Of Questionable Character: The Construction of the Subject in Ulysses

Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 13, Summer 2002© 2002 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 Of Questionable Character: The Construction of the Subject in Ulysses KEVIN ATTELL [I]n Bloom’s humble opinion [it] threw a nasty sidelight on that side of a person’s character, no pun intended. (U 16.1871–3) It is often said that reading Ulysses is like learning to read all over again. And it’s true; a fundamental and sometimes frustrating part of the experience of reading the novel is, in fact, learning how to read it. The notoriously massive array of schemata, guidebooks, annotations , and critical studies that have arisen around the novel since (and even slightly before) its publication might thus be seen as a cumulative record of that learning process which its collective readership has gone through. This proliferation of interpretive critical tools, moreover, is initiated by Ulysses itself and by the early tips Joyce gives to, for example, Stuart Gilbert and Carlo Linati as to how his novel is put together. Even from the moment of its title—the classical reference superimposed on a contemporary chronicle—Ulysses announces that what lies in the text ahead will be the site of an unusual interpretive task, and the text constantly perpetuates that task through an encyclopedic accumulation of historical references and a series of experimental technical manipulations which themselves demand to be deciphered as they inform and deform the narrative of June 16th, 1904. In this peculiar position as both a book and its own guidebook, Ulysses takes up an oddly participatory role in the readerly processes of its audience and thus foregrounds not only the 05-T2429 9/13/02 12:07 PM Page 103 104 of questionable character narrative’s textual density but also the readerly methods and strategies which are brought to the text. In this essay I want to examine the nature of that participation, and to explore the hermeneutic and philosophical claims of such a self-reflexive encyclopedic fiction. At the risk of initially seeming a “defense” of Ulysses against its detractors , this essay will use as a frequent interlocutor Leo Bersani and his influential essay “Against Ulysses,” which to my mind is one of the most subtle and persuasive of the negative critiques of Joyce’s fiction. In “Against Ulysses” Bersani mounts a strong attack on Joyce’s novel, and in particular on the exegetical practices it demands of its readers. Sensing in Ulysses a claim for the redemptive power of art, Bersani brings out—through a paired reading of Stephen’s aesthetic theory at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and of the critical apparatuses amassed around Joyce’s fiction—what he sees as an implicit promise of salvation made by the novel to the ideally monastic Joycean hermeneut. As much a polemic against Joycean criticism as against Joyce’s fiction, “Against Ulysses” seeks to lead the followers out of the church and into the world by revealing a repressive mystification at work within the supposedly avant-garde modernist text. In his argument, then, the first thing Bersani wishes to establish is “the traditional view of human identity which Ulysses defends,”1 and to this end he begins by showing how the germ of the purportedly radical novelistic technique of Ulysses—Stephen’s early aesthetic theory—contains and conceals venerable humanistic assumptions. At the end of A Portrait Stephen offers an aesthetic theory based on Aquinas’ notion that beauty is composed of three qualities, integritas , consonantia, and claritas, which he translates as wholeness, harmony , and radiance. Of these three moments Bersani finds the third most relevant to the problems posed by Ulysses (“Tell me now what is claritas and you win the cigar”). According to Stephen’s gloss, claritas is that in the art object which radiates the unique and present essence of the thing itself. The first two moments of integritas and consonantia refer to the phenomenal accidents of the object: the integritas is the oneness of the thing “selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which it is not,” while the consonantia is...