"Ulysses" Quotīdiānus: James Joyce's Inverse Histories of the Everyday by Jibu Mathew George (review)

"Ulysses" Quotīdiānus is an unusual book whose meticulous detail and scope ambitiously mirror its subject-matter—the minutiae of the Joycean everyday—in its comprehensive inclusiveness. A challenging but overall rewarding read, Jibu Mathew George's study is bound to surprise its academic readership—provided one does not lose heart or diligence while disentangling the gyrational, multi-pronged strands of the eight chapters. George takes remarkably great care in weaving together "quotidian 'micro-histories' surrounding work and income, material objects and practices, everyday relationships, body and health, ideologies and power, socio-psychological resources, and … gender issues" (xviii), on the basis of which, so the argument goes, history may be reconceived. The book is furthermore equipped with a "Foreword," "Preface," and "Introduction"; written respectively by eminent Joyce scholars Anne Fogarty, Matthew Creasy, and Geert Lernout, these short texts stress the importance of the quotidian in Joyce's works, while giving brief evaluations of George's historiographically oriented study.

There is a lot to recommend George's view that Ulysses's representational qualities, in depicting Dublin quotidian life, lay out "a sphere of alternative historical experience" (2). Shedding light on the transcultural pan-historicity of ordinary (gendered) daily practices, their cultural-historical, corporeal-material, and symbolic embeddedness, and the modernists' (and Joyce's characters') critical reflections thereupon, George follows in the vein of the New Modernist Studies' "vertical" expansion.¹ While putting the banal center stage marks a critical path perhaps less downtrodden than others, important work has been done here in recent years. Apart from Declan Kiberd's seminal book, studies by Liesl Olson and Saikat Majumdar, to name but two who focus on Joyce, have spearheaded this field.² Given Kiberd's detailed engagements with quotidian Joyce and Majumdar's historiographical angle, it is surprising that George did not ground "Ulysses" Quotīdiānus in the rich scholarship of this field, especially since Majumdar's argument is largely congruent with his own. George reads Ulysses not as a hyperrealist, hyperstylized mock-epic, whose most impressive heroic figure would be language itself, the book being the event; rather, he employs historiographical concepts from the Annales School (notably that of Fernand Braudel) to contend that Ulysses should be considered an ethically charged quotidian micro-history capable of unmasking ideology while displaying the potential for change.³

Through the lens of a multiperspectival Alltagsgeschichte ("everyday history"—62, 64–65, 76–78, 246 n17), Ulysses can thus be viewed as a potent counter-narrative, challenging conventional historiographic and mythical foci on great men, war, and violence by means of appropriating Homer and literary history and embedding them in conventional Dublin everyday life. George's Marxist interpretative plane points toward Genettian "palimpsest" instances of revolutionary possibility from below, "where there is room for singular activities" (263, 247).⁴ Yet George also acknowledges the presence of "received" or ideological discourses and "ideas"—such as Irish nationalism, anti-Semitism, religion, or western narrative, cultural, and literary knowledge—within "quotidian consciousness," foregrounding their constructed, malleable nature in the face of the history of the everyday (263). The Blooms finally emerge as contrapuntal, "complementary" (298) foils, through which critical consciousness is enacted and voiced, anticipating their reunification (298).

This appears to be what the intriguing phrase "inverse" or "corrective hermeneutic" (30, 25) entails: a phrase whose meaning is, however, not self-evident and which should have been clearly defined, especially when it is argued that Molly's "corrective" be viewed as "a hermeneutic of possibilities and reconciliation rather than one of suspicion and perennial resistance" (298). This slight vagueness is paired with a tendency to idealize this "hermeneutic of possibilities." Most readings delineated in "Ulysses" Quotīdiānus are, admittedly, sound and conventional. As Matthew Creasy's "Preface" notes: "[t]he ordinary is the extraordinary within this study, in its very ordinariness" (xiii). But Creasy is right to issue a word of...