there is a notably less rich cast of characters - but also more on the younger man than Bloom - Stephen even gets the concluding soliloquy in Penelope in place of Molly.

Hamlet was a key reference in the original - consciously so in the character’s minds with Haines comparing the Martello Tower to Elsinore, and Stephen bending the ear of anyone who will listen with his theory on Hamlet as an allegory for Shakespeare’s own life, with The Bard as the Ghost, pointing to Anne Hathaway’s alleged adultery with Shakespeare’s brother.

Here if anything Hamlet’s influence on the the text itself is stronger. The ghost of Hamlet himself literally stalks Stephen throughout the day and each episode has not only its Ulysses based name but is also linked to a scene from the play, with plenty of interlinks and quotations. As just one example, Deasy offers Stephen advice using the exact words of Polonius to Laertes in Act 1 Scene 3, words which Stephen of course recognises from the play but still treats as genuine advice and attempts to apply to his own situation.

DEASY: Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend.
STEPHEN: I fear Mulligan is lost to me despite the alemoney he owes me. I misspent my loan from A.E.
DEASY: This above all: to thine ownself be true.
SEDULOUS: The notion of both truth and ownership of self are both a fallacy. A man in love or under pressure will reinvent himself for a reprieve. I am suffering from both states.

At another point Sarah Bernhardt asks Laertes (!):

DIVINE SARAH: Is this a joke?
LAERTES: More a modern adaptation?

And McCabe’s Dedalus has a modern (albeit more 1980s than 2020s) computing theme running through it, for example in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure type game where the reader can choose to be diverted to Notes at the back which, for example, explain than an “agenbite of inwit” refers to the fact that the “feeling of being duplicated, transported and filed as a digital entity is on many levels similar to a hangover” and that the mysterious man in the macintosh first seen at the funeral is in fact concealing an Apple Mac under his coat. Yes McCabe is equally as fond as Joyce of “punnilingus!”

At one point Bloom refers to another character’s words as a “portentous pastiche” and a novel like this, based so closely on a famous original, full of cross-references, does raise a number of questions for the reviewer.

1. Does it stand alone if read without any knowledge of the many references? The 2018 longlisted Playing Possum is a good example here of a book that read as a fascinating tale in its own right: it was only subsequent research that dug up the sheer volume of underlying references in seemingly almost every sentence.
2. Does it make the reader work too hard and perhaps make them fee inadequate? Is there an element verging on self-indulgence even showing off. That was one criticism of Playing Possum (not one I shared but I could appreciate the point) and also, of course, of Ulysses itself.
3. Does it overly rely on the merits of the original, gaining from the reflected glory. While I enjoy his work, I do feel some of Enrique Vila-Matas's novels lean a little too heavily on their sources. His Dublinesque is an obvious point of comparison to Dedalus
4. How does it measure up against the original? Does it cause us to reinterpret it? The gold standard here for me is Meursault, contre-enquête by Kamal Daoud, which is strong enough that it deserves to be read alongside L'Étranger as a sister volume and alternative perspective on the story.

Here for Dedalus, my tentative answers would be:

1. I don’t thing this does, or is even intended, to stand alone. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there is perhaps less pure originality than in Playing Possum, which drew on multiple sources.
2. Undoubtedly a scholar of Ulysses or Hamlet would get much more out of this than I did, but even passing familiarity with Ulysses bears considerable fruit in the reading and the novel signposts itself to the reader in a way that Playing Possum didn’t.
3. Here again McCabe would I think happily see his work as standing in Ulysses reflection, but this is still an impressive reworking in its own right, more so that some of the Vila Matas works.
4. I would certainly point Joyce fans to this work and strongly recommend it, but I didn’t feel it achieved the Mersault level of causing me to reinterpret the original, although the argument that Joyce perhaps could have experimented more with typesetting and graphical design (as of course Sterne did over 150 years earlier was well made. Here the author’s intention to provide more of Stephen’s perspective was lost a little for me in the intellectual puzzles the book presents. But if anything Dedalus scores best on another, related but different, criteria - a more accessible way in to better appreciate the majesty of Joyce’s original.

Overall, an impressive work, one that would reap more on a re-read. That re-read could go in one of two directions so perhaps it needs three:

• Searching deeper for correspondences with Hamlet and Ulysses
• Or, taking those as read and, if anything, tuning them out to focus more on the human story of Stephen.

Although there is a middle ground, a 'both', between the two since in order to fully appreciate Stephen's story one needs more familiarity not just with Ulysses and Hamlet, which I have read, but The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, which I haven't.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I am being pursued by another book. I have seen a valid hero on the ramparts of the place I live in. Between the ghost of my mother and this figure in black, peace is an impossibility ... My mother stays : this physic but prolongs thy sickly days."

"My mother has been appearing to me. I am being pursued by Hamlet."

"DIVINE SARAH: Is this some kind of joke?
LAERTES: More of a modern adaptation."

The date is 17 June 1904. What is significant about this date? It is the day after 16 June 1904, otherwise known as Bloomsday, the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses happens. I don’t know how many people have read Ulysses and then thought “I wonder what happened the next day?”, but Chris McCabe has read Ulysses many times and clearly has given the next day a lot of thought.

I have to confess that I have not read Ulysses. I think a working knowledge of Joyce’s book would help enormously when reading this one, but I had to make to with reading several plot summaries and then having the Wikipedia plot summary printed out beside me as I read.

However, McCabe is not content with simply imagining a new day in the life of Stephen Dedalus. No, he wants to add to the number of books I have open simultaneously by conflating Ulysses and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (the Shakespeareans reading this will already have noticed a quote from Hamlet in the opening quote of my review). So, a working knowledge of both those texts would help.

Then, as if reading three texts at the same time isn’t complicated enough, McCabe writes elliptically, I suppose in a way that imitates Joyce, and this means that a lot of his text is not immediately obvious.

It is a heady mixture: Ulysses, Hamlet and experimental prose/structure. It is not for the faint-hearted.

That said, it is a huge amount of fun. Even for someone who does not know Ulysses.

The structure of the book follows the parts/chapter of Ulysses. But, at the same time, each chapter has a subtitle which follows the scene titles in Hamlet. There are multiple quotes from Hamlet spread through the book (the first words Dedalus speaks are “I to sulphurous and tormenting flames must render up myself”), so many, in fact, that I rather lost count. Also, stage directions from the relevant scene of Hamlet are often inserted into the narrative (e.g. “EXIT GHOST”).

Did someone mention a ghost? Dedalus’ mother, as can be seen in the opening quotes, takes on the role of the ghost.

It is all hugely clever. Often very entertaining. Sometimes incomprehensible. Even though I don’t know Ulysses, I could enjoy the sheer creativity of the writing. And my handy Ulysses synopsis gave me some clues as to how the author was using the original work by Joyce to guide some of his story and some of his choices of style in different chapters. Consider, for instance, this from the author’s blog:

In the Oxen of the Sun episode Joyce famously used George Saintsbury’s Specimens of English Prose Style to pastiche the history of literature up until he was writing his own book. In Dedalus I have continued this experiment using the first pages of fiction writers who wrote in the decades following Joyce, selecting one writer from each decade up to 2014: Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913); Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925); Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936); George Orwell, 1984 (1949); Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955); Williams Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959); Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963); Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973); Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985); Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (1996); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006) and Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013).

In that chapter of Dedalus (corresponding to Act 4, Scene 4 of Hamlet), we read re-worked openings of each of the books mentioned. This is very clever and anyone who has read the relevant books will have great fun seeing how McCabe has used them but re-worked them for his own purposes.

The book is full of clever things like this. For example: For my response to Sirens I created a series of sound poems that recycle the language of each section of Dedalus (my own novel) up until this point. There are also echoes of two books I read last year. Rosie Snajdr’s A Hypocritical Reader includes an invitation to the reader to choose their own adventure for part of the book, and that is here, too with options that take you on a roundabout route to the next chapter. (And some of the writing in both these books is equally obscure.) And there are unusual, graphic page layouts which will look very, err, familiar to those who have read One Rainy Day in May and the other four volumes of The Familiar by Mark Danielewski.

I did have a lot of fun reading this book. I often enjoyed the language and the creativity of the ideas. But I was left at the end with a question as to whether the book was just a bit too clever. I am completely sure that I have missed a significant proportion of the cleverness of the book due to my lack of knowledge of Ulysses and my only basic knowledge of Hamlet. And also because, for some of it, I simply could not grasp what the author was saying (this doesn’t actually worry me as I am a great fan of books that work by impression, so I am nearly always happy, within reason, when there are parts of a book that I don’t understand but which help with the overall atmosphere). I would really love to hear what someone familiar with both Ulysses and Hamlet (which McCabe clearly is) thinks about what the author has done here.

This book is on the long list for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize. This means it is impossible for me not to draw a comparison with a book from the previous year of that competition: Playing Possum by Kevin Davey. There are similarities in the cleverness, the creativity and the fun involved in both books. In the end, it is down to personal taste, but Playing Possum was just about my favourite book of 2017 and I found Dedalus didn’t quite reach to the same heights: both were great fun to read, but PP felt more consistent and more playful to me.

This is not an easy book to read, but it is rewarding. It is probably even more rewarding if you know both Ulysses and Hamlet, but I would not let lack of knowledge of one or other (or both) of these necessarily put you off reading this one. A bit of basic preparation with Wikipedia etc. might not be a bad idea, but there is a lot to get from this book with even just a basic knowledge of the two classics that underpin it.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Dedalus. I found it funny, erudite, inventive, original, and respectful (of James Joyce and Shakespeare). I hope it gets a wide distribution. The packaging of the book is superb and it’s a wonderful example of the special bond that sometimes exists between author and publishing house (Chis McCabe’s own blog details the depth of this (and also gives valuable information on his objectives in Dedalus)).

Joyce himself, in conjunction with Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare & co would approve. Credit to the RoC judges for selecting this for their 2019 Prize shortlist.

I read Ulysses four years ago, and properly understood about 25% of it. Reading Dedalus brought back good memories, and even enhanced my original comprehension of Joyce’s original.
To fully enjoy and appreciate Dedalus I believe that a reading of Ulysses as being absolutely essential. Its difficult to properly review Dedalus without recalling key themes and writing styles in Ulysses. And that’s the difficulty with Dedalus; as a stand-alone novel much of it is inaccessible. I wish I had read or studied Hamlet and suspect my ignorance in that department means I missed many additional subtleties in Dedalus.

My notes here pick up my personal highlights. Another reviewer might pick out totally different favourites (there are many).

• Clever referencing of the original Bloomsday

Dedalus is set 24 hours after the events in Ulysses, on June 17 1904. The named chapters in Dedalus follow the style of Ulysses, itself a continuity from Homer’s Odyssey; some of the McCabe chapters are a straight continuum of the Joyce original (a visit to the pub, or the Martello Tower, or the hospital, for example). Some chapters have subtle twists- in Joyce’s NESTOR the school students at Dalkey are disinterested in Stephen. McCabe’s students have “eager faces”(21) and there’s banter with the boys.
McCabe’s Oxen of the Sun, takes Joyce’s idea and gives it a twist. Twelve great works of literature (one for each decade) are re-worked into a Dublin setting

Orwell Nineteen Eighty Four “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”
Dedalus: It was a bright muggy day in June, and the clocks were striking ten”
The whole section has embedded references back to Ulysses, while keeping the style of the comparison novel
The Poster in Dedalus reads ELIJAH. (substituting for Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty Four)
The figure of Elijah represents and personifies metempsychosis in Ulysses (Circe) placing Leopold Bloom in the role of Elijah, the promised messiah.
“Stephenspeak” substitutes for “Newspeak”

Margaret Atwood Handmaids Tale “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium”
Dedalus: I had slept in what once had been the defence tower (131)

Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
Dedalus: A seagull screams across the sky. This has happened before but there is nothing to compare it to now (129)

Eimear McBride A Girl Is a Half Formed Thing : “For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you.”
Dedalus: For her, she’ll soon. I’ll give her name. In the yellow of her skin she wears my name. Mother mine? Yes me.

The new rewording and layering of the original novel theme is expertly related to Dedalus (and by extension Ulysses. Its superb.

Because Dedalus is set a day later there’s also a multitude of references of events featured and remembered from the later part of June 16th. A first example is on the first page of Dedalus and the recollection of ”The incident with the Chandelier”
In Joyce’s Episode 15, "Circe," at midnight the previous day a drunken Stephen lashes out at the chandelier, crying "Nothung". (This Joyce sentence itself a very clever take on Wagner’s magic sword)

• Meta Fiction

1980’s computers/the internet. Chris McCabe as a character in dialogue with his interviewer ”And will it end? In a world of possibles. Perhaps” The world of possibles

• Metempsychosis/Man in Black

Joyce scholars often cite metempsychosis as one of the most import themes of Ulysses, running through the book. Met him pike hoses (Molly Bloom) called it till I told her about the transmigration
(In the UK in the 1980’s “the Two Ronnies” came up with a classic sketch ‘The Hardware Shop', commonly called 'Four Candles'- derivative of pike hoses…!)

McCabe gives similar emphasis to the concept: the supposed transmigration at death of the soul of a human being or animal into a new body of the same or a different species. In Proteus, Stephen thinks, “God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain”
Wonder how it feels the day after, if that metempsychosis I told Molly about is true (72) (Lestrygonians Episode 8)

McCabe in dialogue with the reader, via the notes, says: ”You have found the man in black” Would you like to metempsychosise?” (136)

• Read across to other James Joyce works

One example:
(76) Dedalus muses Whats that poem I liked? Herrick
Contemporary critics of Joyce's Chamber Music (1907 ) saw in the early poems "something of the spirit of Waller and Herrick

• McCabe’s playful, visual and twenty first century insertions

1980’s computers; the subject of visual representations and “Notes” to each of the chapters
New Zealand band, The Chills, (song selected Pink Frost (1984))
Text visuality (not quite Mark Danielewski). Cyclops text formed in the shape of an eye, Aeolus in the style of a firework exploding
“Chain” technique in Wandering Rocks. The last few words of one character are the commencement of the next character observations

I hope Chris McCabe and Hennington Press manage to get Dedalus promoted in Dublin. Joyce scholars are notoriously defensive, and difficult on the subject of James Joyce’s legacy. Dedalus is clearly a respectful and loving homage to Ulysses and I am certain Dedalus is a book that would find many willing readers.

I loved it.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chris McCabe has pulled off an impressive feat if literary impersonation here. He's written a sort of sequel to James Joyce's Ulysses, imagining the day following the events in the original novel. He repeats the same chapter names and a few of the stylistic variations used.

The general tone of the book sticks pretty close to how Joyce sounds. I liked the chapter Oxen Of The Sun because in Joyce's original each section recapitulates a different development of the English language through time. In Dedalus this is mirrored by McCabe choosing to write each section in the style of a different novel, starting with Remembrance Of Things Past and finishing with A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing. The latter a particularly apt choice since Eimear McBride's prose was often compared to Joyce's.

I think you'd have to be somewhat familiar with Ulysses to get the most out of this. Not sure if it would make much sense to anyone who wasn't acquainted with that classic

[Tommi · Rating 4 out of 5]

[3.5] Read a few weeks ago but never remembered to update it on Goodreads even though the book completes my reading of the Republic of Consciousness longlist. So, briefly put:

This is an adventurous tribute to Joyce’s Ulysses, a potpourri of different styles where Chris McCabe adheres to the chapter arrangement of the original novel and adds to it the scene-by-scene structure of Hamlet. He takes cues from Joyce’s text but interprets them in his own way. He tops it all off with a digital twist, which he backs up with what seem like fabricated references to all sorts of digital Joyce studies (although Hypermedia Joyce Studies is a real thing).

I liked it as a tribute to a novel I already love, having just finished my reread of Ulysses before reading this, but I’m unsure how I feel about it as a standalone. Hence, I’m a little curious about it getting shortlisted for the RoC prize – I’m not sure I would want to read this without any prior knowledge of Joyce’s book. The other “Joyce book” on the shortlist, Alex Pheby’s Lucia, is arguably more readable as a standalone.

The physical book itself is beautiful, by the way, so kudos to Henningham Family Press, a press I had never even heard of before!

[Jackie Law · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2019 longlist – Dedalus by Chris McCabe, a sequel to Ulysses by James Joyce.

In the Republic of Consciousness podcast episode that discussed the prize’s 2019 longlist, Neil Griffiths mentioned that some readers consider Ulysses by James Joyce to be the best book ever written in the English language. I have heard it talked about as one of the most important works of modernist literature. Declan Kiberd (Irish writer and scholar) described Ulysses as

“a demonstration and summation of the entire movement”
“Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking”

The book is vast (730 pages) and, when I have flicked through a copy considering a purchase, written in heavy language. I have not read it.

Ulysses is set in one day, 16 June 1904 – the day James Joyce first went out with Nora Barnacle who he would subsequently marry. Dedalus is mostly set the next day. It is a sequel of sorts although considerably easier to read. Such an audacious concept may be regarded as brave, or perhaps bonkers. It succeeds in being a lot of fun.

The writing plays with and mimics many great and classic works of literature in language and style, referencing and (mis)quoting revered writers with abandon. Interspersed are modern elements such as computer links that suggest you may click to choose your own adventure. Between each ‘Part’ are coded maps that can be slotted together. These summarise the action to date. Certain maps offer suggestions to “>GO TO” earlier or later pages. The book works when read sequentially or as a series of loops.

The story of Hamlet, with its study of a father-son relationship, is a key reference. In a wonderfully meta section the author is interviewed about his own father and his literary inheritance. I have neither read Hamlet nor watched it on stage. I know enough from summary and heresay to appreciate what is being done in Dedalus. Those with more detailed knowledge will likely enjoy the author’s play on particular features.

Dedalus: Act 1, Scene 1, is set in the Martello Tower at 8am. Stephen awakens hungover with memories of the previous day’s activities. He must somehow get to his teaching job so dons the trousers hanging on the back of a chair. They are not his. Outside he encounters Mulligan and then a dead body from the sea over which he vomits. He teaches a lesson at the school, visits a prostitute, goes for a drink in a pub, encounters Leopold Bloom who he calls Leonard. A man in black passes by on several occasions.

Leopold needs to talk to Stephen about Molly, his wife. He picks up the lotion she requested from the pharmacy, a task he should have done yesterday. He returns to the cemetery where they buried Dignam before seeking out Stephen. He is observed and lusted after by a priest.

The story flows and engages yet this is not a book that feels the need to follow any standard ‘rules’ of writing. There are pages that seemingly exist to play with the sounds made by word and letter combinations. A chapter titled ‘Cyclops’ has all the text on each page printed in a single circle, an eye looking out at the reader. There are stylised observations and commentary. Poems explore: urinating, sex, drunken high spirits. Any recoil felt reading descriptions of bodily functions serves to highlight how sanitised life is now expected to be.

“Something is rotten in the state of Dublin”

The paragraphs covering a pub scene are written in the vein of works such as: Gone With The Wind, 1984, Lolita, The Bell Jar, The Handmaid’s Tale, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and more.

A section of ‘Notes’ at the end of the book explores the story as a history of computers and suggests that the machine’s key developments were foreshadowed in Ulysses.

And all of this somehow works. The plot is almost incidental to the pleasure of reading the inventive prose and recognising where the author took each idea from, how he compiles and builds his tribute to Joyce’s work. It is clever but not irritatingly so. This is a writer playing with ideas and granting them the freedom to fly. It is glorious to read.

Max Porter is quoted on the cover saying:

“Parts of this book will remain with me, and pollute my reading of Hamlet and Ulysses, forever.”

I will not be adding these two great works to my reading pile, but I am very glad to have read Dedalus.

[Elle]

I found the opening chapters of this book quite a challenge to get into. The language felt heavy. There is also the fact that I haven't read James Joyce's "Ulysses," of which this book is a sequel, and thus lack context to fully engage with this world.

But I am still TBR-ing this, along with "Ulysses," because now that I've been introduced to it, I need to know and understand what this is all about. :)

*I read an excerpt of this book on The Pigeonhole app as part of The Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019 anthology. This title has been longlisted for The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2019.

[Lydia Hughes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Joyce’s masterpiece, I stumbled through this book like a blindfolded tightrope walker. That being said, it’s fair to say that McCabe’s tribute to ‘Ulysses’ parallels its predecessor’s titanic literary proportions. Another review aptly summaries it thusly: ‘Stephen and Bloom, cut from Joyce’s ego, become cultural types pasted into Digital Age storytelling.’ Modernism is recast in apprehension of our current cultural moment: McCabe utilises clever references, paying homage to 1980s text adventure gaming, Google maps, and browser pop-ups. His paragraphs are simultaneously uniquely poetic, reminiscent of Joyce’s masterpiece, and cognisant of the ways in which literature must respond to the digital epoch. Joyce’s self-portrait is shot through with allusions to my favourite Shakespeare play—Hamlet—,adding an additional layer of literary and historical resonance. A fascinating ode to lost fathers. However, as mentioned in my ‘Ulysses’ review, I regret to admit that this style of writing is a little beyond my limited intellect: perhaps one day I will have the mental capacity to adequately comprehend its scope.

[Ian Mond · Rating 5 out of 5]

What else could follow Ulysses than reading Chris McCabe’s fantastic sequel? It's set on the very next day with Stephen suffering a hangover (he pukes on a corpse) and Bloom seeking out the poet while continuing to have conniptions about his marriage. Broken up into the same 18 “chapters” of Ulysses, the novel is barely the length of two of those episodes. McCabe doesn’t so much as ape Joyce’s structure and style as tweak it, play with it, even digitise it (there’s a whole choose your own adventure thing going on in the middle section of the book). The intermingling of Hamlet draws out a theme about sons and their fathers. Not just Bloom as a defacto father for Simon but McCabe’s own relationship with his Dad, which he speaks to in the Ithaca episode (yes, via a Q&A) and where he reveals that his Dad handed him a copy of The Essential James Joyce when Chris was a boy. Basically, if you’ve read Ulysses you’d be mad not to read this. (It’s also a beautiful and visually appealing book, but Henningham Family Press books always are).