Copyright © 2017 Johann Tienhaara

This is ostensibly a review of a review of a book about the novel Ulysses.

Spoiler: I think the reviewer might not have ever read Ulysses.

But mostly this review-of-a-review is a (re-)declaration of my love for a beautiful novel.

Almost nobody reads Ulysses. So whatever you've heard about it is almost certainly nonsense.

Ulysses is an anti-intellectual novel about love and pacifism and forgiveness.

If you've never read my favourite novel -- or even if you have -- read my review of the review, below; not the narrow junk review linked above.

Or better yet, go out and pick up Ulysses and The New Bloomsday Book from your local library, and alternate, a chapter at a time, between the two.

In recent decades, there has never been a better time to contemplate the deliberate and difficult pacifism, in the face of personal insult and injury, of Leopold Bloom.

In a world so increasingly full of self-righteousness and hatred, we could use more Ulysses.

The review details some interesting history of the troubles Joyce faced publishing, the legal events, etc, of which I only really had vague ideas. But it says almost nothing about the book supposedly being reviewed -- The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses.

There are some very odd things in the review, too. "Leopold Bloom -- a devoted husband to his wife Molly, with whom he has one daughter": They had a son together, too, who died at 11 days old or 11 months old or something like that (and nobody is really sure why the numbers 11 and 32 -- symbolizing death and rebirth, supposedly -- so fascinated Joyce; but they came up repeatedly in his novels).

The death of his son is a strong motivation for the fantasies Bloom has later in the novel about adopting Stephen Dedalus; and it is also the motivation for Molly to cheat on Leopold in the first place, since he has refused to fully ejaculate ever since their son died. She always has to "finish the job meself".

Leaving out this crucial part of Bloom's character and history is, I think, exactly the kind of mistake that all the censors of the 1920s made -- they only bothered to read the smutty bits, not the story that holds it all together.

Or the same kind of microscopic view you can find in amusing essays on Ulysses. Derrida, in a talk one Bloomsday, reported the number of times the word "Yes" appears in the book. He was later corrected by someone who had done a more precise count. The final words of the novel are almost all "yes" as Molly Bloom has an orgasm, "finishing the job meself", while Leopold snores.

Part of me wonders if the author of the article ever actually read Ulysses, or just chose some random sentences out of it, e.g. from other people's essays.

I have yet to figure out why the following yawn-inducing piece of tripe is one of the "shimmering intellectual conversations". I wonder if it's not more like Joyce to be making fun of some metaphysical rubbish idea popular at the time:

Yawn.

There is a part where Bloom talks about how beautiful a couple of Italians speaking their own language sound.

Stephen Dedalus shoots him down mercilessly, sneering that they are just haggling over money.

Meanwhile we know that Stephen Dedalus's intellectualizing about Shakespeare's play Richard III -- that it was written about William's brother Richard -- with the same motivation that led Shakespeare to bequeath to his wife his *second* best bed -- really was the intellectual stuff Joyce was fond of, since he went around Europe giving talks about it before Ulysses was written.

The idea that there is no neat, tidy, contained plot in Ulysses sounds to me like post-modernist academic rubbish, propagated by shit-disturbers like Ezra Pound ("Faces in a station of the metro / petals on a wet, black bough" was his "irruption" of poetry, as some might say). Intellectuals since Pound have embraced the idea of finding radicalism and the deconstruction of plot in every corner of literature.

To me there is a very clear, contained plot.

In the midst of a war, Joyce wrote about a husband and wife who drift a long way apart, only to come back together and quietly make peace with one another, each dreaming of their imperfect but united future as they fall asleep.

The plot is simple: man sets out in the morning, and gradually the tension builds as we learn the reason for his meanderings: the main character would rather suffer in silence and let slights, insults and injuries slide off his back, than enter into conflict.

Leopold Bloom leaves the house because he knows his wife is planning to cheat on him with another man.

Unlike the original Odysseus, who returned home with blade dripping vengeance, Joyce's Ulysses wanders to avoid conflict. He avoids confronting Molly. In the street he avoids confronting his enemy, "Blazes" Boylan.

The novel and characters all climax at once. But then we gradually discover that it was all really an anti-climax: a conflict would have been pointless anyway; tomorrow the characters will all carry on about their business as if nothing ever happened, since it was all, in the end, just another day in their lives. In the end, nothing climactic happened, because of the deliberate choices the characters made in their lives.

Leopold returns home to sleep beside his wife in peace. Molly is disappointed by "Blazes" Boylan, and climaxes herself while reminiscing about Leopold's proposal to her. And because of Bloom's choice to forgo confrontation, nobody was hurt in the process.

Ulysses was a very political novel; though not, in my opinion, because it was anti-Victorian.

That's like saying that a novel today is political because it is written from an atheist perspective.

Atheism is so prominent today it is no longer a political stance, only a stance of orthodoxy "me, too!".

400 years ago, when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were published as thinly veiled parodies of God and Jesus (Sancho Panza gets "crucified" late in the stories) and the absurdity of faith (portrayed as Don Quixote's ridiculous, unwavering belief in the literalness of romance novels about Arthurian knights), writing an atheist novel was absolutely a political stance, and nearly had dire consequences for Miguel, when the Inquisition went after him.

Meanwhile, Joyce wrote about pacifism while all the major armies of the world were busy gutting each other like suet in the trenches across Europe.

Pacifism was Joyce's dangerous political stance.

Leopold Bloom was an heroic pacifist at a time when bloodlust reigned supreme.

I can't help but imagine the voices attacking Joyce for his pacifist stance: "We must DO something!"

It is the same chorus that has echoed, throughout history, in the lead-up to every bloodbath.

Even today I can hear those voices singing.

We could all use a new Leopold Bloom today; a rebel who refuses to go to war, against our chants of self-righteous moral superiority as we dig our trenches and prepare to tear down our enemies.

In the midst of the creation of the state of Israel, which at the very least was partially prompted by anti-Semitism in the west and inspired by British military plans to use the Jews to fight proxy wars in the middle east, and was at the very worst a "Back to Africa" type plan (to get rid of the blacks in America, to get rid of the Jews in Britain), Joyce wrote about a humble, down-to-earth, pacifist man, unburdened by all the character flaws around him (including, interestingly, intellectualism), who happened to be a Jew.

While Jewishness was almost as important to the political position of the novel as pacifism, it was portrayed as entirely *un*important as a trait of the main character.

Leopold Bloom happened to be a Jew, in the same way he happened to have a certain colour of hair, or he happened to wear a bowler; it told us nothing of who he was or how he behaved, least of all that he was a die-hard pacifist and a decent human being.

My favourite English prof apparently wrote his PhD around the fact that Joyce was guilty of a sort of anti-Semitism himself -- the idea that the Jews are not just a religion, but also a race -- whereas there is no "Jewish race".

But I've never quite figured out how (or even if?) that should shape our understanding or enjoyment of Ulysses.

Ever since then, I've wondered if it's basically not humanly possible to write anything interesting about the novel Ulysses, because no matter what we say, the novel has already said it, and probably its inverse and 5 different shades in between, in a more succinct, natural and, above all, interesting way.

Joyce once said something along the lines of "Ulysses'll keep scholars busy for decades".

Knowing that just about everything I've ever read about the content of the novel is ridiculous makes me forgive the review's author a little for not seeing things the way I do.

And it also makes this whole review-of-a-review-of-a-book-about-the-novel implode on itself.