In August 1924, the long-suffering Stanislaus Joyce sent a letter of complaint to his brother, James, in which he mentioned his difficulties with Ulysses. “The greater part of it I like,” he wrote, before adding with characteristic bluntness: “I have no humor with episodes which are deliberately farcical ... and as episodes grow longer and longer and you try to tell every damn thing you know about anybody that appears or anything that crops up, my patience oozes out.”
In his exasperation, Stanislaus anticipated the fate that awaited Ulysses, a novel that, almost 90 years after its publication, seems to have utterly exhausted the patience of the ordinary reader to the point where it is now perhaps the most unread literary masterpiece of all time. Declan Kiberd begins Ulysses and Us, his inspired reclamation of Joyce’s great epic of the everyday, by acknowledging the great irony that “a book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman” has “endured the sad fate of never being read by many of them”.
Kiberd’s previous books include the brilliant Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation and Ulysses: Annotated Students’ Edition. The preoccupations of both books come together in Ulysses and Us. The first — and more interesting — part of the book is a polemic, which tackles what Kiberd sees as the enduring misrepresentation of Joyce’s dauntingly ambitious novel: “How can a book like Ulysses have been so misread and misunderstood?” he asks early on. “How was it taken as a product of a specialist bohemia against which it was in fact in open revolt? Why has it been called unreadable by the ordinary people for which it was intended?” In the second part of Ulysses and Us, Kiberd goes on to give a chapter by chapter breakdown of the novel, best read alongside the original text, to help, it would seem, those “ordinary people” reclaim the book.
If Kiberd tends to downplay the novel’s difficulty, he is a tireless and refreshingly clear-headed champion of its myriad rewards. Even if you do not have the patience to read Ulysses with Kiberd’s chapter-by-chapter guide nearby, you should try and read his two opening chapters, entitled How Ulysses Didn’t Change the World and How it Might Still Do So. Together, they make up a rigorous, politically combative and heartfelt argument for the continuing relevance of a novel “that has much to teach us about the world — advice on how to cope with grief; how to be frank about death in the age of its denial; how women have their own sexual desires and so also do men; how to walk and think at the same time ... how to tell a joke and how not to tell a joke ...”
It is his contention that Ulysses has suffered most at the hands of its so-called champions, the seemingly endless stream of academics that constitutes the Joyce industry in all its self-sustaining, self-defeating specialization. Their cardinal sin, he insists, is not their willful obfuscation or often surreal jargon — “parallax, indeterminacy, consciousness-time” — but their determination to wrest the book from its actual — and symbolic — setting.
“Many of them reject the notion of a national culture, assuming that to be cultured nowadays is to be international, even global, in consciousness,” writes Kiberd. “In doing this, they have removed Joyce from the Irish context which gave his work so much of its meaning and value.”
As Kiberd points out, Ulysses is a novel so rooted in a sense of place that, as its author once memorably put it, if Dublin was to “suddenly disappear from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”
Ulysses is a novel that, long before the term was invented, attempted to map out the psychogeography of Joyce’s native city. It is also, though, as Kiberd reminds us, a novel “written to celebrate ordinary people’s daily rounds.”
It is a book about the passing on of wisdom from one generation to another, from one remarkably content older Dubliner, Bloom, to the younger, altogether more troubled Stephen Dedalus. Kiberd’s subtitle is The Art of Everyday Living and that is what he emphasizes throughout.
For all that, though, Ulysses does remain a difficult read and, I suspect, seldom finds its way on to book club reading lists. More worryingly, as Kiberd points out, it has also fallen off the syllabuses of many university degree courses in English literature.
What has also been lost is the notion of the novel as a medium for self-improvement, a notion Joyce believed in wholeheartedly. He insisted, as Kiberd succinctly puts it, “on the use-value of art” and saw Ulysses as a book that could engage both scholars and ordinary readers alike. This now seems like wishful thinking, but, as Kiberd states: “Ulysses took shape in a world which had known for the first time the possibilities of mass literacy and the emergence of working men’s reading libraries.” That utopian ideal now seems distant.
The last word, though, should not, for once, go to Joyce but to the common reader, in this instance Declan Kiberd’s father, a Dubliner through and through. “My father loved Ulysses as the fullest account ever given of the city in which he lived,” writes Kiberd. “There were parts that baffled or bored him, and these he skipped, much as today we fast-forward over the duller tracks on beloved music albums. But there were entire passages he knew almost by heart.”
Last week the State Department made several small changes to its Web information on Taiwan. First, it removed a statement saying that the US “does not support Taiwan independence.” The current statement now reads: “We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side. We expect cross-strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means, free from coercion, in a manner acceptable to the people on both sides of the Strait.” In 2022 the administration of Joe Biden also removed that verbiage, but after a month of pressure from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), reinstated it. The American
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative caucus convener Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) and some in the deep blue camp seem determined to ensure many of the recall campaigns against their lawmakers succeed. Widely known as the “King of Hualien,” Fu also appears to have become the king of the KMT. In theory, Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) outranks him, but Han is supposed to be even-handed in negotiations between party caucuses — the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) says he is not — and Fu has been outright ignoring Han. Party Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) isn’t taking the lead on anything while Fu
There is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot to put millions at the mercy of the CCP using just released AI technology. This isn’t being overly dramatic. The speed at which AI is improving is exponential as AI improves itself, and we are unprepared for this because we have never experienced anything like this before. For example, a few months ago music videos made on home computers began appearing with AI-generated people and scenes in them that were pretty impressive, but the people would sprout extra arms and fingers, food would inexplicably fly off plates into mouths and text on
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
RSS