Beki Mc.’s Reviews > Ulysses and Us > Status Update

"Dante and Joyce insist on describing as real events the assumption of their characters into the heavens. They both treat these supernatural moments as existing within the same order of reality as random meetings in a city street."

"By the close, the participants other than Bloom are blind drunk and so is the language. Already halfway to the technique of Finnegans Wake, Joyce has put English to sleep, revealing the deeper idiom of dreams."

"His monologues have the improvisational quality of jazz. They are the sounds of the city, a city not centrally planned but made up of additions and accretions, as its composers go along. Bloom celebrates music as an art which can mediate between the physical and spiritual to the point at which those opposites merge."

"Dublin is both a colonial and an anti-colonial city, in which these forces are not just opposed but also sometimes interpenetrated by one another. The intimate enemy may offer many bribes, from Haines's cigarettes to an efficient tram system, but all the time citizens will find their own ways of withholding consent."

"The art of everyday living demands that a person has the wisdom to process a potentially negative experience in a different way, transcending the problem rather than being limited by it. Organ by organ, page by page, Joyce is intent upon his creation of a new species of man."

"Even in psychoanalysis, as in the sacrament of confession, the disclosure of one person's innermost secrets to another had been made in a darkened space: but Bloom's communing with himself is done mostly in daylight and in public places. To each and every detail of the surrounding world he gives that close attention which is the nearest modern equivalent of prayer."