A few years ago some Twitter wit, I forget whom, suggested that the eighteen episodes comprising James Joyce’s Ulysses might be conceived of as more-or-less independent scrolls; that the compounded tome represents a collection of said scrolls compiled in a manner like unto how Homer might have aggregated The Odyssey from the efforts of pre-existing raconteurs, imparting his own authorial stamp to the collective work. While I’ve no indication that such was Joyce’s intent, I’ve ever since found the mental image of a disheveled pile of scrolls to be a useful model for thinking about Ulysses and its (in)famously radical shifts of style and emphasis from one episode to the next. This could also account for Joyce referring to said independent components as episodes rather than the conventional chapters.
Taking on Ulysses episode by episode, James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays, edited by Hart and Hayman, is so stuffed with invaluable insights that never before in my life have I filled up a book with so many Post-It notes for later review. Having already been though Ulysses about seven or eight times in the last few years, and beginning ― so I innocently believed ― to acquire a certain panoramic vision and appreciation of its sweeping narrative and vast multitude of characters, Hart and Hayman humbled me, revealing that in some ways I am only just beginning to break down through the superficial crust of the book and to plunge into the true and unexpected allusive ocean of dimly-lit psychopoetics which broods beneath. Some of the episodes I now must fundamentally rethink; others I now suspect I perceive only through the darkest glass most obscurely.
Of course this is the great fun[1] of reading James Joyce, and what you find in no other writer: as soon as the words “I understand” occur to you, the solid earth crumbles from beneath your feet. It’s not so much a matter of coming to understand Joyce’s stories as it is learning how to read, and reconsidering what the act of reading is, or can, or may be.
Some of the eighteen essays to be found in Hart and Hayman ― one essay for each of the episodes in Ulysses ― are more mind-blowing than others. Robert Kellogg on Scylla and Charybdis is something of a revelation. Clive Hart on Wandering Rocks is nothing less than astonishing. Jackson I Cope is a most helpful guide through the musicality of Sirens, providing a number of useful guideposts. David Hayman shows us how the text of Cyclops is nested in a way I hadn’t picked up on before, and also here sets out his critical Arranger theory of narration throughout Ulysses, which by itself makes this particular essay a vital one. Likewise while JS Atherton may not be the last word on Oxen of the Sun, he probably comes close; at a minimum, Atherton’s essay is unquestionably required reading.
Reading and carefully reflecting on Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated and Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study are of secondary importance only to successive re-readings of Joyce’s original text if one hopes to begin to garner something approaching a respectable comprehension of Ulysses. James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays is likewise an important reference work, though perhaps a bit less so for the layman than for the academic scholar, but only a bit. If Gifford and Gilbert and Joyce were required reading for a 400-level course, then you’d expect to encounter Hart and Hayman in a graduate course. It’s not too much for the layman to come to terms with. I am myself such a layman, and I find this book to be masterful and helpful in the extreme.
[1] Some might object to my use of the word “fun” here . . . until they’ve made their first conceptual breakthrough and acknowledged that Joyce’s conception of fiction is unlike anything they’ve encountered before.
Tagged: James Joyce
