Something Rich and Strange

Ulysses presents its central figures from many perspectives. Joyce’s proliferation of stylistic devices enables readers to view Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom from different angles. Although confused and irritated readers might take the profusion of styles as a showy display of erudition, or, at best, as creating opportunities for humor, this chapter argues that the multiplication of narrative techniques serves important novelistic purposes. They enable Joyce to provoke revisions of our conventional values and to recognize the extraordinary in the commonplace. The chapter suggests broadening David Hayman’s seminal concept of “the Arranger” to consider arrangements, ways of reordering and restructuring the world that transcend the perspective of any potential human observer. Joyce’s multiple perspectives are akin to the worlds of experience favored by pragmatists like William James and John Dewey. They enable us to recognize the heroism in Bloom and to reflect on moral attitudes we take for granted.

Feeling Ulysses

This chapter challenges approaches to reading that rely on “scopic dominance” (here referred to as Cyclopean) and suggests that Ulysses, in particular, rewards readers who feel with, through, and about bodies—human and textual. The chapter proposes an approach to reading that produces an affective: one that moves us and that we move, one that we encounter with our living bodies. The sense modalities of sight and touch are used to illustrate Joyce’s broader approach to senses, perception, and epistemological questions more broadly. To read Ulysses “feelingly” is to engage the senses together with the emotions in the act of reading. Such readings cultivate a multi-perspectival proximity to the content, context, and language of the work. Affect theory provides a useful way of reconceiving the reading self: as porous, responsive, and part of an ever-unfolding process of being in relation with the world. This essay stages an encounter between text and reader that is designed to show readers how to feel their way through the text in a way that allows reading to become more reciprocal or mutual. The value of such an approach is that it makes it easier for a reader to be touched, and perhaps altered, in return.

A Portrait of Consciousness

Departing from observations taken from the legal judgment that lifted the ban on Ulysses that concern the intricate way that Joyce in his novel portrays “the screen of consciousness,” this chapter first examines the classical empirical model of human perception where the eye is modeled on the lens of a camera. Moving to a consideration of what that model misses in terms of the webs of associations woven into perception by the experiential history of the perceiver and some philosophical arguments critiquing that oversimplified model, the chapter then looks into some details concerning acts of remembering, moments of recognition, the understanding of human motives, and the way the past can overlay the perception of the present, all of which challenge any reductive model of mere ocular sensation as the fundamental content of perception. With this background the chapter then moves to its main project, a reading of Joyce’s great novel that sees the work as an expansive and encompassing study of the nuances of perception, of the relationally complex ways in which the mind organizes and interacts with the world, and of the structuring power that our language exerts within perceptual consciousness.

Between Detachment and Disgust

Funerals are occasions for grief, if the dead person was close. But they are also reminders of our own mortal condition and invitations to contemplate it. Especially when the dead person was not close, a funeral service and an ensuing trip to the graveyard are often meditative times, providing powerful signals about our own future, stimulating fear or bringing hidden fear to the surface. They create, all too often, a volatile emotional condition in which we may be susceptible to some of fear’s less savory neighbors, other painful emotions (anger, envy, disgust) that may pollute our relationship with others. But the reminder of a shared fate might also have more benign consequences (as Rousseau thought), encouraging a kind of egalitarian compassion, an awareness of a common human condition that transcends class and wealth and even religion, bringing people together.

Doing Dublin in Different Voices

Stephen, Bloom, and Molly apprentice themselves in an experimental spirit to diverse figures from history and legend, figures whose importance to them is something they understand very imperfectly so far. They must speak and act before mixed audiences of fellow Dubliners with diverse senses of history, diverse reasons for minding their business, and diverse claims to understand them better than they understand themselves. So they make ongoing efforts to anticipate the interpretations others might give their sayings and doings, embracing welcome ones while fending off unwelcome ones. To tell their stories, Joyce must break with Flaubert and let the perspectives of diverse characters contest one another within the confines of individual scenes, invoking a character’s distinctive perspective by means of his or her distinctive voice. Two resources he relies on for this purpose are virtual backtalk and what Hugh Kenner called the Uncle Charles Principle.

Ulysses May Be a Legal Fiction

This essay looks at what James Joyce’s Ulysses has to say about the nature of fiction. Precisely because Joyce worked very hard to represent Dublin as accurately and meticulously as possible, Ulysses blurs an easy division between fact and fiction. This essay considers how one can discuss fictional entities in ways that make sense. Rather than settle upon a “possible worlds” approach to considering fiction, this essay looks at the advantages and disadvantages of what can be called endorsement: judging the truth of a statement about a fiction is simply a matter of determining whether the fiction endorses that statement. Instead of multiple (even infinite) possible worlds, a work of fiction occasions multiple possible endorsements precisely because any work of fiction is inherently incomplete and thus requires the initiatives of its readers to fill in its manifold gaps.

Introduction

The Introduction explores the philosophical significance of Ulysses. Despite the relative neglect of the novel by Anglophone philosophers who have discussed literary modernism, it argues that Joyce’s fiction takes up the oldest questions of philosophy, those revolving around the qualities of the good life. In particular, Ulysses focuses on the middle years, when the “straight way” has been lost. Through its explorations of the thoughts and feelings of the central characters – Bloom, Stephen, and Molly – Joyce brings about a revaluation of everyday values, and an elevation of the commonplace. His strategies for doing so require the development of new narrative techniques, so that philosophical explorations are often intertwined with attention to the features on which literary scholars have fastened. The introduction closes with brief summaries of the themes of the individual chapters.