Joyce's Ulysses

31:3 Book Reviews contains numerous enors: Yeats, did not, for instance, publish his first poems in 1882 or a Collected Poems in 1895. Finally, as William Butler Yeats will doubtless be sold primarily to libraries, most readers will miss the heroic efforts of the dust-jacket artist to make the sketch of Yeats look as much like the photograph of Bloom as possible, but at least they will be spared the howler that Mosada was Yeats's "first collection of poems." Richard J. Finneran Tulane University JOYCE'S ULYSSES Daniel R. Schwarz. Reading Joyce's 'Ulysses'. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. Cloth $27.50 Paper $11.95 The artist, Stephen Dedalus argues in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is akin to the God of creation—that is, "invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." That much said, however, one hastens to add that Joyce was hardly "indifferent" where anivadversions of his younger self were concerned. Not only is Stephen a portrait of the artist as a young man—words that Joyce insisted put his title into proper perspective—but even more important, Stephen's aesthetic pronouncements are longer on sound and fury than they are dramatically realized art. I belabor this point because Stephen's convoluted theories come to little more than Romanticism with a scholastic stink; it is Joyce's unflinching Modernism— with its ironic perspective, its formalism, its mythic substructures—that marks the essential difference between the very young young man Joyce was and the consummate artist he came to be. Ulysses confirms our suspicion that once Stephen flies over the nets of family, church, and state, he will have soared past his best—indeed, his only—material. Leopold and Molly Bloom provide the necessary elements—the Life, if you will— that Stephen has so sorely missed in the Dublin of Simon Dedalus, the Catholic Church, and the Irish state. In short, we read Ulysses because of Stephen, because of Molly and most especially , because of Bloom. Granted, Joyce meant us to see them as avatars—at once diminished and ennobled—of Telemachus, the son; Penelope, the wife, and Ulysses, the wily Hero and wandering husband. For all its stylistic dazzle, for all its Modemist difficulty—including demonstrations at their most strained—it is Joyce's characters who matter, and Joyce's human comedy that moves us. I realize that the innocent paragraph I've just written will, no doubt, consign me to that outer circle reserved for unreconstructed New Critics. So be it. To insist that Ulysses refers to nothing outside itself, that it is merely an 324 31:3 Book Reviews elaborate play of word on word, style on style, is to rob the novel of its warmth, its richness and, yes, its value. Those suspicious of the Big Words I've thrown off so lightly—everything from "novel" (rather than "text") to "value" (whose! I can hear them muttering, as they answer their own question: white, middle-class, male, probably tenured)—read quite another Ulysses from mine. The result is that Ulysses criticism has tumed into something of a Texas stand-off. Those out to deconstruct Big Game, to add Joyce's text to the other notches on their critical belts, have nothing to say to those still rattling on about Stephen and Molly and Bloom, as if they were actual people one could invite to a conference. At this point, enter Daniel R. Schwarz, a peace-maker if there ever was one: There is a danger [Schwarz tells us in his introduction] that the study of Ulysses has become like ground that has been farmed for so long that it now only supports exotic crops like persimmons. While we have a vast array of critical landscape of Ulysses, I shall attempt to provide a bridge between those who stress Ulysses as a novel that reveals the psyche and motives of characters and those who stress Ulysses as an elaborate rhetorical experiment . As he demonstrated in The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories from James to Hillis Miller, Schwarz moves easily and thoughtfully among wide ranges of critical thought. He has, in short, the equipment necessary to read...