David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I would not claim to be the greatest Joyce scholar. I would award that to my great friend Fritz Senn in Zürich who is 90 years old and still keeping his students happy. It is a very important and happy day. As Samuel Beckett might have replied, it is a happy day because it is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses. In the early 1920s James Joyce was in Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, bemoaning the fact that he could not find a publisher for Ulysses. I remember Sylvia Beach very well. She was a tiny bird-like little American woman, but a woman of great fortitude and steel. She offered to publish it and Joyce took up her offer. So it was that 100 years ago today Ulysseswas published.

What a remarkable book. Virginia Woolf had outlined the design for stream of consciousness in, I think, The Common Reader. However, she never did it herself. She wrote the prescription; Joyce fulfilled the medicine. He was very superstitious and so it was published on his birthday, 2 February 1922. Sylvia Beach went to the railway station and collected the first two copies, one for the window of her shop and one for James Joyce. When Joyce opened it, he discovered that the printer in Dijon, Darantière, had decided to correct Joyce's manuscript. For example, there was a list of characters, famous Irish characters ranging over the centuries, including Michael Angelo Hayes. Darantière thought "Michelangelo?" and so put "Michelangelo, Hayes", not realising that Michael Angelo Hayes was a real person known to Joyce and had founded the Dublin Photographic Society. That partly explains the 5,000 errors that were claimed to be in Ulysses. Whatever about the errors, it is a wonderful life-enhancing book and we should give thanks to James Joyce for having written it and having given us so much pleasure.