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Ulysses on the Liffey
Hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, in good condition. From the collection of W.L. Webb, the Guardian's literary editor for many years. Jacket is marked and sunned. Edges are creased and nicked. Board edges, corners and spine ends are bumped and rubbed. Page block is tanned and blemished. Boards are clean, binding is sound and pages are clear. LW
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1972
About the author
Richard Ellmann
104 books115 followersRichard David Ellmann was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition won James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focuses on the major modernist writers of the 20th century.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
April 18, 2010
Got your tin of Red Bull ready? Okay - now get another. And - get some Anadin Extra too. That's for after. Because this is not skateboarding on a Sunday afternoon, this is not Strictly Come Dancing and this is definitely not that Aerosmith video with Alicia Silverstone. And - it's not even Strictly Come Dancing with mythical Greek heroes instead of grade D celebs. What this is is proper Ulysses criticism and I don't think I like it. For instance :
"Joyce is so far faithful to Homer as to let the initial burden of opposing the suitors of Penelope fall principally on Telemachus. In the third triad of chapters Bloom is conspicuous only in the middle, Stephen holding the stage in Aeolus and Scylla and Charybdis with his two parables, one of nationalism, the other of art. In accordance with their hypothetical juncture in the first six episodes, the two men are now banded together without being aware of the fact. Unconsciously they are in league against the powers of this world and the next. Their first joint enterprise is in defence of language, both of English as a whole and of the integrity of each word. If the artist is to bring the word to his race, he must begin by rejecting false diction and the false gods it enshrines."
Oh yes, get thee behind me false diction! I vomit thee forth. This is as I recall the kind of jiggerypokery which passed for exegesis when I was a wee bookish geek at the University of Southampton. I could make a fair fist of it but I never really believed in it when I was writing essays on Yeats' wonderful poem Vaseline in Action or Dickens' searing novel of life as an early Victorian pest controller Great Infestations . It just seemed as though no one ever thought like that except people who were given professorships on the basis of the fact that they did. And of course if you did think like that, you could just turn on a tap and out it would come:
"The antithesis of cream and blood is reasserted in the fleshiness and fleshlessness of the people Bloom meets."
"Father Time misbehaves, offering not decorous succession but frisky agitation, and Mother Space cannot be kept at home,"
"The brain's womb is also a tomb : experience dies in it to be reborn like Christ beyond space and time. The process is painful, like labour or murder."
All these big words - the thatness of that, the thisness of this, and howsomever the that and the this coexitentialisagilliframuglify each other and our very selves - is this not the very pith and plinth of great literature and the point where we sit on the high diving board of human things and cannonball off into the voidoid?
Well, I think it's self-evident.
But I don't like it.
"Joyce is so far faithful to Homer as to let the initial burden of opposing the suitors of Penelope fall principally on Telemachus. In the third triad of chapters Bloom is conspicuous only in the middle, Stephen holding the stage in Aeolus and Scylla and Charybdis with his two parables, one of nationalism, the other of art. In accordance with their hypothetical juncture in the first six episodes, the two men are now banded together without being aware of the fact. Unconsciously they are in league against the powers of this world and the next. Their first joint enterprise is in defence of language, both of English as a whole and of the integrity of each word. If the artist is to bring the word to his race, he must begin by rejecting false diction and the false gods it enshrines."
Oh yes, get thee behind me false diction! I vomit thee forth. This is as I recall the kind of jiggerypokery which passed for exegesis when I was a wee bookish geek at the University of Southampton. I could make a fair fist of it but I never really believed in it when I was writing essays on Yeats' wonderful poem Vaseline in Action or Dickens' searing novel of life as an early Victorian pest controller Great Infestations . It just seemed as though no one ever thought like that except people who were given professorships on the basis of the fact that they did. And of course if you did think like that, you could just turn on a tap and out it would come:
"The antithesis of cream and blood is reasserted in the fleshiness and fleshlessness of the people Bloom meets."
"Father Time misbehaves, offering not decorous succession but frisky agitation, and Mother Space cannot be kept at home,"
"The brain's womb is also a tomb : experience dies in it to be reborn like Christ beyond space and time. The process is painful, like labour or murder."
All these big words - the thatness of that, the thisness of this, and howsomever the that and the this coexitentialisagilliframuglify each other and our very selves - is this not the very pith and plinth of great literature and the point where we sit on the high diving board of human things and cannonball off into the voidoid?
Well, I think it's self-evident.
But I don't like it.
August 10, 2014
Not sure I buy some of his more tenuous links, but certainly some great analysis here.
Read
May 31, 2022One of my read-alongs for Ulysses. I found it a valuable resource for ideas about how to think of Ulysses but I can’t say I understood Ellmann deeply enough to rate the book. I’ll leave that for literary scholars and persons who (understandably) dedicate their lives to teasing all of the meanings out of James Joyce.
November 28, 2009
Crazy deep digging into the world and inhabitants of Bloomsday, Dublin, 16 June 1904, by Ellmann, whose James Joyce is the finest literary biography I've ever read. Certainly not for the uninitiated.
February 15, 2017
When I read a book about Ulysses, I seek new and original insights that exist outside the text of the novel. Is this book of Richard Ellmann's, Ulysses on the Liffey, intended to be criticism? Is it to be a guide? Is it to be Ellmann's interpretation of the events portrayed in Ulysses? Any of these, or any combination of them, I'd find acceptable. Happily, now and again it engages in all three of these activities. Ellmann presents his arguments, then offers support and defense for them. He makes his case.
James Joyce's novel Ulyssess contains eighteen episodes. Ellmann's chief contention is that Ulysses is to be read as six independent triads of episodes. Each triad of episodes, he tells us, is presented in the formulation of a syllogism: the first episode presents the thesis, the second the antithesis, and the third a synthesis of the first two.
To a degree that is less comprehensive and insistent than Ellmann presents, variations on this claim are often made by others. There's no mistaking the parallelism of the first six episodes, taking place simultaneously in different locations: Telemachus and Calypso take place at 8:00 a.m., Nestor and Lotus-Eaters at 10:00 a.m., and Proteus and Hades at 11:00 a.m. Besides the temporal connections, abounding symbolism links these decidedly syllogistic episodes together. The same pattern of syllogism is evident in the last three episodes, constituting the Nostos section of the book. Thus we have two initial triads and one last triad of episodes that nearly everyone can agree upon.
Ellmann has more trouble justifying the structural relationships of the intervening nine episodes. He insists on distorted readings of them in order that they might be bludgeoned into conforming to his theory of triads. This is troubling to a reader of Ellmann's book, which becomes more more about rationalizing Ellman's flawed theory than a critique, guide, or interpretation of Joyce's novel. The traditional "novel" in Ulysses ends with Scylla and Charybdis, the ninth episode. It's conceivable that Aeolus, Lestrygonians, and Scylla and Charybdis could comprise a triad, although viewing them in a relationship as thesis, antithesis and synthesis as Ellmann proposes seems tenuous at best, and his arguments for doing so are predictably weak. He makes the effort, of course, trying to prop up the idea instead of using this space in his book to more profitably interrogate the text of Ulysses.
But Ellmann's flailing about reaches the point of no return at the tenth episode. In Wandering Rocks, he claims, Joyce has warped the spacetime continuum, initiating the deconstruction of the Aristotelian framework of the first half of the novel. But far from being discontinuous and incapable of unification, the separate stories contained in Wandering Rocks are intricately linked and as fully functional and interlocked as are the tiny gears in a pocket watch: the episode is adroitly and stunningly unified, start to finish. No, Wandering Rocks functions as an independent hinge joining the first nine episodes to the last eight: Wandering Rocks simply can't be part of any triad of episodes. Beginning not with Wandering Rocks but with the eleventh episode, Sirens, and continuing all the way to Penelope at the end, Joyce is actively engaged in disassembling and distorting text, and his narrator is heavily engaged in acts of sabotage of one form or another. By ignoring this and trying to shoehorn Wandering Rocks into an imagined triad, Ellmann fills up his book with endless false comparisons and unnatural groupings. His book would be far more successful had he mentioned the three triads at the beginning, one triad at the end, the Wandering Rocks as a hinge, and the intervening five episodes as a block of increasing distortion culminating in Circe.
The flawed premise of the book leads to distorted inferences drawn, inappropriate emphases asserted, and misguided conclusions declared. Given the name of the book, it's noteworthy and peculiar just how little space Ellmann devotes to analyzing the content of Ulysses. Unfortunately, considerable space is taken up instead by tables summarizing his arguments. In fact, these are nothing more than the outline for Ellmann's book itself in disguise. Furthermore, the several illustrations included have only trivial bearing on his story. He includes numerous interstitial chapters which are trivial, irrelevant, and in some cases over-generalized well beyond the point of absurdity (see, for example, the incomprehensibly muddled section "Three Propositions" at the end of the book, pp 184-5).
Provided the reader can endure its frustrations, scattered original insights and perspectives may be dug up throughout Ellmann's text. He is occasionally perceptive, sometimes strikingly so, but the canvas on which he is painting is so small that often he compresses his ideas down into a kind of soupy Babel of metaphors that evade meaningful interpretation or even, often enough, comprehension. He has some thoughtful points to make about how Ulysses can be read with respect to Aristotle and David Hume. He points out how three views of history are presented in the first few episodes. History, Haines suggests, is a demonic force to be blamed for current events and conditions. History, Deasy believes, moves forward by divine grace toward some great goal. And Stephen of course views history as a blood-soaked nightmare. Unfortunately, Ellmann never really develops this seemingly fertile ground. He cleverly and wisely identifies the presence of two narrators in Cyclops, which is an important read of that episode: I haven't heard others speak of the Cyclops episode in quite those terms. But unfortunately these gems and several others are buried under all the talk about triads, an architectural theory that finally can't withstand the load it's intended to bear.
Richard Ellmann could have written an engaging and provocative book about Ulysses. He chose to write Ulysses on the Liffey instead.
James Joyce's novel Ulyssess contains eighteen episodes. Ellmann's chief contention is that Ulysses is to be read as six independent triads of episodes. Each triad of episodes, he tells us, is presented in the formulation of a syllogism: the first episode presents the thesis, the second the antithesis, and the third a synthesis of the first two.
To a degree that is less comprehensive and insistent than Ellmann presents, variations on this claim are often made by others. There's no mistaking the parallelism of the first six episodes, taking place simultaneously in different locations: Telemachus and Calypso take place at 8:00 a.m., Nestor and Lotus-Eaters at 10:00 a.m., and Proteus and Hades at 11:00 a.m. Besides the temporal connections, abounding symbolism links these decidedly syllogistic episodes together. The same pattern of syllogism is evident in the last three episodes, constituting the Nostos section of the book. Thus we have two initial triads and one last triad of episodes that nearly everyone can agree upon.
Ellmann has more trouble justifying the structural relationships of the intervening nine episodes. He insists on distorted readings of them in order that they might be bludgeoned into conforming to his theory of triads. This is troubling to a reader of Ellmann's book, which becomes more more about rationalizing Ellman's flawed theory than a critique, guide, or interpretation of Joyce's novel. The traditional "novel" in Ulysses ends with Scylla and Charybdis, the ninth episode. It's conceivable that Aeolus, Lestrygonians, and Scylla and Charybdis could comprise a triad, although viewing them in a relationship as thesis, antithesis and synthesis as Ellmann proposes seems tenuous at best, and his arguments for doing so are predictably weak. He makes the effort, of course, trying to prop up the idea instead of using this space in his book to more profitably interrogate the text of Ulysses.
But Ellmann's flailing about reaches the point of no return at the tenth episode. In Wandering Rocks, he claims, Joyce has warped the spacetime continuum, initiating the deconstruction of the Aristotelian framework of the first half of the novel. But far from being discontinuous and incapable of unification, the separate stories contained in Wandering Rocks are intricately linked and as fully functional and interlocked as are the tiny gears in a pocket watch: the episode is adroitly and stunningly unified, start to finish. No, Wandering Rocks functions as an independent hinge joining the first nine episodes to the last eight: Wandering Rocks simply can't be part of any triad of episodes. Beginning not with Wandering Rocks but with the eleventh episode, Sirens, and continuing all the way to Penelope at the end, Joyce is actively engaged in disassembling and distorting text, and his narrator is heavily engaged in acts of sabotage of one form or another. By ignoring this and trying to shoehorn Wandering Rocks into an imagined triad, Ellmann fills up his book with endless false comparisons and unnatural groupings. His book would be far more successful had he mentioned the three triads at the beginning, one triad at the end, the Wandering Rocks as a hinge, and the intervening five episodes as a block of increasing distortion culminating in Circe.
The flawed premise of the book leads to distorted inferences drawn, inappropriate emphases asserted, and misguided conclusions declared. Given the name of the book, it's noteworthy and peculiar just how little space Ellmann devotes to analyzing the content of Ulysses. Unfortunately, considerable space is taken up instead by tables summarizing his arguments. In fact, these are nothing more than the outline for Ellmann's book itself in disguise. Furthermore, the several illustrations included have only trivial bearing on his story. He includes numerous interstitial chapters which are trivial, irrelevant, and in some cases over-generalized well beyond the point of absurdity (see, for example, the incomprehensibly muddled section "Three Propositions" at the end of the book, pp 184-5).
Provided the reader can endure its frustrations, scattered original insights and perspectives may be dug up throughout Ellmann's text. He is occasionally perceptive, sometimes strikingly so, but the canvas on which he is painting is so small that often he compresses his ideas down into a kind of soupy Babel of metaphors that evade meaningful interpretation or even, often enough, comprehension. He has some thoughtful points to make about how Ulysses can be read with respect to Aristotle and David Hume. He points out how three views of history are presented in the first few episodes. History, Haines suggests, is a demonic force to be blamed for current events and conditions. History, Deasy believes, moves forward by divine grace toward some great goal. And Stephen of course views history as a blood-soaked nightmare. Unfortunately, Ellmann never really develops this seemingly fertile ground. He cleverly and wisely identifies the presence of two narrators in Cyclops, which is an important read of that episode: I haven't heard others speak of the Cyclops episode in quite those terms. But unfortunately these gems and several others are buried under all the talk about triads, an architectural theory that finally can't withstand the load it's intended to bear.
Richard Ellmann could have written an engaging and provocative book about Ulysses. He chose to write Ulysses on the Liffey instead.
September 9, 2021
Brilliant and in-depth analysis of Ulysses which begins with the premise that the episodes are set into sections of three which follow certain patterns. I stand in awe of Joyce scholars, and Ellmann in particular.
Read
February 15, 2021This is an exceedingly difficult book from the 1970s by the dedicated Joyce scholar and biographer, Richard Ellmann. Even though I could only grasp a fraction of the author's complex argument, which pairs Joyce & Homer (and Aristotle & Hume!), I did find reading each painstaking analysis of each Ulysses chapter to be a sort of wonderful re-visiting of the novel in its entirety, without have to actually re-read it. Quite an inspiring experience. Joyce seems to have been a man unlike any other.
November 18, 2025
An elaborate yet digestible deeper analysis of the major and minor themes of Ulysses.
November 21, 2013
What I liked best about this book was its attempt to apply philosophical categories to Ulysses. That said, the application of those categories was sort of slapdash. If you've read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, you know that every so often there is a confusing chart of unexplained triadic relationships. This book is like that too - there are charts that aren't exactly explained or defended in the text itself. The project somehow seems like the right one, but the results are skimpy and inconsistent, and often arbitrary-feeling. A lot of plot summary is offered as though it were analysis. Somehow Ellman fails to capture the sense of the whole in his piecemeal picture of the novel. Not that I blame him - Joyce's Modernist Allegory was a much more rigorous treatment of similar ground - more emphasis on technique than philosophical commitment, but that also feels more appropriate.
April 11, 2022
Is there a Guide for this Guide?
I recently re-read "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and found Ellmann's comments and insights very helpful, so I bought "Ulysses on the Liffey" to accompany me during my second read of "Ulysses".
"Ulysses" is a 'heavy' book in its own right and I was hoping Ellmann's book would lighten the load a bit. However, I found "Ulysses on the Liffey" to be more difficult to read than "Ulysses" - a big sigh of despair would escape me whenever I picked up Ellmann's book.
NOTE: I was an English Lit major in college, have read some heavy classics (such as Proust's "In Search Of Lost Time", "Don Quixote" etc.), and am familiar with the Odyssey (read it 2X) so I have a decent background here.
Unless you are a Joyce scholar, or really want to know ALL you can about "Ulysses" I would leave "Ulysses on the Liffey" on the bookstore shelf.
I recently re-read "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and found Ellmann's comments and insights very helpful, so I bought "Ulysses on the Liffey" to accompany me during my second read of "Ulysses".
"Ulysses" is a 'heavy' book in its own right and I was hoping Ellmann's book would lighten the load a bit. However, I found "Ulysses on the Liffey" to be more difficult to read than "Ulysses" - a big sigh of despair would escape me whenever I picked up Ellmann's book.
NOTE: I was an English Lit major in college, have read some heavy classics (such as Proust's "In Search Of Lost Time", "Don Quixote" etc.), and am familiar with the Odyssey (read it 2X) so I have a decent background here.
Unless you are a Joyce scholar, or really want to know ALL you can about "Ulysses" I would leave "Ulysses on the Liffey" on the bookstore shelf.
August 2, 2011
Ellmann does convey what Ulysses is all about - a help for me at least as I make another attempt on Mt. Ulysses.
Of course, he assumes that the reader of his book has already read Ulysses, a reasonable assumption. One who hasn't or isn't reading the book along with Ellmann's volume, then it may be a bit rough-going, but Ellmann's intent comes through despite all the (unnecessary) discussion of Joyce's references to obscure sources.
Of course, he assumes that the reader of his book has already read Ulysses, a reasonable assumption. One who hasn't or isn't reading the book along with Ellmann's volume, then it may be a bit rough-going, but Ellmann's intent comes through despite all the (unnecessary) discussion of Joyce's references to obscure sources.
March 9, 2024
I want to be impressed with this book, and I do find it impressive in some ways but I also find it annoyingly self-assured and needlessly highfalutin in its language and ideas.
January 18, 2008
The great biographer of James Joyce explicates ULYSSES.
Ellman's prose is poetry.
Ellman's prose is poetry.
June 10, 2019
Short book with some good insights
April 15, 2021
Man. A delightful way to prepare for a session of Ulysses trivia that you’re taking much too seriously.
Read
June 16, 2021Everyday is like Bloomsday
August 3, 2022
Excellent companion piece.
July 7, 2026
I read this after reading Ulysses. To do justice to either book, I’d probably need to be reborn and re-educated.
September 7, 2022
It's short and useful, though almost as if written by joyce's younger stepsibling or something. Gets too poetic and ineffable at times.
September 14, 2008
THE ESSENTIAL ANSWER TO WTF??
October 20, 2009
really really good. beautiful interpretation
June 30, 2012
Very good. Gets a little dense, at times, but not too much. At other times, it's almost breezy.
February 8, 2016
A very readable exegesis of Joyce's masterpiece. A must for anyone looking for a deeper look Ulysses.
July 25, 2022
Many of the thoughts in this Ellmann work are provocative and should be read by anyone looking to learn more about 'Ulysses' - he's one of several authorities on Joyce, though now deceased.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews