Discussion of horses in Ulysses usually begins and ends with the Ascot Gold Cup, the 1904 edition of which fell the same day as James Joyce’s epic and was won by 20-1 outsider Throwaway.
That upset provides a comic subplot in the novel and the excuse for casual anti-Semitism, as Leopold Bloom accidentally tips the winner and is wrongly assumed to have backed it while failing to stand a drink from the proceeds.
But even as Joyceans prepare to celebrate the centenary of publication on February 2nd, there has been a dramatic late entry into the novel’s equestrian stalls.
This one wouldn’t be much use at Ascot, being built for slower manoeuvres than a flat-race. Even so, if a new book called Helen of Joyce –Trojan Horses in Ulysses is believed, it’s a bigger winner than Throwaway.
Detective Fiction – Frank McNally on three famous Dublin characters, real and imaginary
On the latchiko – Frank McNally on the rise and fall of a mysterious Irish insult
Pen portrait – The 1922 diary of one of Seán Keating’s ‘Men of the South’
Tibb’s the Season – Frank McNally on the patron saint of things that never happen
In one sense, author Senan Molony’s argument should come as no surprise. Even people who have never read Ulysses and have no ambitions to do so will probably know that it is inspired by Greek mythology.
But the consensus of a century is that the plot is modelled on Homer’s Odyssey, which classical scholars among you will recall was an account of the misdventures experienced by Odysseus/Ulysses on his long journey home from the Trojan War.
Hence the 18 “episodes” of Joyce’s book, in which the banal happenings of a 1904 day in Dublin humorously mirror the mythical events of the Odyssey.
In Molony’s radical re-reading, by contrast, Ulysses is not just about the Odyssey. It’s also shot through with Homer’s other epic, the Iliad, describing the war itself, and with Troy’s Roman spin-off, the Aeneid.
This may border on heresy for some Joyceans. But like the man himself, Molony writes as a recovering student of Dublin's Belvedere College (in his case the Class of '81), where all three sagas were taught. The weight of evidence he brings to his case is impressive, occasionally ingenious.
"Dublin is Troy," he declares in his opening sentence and then points to page one of Ulysses, where the characters occupy a military stronghold and where Buck Mulligan is said to have a face "equine in its length" with hair "grained and hued like pale oak".
From a lesser writer, Molony suggests, that might be just a badly mixed metaphor. From Joyce, Mulligan is both equine and oaken for a reason.
Mind you, insofar as any character in Ulysses corresponds definitively with the wooden horse, according to Molony, it's Blazes Boylan, who storms another citadel – No 7 Eccles Street – for an adulterous tryst with Molly Bloom, aka Helen.
Unlike Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships but who had few speaking lines, Molly is given the last 60 pages of Joyce’s book to describe her every thought. In one of those thoughts, she calls Boylan a “stallion”.
Helpfully, Molony's book even separates the characters of Ulysses into Greeks (Molly, Stephen Dedalus, the Citizen, etc) and Trojans. The latter include Leopold Bloom, although his character spans three different protagonists in the war: Paris (whose elopement with Helen started the trouble), Hector, and Aeneas.
No doubt it’s the mention of Hector there, by the way, that reminds me of a once-famous, real-life Irish horse called “Troytown”.
For those of us bereft of a classical education, the name “Hector” is now mainly and indelibly associated with the town of Navan. So was the horse.
But there was a Paris involved in Troytown’s tale too. And if not exactly Greek, his story ended in tragedy.
Owned by a “Major Gerrard”, Troytown’s first big success was the 1919 Grand Steeplechase of Paris, when he stormed Auteuil racecourse and took advantage of the poor state of French horses after another great war.
A year later, he completed a rare double when also winning the English Grand National, by 12 lengths. He was Ireland’s most famous thing on four legs then. The Parisian exile Joyce must have heard of his exploits.
Alas, like yet another character from the Trojan War, Troytown had an Achilles Heel: a tendency to go through fences rather than over them. Such was his power, he usually got away with it. But on a return to Paris in 1920, he made one mistake too many, fatally.
Like at least two famous Irish writers, he is now buried in one of the city’s celebrity graveyards: the animal cemetery at Asnières. Back in Navan, meanwhile, the Troytown Handicap is still run annually in his honour.
Returning to literary horses, I am told that Helen of Joyce is available in terrestrial Troy, aka Dublin, at Books Upstairs.
Elsewhere, it can also be ordered online from printwellbooks.com.