Living Happily However After

There are an awful lot of stories out there that treat happiness as an experience, as put off to the end, or as both. So let us review two famous, distant, but related narratives of Western literature, each with a remarkable geometry of its own even though they putatively tell the same story: Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses. When Henry James associates his trade with drawing circles, he invokes more than two millennia of studying Euclidean geometry in the classroom. He doesn't insist on proof. The artist resorts to fiction, "a geometry of this own"; nevertheless he or she customarily envisions, within the artificial spatial and temporal confinement of the action, a sort of Q.E.D.: Quod erat demonstrandum. Whatever individual readers of Ulysses conclude about its treatment of happiness, however, it will be clear that Joyce does not subscribe to the convention (or religion) of living happily ever after. As Declan Kiberd argues at length, Ulysses is about "the reality of ordinary people's daily rounds". (Excerpt)