Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece

by Declan Kiberd

Book Overview

Declan Kiberd, professor of Anglo-Irish literature at the University College Dublin and Ireland's premier literary historian, offers an audacious, pioneering new take on James Joyce's masterpiece. Ulysses , he argues, is not an esoteric work for the scholarly few but indisputably a work rooted in the lives of ordinary citizens, offering a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life in the modern world. Structuring his analysis around the mundane...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393070999
• ISBN13: 9780393070996
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

A fresh, thoughtful look at Joyce's masterpiece

I admit a penchant for reading scholarly essays, especially ones on the seemingly inexhaustible subject of Joyce's Ulysses. The thought of all those scholars, still working the marrow from Joyce's work, and for a time to come! Like Shakespeare, there is so much criticism currently on Joyce's work that scholars needn't focus directly on Ulysses itself and can thereby suffice themselves with careful evaluation and assessment of the work done by preceding generations. This mass of scholarship is partially responsible for the reputation Ulysses has garnered as a demanding, inscrutable work not particularly suited for the general readership. In his new book however, Declan Kiberd posits that Ulysses is not a play thing for the cognescenti, rather it is a radical, demotic newspaper of human experience whose primary function is to liberate the mind from dogma and repressive paradigm--and to this extent, he is absolutely correct. Generally speaking, most scholarly work on Ulysses tends to be composed of discrete chapters that have a direct, chapter-to-chapter correlation to the ones in Ulysees, each written by a seperate scholar. Clive Hart's James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays and Joyce's Ulysses: The Larger Perspective are both excellent examples of this. These works provide compact, incisive analysis that makes thrilling if somewhat brief reading. The drawback to all this is the somewhat icy draft of stringent motivation rooted in the hearts of all these stabs at academic recognition. This is why Declan Kieberd's book Ulysses and Us makes a notable addition to Joycean scholarship. The book is written in an expository and accesssible fashion. The motus operadi is leisurely, brisk perhaps, as Kiberd strolls us along the pages of Joyce's masterpiece. Not unlike the pace set in Ulysses, he mimics the carefully hidden peripatetic treasures that characters, and ultimately, careful readers of Ulysses discover in their journey. Kieberd also draws fresh insight into the structure of the work and highlights similarites you might miss if you let the procrustean Stuart Gilbert schemata inform your reading experience. In fairness, that tendency to chop up the chapters of Joyce's work for individual critical inspection is a fault all of its own, since each distinct style does have a more than arbitrary connection to the events it describes; so it's logical that scholars would approach the work by focusing on the chapter styles; and, as Ulysses progresses these styles become more pronounced starting in Aeolus with the bold, newspaper headlines, on through Oxen of the Sun, culminating--I believe--in the question and answer catechisms of Itacha. Declan does a fine job, staying away from this tiresome talk of style, elaborating on such things as the importance of walking (in Ulysses and in our own lives) and the ways a simple activity like this can bestow the opportunity for chance and discovery to pierce daily routine; more spefically, and something I miss

Keeping it real

There seem to be two responses to "Ulysses" these days. The first is loudly to proclaim the work's awesomeness by citing Joyce's exquisite mastery of language and form. The other is to complain about how hard it is to read and to conclude that the man was a pretentious charlatan. You wouldn't know it from reading the reviews for "Ulysses" on this site, but there exists another way of responding to "Ulysses": strange to say, there are people out there who love "Ulysses" not as a towering colossus of the western canon, but as a beautiful and moving work of literature. Some of us love "Ulysses" in the same way that many people love "Pride and Prejudice" or "Dune" or "Cold Comfort Farm", as a work to keep coming back to for pure pleasure. Some of us have even been known to pass our leisure hours in deep study of Bloom's precise itinerary in the same way that Tolkein nerds pore over maps of Middle Earth. Joyce made it clear what he thought was the chief glory of "Ulysses": that it presents the most completely and vividly realized character in world literature. He also insisted that he conceived that character as deeply sympathetic, calling him simply "a good man". Joycean scholarship, however, has presumed to know better. It is true that early critics of "Ulysses" were often willing to engage with the content, rather than with merely the form, of the book. Unfortunately, perceptive early critics like Wyndham Lewis and Harry Levin suffered from an acute snobbery which prevented them appreciating the humanity of Joyce's cast of impecunious provincials. Levin, in his otherwise excellent early study of Joyce's oeuvre, goes so far as to call Bloom a "pathetic little man" (or words to that effect). Later critics have betrayed less social snobbery, but at the cost of abondoning all interest in "Ulysses" as a human drama and condemning it to a slow death at the hands theory-addled professionals and their increasingly baffled students. Declan Kiberd's new book is a passionately argued plea that we not only take a more sympathetic view of Joyce's hero, but also that we read "Ulysses" in the same way that its principal models were read of old: as a guide for how to live our lives. In his first two chapters, perhaps the book's most compelling, Kiberd reminds us of how Joyce, uniquely for a high modernist, was deeply sympathetic to the emerging middle class and its bourgeois values. Kiberd might have gone further here: he might have reminded us that while, say, TS Eliot espoused various forms of elitism and contempt for modernity, and while Ezra Pound wound up on Italian fascist radio frothing at the mouth about the Jews wrecking the world economy, Joyce portrayed with deep sympathy an astonishingly appropriate twentieth-century Everyman: a tolerant, deracinated, socially undistinguished Jew who works in advertising. (It's interesting that while he praises Joyce for extolling the type of common man whom his contemporaries held in contempt, Kiberd can't help bu

Readable & Entertaining!

"Finally, a readable book that tells us why we are supposed to understand the James Joyce's book Ulysses."

A New Way of Looking at a Classic

James Joyce's _Ulysses_ has had two big strikes against its reputation ever since it was published in 1922. One is that it is a dirty book. This is a false and silly charge. Long ago the courts decided that it could be imported into the U.S. because it is not obscene, and anyone looking for stimulation by searching for the "good parts" is in for frustration. The other strike is that it is a difficult book. This charge is more accurate. _Ulysses_ is certainly not a novel that is as accessible as _Gone with the Wind_, for instance. It recounts only the ordinary events of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin, but it does so in the most extraordinary way. Each of the chapters is written in a different style, and there are parodies of historic or specialist (like legalese or scientific) prose which might be best enjoyed by literary experts. The book has hundreds of characters within it, but concentrates on just three, the contented Mr. Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman; the anguished Stephen Dedalus, a student and teacher; and Bloom's wife, Molly, who spends the whole day at home. I had always thought that the detailed stories of these characters, with long pages that show their inner thoughts, was the least didactic of novels; it was a joyous celebration of daily life, and of wordplay, and it held within it three characters which are among the most believable and fully drawn in all literature. It did not, in my view, have a lesson to teach. I am having to reevaluate my stance in light of _Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece_ (Norton) by Declan Kiberd. The first chapter is "How _Ulysses_ Didn't Change Our Lives" and the second is "How It Still Might Do So". There are eighteen subsequent chapters, each one keyed but not restricted to one of the eighteen chapters of _Ulysses_ itself, to explain how the book reflects on day-to-day activities like eating and ogling. There are final chapters that set _Ulysses_ within the literary neighborhood of Homer, the Bible, Dante, and Shakespeare, all of which readers of the book will know are borrowed extensively for the text. Kiberd downplays the book's difficulty, and says "_Ulysses_ is an epic of the bourgeoisie," but that literary specialists have removed it from the specifically Dublin environment and from commoners and common readers. Putting aside the difficulty of the book, what might _Ulysses_ teach us? Why, it might teach us kindness. Its whole point is the eventual paternal and filial union of the bohemian Stephen with the bourgeois Bloom in the final chapters of the book. Stephen is a troubled son, returned to Dublin upon the death of his mother, called upon to do so by his improvident father. He has intellect galore, well founded in the classics and in Catholic teaching. He can spontaneously expound to other intellectuals about his theory of _Hamlet_, that other book of disturbing father and son relations. Stephen's intellect gives him no peace