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Reading Joyce's Ulysses
Reissued to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, this now classic text includes a new preface by author Daniel Schwarz taking account of scholarly and critical developments since its original publication. It shows how the now-important issues of postcolonialism, feminism, Irish Studies and urban culture are addressed within the text, as well as a discussion of how the book can be approached by both beginners and seasoned readers. Schwarz not only presents a powerful and original reading of Joyce's great epic novel, but discusses it in terms of a dialogue between recent and more traditional theory. Focusing on what he calls the odyssean reader, Schwarz demonstrates how the experience of reading Ulysses involves responding both to traditional plot and character, and to the novel's stylistic experiments.
- GenresNonfiction
293 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1987
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 10, 2017
A decidedly scholarly and dense tone infuses Daniel R Schwarz's book. As I began my read, the book's style caused me to immediately slam on the breaks. The first few pages struck me as a pompous graduate-level lecture that was not in the least adapted for textual presentation. This was going to demand a close reading. I dreaded the slow slog before me.
But after a few pages Schwarz settled down somewhat and found his groove. Still, this is certainly not an easy-going explication of James Joyce's Ulysses. This is not for beginners.
Does Schwarz truly settle down and hit his stride? Or, like a high school junior struggling to read his first Shakespeare play, do we as readers eventually grow inured to unfamiliar Schwarzian idiosyncrasies and automatically penetrate through them to his meaning, or to as much meaning as we can fathom? Of course that's one fundamental relationship between every reader and every book. Regardless, not too far into the book, the revelations begin to flow. Schwarz does have some valuable and original insights to reveal. Some? He's an unexpected treasure trove of new ideas. As these began to pour out of his cornucopian book, I happily put aside my initial reticence.
From previous study I've constructed a model in my imagination of the skeletal structure of Ulysses. That is, I've arrived at a sound understanding of how the eighteen episodes articulate with and relate to one another. Schwarz's book impresses me most by illuminating deeper, softer levels of textual structure within Ulysses. Schwarz shows the way to the extended and intricate framing webwork on which all of the text of all eighteen episodes communicates with itself ― what might be called the intratextuality of Ulysses. Schwarz paints this picture in terms of metaphors and metonyms and his points are not always easy to grasp. Without zeroing in with precision, he talks all around, for example, an image of stacks of related characters and historical individuals. It is the connections between clusters of such stacks ― stacks of characters, of places, of ideas ― that engender the allusive intratextual network of Ulysses. A few specific stacks Schwarz indicates (although the reader must assemble them from far-flung passages in the book) are:
Leopold Bloom/Odysseus/Shakespeare/Elijah/Alfred H Hunter/Moses/Parnell/Christ, and
Stephen Dedalus/Telemachus/Hamnet/James Joyce, and
Molly Bloom/Penelope/Calypso/Nora Barnacle, and
Buck Mulligan/Oscar Wilde/Falstaff/Mephistopheles.
By continuous shuffling among the allusive elements contained within and between the many stacks found within Ulysses, an almost infinite number of resonances and harmonies emerge: this is the interior soft-structure of Joyce's book.
Schwarz never spells it out so clearly, but in his esoteric professorialspeke it's all there, waiting to be teased out. This is his impressive triumph, although his lesser themes are far from trivial too . . . and then he reaches the middle of his book.
Unfortunately, as Schwarz turns to exploring Ulysses episode by episode, he's treading over ground long since mapped by generations of explorers. He begins strong enough, but before too long he seemingly grows bored with the task and has less and less to say. He never runs out of insights, but they become increasingly rare and elusive. The book now sadly becomes almost a self-parody as Schulz replaces original perceptivity with an interior network of his own collegiate, allusive, bombastic buzzwords on which he builds repetitive sentences intermixed with tedious signposts marking the highlights of Joyce's book. One might invent a decent drinking game by flipping to any page in the last third of Schwarz's book and counting up the times he uses the words bathetic, odyssean reader, ventriloquy, metaphoricity, typology, teleology, nominalistic, metonymical, metaferocity, patristic, signifyer, signified and diachronic to determine how much to drink. Except for the high-blown pretense of his vocabulary, Schwarz's word stew is in fact less effective than the cliché gumbo style of Joyce's Eumaeus episode.
Which of course is a shame since much of this book is, in its way, otherwise dazzling. In the end Schwarz's professorial voice is the book's bane. I have learned much from Schwarz, but I find his is a hard book to recommend.
But after a few pages Schwarz settled down somewhat and found his groove. Still, this is certainly not an easy-going explication of James Joyce's Ulysses. This is not for beginners.
Does Schwarz truly settle down and hit his stride? Or, like a high school junior struggling to read his first Shakespeare play, do we as readers eventually grow inured to unfamiliar Schwarzian idiosyncrasies and automatically penetrate through them to his meaning, or to as much meaning as we can fathom? Of course that's one fundamental relationship between every reader and every book. Regardless, not too far into the book, the revelations begin to flow. Schwarz does have some valuable and original insights to reveal. Some? He's an unexpected treasure trove of new ideas. As these began to pour out of his cornucopian book, I happily put aside my initial reticence.
From previous study I've constructed a model in my imagination of the skeletal structure of Ulysses. That is, I've arrived at a sound understanding of how the eighteen episodes articulate with and relate to one another. Schwarz's book impresses me most by illuminating deeper, softer levels of textual structure within Ulysses. Schwarz shows the way to the extended and intricate framing webwork on which all of the text of all eighteen episodes communicates with itself ― what might be called the intratextuality of Ulysses. Schwarz paints this picture in terms of metaphors and metonyms and his points are not always easy to grasp. Without zeroing in with precision, he talks all around, for example, an image of stacks of related characters and historical individuals. It is the connections between clusters of such stacks ― stacks of characters, of places, of ideas ― that engender the allusive intratextual network of Ulysses. A few specific stacks Schwarz indicates (although the reader must assemble them from far-flung passages in the book) are:
Leopold Bloom/Odysseus/Shakespeare/Elijah/Alfred H Hunter/Moses/Parnell/Christ, and
Stephen Dedalus/Telemachus/Hamnet/James Joyce, and
Molly Bloom/Penelope/Calypso/Nora Barnacle, and
Buck Mulligan/Oscar Wilde/Falstaff/Mephistopheles.
By continuous shuffling among the allusive elements contained within and between the many stacks found within Ulysses, an almost infinite number of resonances and harmonies emerge: this is the interior soft-structure of Joyce's book.
Schwarz never spells it out so clearly, but in his esoteric professorialspeke it's all there, waiting to be teased out. This is his impressive triumph, although his lesser themes are far from trivial too . . . and then he reaches the middle of his book.
Unfortunately, as Schwarz turns to exploring Ulysses episode by episode, he's treading over ground long since mapped by generations of explorers. He begins strong enough, but before too long he seemingly grows bored with the task and has less and less to say. He never runs out of insights, but they become increasingly rare and elusive. The book now sadly becomes almost a self-parody as Schulz replaces original perceptivity with an interior network of his own collegiate, allusive, bombastic buzzwords on which he builds repetitive sentences intermixed with tedious signposts marking the highlights of Joyce's book. One might invent a decent drinking game by flipping to any page in the last third of Schwarz's book and counting up the times he uses the words bathetic, odyssean reader, ventriloquy, metaphoricity, typology, teleology, nominalistic, metonymical, metaferocity, patristic, signifyer, signified and diachronic to determine how much to drink. Except for the high-blown pretense of his vocabulary, Schwarz's word stew is in fact less effective than the cliché gumbo style of Joyce's Eumaeus episode.
Which of course is a shame since much of this book is, in its way, otherwise dazzling. In the end Schwarz's professorial voice is the book's bane. I have learned much from Schwarz, but I find his is a hard book to recommend.
April 17, 2016
The writing style is a bit pedantic and it's not as in depth as I would have liked, but still a decent companion piece to Joyce's masterwork.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews