The Word Known to All Men; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love James Joyce

John Lennon—a closet James Joyce scholar who even subscribed to the James Joyce Quarterly in the 1970s—claimed in the 1967 hit song by The Beatles that "all you need is love." Since its original publication in 1922, some critics have suggested that love is all you need to break through the thorny thicket of complexity presented by Joyce's experimental style in Ulysses (not to mention the subsequent, and even more daunting, Finnegans Wake in 1939), a style that shifts and evolves from episode to episode. Joyce himself hinted that the novel was his epic affirmation of that "[w]ord known to all men," as his literary alter-ego Stephen Dedalus puts it in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses (Joyce 1986,429-430). That "word" is widely interpreted as love, and love is the subject of Joyce's great, human epics.

Reading Ulysses simultaneously as Joyce's treatise on the nature of love and as a kind of love letter to love is nothing new. The most widely accepted theory on why Joyce selected June 16, 1904 as the date his epic of a single day takes place is because that was possibly the date that he first went out with his lifelong partner and future wife, Nora Barnacle. Such a reading makes the book, on one level, a kind of anniversary present, a token of love for the love of Joyce's life. One of the originators of the theory that the date of Ulysses had this biographical origin, Richard Ellmann, is also one of the first proponents of the idea that, in spite of all the stylistic bells and whistles, the "theme in Ulysses was simple" (Joyce 1986, ix). Ellmann and others have established an interpretive tradition that Ulysses is essentially about love, the entire spectrum of love from the eros to agape. According to this interpretation, Joyce's epic fits into a tradition of narratives of love and reconciliation in an attempt to apply epic conventions to subject matter that is all-too-human. Or, as Ellmann himself puts it, "Ulysses revolts against history as hatred and violence, and speaks in its most intense moments of their opposite" (xiv), namely Stephen's "word known to all men." Despite ostensible differences in tone, style, and method, Declan Kiberd and Janine Utell both recognize that Ulysses is concerned with love as the most complex and the most human of emotions. Each text offers a critical reappraisal of Joyce's work emphasizing what one can still learn from reading Joyce in the early twenty-first century, and how one might learn again to love reading Joyce. As a result, their books represent an important step in restoring a sense of humanity to an author whose texts have been relegated to the status of relics for specialists.

"Ulysses" and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece, Declan Kiberd's ode to the ordinary in Ulysses, attempts to find some middle ground between the extremes of unabashed praise and unqualified contempt by arguing that what makes the book great is exactly that which it celebrates: its humanness. Kiberd's task, taken up by others before him, is to save Joyce's book from its abstraction into inscrutable theory by "specialist elites" (2009, 10) and to return it into the hands of the ever-elusive "common reader" (17). He argues that Ulysses "should be accessible to ordinary readers as once were the Odyssey, the New Testament, the Divine Comedy and Hamlet" (21). Making an argument that Joyce was as much Romantic as Modern in his celebration of the minutiae of everyday life, Kiberd claims that "[i]t is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people," for it—according to Kiberd...