Mr. Gilbert, a close friend of James Joyce, wrote this book based on lengthy conversations he had with the novelist. The book is basically James Joyce explaining his novel through the agency of another man.
It’s noteworthy that Joyce realized that “Ulysses” needed to be explained. Apparently even literate readers weren’t apprehending the nuances that Joyce had so carefully salted into his text, so Joyce felt the need to clue them in.
This book succeeds in cluing us in. Joyce’s major themes were already well known to the readership; what this book does is show us some of the detailed structural mechanisms through which the themes are expressed in the novel. Structure is everything. This book is about the STRUCTURE of “Ulysses.”
In a famous analogy, Mr. Gilbert in his introduction brings out the way the the internal structural relations, of “Ulysses” reward study. The more you read, the more you see. “At a first and casual reading, these [the structural mechanisms] are perceived vaguely, as a misty nebula of light; in the course of a more attentive perusal their number and permanence will gradually become apparent, ‘as,’ to quote the admirable metaphor of M. Valery Larbaud, ‘at night, after one has been contemplating the sky for a little while, the number of stars seems to have increased.’ ” So Mr. Gilbert’s book is like a planetarium, where a skilled guide points out to us the various stars, planets, and constellations, so that the next time we are outdoors at night and look up, we will have increased understanding of what is above us.
I am writing this in the year 2020. “Ulysses” was published in 1922. It’s been a hundred years. Does anybody read “Ulysses” any more? Is the novel still important? I have the feeling that not very many readers, certainly not very many young readers, are pushing their way through the nearly 600 pages of “Ulysses” these days. (Some wag once said of “Ulysses” that “It’s the greatest novel nobody’s read.” And indeed, it took me fifty years to finish reading it.) But the fact that nobody’s reading it sends a message: by his herculean compositional effort, James Joyce may have outsmarted himself. His novel is too esoteric. People acknowledge its value, but they don’t read it. It has become a museum piece.
From the point of view of audience and importance, one might well compare the fate of “Ulysses” with the fate of other novels that came out at about the same time. Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu” comes immediately to mind. That novel’s reputation has waxed; a lot of people are reading it. Filmmakers are delving into it. Hopefully someone will do a new translation soon. “A la recherche” is even longer than “Ulysses,” but young people are reading it, while they’re not reading “Ulysses.” Why?
I suggest that the reason is, again, Joyce’s overintellectualizing. Proust just lays his prose out there. He doesn’t demand that his readers wrestle with Aristotle, with Homer, with Aquinas, with Shakespeare and Swift. He doesn’t rage at God or curse his homeland. He doesn’t philosophize. Both authors achieve great beauty. But Proust’s beauty is more relaxed, more open, more available. For all Joyce’s esthetics, Proust’s work comes nearer to achieving Joyce’s own definition of beauty (copied from Aristotle): “wholeness, harmony, radiance.”
It is not my intention to sound dismissive of Joyce’s literary achievement in “Ulysses.” I think scholars agree that “Ulysses” represents the apogee of the movement known as “literary realism” that began with Gogol, Turgenev and Balzac. As literary realism, and coming right after the Great War had demolished romanticism, “Ulysses,” like Eliot’s “Waste Land,” struck just the right note. All authority is cast away. God is dead. Man must regard himself to find both truth and beauty, if they are to be found.
On a personal note, I fervently wish to thank James Joyce for having written “Ulysses,” because this novel’s opening chapter (named “Telemachus” in Stuart Gilbert’s treatise) was my introduction to one of literature’s reasons for being. It was this chapter, way back when, that first made me aware that there is a spirit world.