Holography

“The bulk of James Joyce’s Ulysses concerns a stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom of Dublin. Ulysses is regarded as one of the great twentieth-century novels, but even its staunchest supporters would refrain from describing it as a cracking yarn. Joyce’s aim, when he sat down to write, was not to produce a good story. 

As he explained to his friend Frank Budgen, ‘I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.’ He was trying to use the medium of a novel to grasp Dublin from every perspective. 

Using only a typewriter and reams of paper, Joyce was attempting to do to early twentieth-century Dublin what RockStar North, the Scottish developers of the video game Grand Theft Auto V, did to early twenty-first-century Los Angeles. 

In Grand Theft Auto V every aspect of the city, including its movies and culture, social media and technology, race relations, stock market, laws and business culture, is recreated and satirised. 

Ulysses is admittedly not often compared to Grand Theft Auto V, but I suspect those familiar with both titles will let the analogy stand.