Declan Kiberd is an Irish intellectual and writer who has written extensively on Joyce and provided an excellent introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses.
Here, he joins the ranks of those who have sought to explain the Joyce’s polyphonic, astonishing novel in a book-length essay. As with other guides, he takes a chapter by chapter approach, but also provides general chapters dealing with themes that are present throughout the novel.
(A word about the cover. I’ve always loved Faber’s cover design, especially the iconic Pentagram design from the 1980s. More recently their covers have been more patchy, but this is a glorious exception. It shows Marilyn Monroe sitting in a playground reading Molly’s soliloquy [sic - it's nearly always called that, but it is not spoken]. Marilyn has a wonderful, rapt, absorbed expression on her face that epitomises the feeling I had when reading that astonishing episode, and the blocks of colour that enclose the title and author’s name are chosen to match the colours of the stripes on her swimming costume. One wonders if she knows that Molly is masturbating in that section?)
Kiberd tries to distance Ulysses from the modernist tradition, its author from the charge of being elitist, and the the novel from the idea that it is ‘unreadable’. He places it firmly in a tradition of Irish writing, and of anti-modernism. He claims that Joyce intended Ulysses to be read by the ‘ordinary’ man (but then Schoenberg seriously thought people would whistle his music in the streets, so optimism about a work’s mass appeal is no guarantee that it will actually have that appeal). I have no idea how one would identify an ‘ordinary’ man, but I seriously doubt that many people today read Ulysses; it’s certainly not going to be featured on Oprah or Richard and Judy any time soon.
Ulysses is emphatically not ‘unreadable’. It’s very hard going in places – especially in the later episodes – and makes a range of allusions that hardly any one person other than its author can be expected to understand without help, but it is still luminously beautiful and one of the few books I know of that makes the actual job of reading each word a pleasure. Somewhere in his diaries, Richard Burton wrote that he had ‘again devoured Ulysses‘. It’s that kind of book.
There are a few aspects of Kiberd’s argument that I’m not wild about, and top of that list is the idea that Leopold Bloom is an ‘androgyne’. Thinking of him being a ‘feminine man’ because he brings his wife breakfast or tolerates her assignation with Boylan seems to me to belong to an entirely different century than ours. In fact, in many ways, Bloom is the prototype renaissance man.
This quibble aside, Kiberd does an excellent job of writing for several hundred pages about one of the most formidably difficult novels without sounding like an extended version of Pseud’s Corner, which is an achievement in itself. If you’re looking for a crib to sit beside Ulysses as you read, there are better options, such as The New Bloomsday Book
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