Ulysses on the Liffey in James Joyce Reading Group

Feb 14, 2017 Bob R Bogle rated it it was ok

Shelves: all-things-joyce

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 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. ...more

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Jul 25, 2022 Andrew Pitkin rated it it was amazing

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. ...more

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