Ulysses Revisited

In U.S. intellectual life, James Joyce's Ulysses* has long been a touchstone--and a sacred object. Anyone admitting dislike or incomprehension of it is almost automatically drummed out of any self-respecting literary regiment. Now, writing in the New Statesman and Nation, one of the best critics on either side of the Atlan tic has reassessed Ulysses. Says Britain's V. S. Pritchett:

"We needed a memory as exhaustive as Joyce's [own] as we sink into the bog--so misleadingly called a stream--of Irish consciousness. Joyce is the theologian of the interior morass ... As for meaning, Joyce attempts to replace it by 'pattern,' and, in doing so, he was prophetic of modern habit: unguided by moral conviction, impelled by scientific bent, we use the notion of 'pattern' to cover our lack of sense of moral direction." In Joyce's pattern, "God becomes word, life becomes a fantastic department of rhetoric and we need not go outside its inebriation in order to live. Living? Our words will do it for us."

Critic Pritchett concedes that Joyce had humor and "the imagination to turn his squalid people into giants first. No one can say that the characters of Ulysses are trivial in dimension, even though their preoccupations are mean, food-stained, dreary and unelevating. His people are Celtic monsters, encumbered by the squalor of their enormous burden of fleshly life--enormous because it is so detailed--and the dreadful, slow, image-spawning of their literal minds . . . One can see that, in Joyce's imitators, the interior monologue was a blow for democracy, a rather dreary one; the fact that we all have a garrulous unconscious that is occupied with absurd free associations, wipes out differences of character and status, for Jack's drooling is as good as his master's . . .

"Ulysses diminishes . . . from comic epic to the curiosity of a learned crossword puzzle and, as such, a major, unrequited European export to the scholar-technicians of the American universities. They find more and more in it, as we find less and less . , ."

* First published as a book in 1922, but not legally admitted to the U.S. until 1933, after a U.S. District Court decision setting aside a Federal ruling that the book was obscene.

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