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Ulysses ve Biz
“Edebiyat eleştirisinin hakiki esin kaynağına ve kalıcı değerine, coşkusuna ilişkin muhteşem bir örnek.”
-Graham Allen, Sunday Business Post-
“Akademik jargondan özgürleşmiş, hünerli bir performans ve tutkulu bir adanmışlık.”
-London Review of Books-
“Kiberd güzel ve ışıltılı yazıyor... Büyük bir bilgi birikimi sergiliyor; ama bu giysiyi rahatlıkla giyiyor üstüne, asla gösteriş yapmadan.”
-Peter Sherdian, Irish Mail on Sunday-
“Ulysses’i eline alıp, hemen göze çarpan zorluğu karşısında paniğe kapılmış herkesi yatıştıracak ve aydınlatacak.”
-Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times-
“Zekice yazılmış ve ilginç... Kiberd istediği etkiyi yaratıyor. Ulysses’e tekrar başlıyorum.”
-Sam Leith, Daily Mail Book of the Week-
-Graham Allen, Sunday Business Post-
“Akademik jargondan özgürleşmiş, hünerli bir performans ve tutkulu bir adanmışlık.”
-London Review of Books-
“Kiberd güzel ve ışıltılı yazıyor... Büyük bir bilgi birikimi sergiliyor; ama bu giysiyi rahatlıkla giyiyor üstüne, asla gösteriş yapmadan.”
-Peter Sherdian, Irish Mail on Sunday-
“Ulysses’i eline alıp, hemen göze çarpan zorluğu karşısında paniğe kapılmış herkesi yatıştıracak ve aydınlatacak.”
-Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times-
“Zekice yazılmış ve ilginç... Kiberd istediği etkiyi yaratıyor. Ulysses’e tekrar başlıyorum.”
-Sam Leith, Daily Mail Book of the Week-
464 pages, Paperback
First published September 28, 2009
36 people are currently reading
441 people want to read
About the author
Declan Kiberd
46 books29 followersDeclan Kiberd is a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at the University College Dublin and the author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, which won the Irish Times Prize, and of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece. He lives in Dublin.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews
November 20, 2013
A righthearted but wrongheaded attempt to reboot Ulysses as a fount of the zen wisdom of everyday life and a book every ordinary reader should eagerly glom onto. This is a very stupid idea. God bless Declan Kibert for having such a stupid idea, but God curse all his friends and editors for not strenuously dissuading him from writing this turgid self-defeating attempt to do the impossible.
He’s an academic who rages against the elitism of academia, the abstruseness of the professors, and wants to lead a people’s revolution to take back Ulysses from their undead mottled hands and torch their fusty theses and caper up and down the quadrangle yelling “Free Joyce from the Joyceans!” . He says :
It should be as accessible to ordinary readers as once were the Odyssey, the New Testament, the Divine Comedy and Hamlet.
I dunno, this kind of jazz baffles me. What readers did those things have? Er, none except the teeny weeny eeny minority who were literate, so by definition, not “ordinary”. Maybe some ordinary types got to see Hamlet and hear the Odyssey being declaimed. Anyway, he says
Any teacher knows that many students today sprinkle their essays with quotations from the lyrics of rock music and from popular films. This suggests that they still yearn for instruction from artists on how to live.
And he proposes that Ulysses is the thing to replace the aphorisms of Eminem and Katy Perry. You know, I think somebody slipped something in Declan’s drink when he wasn’t looking. Ulysses is not for the ordinary reader, however you teach it. That’s the main problem. But the other, worse, problem is that Declan writes in the same way that all the jawbreaking Joyceans do. Let’s open this book at random. Page 176.
Although Bloom can at one moment feel that all is lost, turning down the frieze on a doily in a gesture which reverses that in the morning when he straightened Molly’s bedspread, his use of water imagery suggests acceptance of what has happened between her and Boylan : “as easy stop the sea”. Hours later, Molly will use the same image of the sea to explain her adventure so this line also carries a suggestion that the Blooms are married not just in law but in the profound depths of a shared imaginative life.
Just the same professorial Joycean jabber and blather you have read, or hopefully, avoided, in a jillion previous tomes. I don’t need it, neither do you. You need to read Ulysses instead because you’re not an ordinary reader.
Read on and off over the the last 2 years, but today I just got f-f-f-f-f-f-fed up of it.
He’s an academic who rages against the elitism of academia, the abstruseness of the professors, and wants to lead a people’s revolution to take back Ulysses from their undead mottled hands and torch their fusty theses and caper up and down the quadrangle yelling “Free Joyce from the Joyceans!” . He says :
It should be as accessible to ordinary readers as once were the Odyssey, the New Testament, the Divine Comedy and Hamlet.
I dunno, this kind of jazz baffles me. What readers did those things have? Er, none except the teeny weeny eeny minority who were literate, so by definition, not “ordinary”. Maybe some ordinary types got to see Hamlet and hear the Odyssey being declaimed. Anyway, he says
Any teacher knows that many students today sprinkle their essays with quotations from the lyrics of rock music and from popular films. This suggests that they still yearn for instruction from artists on how to live.
And he proposes that Ulysses is the thing to replace the aphorisms of Eminem and Katy Perry. You know, I think somebody slipped something in Declan’s drink when he wasn’t looking. Ulysses is not for the ordinary reader, however you teach it. That’s the main problem. But the other, worse, problem is that Declan writes in the same way that all the jawbreaking Joyceans do. Let’s open this book at random. Page 176.
Although Bloom can at one moment feel that all is lost, turning down the frieze on a doily in a gesture which reverses that in the morning when he straightened Molly’s bedspread, his use of water imagery suggests acceptance of what has happened between her and Boylan : “as easy stop the sea”. Hours later, Molly will use the same image of the sea to explain her adventure so this line also carries a suggestion that the Blooms are married not just in law but in the profound depths of a shared imaginative life.
Just the same professorial Joycean jabber and blather you have read, or hopefully, avoided, in a jillion previous tomes. I don’t need it, neither do you. You need to read Ulysses instead because you’re not an ordinary reader.
Read on and off over the the last 2 years, but today I just got f-f-f-f-f-f-fed up of it.
November 16, 2012
Hey, pleb! Ever fancied reading the second hardest masterwork by James Joyce, but felt too damn plebeian to do so? Has it ever occurred to you, as you sit in your disreputable alehouse quaffing toxic hemlocks to escape the hell of your nine-to-five backbreaking manual occupation, that a 933pp novel about a cuddly Jewish-Irishman and his quirks is the solution to the pain of being born poor, dumb and drunk? Maybe you haven’t read a book since school, and even then, you only skim-read the first two pages, you lardy ignoramus? Perhaps you think, in your infinite plebitude, James Joyce is a runner-up on The X-Factor? Oh, you silly proletariat fool! Come hither, does Declan Kiberd have a book for you! In fact—no he doesn’t. He has a book for us clever people who have already read Ulysses. A book written especially so us eggheads can feel better about our elitist tendencies and continue to plough our self-regarding furrows by pretending we are reading a text written for the Everyman rather than Everyman-in-a-Thousand. See what I did there? Or are you too busy rolling around in your own vomit to notice? Kiberd’s book is at its most engaging when moving section by section, although overall it reads more like a brilliant riff on his most beloved book rather than a coherent reading of Ulysses for the plebs. Nice try, though.
April 5, 2018
Ulysses and Us was disappointing.
The editing and proofreading did not serve the author well.
Factual errors, questionable readings, and outlandish ideas litter the book. Its generally enthusiastic reception fairly reflects the morose state of Joyce scholarship these days. (updated 4.4.18)
The editing and proofreading did not serve the author well.
Factual errors, questionable readings, and outlandish ideas litter the book. Its generally enthusiastic reception fairly reflects the morose state of Joyce scholarship these days. (updated 4.4.18)
September 16, 2019
Книга о величайшем, быть может, «обывательском романе» (тм) в истории человечества до сих пор: Кайберд подчеркивает, что «Улисс» — роман и про людей, и для людей, простых и затрапезных, и задает простой, по сути, вопрос: как вышло так, что он был кооптирован академиками и истерическими фанатами, перестал быть книгой для чтения и стал книгой для расшифровки и декодирования «интеллектуальной элитой» (ответ там тоже есть, в общем, и — не считайте это спойлером — Джойс сам приложил к этому руку, заморочив Гилберта и Линати «схемами», тем самым предохраняя текст от «каннибализации»; удалось ему это или нет — уже другой вопрос). Ключевой образ тут: даже личная копия Хемингуэя, знакомого с Джойсом и преклонявшегося перед ним, разрезана только в начале и в конце.
Но книга Кайберда — совершенная бесценная точка пересборки. Он не предлагает «ключ» или «трактовку» — он бережно ведет читателя по тексту, предлагая ему некоторое количество других углов зрения на «Улисс», линейного и симультанного. «Обывательский» же это роман не просто из-за героя — «маленького человека» из школьной программы (там они все такие), — а потому, что непримечательна вся жизнь Леопольда Блума. С ним не происходит ничего чудесного, героического, даже сколько-нибудь из ряда вон выходящего. В выведении непримечательного на первый план (какими средствами — тоже вопрос другой) и есть дар модернизма нам. И уже поминавшиеся «Записки жильца» Липкина и «4 3 2 1» Остера в этом смысле — тоже романы модернистские, без всяких –пост-, мета- и прочих приставок. Но где-то близко к началу этой линейки высится, конечно, «Улисс».
Книга вообще демонстрирует фигуры высшего пилотажа великолепного литературоведения. Один из углов зрения, предлагаемых Кайбердом: «Улисс» — это роман «гэльского возрождения», а так на него смотрят нечасто. Сопоставляя повороты сюжета со временем написания тех или иных эпизодов в диапазоне 1917—1922 годов, он показывает, как «изобретение Ирландии» отражалось в тексте (это среди прочего). Один из лейтмотивов, о котором он, правда, говорит как-то мимоходом, — это «stranger in the house»: из-за Бойлана, в частности, Блум бродит весь день по городу, чтобы не мешать Молли. При этом ни он не является воплощением или символом интеллигентного ирландца, фигурой заменяющей самого автора (как таким альтер-эго не является Стивен; ну, оба они — не нацело Джойс, как минимум), ни Молли — матери-родины, Ирландии. Скорее они — смутные отражения, тени на стене, и в этом, опять же среди прочего, — гениальность Джойса. А изгойская перипатетика Блума — отражение эмиграции и изгойства «диких гусей» Ирландии начала ХХ века (до них были другие, но нас интересуют эти — их тоже так называли; это эмиграция из «эстетических разногласий» с системой).
Блум, понятно — everyman, задел на будущего Уховьёрта, человек смутной принадлежности, неправильный еврей, чужой в своей стране, и тут представляется уместным присмотреться к нему как к основе системы ценностей самого Джойса. Зная все, что мы знаем про эту пару «безмолвного брака», Польди и Молли, легко представить дальнейшие отношения родины и ее задумчивого изгоя, то ли мужа, то ли сына: они, конечно, будут как-то взаимодействовать и дальше, никуда не денешься, но отношения их будут далеко не такими радужными, как хотелось бы надеяться («да»-то оно «да» в конце, но что это за «да»? натурально «мама тебя любит, а ты ее бесишь»). Не забываем, что, как только роман вышел, в уже Свободном государстве его мигом запретили.
Еще две темы для чьих-нибудь будущих диссертаций (я просто не очень знаю, может и есть они уже; да и с хорошей точностью есть):
— отцы живые и мертвые у Джойса и Бартелми. Бартелми не на пустом месте свою статую мертвого отца возводил — в фундамент его передвижного постамента прочно вмонтирован «Улисс»;
— и вот еще о чем Киберд говорит здесь лишь впроброс: мотив разбитого зеркала здесь и в «Повесе западного мира» Джона Миллингтона Синга (1907).
Но книга Кайберда — совершенная бесценная точка пересборки. Он не предлагает «ключ» или «трактовку» — он бережно ведет читателя по тексту, предлагая ему некоторое количество других углов зрения на «Улисс», линейного и симультанного. «Обывательский» же это роман не просто из-за героя — «маленького человека» из школьной программы (там они все такие), — а потому, что непримечательна вся жизнь Леопольда Блума. С ним не происходит ничего чудесного, героического, даже сколько-нибудь из ряда вон выходящего. В выведении непримечательного на первый план (какими средствами — тоже вопрос другой) и есть дар модернизма нам. И уже поминавшиеся «Записки жильца» Липкина и «4 3 2 1» Остера в этом смысле — тоже романы модернистские, без всяких –пост-, мета- и прочих приставок. Но где-то близко к началу этой линейки высится, конечно, «Улисс».
Книга вообще демонстрирует фигуры высшего пилотажа великолепного литературоведения. Один из углов зрения, предлагаемых Кайбердом: «Улисс» — это роман «гэльского возрождения», а так на него смотрят нечасто. Сопоставляя повороты сюжета со временем написания тех или иных эпизодов в диапазоне 1917—1922 годов, он показывает, как «изобретение Ирландии» отражалось в тексте (это среди прочего). Один из лейтмотивов, о котором он, правда, говорит как-то мимоходом, — это «stranger in the house»: из-за Бойлана, в частности, Блум бродит весь день по городу, чтобы не мешать Молли. При этом ни он не является воплощением или символом интеллигентного ирландца, фигурой заменяющей самого автора (как таким альтер-эго не является Стивен; ну, оба они — не нацело Джойс, как минимум), ни Молли — матери-родины, Ирландии. Скорее они — смутные отражения, тени на стене, и в этом, опять же среди прочего, — гениальность Джойса. А изгойская перипатетика Блума — отражение эмиграции и изгойства «диких гусей» Ирландии начала ХХ века (до них были другие, но нас интересуют эти — их тоже так называли; это эмиграция из «эстетических разногласий» с системой).
Блум, понятно — everyman, задел на будущего Уховьёрта, человек смутной принадлежности, неправильный еврей, чужой в своей стране, и тут представляется уместным присмотреться к нему как к основе системы ценностей самого Джойса. Зная все, что мы знаем про эту пару «безмолвного брака», Польди и Молли, легко представить дальнейшие отношения родины и ее задумчивого изгоя, то ли мужа, то ли сына: они, конечно, будут как-то взаимодействовать и дальше, никуда не денешься, но отношения их будут далеко не такими радужными, как хотелось бы надеяться («да»-то оно «да» в конце, но что это за «да»? натурально «мама тебя любит, а ты ее бесишь»). Не забываем, что, как только роман вышел, в уже Свободном государстве его мигом запретили.
Еще две темы для чьих-нибудь будущих диссертаций (я просто не очень знаю, может и есть они уже; да и с хорошей точностью есть):
— отцы живые и мертвые у Джойса и Бартелми. Бартелми не на пустом месте свою статую мертвого отца возводил — в фундамент его передвижного постамента прочно вмонтирован «Улисс»;
— и вот еще о чем Киберд говорит здесь лишь впроброс: мотив разбитого зеркала здесь и в «Повесе западного мира» Джона Миллингтона Синга (1907).
August 29, 2010
There seem to be two responses to "Ulysses" these days. The first is to proclaim the work's awesomeness by citing Joyce's exquisite mastery of language and form. The other is to complain about how hard it is to read and to conclude that the man was a pretentious charlatan. You wouldn't know it from reading the reviews for "Ulysses" on this site, but there exists another way of responding to "Ulysses": there are people out there who love "Ulysses" not as a towering colossus of the western canon, but as a beautiful and moving work of literature. Some of us love "Ulysses" in the same way that many people love "Pride and Prejudice" or "Lucky Jim" or "Cold Comfort Farm", as a work to keep coming back to for pure pleasure. It's even been rumoured that some hardcare fans waste entire evenings in the rapt study of Bloom's itinerary, in much the same way that Tolkien nerds pore over maps of Middle Earth.
Joyce made it clear what he thought was the chief glory of "Ulysses": that it presents the most completely and vividly realized character in world literature. He also insisted that he conceived that character sympathetically, calling him simply "a good man". Joycean scholarship, however, has presumed to know better. It is true that early critics of "Ulysses" were often willing to engage with the content, rather than with merely the form, of the book. Unfortunately, social snobbery often prevented perceptive early critics like Wyndham Lewis and Harry Levin from appreciating the humanity of Joyce's cast of impecunious provincials. Levin, in his otherwise excellent early study of Joyce's oeuvre, goes so far as to call Bloom a "pathetic little man" (or words to that effect). Later critics have been less snobbish, but at the cost of abondoning all interest in "Ulysses" as a human drama and condemning it to a slow death at the hands theory-addled professionals and their increasingly baffled students.
Declan Kiberd's new book asks us not only to take a more sympathetic view of Joyce's hero, but also to read "Ulysses" in the same way that its principal models were read of old: as a guide for how to live our lives. In his first two chapters, Kiberd reminds us of how Joyce, uniquely for a high modernist, was sympathetic to the emerging middle class and its bourgeois values. Kiberd might have gone further here: he might have reminded us that while, say, TS Eliot espoused various forms of elitism and contempt for modernity, and while Ezra Pound wound up on Italian fascist radio frothing at the mouth about wicked Jews wrecking the world economy, Joyce portrayed with deep sympathy an astonishingly appropriate twentieth-century Everyman: a tolerant, deracinated, socially undistinguished Jew who works in advertising. (It's interesting that while he praises Joyce for extolling the type of common man whom his contemporaries held in contempt, Kiberd can't help but contrast an idealized Edwardian "civic bourgeoisie" with the apparently less virtuous masses of our own day. Like Joyce's sniffy contemporaries, Kiberd sees salt-of-the-earth virtue in the idealized masses of the past while holding his nose when confronted with the unwashed of his own day. I suspect Joyce would have found rather more to admire in the society of the early twenty-first society than does Kiberd.)
Kiberd's timely book makes a compelling case for reading "Ulysses" as a paean to the richness and dignity of everyday life. You may be less than convinced by his claim that "Ulysses" presents us with a set of instructions on how to live our lives, and you may wind up less sanguine than the author about the allegedly exemplary character of Bloom's life, but you'll find gems of wisdom here that will send you back to "Ulysses" afresh. (It's worth noting that the book contains readings of each of Ulysses's eighteen chapters that presuppose a certain familiarity with the novel. It may not, therefore, be the best introduction for the novice, but it would still be useful to have it at your elbow when attempting "Ulysses" for the first time.) If you care about "Ulysses", or think you might care given a little effort and guidance, buy this wonderful book.
Joyce made it clear what he thought was the chief glory of "Ulysses": that it presents the most completely and vividly realized character in world literature. He also insisted that he conceived that character sympathetically, calling him simply "a good man". Joycean scholarship, however, has presumed to know better. It is true that early critics of "Ulysses" were often willing to engage with the content, rather than with merely the form, of the book. Unfortunately, social snobbery often prevented perceptive early critics like Wyndham Lewis and Harry Levin from appreciating the humanity of Joyce's cast of impecunious provincials. Levin, in his otherwise excellent early study of Joyce's oeuvre, goes so far as to call Bloom a "pathetic little man" (or words to that effect). Later critics have been less snobbish, but at the cost of abondoning all interest in "Ulysses" as a human drama and condemning it to a slow death at the hands theory-addled professionals and their increasingly baffled students.
Declan Kiberd's new book asks us not only to take a more sympathetic view of Joyce's hero, but also to read "Ulysses" in the same way that its principal models were read of old: as a guide for how to live our lives. In his first two chapters, Kiberd reminds us of how Joyce, uniquely for a high modernist, was sympathetic to the emerging middle class and its bourgeois values. Kiberd might have gone further here: he might have reminded us that while, say, TS Eliot espoused various forms of elitism and contempt for modernity, and while Ezra Pound wound up on Italian fascist radio frothing at the mouth about wicked Jews wrecking the world economy, Joyce portrayed with deep sympathy an astonishingly appropriate twentieth-century Everyman: a tolerant, deracinated, socially undistinguished Jew who works in advertising. (It's interesting that while he praises Joyce for extolling the type of common man whom his contemporaries held in contempt, Kiberd can't help but contrast an idealized Edwardian "civic bourgeoisie" with the apparently less virtuous masses of our own day. Like Joyce's sniffy contemporaries, Kiberd sees salt-of-the-earth virtue in the idealized masses of the past while holding his nose when confronted with the unwashed of his own day. I suspect Joyce would have found rather more to admire in the society of the early twenty-first society than does Kiberd.)
Kiberd's timely book makes a compelling case for reading "Ulysses" as a paean to the richness and dignity of everyday life. You may be less than convinced by his claim that "Ulysses" presents us with a set of instructions on how to live our lives, and you may wind up less sanguine than the author about the allegedly exemplary character of Bloom's life, but you'll find gems of wisdom here that will send you back to "Ulysses" afresh. (It's worth noting that the book contains readings of each of Ulysses's eighteen chapters that presuppose a certain familiarity with the novel. It may not, therefore, be the best introduction for the novice, but it would still be useful to have it at your elbow when attempting "Ulysses" for the first time.) If you care about "Ulysses", or think you might care given a little effort and guidance, buy this wonderful book.
September 14, 2019
For anyone who has attempted to read James Joyce's Ulysses or has successfully read it and wants a better understanding for a second reading then this book is perfect.
This book really shows that Joyce's book is still very relevant in this modern world and we can learn a lot from it.
I plan to read Ulysses every year leading up to Bloomsday and this book is perfect to read along with Ulysses.
Also a class or a reading group is a great aid also.
This book really shows that Joyce's book is still very relevant in this modern world and we can learn a lot from it.
I plan to read Ulysses every year leading up to Bloomsday and this book is perfect to read along with Ulysses.
Also a class or a reading group is a great aid also.
June 4, 2022
One of those books that thinks a sinister cabal of academics is stopping the man in the street buying and enjoying Ulysses. A false premise I can forgive; the starchy and pompous delivery I cannot. Anthony Burgess stated the case for Joyce far better when Kiberd was still in primary school.
January 22, 2018
hep aklımda keşke aynı anda ulysses'i de okusaydım düşüncesi vardı artık ulysses'i okurken yanına eklerim bir de bu kitap gibi sadece tutunamayanlar üzerine bir kitap olsaydı
January 2, 2024
This book was amazing. I read this book as part of my Master thesis analysis of Joyce's "Ulysses" and helped me a lot in putting many things into perspective.
The most important thing highlighted in this book, that I definitely agree, is that "Ulysses" depicts a story of everyday life in the streets of Dublin and tries to make the ordinary of everyday life as something extraordinary. this stuck with me.
The most important thing highlighted in this book, that I definitely agree, is that "Ulysses" depicts a story of everyday life in the streets of Dublin and tries to make the ordinary of everyday life as something extraordinary. this stuck with me.
June 18, 2023
A long but enchanting university lecture, full of delightful, insightful observations and historical references. I wish I were a student in one of Kiberd’s classes. I don’t buy his overarching argument that Joyce (like Dante and Milton and Shakespeare?) wrote for the “Common Man…” But wouldn’t it be cool if that were true? What a wonderful world it’d be!
May 22, 2018
Engaging, loving, lovable, effervescent, and absolutely needed in Russian.
Read
September 29, 2010Fascinating book that takes as its jumping off point that Ulysses has been hijacked by the Joyce industry and has much to offer the lay reader. (Sorry, can't bring myself to write "common man" without fearing I'll come off like Barton Fink.) Kiberd's criticism brings home a number of points I'd never really considered before. Everyone knows why the book was set on June 16, 1904, but Joyce labored on the novel during the Great War and Easter uprising, and so writes with foreknowledge of the world that is waiting for his irrepressible Dubliners. Kiberd's book isn't a guide, and reads like a series of lecture from a wise and learned professor who has been thinking and writing about Irish literature all his life. A pleasure to return to Dublin via Kiberd's insight, and while I don't agree with everything he posits, I think he succeeds in wresting Ulysses away from the specialists and returning it to the rest of us. As William Faulkner said, Ulysses should be read the way a preacher reads the Old Testament: with faith.
May 12, 2012
I read this alongside Ulysses and it was quite a big help in figuring out what the heck was going on in the book. His premise is about bringing back Joyce's connection to the "common man" and everyday life rather than just all the academic theory connected with Ulysses. It's pretty readable as far as literary criticism goes, but that's not to say that I understood all his discussion about Joyce's meaning in his work.
November 23, 2022
Declan Kiberd is a world renowned Joycean scholar, and reading this collection of essays and meditations on Ulysses and Joyce, I can see why. His takes on each of the episodes move beyond translation and explanation and into the sort of human and simultaneous subconscious connections that Joyce was seeking to make with his readers. This book had the effect of a brilliant literary conversation. Only for Joyce fanatics, perhaps, but well worth the read.
October 24, 2010
It wasn't simply the cover that grabbed my attention: a photo showing Marilyn Monroe in short shorts and sleeveless top sitting in a park reading Ulysses. You can tell she's reading near the end of the novel, probably the Molly Bloom soliloquy. Of course! But I'm passionate about James Joyce and his novel Ulysses, too. The subtitle can be misleading--The Art of Everyday Living. My first thought was that it's one of those books of popular psychology or light philosophy using literature as a loose base. However, the agency of the subtitle is through Joyce's book rather than Kiberd's. Ulysses and Us is one of the better works of Ulysses scholarship I've read. According to the author, Joyce wanted to create a reading experience so unique that new types of readers would be formed. He spends a considerable amount of time discussing his idea that Joyce saw banality in literature because the modern novel was focused on the bohemian. Therefore he set out to produce a work in which the bourgeois is welded to and overcomes the bohemian. Ulysses in this sense is a self-help manual in which an older man teaches a younger one how to live and be whole. Because Joyce saw that the middle class had no real public culture which promotes its importance and triumph, meaning everything is reduced to mass entertainment, he wanted to write a novel showing the bourgeois and everyman as heroic, in this way teaching us a new, better way of living. Following chapters outlining those general ideas, Kiberd gives the reader an impressive and fairly comprehensive critical analysis of each chapter in Ulysses. And he ends with several fascinating chapters which explain Ulysses's relation to The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, The Bible, and Hamlet. It's near the end that Kiberd makes one of his most intriguing points, that in being deliberately obscure about his novel's meaning Joyce inadvertently encouraged the creation of a small industry dedicated to interpreting the novel and that this may have lessened the importance of reading it. I like to think Marilyn wasn't discouraged. I remember reading somewhere that she enjoyed a literary novel, so maybe she did read Ulysses. We can understand why.
August 18, 2011
I am planning yet another attack on Mount "Ulysses." I have learned from my successing at scaling Proust's Peak that it's pointless for me to undertake a frontal assault. I need to proceed by indirection.
In the case of Proust I learned to cope with the "loneliness of the long distance reader" by ingesting six or seven biographies of Proust and his mother before I picked up "In Search of Lost Time" again. After that bit of guidance and instruction, I read the novel through - all 3300 pages - twice - and was sorry that the book wasn't even longer.
In the case of Joyce, Ellman's biography didn't have the same effect. So I've been searching for some commentary, some initial perspective that will give me a toe-hold for my exploration of Joyce's great novel. I'm hopeful that Kiberd's book provides just that. The first two chapters seem promising.
Now if anyone can give me directions to the top of Mount Musil I would be most grateful.
I'm now reading "Ulysses and Us," and it does convey a sense of what Ulysses is all about - at lest Kiberd's view, but at least it's a useful point of departure. I'm planning to read introductions to the novel by Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, and then I might have a chance of completing the novel on my own. Otherwise it's merely an incomprehensible mess of pointless words.
I've also acquired a series of lectures on Ulysses from the Teaching Company. These might be worth listening to, perhaps not.
In the case of Proust I learned to cope with the "loneliness of the long distance reader" by ingesting six or seven biographies of Proust and his mother before I picked up "In Search of Lost Time" again. After that bit of guidance and instruction, I read the novel through - all 3300 pages - twice - and was sorry that the book wasn't even longer.
In the case of Joyce, Ellman's biography didn't have the same effect. So I've been searching for some commentary, some initial perspective that will give me a toe-hold for my exploration of Joyce's great novel. I'm hopeful that Kiberd's book provides just that. The first two chapters seem promising.
Now if anyone can give me directions to the top of Mount Musil I would be most grateful.
I'm now reading "Ulysses and Us," and it does convey a sense of what Ulysses is all about - at lest Kiberd's view, but at least it's a useful point of departure. I'm planning to read introductions to the novel by Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, and then I might have a chance of completing the novel on my own. Otherwise it's merely an incomprehensible mess of pointless words.
I've also acquired a series of lectures on Ulysses from the Teaching Company. These might be worth listening to, perhaps not.
October 15, 2010
I bought this at the Dublin Writers' Museum, and I started reading it in the home of Leopold Bloom!
But I lost interest in it well before I got to the chapter about Molly. To see my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...
But I lost interest in it well before I got to the chapter about Molly. To see my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...
July 22, 2021
‘Today’s social movements aim at the inclusion of gifted souls in the dominant structure, rather than at the revolutionary transformation of social relations’. That’s the most insightful and far-reaching piece of political commentary I’ve read for a long time, and far more true today even than when it was written in 2009. In terms of literature, what it means is that courses are not geared to enabling students to understand or enjoy literature, but only to passing exams; by doing so you are able to rise up the hierarchy and eventually enter the type of cabals which see books like Ulysses as their own jealously-guarded preserve.
But sadly, this is not the book to rescue Ulysses from such treatment and restore it to what Kiberd claims is its lost intended accessibility. It’s the book of a very well-read academic who sees parallels all over the place: the sort of parallels that everything has with everything, if you look hard enough (I think those with the old Gaelic literature are particularly strained). Thus it is not simplifying, but massively expanding the literary and conceptual world the reader has to deal with. It’s not difficult as academic studies go; but does the sentence quoted above, profound as it is, sound like the work of someone who knows how to make things easy for the general reader?
Personally, I would advise anyone approaching Ulysses for the first time, and who is just interested in what one of the definitive modern works of art has to offer without wanting to pass an exam on it, simply to read it without worrying too much about understanding every passage. As Kiberd says, fundamentally, it’s just a book about a day in Dublin. Its difficulty does not lie in long words or complex ideas (actually the ideas are pretty commonplace), and certainly not in classical references: the whole link to Homer is much more a guide for the author than a key for the reader. As Joyce says in the book: the real question about any work of art is, how deep a life does it spring? And he was aiming to go deep, not wide. The difficulty lies in following the characters’ trains of thought, as they take short cuts at jump around from one thing to another. But that very difficulty is also the book’s triumph: Joyce manages to give an impression of what life feels like from the inside. If this aspect could be explained away, the book would lose its point.
The book’s ideal reader is its own hero, Bloom, the ‘cultured allroundman’ – not an academic specialist, simply someone who is intelligent and interested in life generally. It’s not a book for the habitual skimmer, as unfortunately I am. In an ordinary book you can skim the meandering bits to get to a point where the story gains momentum. Here it’s all meandering, and crucial details can be thrown in amongst a lot of (to the main events of the book) irrelevant flotsam. It’s actually a bit like a detective story: you have to spot the important bits, the clues, and put them together. There are scenes (eg the discussion of Hamlet) where knowledge of other things is useful, but on the whole the apparatus you need in order to understand it is not so much extensive learning as concentration, quick wits and a good memory. Theoretically, that is precisely Kiberd’s view: but his book would be entirely unnecessary to such a one.
If we must have criticism, then, the most useful as well as the briefest is George Orwell’s: ‘[Joyce] discovered an America that had been under everyone’s nose’. But for me, books like this are off-putting.
But sadly, this is not the book to rescue Ulysses from such treatment and restore it to what Kiberd claims is its lost intended accessibility. It’s the book of a very well-read academic who sees parallels all over the place: the sort of parallels that everything has with everything, if you look hard enough (I think those with the old Gaelic literature are particularly strained). Thus it is not simplifying, but massively expanding the literary and conceptual world the reader has to deal with. It’s not difficult as academic studies go; but does the sentence quoted above, profound as it is, sound like the work of someone who knows how to make things easy for the general reader?
Personally, I would advise anyone approaching Ulysses for the first time, and who is just interested in what one of the definitive modern works of art has to offer without wanting to pass an exam on it, simply to read it without worrying too much about understanding every passage. As Kiberd says, fundamentally, it’s just a book about a day in Dublin. Its difficulty does not lie in long words or complex ideas (actually the ideas are pretty commonplace), and certainly not in classical references: the whole link to Homer is much more a guide for the author than a key for the reader. As Joyce says in the book: the real question about any work of art is, how deep a life does it spring? And he was aiming to go deep, not wide. The difficulty lies in following the characters’ trains of thought, as they take short cuts at jump around from one thing to another. But that very difficulty is also the book’s triumph: Joyce manages to give an impression of what life feels like from the inside. If this aspect could be explained away, the book would lose its point.
The book’s ideal reader is its own hero, Bloom, the ‘cultured allroundman’ – not an academic specialist, simply someone who is intelligent and interested in life generally. It’s not a book for the habitual skimmer, as unfortunately I am. In an ordinary book you can skim the meandering bits to get to a point where the story gains momentum. Here it’s all meandering, and crucial details can be thrown in amongst a lot of (to the main events of the book) irrelevant flotsam. It’s actually a bit like a detective story: you have to spot the important bits, the clues, and put them together. There are scenes (eg the discussion of Hamlet) where knowledge of other things is useful, but on the whole the apparatus you need in order to understand it is not so much extensive learning as concentration, quick wits and a good memory. Theoretically, that is precisely Kiberd’s view: but his book would be entirely unnecessary to such a one.
If we must have criticism, then, the most useful as well as the briefest is George Orwell’s: ‘[Joyce] discovered an America that had been under everyone’s nose’. But for me, books like this are off-putting.
February 25, 2023
This book has mostly favorable but decidedly mixed reviews. I find a few of these negative takes baffling. First, I am not sure why anyone would be so put off by Kiberd's assertion that Ulysses not only embodies 'the everyday' but that Joyce intended it to be read that way. It does and he did by all accounts. Second, Kiberd has not written a dumbed-down interpretation of Ulysses here—where are people getting this? Is it the cover photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses and the implication that Joyce's heady work needs to be brought down to earth—to us? Readers who stop there and go no further than the introduction are playing into the point entirely by uncritically rejecting what is perceived as trite: here a woman whose surface sexuality famously belied a deeply complex and tragic web of pain and authentic selfhood (not unlike Bloom's, Molly's, or Stephen's frankly). In fact, I actually would not characterize Ulysses and Us as a book for the average reader, but rather one that engages with critical theory and modern literature deftly and creatively—it is not a light read.
In some ways Ulysses and Us is a guide, but I find it is structured more like a thoughtful review of each episode of Ulysses as Kiberd interprets them—that is urbanist, sexual, androgynous, scriptural, atheistic and so on—through the exposition of others, through psychoanalysis, and through the author's not insignificant expertise on Joyce's life and about Ulysses in particular. By tracing each episode through 'a dying civic culture' the book is also a reflection on the publicness of everyday life in a very real way that I found expansive, rather than diminishing of the lives laid bare in Joyce's work. Perhaps naysayers are responding to the fact that Kiberd himself promises Ulysses and Us will be explanatory and accessible at the beginning. But this is a misrepresentation of his own goals, because the book almost immediately becomes so much more than that. 'The everyday' here is the banal kitchen talk and inner life of ordinary people, yes. But Kiberd explains that this is only so far as everyone else in the world—in the city inhabited and felt by Joyce's heroes and archetypes especially—has their inner monologues, their limitations, and their desires for connection in the lived experience of the long day. This is a mirror, which not the same as interpreting Ulysses 'for the rest of us'.
I recommend Ulysses and Us to anyone who reads or studies Ulysses, not as a replacement for Ellmann or the Bloomsday guide, but as a supplement to these more celebrated interpretations and biographies of Joyce's life and work.
In some ways Ulysses and Us is a guide, but I find it is structured more like a thoughtful review of each episode of Ulysses as Kiberd interprets them—that is urbanist, sexual, androgynous, scriptural, atheistic and so on—through the exposition of others, through psychoanalysis, and through the author's not insignificant expertise on Joyce's life and about Ulysses in particular. By tracing each episode through 'a dying civic culture' the book is also a reflection on the publicness of everyday life in a very real way that I found expansive, rather than diminishing of the lives laid bare in Joyce's work. Perhaps naysayers are responding to the fact that Kiberd himself promises Ulysses and Us will be explanatory and accessible at the beginning. But this is a misrepresentation of his own goals, because the book almost immediately becomes so much more than that. 'The everyday' here is the banal kitchen talk and inner life of ordinary people, yes. But Kiberd explains that this is only so far as everyone else in the world—in the city inhabited and felt by Joyce's heroes and archetypes especially—has their inner monologues, their limitations, and their desires for connection in the lived experience of the long day. This is a mirror, which not the same as interpreting Ulysses 'for the rest of us'.
I recommend Ulysses and Us to anyone who reads or studies Ulysses, not as a replacement for Ellmann or the Bloomsday guide, but as a supplement to these more celebrated interpretations and biographies of Joyce's life and work.
July 29, 2019
Always good to read a bit more about Ulysses to help with the understanding. This book has an unusual slant: The author believes that the novel was written for the Average Joe but over the decades was taken over by academia and that hidden within the novel are instructions on how to live your life sensibly.
Weeeelllllll........
I really take this premise with a huge saucer full of salt. There is no way anyone in their right mind would ever attempt to write a book as overly complex as Ulysses with the intention to have the Ordinary Citizen on the street as its ideal reader.
Seeing Bloom as the shining example of how to live one's life sensibly also assumes that we should all be as fascinated with our bodily fluids as he is. Throughout the book Bloom is constantly referred to as a "womanly man" even for the sequences with Dirty Gerty where he is quite removed from being a New Man and displays a fascinating horror with her being a cripple. (And of course jerks of looking at her.)
For the most part the book is a chapter by chapter run through Ulysses but Kiberd irritatingly replaces the generally accepted chapter headings with new ones such as "Eating", "Singing", "Wandering". The chapters are short enough to support his main line of argument but of course are far too short to really offer a proper in-depth analysis of the relevant chapters in the novel.
By far the best chapters in Ulysses and Us are towards the end when he no longer focuses on a chapter by chapter review but instead compares Ulysses with the Odyssee, the Bible, Hamlet etc. I got far more out of those ones than out of the Self Help Manual Thesis.
Overall, an interesting but not essential addition my Joyce collection.
Weeeelllllll........
I really take this premise with a huge saucer full of salt. There is no way anyone in their right mind would ever attempt to write a book as overly complex as Ulysses with the intention to have the Ordinary Citizen on the street as its ideal reader.
Seeing Bloom as the shining example of how to live one's life sensibly also assumes that we should all be as fascinated with our bodily fluids as he is. Throughout the book Bloom is constantly referred to as a "womanly man" even for the sequences with Dirty Gerty where he is quite removed from being a New Man and displays a fascinating horror with her being a cripple. (And of course jerks of looking at her.)
For the most part the book is a chapter by chapter run through Ulysses but Kiberd irritatingly replaces the generally accepted chapter headings with new ones such as "Eating", "Singing", "Wandering". The chapters are short enough to support his main line of argument but of course are far too short to really offer a proper in-depth analysis of the relevant chapters in the novel.
By far the best chapters in Ulysses and Us are towards the end when he no longer focuses on a chapter by chapter review but instead compares Ulysses with the Odyssee, the Bible, Hamlet etc. I got far more out of those ones than out of the Self Help Manual Thesis.
Overall, an interesting but not essential addition my Joyce collection.
June 15, 2022
Mostly beyond me, in much the way Ulysses is exasperating, this book is nevertheless a readable guide to following along to Ulysses. I suspect the Eng Lit bods would appreciate it far more than someone like me. It takes a chapter by chapter approach to coincide with Ulyssess and then there are some very academic / literatti type essays that follow on to finish the book.
Perhaps I'd need to be in the mood but I skim-read the post chapter essays as they were impenetrable to people who aren't schooled in high brow literature knowledge. The chapter guides to accompany the book are more accessible and often interesting.
Perhaps I'd need to be in the mood but I skim-read the post chapter essays as they were impenetrable to people who aren't schooled in high brow literature knowledge. The chapter guides to accompany the book are more accessible and often interesting.
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July 8, 2019Ulysses is indeed based on everyday life (with some hallucinatory bits), but Kiberd is trying too hard to make the case Joyce intended the book to be read by everyman. That said, some of his discussion and insights about passages in the book helped me (I'm listening to Ulysses) get a handle on what is happening in the book. Some of his afterwords (there are many--comments on Shakespeare, the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy) weren't particularly illuminating and raised some odd theories (at least in my opinion). Worth it, but not overwhelmingly so.
December 22, 2021
A great guide if you want to dive into the depths of Ulysses. It won't hold your hand, though. It tends to get bogged down in academic language, which is crap because the intro says Ulysses is meant to be enjoyed by everyone!
I suppose it's my own fault... I picked it up not knowing it's a college text book. 'sake like.
I'd recommend "Ulysses... for the rest of us!", a lecture series hosted by Conner Habib and the Museum of Literature Ireland instead if you're looking for a more accessible guide to Ulysses.
I suppose it's my own fault... I picked it up not knowing it's a college text book. 'sake like.
I'd recommend "Ulysses... for the rest of us!", a lecture series hosted by Conner Habib and the Museum of Literature Ireland instead if you're looking for a more accessible guide to Ulysses.
April 19, 2022
Rather an academic book. Looking through the acknowledgements, i can see that many of Kiberd's students helped out with the book. So there's obviously a lot of academic discussion feeding into this book. That was fine for me because I was reading up a lot about each episode and was treating it as a study project. But it's not a book that you'd pick up and run through. Apparently Marlyn Munroe had Ulysses in her car and used to dip into it now and then. It probably helped a lot in dealing with Norman Mailer. Ulysses and Us is a book that's worth coming back to again.
March 26, 2017
Ulysses is one of those books that it definitely helps to have a guide for, and Kiberd's text is informative and helpful without assuming the reader is ignorant. The author provides a chapter by chapter analysis of Joyce's work, as well as chapters which discuss overall themes in the larger work. I still believe that Ulysses is best read in a group where discussion is possible, but, if you were reading alone, this would definitely help with context and interpretation.
June 9, 2019
If you're looking for very accessible analysis of the novel, and also a readable guide, this is what I would recommend. Also, if you're trying to convince yourself that you are capable of reading the novel, I would read the opening chapters of Kiberd also
August 22, 2018
I cannot recommend this highly enough for anyone wanting to make an attempt on Ulysses. This is your boot camp and you will be champing at the bit to tackle the mountain after you've read it.
November 26, 2020
This helped my understanding of Joyce immensely!!
August 12, 2022
It really makes most sense if you've read Ulysses by James Joyce, or at least extracts.
July 20, 2024
Great!
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