There seem to be two responses to "Ulysses" these days. The first is 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": 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 "Lucky Jim" or "Cold Comfort Farm", as a work to keep coming back to for pure pleasure. It's even been rumoured that some hardcare fans waste entire evenings in the rapt study of Bloom's itinerary, just as Tolkien 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 sympathetically, calling him simply "a good man". Joycean scholarship, however, has generally presumed to know better. It is true that early critics of "Ulysses" were often willing to engage with the content, rather than the form, of the book. Unfortunately, social snobbery often prevented perceptive early critics like Wyndham Lewis and Harry Levin from 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". Later critics have been less snobbish, 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 asks us not only to take a more sympathetic view of Joyce's hero, but also to 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, Kiberd reminds us of how Joyce, uniquely for a high modernist, was 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 wicked Jews wrecking the world economy, Joyce portrayed with 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 but contrast an idealized Edwardian "civic bourgeoisie" with the less virtuous masses of our own day. Like Joyce's sniffy contemporaries, Kiberd sees salt-of-the-earth virtue in the idealized masses of the past while holding his nose when confronted with the unwashed of his own day. I reckon Joyce would have found more to admire in the society of the early twenty-first society than does Kiberd.)
Kiberd's timely book makes a compelling case for reading "Ulysses" as a paean to the richness and dignity of everyday life. You may be less than convinced by his claim that "Ulysses" presents us with a set of instructions on how to live our lives, and you may wind up less sanguine than the author about the exemplary character of Bloom's life, but you'll find gems of wisdom here that will send you back to "Ulysses" afresh. (It's worth noting that the book contains readings of each of Ulysses's eighteen chapters that presuppose a familiarity with the novel. It may not, therefore, be the best introduction for the novice, but it would still be useful to have it at your elbow when attempting "Ulysses" for the first time.) If you care about "Ulysses", or think you might care given a little effort and guidance, buy this wonderful book.
