Introduction: Virgin Reading, Possible Worlds Theory, and the Odyssean Intertext of Ulysses

Abstract

A number of the classic works of Joyce criticism allude to the experience of a “first reading” of Ulysses. After carefully outlining the events of June 16, 1904, Stuart Gilbert writes, “At a first reading of Ulysses the average reader is impressed most of all by the striking psychological realism of the narrative” (8). Years later, Hugh Kenner tells us about “[w]hat the first readers of Ulysses were meant to know of its author” (6).1 Michael Groden, however, puts the concept of a “first reading” of the work in question by reminding us that parts of Ulysses were published in serial form in The Little Review between 1918 and 1920. Consequently, its “literal” first readers encountered Ulysses before Joyce had even finished it and perhaps had not yet figured out the ending of the work. He notes, “Joyce had apparently planned neither ‘Ithaca’ nor ‘Penelope’ very fully in late 1920 and early 1921” (186). This means that when the Linati schema was formulated, the work was not yet finished.2 There are therefore a variety of ways of conceptualizing “first readers” of Ulysses: the people who dipped into parts of the work in The Little Review, those who read the whole thing hot off the press in 1922, and readers who encountered the work for the first time in the decades that followed, and still do, like many of our undergraduates.