Sally Rooney shipping James Joyce

 There is no great Indian literary novel in English because Joyce's Ulysses fell flat in his own country. There was simply no point going down that arduous road. Even for oneself, it could only end in the delirium that is the Wake.

Sally Rooney, in a talk at the Abbey Theatre, titled 'Misreading Ulysses', has said

 Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.

Joyce shows that Ireland could have gone in a different direction. Perhaps it would have done if the Great War hadn't supervened. Still, what was done was done. Joyce's great novel had come too late.  

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.”

The cinema was bound to take over its role, more particularly with the development of the 'talkies'. Joyce himself had tried to make money in that emerging market.  

“When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.”

Philosophy was played out. New technology could settle what appeared to be 'a priori' questions- e.g. Kant's 'incongruent counterparts' argument. It turned out metaphysics  was a sort of displacement activity physicists engaged in while wating for the engineers to design a crucial experiment.  

A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce.

Both were low I.Q. Pasternak and Bulgakov were good enough successors to Tolstoy and Doestoevsky under far more adverse circumstances. But it was Gorki who was, at that time, a God. 

'Portrait' was a bildungsroman. Ulysses is an excellent novel showing the trajectory of that 'Bildung' in a Society whose quite diverse 'bildungsburgertum' was certainly witty and vibrant enough. Sadly, it was the industrial proletariat who would decide geopolitical outcomes. Ayn Rand, it turned out, was the greatest novelist St. Petersburg would produce- at least in terms of shaping the world we now inhabit. 

In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,”

It is a novel. What's more it is a fucking sequel.  

and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.”

James was much worse as a dramatist than as a novelist. He couldn't end shit. Proust saw Flaubert as his antithesis. The novel can't be ended for the same reason the dialectic can't be ended.   

In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.

Why not ask Google or Alexa or whoever? The fact is that the death of the three volume novel, in the 1890's, had been much remarked. Authors adapted to the market. Joyce was subsidized to produce something more substantial. Proust had private means.  

Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg;

whom nobody listened to. Radio, the Record Player, and then Cinema brought symphonic music to the masses.  

the refined traditions of Western realist painting

refinement, in this context, meaning 'boring as shit' 

were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque.

and the advertising poster.  

And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form.

Nonsense! He gives us a Laplacian world, regulated by inversion and Tarde's mimetic law, which is almost as well populated as Balzac. Incidentally, Proust paid to publish the first volume of what was stated to be a three volume novel. It was idiosyncratic, it was self-indulgent- such being the hallmarks of 'modernity'- but it was conventional and legitimately descended from the Duke of Saint Simon and the Marquise de Sevigne. Joyce, it must be said, was innovative. He saw what Dujardin had done and went much further with it. The trouble was that most people are like me. The stream of our consciousness is slightly less interesting than that of a pig. Joyce, genuinely a Socialist because of his early Aquinian Catholicism, couldn't admit this and thus became the prisoner of his own dream book. 

It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition.

Joyce he knew he couldn't write for the mass market- stuff like 'Matcham's masterstroke'- but, precisely because the 'literary tradition' wasn't ailing (indeed, you now had young people doing Degrees in English Literature) he could make a niche for himself by doubling down on quality. 

In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling.

Novels are cheap to write and publish. Films and TV serials are more costly. Still, most novels have always been crap. Still, if they help pass the time, their authors deserve renumeration.  

Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century;

There was always a popular music side by side with classical music. Does this silly lady think her ancestors danced jigs to the strains of Mozart or Vivaldi?  

figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form.

Rooney's ancestors had Rembrandts on the walls of their hovel.  

But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel?

I suppose it had imitators. But Faulkner's 'Sound & Fury' didn't do as well as his later 'corn-cobby' chronicles. Still, being a bit high-brow when young might get your foot in the door. Modernism, after all, is largely a bluff. 

And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

Rooney escaped being unpublished. After that it was a case of bis repetita placent.  Experimentation is all very well. What the punters want is what they enjoyed before.

We might begin by asking a simpler question: what is Ulysses about?

It is about the viability of a wholly Catholic aestheticism as opposed to the decadent sort which had displayed its peacock plumage in the Nineties or the Celtic revival or the Theosophic esotericism that had very distinguished representation in Dublin. What makes Ulysses so effective is Joyce's mastery of naturalism based, I suppose, on his own family's socio-economic trajectory. George Moore was a wealthy landlord. Joyce was the son of a shiftless tenant . The former's 'Confession of a young man' was written in French and reflected on his life as an Art student in Paris. The latter's 'Portrait of the artist as a young man' depicts an intellectual with great literary talent who is also determined to construct an aesthetic philosophy on a par with the theology of Aquinas and other great Catholic philosophers.

What is interesting is that Joyce incorporates Feminist and Socialist ideas through the 'polytropic' Bloom who comes to the rescue of the drunken Daedalus. Joyce escapes the fate of Icarus. It was Bloom's people, in Nazi Europe, who suffered Holocaust.

Politically, I imagine, Joyce had a sneaking regard for the 'West Briton' as opposed to 'Sinn Fein'. Perhaps, this is one reason the Irish are a little cool towards him. 

That depends on who you’re asking. If you’ve read the book yourself, I hope you’ll bear with the following summary, and please feel free to shake your head in disagreement. If you haven’t read it, try to bear in mind that the book is very confusing, and I might well make mistakes. The action begins in Dublin on the morning of June 16th, 1904. Stephen Dedalus—the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, now a twenty-two-year-old university graduate living in Sandycove—has breakfast with his housemates and then goes to teach a class at the private boys’ school where he works.

What is important is the stream of consciousness- the extraordinary 'aesthetic intellection'- displayed by Daedalus as he walks on the beach. Can such an extraordinary mind be of use to his people? What direction will he take? In what manner will he exceed Ibsen or Protestants like Yeats and Shaw? The answer is that Joyce would go deeper into things. One could say he has a Socialist theory of tuirgen. It is possible to enter into the minds of people of all classes or even religious or ideological persuasions. Can this become the basis of a better politics, a better economics, a better jurisprudence? Perhaps. But then there is a war between cousins- Emperors indulging in the traditional 'sport of Kings' till no Kings remained and everything was thrown into flux. Independence would come to Ireland but at a terrible price. This was far from inevitable. History was indeed 'a shout in the street'- a Carmen solutum or rather garbled nonsense without rhyme or reason. 

It’s payday, so he picks up his wages and then walks along Sandymount Strand, still wearing black to mark the death of his mother nearly a year before. Next, we meet Leopold and Molly Bloom, a married couple in their thirties living on the north side of the city. Molly earns money as a concert soprano; Leopold is an advertising agent, the son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother. When we first encounter them, Molly is planning to begin an affair with her tour manager Blazes Boylan when he visits her at her home that afternoon. Leopold is tacitly aware of her plans and, for whatever reason, makes sure to be out of the house in order to facilitate them. He goes out in the morning, buys a cake of soap, attends a funeral, eats lunch, does incredibly little work considering that it’s a weekday, and has dinner.

I think Joyce was aware of the paradox, well known to Yiddish writers, that the 'entrepreneur' (who combines the factor of production' can and will do so even at a loss. What's important is to keep 'in circulation.' It should be remembered that Marxist Socialism reflected the perspective of London where capital markets, pretty much frictionlessly, cleared in a manner that made it sensible to speak of 'riskless assets'. The Great War showed there was no such thing. There were alternative versions of Socialism from smaller places where markets obviously did not clear. Indeed, markets were a 'work in progress'. History was being made from scrap metal. It had no 'iron laws'. 

All the while, he’s thinking of his wife, as well as their teenage daughter Milly and their late son Rudy, who died in infancy. Meanwhile, Stephen Dedalus is also rambling around the city, adrift and increasingly drunk.

Which is the only reason we have any sympathy for the prig.  

He visits the offices of a newspaper and later stops in at the National Library to give a confusing and inebriated lecture on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

It is superb. Back then, everybody had their own theory of Hamlet. Santayana's was fashionably anti-German because of the War. But even the shithead Carl Schmitt- a spoiled Catholic if ever there was one- got in on the action. Joyce's theory is better than most. Still, I have to admit, he was wrong. It is obvious that Hamlet reveals Shakespeare to have been an Iyengar Lesbian who was the first to spread the canard that Iyers put garlic in the sambar. What? In my own way, I'm an intellectual and a man of letters.  

Even after Molly and her new lover Boylan have presumably parted, Leopold Bloom continues to wander. He’s insulted and attacked by an anti-Semite in Barney Kiernan’s pub, and he later masturbates on a beach while looking up a young woman’s skirt. At around 10 P.M., at a drinking session in—of all places—the National Maternity Hospital,

there are bravura pieces of writing in these episodes. Sadly, Joyce runs out of steam. But, to be fair, the reader too is exhausted.  

Bloom and Stephen finally run into each other, and continue their wanderings together. After a visit to a brothel, Stephen is assaulted in the street by a British soldier, and Bloom gets him back on his feet and takes him to a cabman’s shelter. The men then walk back to Bloom’s house, where they drink cocoa and talk. Bloom invites Stephen to stay the night, but Stephen declines. After he leaves, Bloom goes upstairs and gets into bed with Molly. They exchange some conversation, during which he tells her that Stephen is going to give her Italian lessons, and then Bloom falls asleep. In bed beside him, Molly thinks back over her day and her life, reflecting on her new love affair with Boylan, anticipating a possible future love affair with Stephen, and remembering the days of her early youth and the beginning of her relationship with her husband. Countless other characters appear, and countless other occurrences are described, but this seems (at least to me) like a fair summary of the book’s main events.

It is like a summary of Mozart's 'Magic flute'. What is missing is the magic and the flute not to mention Ama-fucking-deus Wolfgang Mozart.  

That’s all very well, of course—even assuming I haven’t made any major mistakes. But none of this explains why Ulysses looms so large in the history of literature;

it is simply the best of its kind.  

nor indeed why it’s supposedly so difficult to read.

It was difficult for me to read because I knew shit about European literature and Irish history and so forth. Still, my Uncle had Stuart Gilbert's guide on his bookshelf and so on my third or fourth attempt I was finally able to enjoy the book as a whole. The effort was well worth it.  

Well, part of what my plot summary failed to convey was, of course, Joyce’s use of language. Here’s Stephen Dedalus in the opening pages of the book, looking out the window of the Martello tower where he lives:

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea.

Which is okay but not great. But that's the point. Stephen hadn't yet found his mot theme or unique voice. Still, it would have been odd if a student of University College Dublin, did not show the influence of Gerald Manley Hopkins. 

Joyce’s prose is famous, in this novel and elsewhere, for its density, its radical novelty, and for its exquisite and unexpected beauty. For this reason, I think, Ulysses is a book that is often experienced “partly.” If you ask a person whether they have read, for example, Crime and Punishment, the answer is pretty much always yes or no. But if you ask whether someone has read Ulysses, the answer is often “bits of it, but not the whole thing.”

Nothing wrong with that. Indian and Irish students of a previous generation quickly learned the art of skimming through books very quickly so as to get to the sexy bits.  

What gives Ulysses this quality—this “bits of it” appeal—is that so many passages of the work can yield a rich and immersive pleasure even outside the context of the overarching narrative.

But they yield even more pleasure within it.  

In the history of the English novel, this style represents a definitive break from the established nineteenth-century tradition. Even the word style is misleading, because throughout the novel, as you probably know, Joyce cycles through any number of distinctive styles, using and discarding them as they suit his purposes. In a sense, then, maybe my plot summary was beside the point: maybe the real pleasures and triumphs of Ulysses are on the level of the sentence.

just as the triumphs of 'the Magic Flute' are at the level of music.  

To an extent, I think, but not entirely. Joyce’s language is certainly very beautiful, but he wasn’t the first or only talented prose stylist of his generation—and there’s more going on in Ulysses than fine writing.

Indeed! But what will Rooney find in it? Ibsenite Feminism? Shavian Socialism? A critique of Sinn Fein? 

The brilliant novelist and critic Anne Enright recently wrote: “Apart from everything that you could possibly imagine, nothing much happens in Ulysses.”

I think what happens is that 'art for art's sake' dies as thoroughly as Europe's 'Enlightenment' project, and its multi-racial Emperors.

It’s very true. We might sense something daringly lifelike in the way that Ulysses rejects the contrivances of traditional plots and structures.

The Tzar's head had been chopped off. Millions of brave men had died in the trenches. It would have been daring of an artist, under the age of sixty, to have just carried on as before.  

And maybe it is this quality, this sense of “faithfulness to reality,” that gives the book its special place in literary history.

There had already been great naturalistic novels. Joyce stood on the shoulders of giants. This is a guy who learned Norwegian just so as to read Ibsen in the original.  

Here are some of Bloom’s thoughts, for instance, as he walks toward Sweny’s pharmacy to get a special lotion made up for his wife:

He walked southward along Westland row. But the recipe is in the other trousers. O, and I forgot that latchkey too. Bore this funeral affair. O well, poor fellow, it’s not his fault. When was it I got it made up last? Wait. I changed a sovereign I remember. First of the month it must have been or the second.

This is pedestrian but it comes as a relief after Stephen's peregrination down Sandymount strand. Perhaps, if Joyce hadn't met Norah Barnacle, he'd have written high falutin' nonsense. 

None of this mental fretting on Bloom’s part serves any of the usual purposes of novelistic prose. Nothing in the plot of the book actually depends on whether he gets the lotion made up for Molly or not. On the contrary, he’s just thinking, the way we all think, aimlessly, doubling back, worrying, forgetting, remembering.

No. The point about polytropic Bloom is that there is always the possibility of Socratic 'palinode'- in other words, smart peeps don't need to do stupid shit just because they get carried away with their own train of thought.  

In our real lives, thoughts don’t occur to us in service of some grander narrative or final meaning: we just wake up, think all day long, and then go to sleep. In that sense, we might propose a Ulysses that concerns itself with the radical banalities of everyday existence, a novel in which nothing of significance takes place.

That would only be the case if curiosity over the fate of Stephen Daedalus's aesthetic project were not the motivating factor for the reader. Don't forget, 'Portrait' is a text for High School Eng Lit (which is how I came to read it) and those kids, more particularly once they get to Collidge, are likely to pick up the sequel.

People eat, drink, walk around, use the toilet, often in meticulous detail, but the conventional machinery of narrative is absent:

but we know, from the prequel, that these ordinary events may be epiphanies. Thus, they aren't ordinary at all. In Ulysses, Gods don't walk amongst men, but, perhaps, we are as Gods when we coincide with ourselves and are our own 'blaze of being' or radiant haecceity. This is the radical 'Feminist/Socialist' aspect of Joyce's great novel.  

like life itself, it’s just a lot of random events in no meaningful order. This, then, might be the grand attack that Ulysses launches on literary tradition: an unprecedented fidelity to the shapelessness of lived experience. After Ulysses, how could we ever return to conventional narrative devices? How could readers—or writers—go back to breathing in the stale odor of plot after the bracing fresh air of life itself?

Where is there a plot in Flaubert's 'un coeur simple' or Joyce's re-working the same theme in 'Clay'? The difference is Bloom, Polytropos, may be able to rise to great heights on Daedalus's borrowed wings. But to what purpose? The wings of the aesthete are of lead. He can but describe the cage where he shits.

But that’s not quite it either. In a way, I’m ignoring the elephant in the room: the title of the book is not “Bloom,” after all, but Ulysses, a Latinized rendering of the Greek name Odysseus. Far from being formless and unstructured, we might therefore read Ulysses as an elaborate rewriting of Greek myth. What seemed like random events are, in this reading, revealed as careful reconstructions of an ancient mythological framework: from the attractions and provocations our hero encounters, to the temptations his wife is facing in his absence. This was the aspect of Ulysses that so particularly impressed Eliot in 1923. “It has the importance of a scientific discovery,” he wrote. “It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” With this mythological key in hand, we can begin to unlock many new and interesting meanings for Ulysses. We start to see Leopold Bloom’s wanderings in the form of an epic journey: and we begin to see Bloom himself, our lonely, tender, funny protagonist, in the light of Homer’s hero. In the opening lines of the Odyssey, Odysseus is described as “polytropos”: “poly” in the sense of “many” and “tropos” in the sense of “turns” or “turning.” Translators into English have tried in various ways to capture the sense of this term: Robert Fagles rendered it as “the man of twists and turns,” while a recent translation by Emily Wilson gives us the simple phrase “a complicated man.” Bloom certainly is that. Like Homer’s Odysseus, he is always turning: through space, geographically, and through circumstances, self-presentations, frames of mind.

But what makes him interesting for philosophy- even aesthetic philosophy- is his aptitude for palinode (i.e. the ability to change direction or see both sides to a question. But what are the two ways in which one could see Daedalus's project? Is it one merely of flight? Lots of people were running away from Ireland or Europe or reality in general. It may be that Joyce came to some sort of conclusion in the Wake. French savants certainly thought so. But we suspect that though the Quest was noble, the Grail would have been of but pinchbeck metal. 

And if, on our voyage through Ulysses, we start to wonder what Stephen Dedalus is doing in Leopold Bloom’s book, the cracked looking glass of the Odyssey might offer us a clue.

There is no such thing in Homer. 'Cracked looking glass of a servant' refers to an essay by Wilde.

If Bloom is our Odysseus and Molly his wife Penelope, then Stephen plays the role of Telemachus: Odysseus’s son and heir. Stephen, adrift and in mourning, might suddenly seem to be in search of a father;

he has a father. Bloom is too close to him in age. Still, like Shakespeare, Bloom lost a son.  

Bloom, with all his complications, may be in search of a son.

Nothing wrong in that at all. Perhaps, Blazes Boylan will do the needful.  

Each of these readings—poetic, chaotic, mythological—seems, at least to me, to offer the reader something of interest: but they are also to some extent mutually contradictory. How can a novel be realistic and symbolic at once?

Because that which is real can also be a symbol of things beyond what is natural or material.  

And how can we be sure we’ve got hold of the right symbols? What about the competing significance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

Which features 'Agrippa's trilemma' not to mention a Father, a Son, and a fucking Ghost! Catholicism may be an absurdity, but it is a rational absurdity.  

Not to mention the recurring Christian theological motifs, so insistently present throughout the text. Maybe Stephen, Leopold, and Molly are really Jesus Christ, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit;

No. Don't be silly.  

or maybe they’re supposed to be Prince Hamlet, the late King Hamlet, and Gertrude.

No. This isn't Agatha Christie. The least marked reading of Joyce is that he upholds the ancient right of Iyers to return to their ancestral homeland of Iyerland from which they were chased away by Marathi leprechauns like Varadkar. Mind it kindly.  

We could even resort to biographical readings—admittedly not my strong suit—and interpret the characters as concealed likenesses of James Joyce himself (twice, I suppose?) and his real-life spouse Nora Barnacle.

who is clearly a Marathi leprechaun 

At this point it feels obligatory to suggest that the characters could somehow be all of these things. But could they?

Sure. Everything can be anything from some particular point of view.  

After all, what sense does it make for the Christian concept of God the Father to merge symbolically with Homer’s Odysseus?

Just Google 'Odysseus in Christian theology'. Much has been written on the subject. 

And why in the character of a Dublin advertising agent whose wife is about to have an affair?

Why not? What was so special about a Jewish joiner in an obscure Roman province? 

Let’s return for just a moment to the plot summary I tried to offer at the beginning. Leopold Bloom does this and that, I explained, while Stephen Dedalus does that and this. Naturally, you didn’t believe, despite the assertive nature of those statements, that I was describing real events. I told you that Stephen Dedalus picked up his wages after work, and you understood what I meant, even though you also understood at the same time that there has never been such a person as Stephen Dedalus. I was describing what happens in the internal reality of Ulysses, an internal reality we all agree to “believe in” as part of the contract between reader and text. But while Ulysses may begin by describing an apparently consistent reality, the later stages of the book are less straightforward. When Stephen and Bloom visit Dublin’s red-light district together in the fifteenth chapter, for instance, the text is presented in the form of a play, complete with dialogue and detailed stage directions. At one point, the reigning British king enters the scene:


Edward the Seventh appears in an archway. He wears a white jersey on which an image of the Sacred Heart is stitched with the insignia of Garter and Thistle, Golden Fleece, Elephant of Denmark, Skinner’s and Probyn’s horse, Lincoln’s Inn bencher and ancient and honourable artillery company of Massachusetts.


When we describe what “happens” in the novel, do we include the appearance of the English king wearing an embroidered image of the Sacred Heart?

Yes. Drunks see all sorts of shit.  

Does that “happen” in the reality of Ulysses? Well, in one very straightforward sense, yes: it’s described in printed words on the page, the same way that everything else that happens in the book is described. But we as readers also know that it isn’t “realistic,” that it violates the internal reality of the scene. Maybe the appearance of Edward the Seventh might be understood as a hallucination, then, or a dream. Okay, but isn’t everything that happens in a novel a kind of hallucination?

No. Some stuff has verisimilitude others bits are overdone or otherwise miss the mark.  

After all, none of it is “really real”—so how do we go about separating the novel’s “reality” from the novel’s “dreams”? And who exactly is dreaming these dreams?

This is made clear enough. After all, Daedalus might be one of those crazy poets who sees visions and experiences raptures. There were plenty such milling about the place back then. 

In the wake of postmodern theory,

i.e. meaningless jibber jabber 

Joyce’s later critics began to suggest that, far from reproducing the realities of daily life, Ulysses offers us no reality at all. “On nothing is Ulysses more insistent,” Hugh Kenner wrote in his excellent book on the novel in 1980, “than on the fact that there is no Bloom there, no Stephen there, no Molly there, no Dublin there, simply language.”

Only in the sense that Shakespeare was a Telugu speaking Lesbian and Joyce dedicated his life to paving the way for Iyers to return to their ancestral homeland after the final overthrow of the tyranny of Marathi leprechauns like Varadkar. Also, I want a crate of Jameson to be delivered to me every week. I'll settle up after I'm dead. 

Even earlier, in 1972, the post-structuralist critic Stephen Heath had claimed that: “The grossest, and commonest, misreading of Ulysses is that which derives a single realist narrative of Bloom and Stephen and, with this as centre of reference, explains or abandons the writing.”

Clearly literary theory had turned to shit some decades previously. Still, Anthony Burgess made a good fist of explaining the Wake. But then he was himself a talented composer. Joyce was a fine singer. His great dream-book isn't for the likes of me. I think Western Music begins with Abba and ends with Boney M.  

We want to read Ulysses as a realistic novel, but Joyce refuses to play the game.

Nope. You pick up a lot of useful information about the period. Indians find Joyce illuminating because of the manner in which the Indian barristocrats imitated the Irish. Why did the Mahatma's boycott of British courts failed whereas the Irish boycott was a qualified success? Reading Ulysses enables us to see that the Irish were way ahead of us even back then. No wonder the country became a knowledge economy and is now richer than England 

Just as we start to love and sympathize with his characters, he insists on reminding us that they’re not real: there is nothing to love, nothing to sympathize with, no one there.

Whatever his other faults, this simply isn't the case.  

These postmodern readings pose valuable questions

No. They are shit. 

—and no doubt, many readers who get all the way to the end of Ulysses do indeed conclude that there is no Bloom there, simply language.

One could say the same about Superman comics. It would be equally false and foolish.  

I can only object that when I read it, there is a Bloom there. And I therefore find myself very interested in what that means. How can a fictional character survive what appears to be his own deconstruction?

There was no fucking deconstruction back then. Joyce is interesting because he wants an Aquinas who isn't a turd emerging from Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. For him aesthetic 'epiphany' serves the same purpose as Brouwer's 'intuition'. An Indian, at this point, might start gassing on about Bhatrihari or Abhinavagupta- but only if he hadn't read that shite.  

Who exactly is Leopold Bloom?

You told us already.  

Each reader, of course, encounters their own Ulysses:

only in the sense that we each encounter our own Spiderman. Mine happens to be a Telugu speaking Lesbian just like Shakespeare. Maybe I'm drinking too much Scotch. Somebody better send me a crate of Jameson PDQ.  

the one they create for themselves in the act of reading. Every reading of the novel yields a new text, one that has been pulled this way and that by the attention and inattention, the knowledge and ignorance, the likes and dislikes of the particular reader. And that reader is inevitably an entire person: a person with their own distinctive body, their own feelings, their own vocabulary, their own personal library of sensory memories and associations. These qualities are not unfortunate failures of objectivity: they are what make us capable of reading in the first place.

No. Reading is a learned activity. What happens is that we change our reading of a text on the basis of other people's readings of it. When I was a kid, I was perfectly happy reading books featuring 'niggers', 'chinks', 'wops', 'kikes' and so forth. It was only after I turned 14 and started school in England that I gave up reading Macaulay. Did you know 'Great Lays of Ancient Rome' isn't about the famous prostitutes of that period? Also 'stoned in Venice' isn't about getting high on a gondola. 

Ulysses demands a reader who can respond as a human being,

So does 'Spiderman'. My novels, however, demand a reader who can respond as a cat. Seriously, that's a huge feline market out there which currently has to make do with the works of Gayatri Spivak Chakraborty.  

emotionally, intellectually, physically, erotically, even spiritually. And these demands are made on readers who are by necessity in no two cases the same.

Some have to read Joyce to get a sheepskin. We feel pity for them.  

In our own particular bodies, reading with our eyes and our hands,

why not feet? What about all those blind people who don't have hands?  

with our own thoughts and feelings, we remake and reinterpret every text we encounter.

No we don't unless, like me, we think Hamlet is about the struggles of a disabled, Telugu speaking, Lesbian who had actually ordered an omelette.  

Every interpretation has its weaknesses, its points of interest, its missing pieces. From this small limited partial perspective, embracing its smallness and limitations, I feel I need not worry so much about “misreading” Joyce. Every reading of Ulysses is a misreading, a faulty but revealing translation, a way of drawing the novel into new and perhaps unintended relationships. All that matters to me is finding a way to read the book that is interesting: that opens out instead of closing down.

This is what she signally fails to provide. What she has said about Ulysses could also be said of Enid Blyton.  In other words, it is 'shite and onions'. 

Ulysses situates itself insistently in a particular textual lineage: its forefathers, we know, are in Homer and Shakespeare.

Nope. It is in the lineage of Flaubert, Ibsen, and the Decadents. Joyce did write a play. It wasn't very good.  

We know this because the book tells us: in its title, in the schematics Joyce wrote and circulated among friends, through Stephen’s half-drunk discourse on Hamlet at the National Library, and through other references too numerous to mention. From epic poetry, through English Renaissance drama, we proceed to Bloom and Stephen and Molly on a summer’s day in 1904. I want to note here that classical poetry and Renaissance theater are, at least in the way they are staged within the text of Ulysses, overwhelmingly masculine forms.

Sally doesn't have a dick. If her novels become unreadable she will have to become a Professor of Grievance Studies.  

They are written by men, about men, performed by men, read and discussed by men, and their concerns are those of the male public sphere.

Men have dicks. They don't have to sit down to pee. How is that fair?  

The terminology provided for us by these generic antecedents has of course filtered into the way we read and think about Ulysses: a book about fatherhood and inheritance, about being and nothingness, violence, imperialism, the state.

and not having to sit down to pee. True, Bloom sits down to have a shit- but it isn't the same thing at all. Most people need to pee several times a day.  

To deny the centrality of these themes in Ulysses would be foolish,

only if you don't have a dick.  I have a dick. That's why I say the central theme of Ulysses is the right of return of Iyers to an ancestral homeland overrun by gay, Marathi, leprechauns. 

and anyway unnecessary. Instead let’s try, as an experiment, looking away from the center, with its grand towering masculine themes

the theme of making women feel like shit because they have to sit down to pee 

and directing ourselves for a moment toward the margins. After all, Ulysses is—for all the deafening noise it makes about its own textual forebears

it does nothing of the sort. Daedalus doesn't gas on about Dujardin or all the brainy cunts he had met at the fucking Sorbonne.  

—not an epic poem or a Renaissance play.

nor a Spiderman comic. Joyce was doing what other avant garde writers had been doing. He took things as far as they could possibly be taken. This also meant that younger writers could concentrate on lighter fiction- unless, obviously, they had to sit down to pee or were totes gay or had been educated beyond their intelligence. 

It is neither a poem nor a play of any kind. It is in fact a literary production of an entirely different nature: an English-language novel.

Which could be in verse. The two Brownings and GBS ('Cashel Byron') had written novels in blank verse. English-language novels were in plentiful supply because English speakers had plenty of money for this type of entertainment. 

The novel in English has always had a curious relationship with gender.

Whereas the novel in Chinese hasn't, because Chinese men don't have dicks.  

It was in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that this new form of storytelling started to develop: relatively long prose narratives, set mostly in the present day, populated by fictional characters whose romantic lives made up the basis of the plot.

The Chinese novel was older. But, contra Rooney, it did not feature women roaming around the countryside and peeing while standing up. Sad.  

These stories were sufficiently new and different from existing forms of popular literature at the time

there wasn't much 'popular literature' when few could read and fewer yet could afford to buy books.  

that they started to be called by the simple word novel.

which means 'new'.  

Formally, these books sketched out the parameters of a new genre of storytelling, incorporating narrative techniques,

did you know that when you tell a story you are 'narrating' it? Sally Rooney knows stuff like this because she got a BA and then an MA in English and American Literature. That's how come she is so smart.  

like epistolary exchanges, that would be crucial to the novel’s later development;

did you know that stuff that happened in the past is crucial to how that stuff develops from then onward? If you do, you are as smart as a lady with an MA from the finest College in Ireland. Sadly, that MA was in stupid shit.  

thematically, their concerns were with gender, status, and sexual morality.

and the manifest injustice evident in the fact that women have to sit down to pee. Sadly, Sally isn't bleck. Then she could bang on about how all dem White chicks are totes Fascist coz they didn't vote for Kamala.  

These were the earliest stories to be described as novels in English, and they were primarily written by women, like Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood.

If you don't have a dick and choose to study stupid shit at Uni, you have to read that crap.  

The formal innovations of these early novels, their tales of seduction and sexual intrigue, not to mention their popularity and commercial success, would prove profoundly influential on the eighteenth-century prose tradition that followed. Male writers like Daniel Defoe,

were better.  

Henry Fielding

like Smmollett, still readable 

and Samuel Richardson

not readable 

drew deeply on the themes and stylistic techniques of the early female novelists,

also they wrote in English. Guess who taught them English? Their Mummies! As Gayatri Spivak Charkaborty has so wisely pointed out 'Mummies don't get dicks due to the catachresis of the invagination of the deconstruction of the posterior of the catachresis of the invagination of the whatever it was I first mentioned. I have proved all this in my next book.'  

sometimes while openly disparaging their work. Richardson described his novel Pamela as “a new species of writing,” which, “dismissing the improbable and marvellous, with which novels generally abound, might promote the cause of religion and virtue.”

Like I said- unreadable.  

Because the term novel had been coined to describe the work of women, Richardson tried to frame Pamela as something else, a “new species,” an attempt to differentiate his supposedly virtuous book from the immoral novels with which it ran the risk of being associated. Considering his disdain for what was then called the novel, we might find it a little strange that twentieth-century histories of the English-language novel generally identified these male writers—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding—as the inventors of the form.

Smollett isn't mentioned. The fucker was Scottish.  

In the intervening centuries, the novel had become an important tradition in English prose, and the books that first gave rise to the term were retroactively excluded from the category. Haywood, Manley, Behn, and other early female novelists are generally discussed even today under the euphemistic label “amatory fiction.”

Jane Austen and Emily Bronte aren't excluded. Why? Their books were good. To be fair 'the fair triumvirate' were serving a different, much smaller, market. Also their concerns were more political.  

If attempts to reconstruct a history for the novel have tended to diminish its female progenitors,

female novelists took note of what other successful female novelists were doing. Male novelists needed to look at what works by male writers were selling well. My own first novel about my sexual awakening didn't find a market because nobody wants to read about a lad who pulls his pudding. An emic account of a convent school girl fisting herself, on the other hand, may gain a market provided the author is red headed and has a name like Colleen MacBride. 

however, I don’t want to go too far in the other direction. The form as we know it certainly owes an enormous debt to the work of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, quite as much as to the early female novelists who began to sketch out a preliminary framework for the genre. But none of these authors, male or female, are widely read for pleasure by ordinary readers today.

Defoe is. I still take pleasure in Roderick Random. But then, I don't have to sit down to pee.  

The eighteenth century was a period of genesis, experimentation and rapid development for the Anglophone prose narrative, but it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that these distinct traditions would reach a transformative synthesis, giving rise to what present-day readers unanimously recognize as the novel.

I find Defoe and Smollett more readable than the great Walter Scott.  

The writer responsible for this extraordinary synthesis—the author of the earliest novels in the English language still widely read and loved in the present day—is Jane Austen.

She wrote about ladies in drawing rooms. But sailors and soldiers and even prostitutes like Moll Flanders led more interesting lives. The novel doesn't have to be as boring as shit. Still, it must be said, for the Englishman abroad- like Charles Darwin on the Beagle, or Kipling's 'Janeities' on the Somme- Jane Austen was a sovereign cure for home sickness or war weariness or the shock of discovering one's ancestors were apes.  

At the beginning of a new century, Austen’s work provided the formal resources that would see the novel develop into the preeminent form of literary writing in English.

Chick lit, maybe. Still, no one can deny the genius of Georgette Heyer.  

Her novels represent the culmination of the emergent genre, a kind of mediation between two related but conflicting traditions in eighteenth-century prose.

Nope. That happens with Georgette Heyer. After the noon-tide brilliance of 'these old shades', there could only be a decline into the twilight of Grievance Studies. 

Before I consider what this might mean for Ulysses, I want to take a moment to discuss what exactly was so formative about Austen’s work.

Like Scott, she strikes a balance between Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, having to sit down to pee and not brooding incessantly over this manifest injustice.  

Although the charisma and complexity of her characters may feel new, we know that English literature had produced compelling personalities before: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, for instance;

Moll Flanders is protean. Elizabeth Bennett is... well, I suppose she is as we imagine Mummy to have been before getting married. 

Shakespeare’s Hamlet; even Beowulf.

Not to mention Jesus Christ whom the Bible keeps mentioning.  

But these characters are dramatized in the context of externally imposed struggles: they get shipwrecked; their father is murdered by their uncle; they are attacked by a powerful monster.

The fact that some estates were 'entailed' on the male heir by primogeniture meant that an external event could cause a previously affluent family to struggle for an 'externally imposed reason'- e.g. the death of the father as happens in 'Sense & Sensibility'. Also, back in those days, you couldn't grow a wealthy husband for yourself in the back garden. Some external event was required to get properly hitched and commence having babies.  

“Character” emerges in these works as a conflict between the individual and the challenges they must overcome.

Because that is how character works. It isn't the case that you can buy yourself a noble character at the Pharmacy.  

In Jane Austen’s work, and in the Anglophone novel since, character is staged purely in relationship to other characters.

Nonsense! Character can be displayed by a Robinson Crusoe or a dude who is trying to make his fortune or to make a scientific or other type of discovery. 'Games against nature' are character building whereas in strategic games, a noble character may be laid low- e.g. Shakespeare's Othello.  

Her plots arise from the conjunction between particular personalities in what were then ordinary social circumstances.

Because stories about relationships work that way.  

The fact that Elizabeth is Elizabeth while Darcy is Darcy provides all the intrigue of Pride and Prejudice.

No. The 'intrigue' is provided by the villain Wickham. 

Austen made of the English-language novel not so much a psychological form as a relational form, its plot provided solely by developments in the relationships between its protagonists.

Human relationships, at least intimate ones, are psychological.  

Of course, in Austen’s work, the most narratively consequential form of relationship is marriage:

It is the prize for which there is competition. But it is the competition which creates narrative tension and sustains our interest. True, the prize may not be worth having. Many an English wife of the period might well have envied Jane her spinster status. If she had inherited a fortune, she'd have been way better off without a hubby. I didn't inherit money, but refused an offer of marriage by a Nigerian Prince. True, I was already engaged to a Nigerian Princess, but that is a different, alas sadder!, story.  

and at a stretch, we could even propose that the novel form is itself a kind of marriage, a union of distinct textual traditions we might label as masculine and feminine.

Very true. War and Peace is a marriage between Spiderman and She-Hulk.  

But obviously, marriage serves another important purpose in Austen’s work and in the novels that followed: it represents the only permissible expression of romantic love and sexual desire.

Austen did not consider sex with donkeys to be permissible. In many ways, she was a woman of her time.  

Austen’s characters can never speak openly about sex, of course:

they aren't even allowed to fist themselves at the dinner table.  

but the tension that animates her novels, the momentum of Elizabeth’s relationship with Darcy or Emma’s with Knightley, is romantic and sexual in nature.

If you had an MA in Literature from one of the best Colleges in the Western World, you too might utter such profound platitudes. 

The fact that erotic attraction in Austen’s work is forced out of language—sublimated into ambiguous gestures and looks and seemingly innocuous speech acts—constitutes in very large part the drama of her narratives.

Sally thinks Elizabeth wants to sit on Darcy's face. Sadly, she isn't advanced enough to want to have sex with donkeys.  

In a sense, then, it is from the unavailability of language that the tensions of the novel arise.

What is the word for fucking a donkey? Austen didn't know. That's what creates the tension in her novels.  

We might propose the novel as a kind of book in which the most important subject cannot be spoken about.

Apparently there is a community in Columbia where it is usual to lose your virginity to a donkey. I suppose they have a word for that which Austen groped in vain.  

The genius of Jane Austen’s technical achievement is apparent not only in her wide readership but in her formal legacy.

more particularly to Colombian donkey fuckers.  

Austen’s narrative structures, her command of pacing, her perspectival techniques, her staging of small knowable social worlds: these are the basic ingredients of what we would now call the novel as a form.

No. These are the ingredients of a genre of chick lit.  You don't see Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum going in for it. Even JK Rowling gives it a miss. 

So if the stakes of the Greek epic are war and peace,

No. It is 'Pheme' or fame. What's important is to leave behind a glorious name. War was what happened during campaign season. Peace was when everybody had to go home to bring in the harvest.  

and the stakes of the Renaissance tragedy are life and death,

Coz dying sucks. That's tragedy, mate.  

then we might say that, at least since Austen, the stakes of the English-language novel are love and marriage.

Only in chick lit. Oliver Twist isn't about getting hitched. Nor is Vanity Fair or Great Expectations.  

And however much Ulysses might seem to protest otherwise, this is precisely what is really at stake for Bloom, Stephen and Molly on June 16, 1904.

Stephen and Leopold should get married. That would strike a blow for Gay Liberation.  

The fate of nations is not involved; we never imagine for a minute that any lethal disaster lurks in store for the characters; all that hangs in the balance is friendship, love, family.

Sally is 'shipping' Daedalus and Bloom. Molly should buy a donkey and join the happy household.  

Ulysses is, like Pride and Prejudice, a purely relational novel.

No. Each mind holds as prisoner its own solitary dream of a world. In the Wake, these dreams melt into each other. Did Grothendieck read Joyce? Perhaps not. But a lot of other French nerds did.  

It was Jane Austen who developed the prose narrative techniques necessary to sustain a reader’s interest in such apparently trivial matters,

she has witty dialogue and pithy, Theophrastian, descriptions of various stock types. Ulysses doesn't. It really aint chick-lit.  

and James Joyce, in writing a novel, necessarily inherited these techniques, though what he did with them was a matter for his own individual genius.

Did you know that Joyce wrote in English? Guess who else wrote in English? Jane Austen! That proves that women should be allowed to pee standing up! 

Austen’s subtly masterful use of perspective becomes in Ulysses a sort of madcap textual rampage, but with much of the same underlying purpose: to illuminate the events of the novel through the eyes and minds of its protagonists.

No. Events illumine aspects of the minds of the characters.  

Even the small circumscribed communities in which Austen stages her plots are echoed in Joyce’s almost implausibly tight-knit Dublin,

That dirty old town was also a pretty small town with a population of under half a million.  

where Leopold Bloom seems to be acquainted with pretty much everyone he meets. Into the vessel of the novel form, Joyce pours the contents of his story, and if at times it overspills, still we recognize the contours of the container. Formally, it’s in Austen’s lineage,

Jane Austen's heroines often went to pubs and brothels. Also they could pee standing up. It is only because of Neo-Liberalism that women are now denied that fundamental right.  

far more directly than Homer’s or Shakespeare’s, that Ulysses participates.

Why stop there? Why not suggest that Ulysses owes more to Queen Victoria's farts than to Homer or Shakespeare?  

But what an unwilling participant it seems to be!

Sally writes chick lit and so she rates Austen. Joyce is famous. Thus he must have been trying to write chick lit. Sadly, he failed probably because of all the peeing standing up he indulged in.  

Everywhere grasping for the father who isn’t there, and too embarrassed to acknowledge the mother who is.

Joyce's Mum was 'beastly dead'. If daddy, not Mummy, had died, my guess is Joyce would have joined the Indian Civil and married off his sisters to Gazetted officers. He would still have written some great books but they may have featured camels and peacocks and elephants.  

Jane Austen might even be imagined as one of the nightmares from which Ulysses is trying to awake.

Coz Joyce kept getting confused and introducing charming young Vicar's daughters who have caught the eye of the young Duke of Dorset. Alas his mother is determined that he marry Zuliekha Dobson who is secretly in the pay of the Kaiser.  

Its Homeric title, its Shakespearean frame of reference, its endless textual allusions to the works of male forebears: all these come to seem like ways of warding off the uncomfortably effeminate generic history Joyce cannot help but inherit.

Very true. When men pee standing up, they are seeking to ward off the imminent transformation of their dicks into vaginas.  

Referring to Don Gifford’s book Ulysses Annotated, which provides citations for the many thousands of textual references in the novel, we note that Daniel Defoe is cited seven separate times. The later Victorian novelist Charles Dickens merits fifteen mentions. Jane Austen’s name doesn’t even appear in the index.

Which proves what Ulysses is actually about is a charming Vicar's daughter who foils the machinations of Zueliekha Dobson (who is actually Mata Hari!) and weds the handsome young Duke of Dorset. 

Though I am suggesting that Ulysses ought to be situated in Austen’s lineage, I’m not suggesting that James Joyce would agree. Ulysses kicks back at, picks apart and argues against many of the techniques and conventions Jane Austen established: but then arguing and kicking back are things children often to do to their parents.

Not me. Mum would have slapped the black off me. 

Austen is, by the way, not the only novelist conspicuously overlooked in the textual world of Ulysses. In its fourteenth chapter, set in Holles Street Maternity Hospital, Joyce stages a stylistically dazzling passage through the history of English literature,

in line with Haekel's popular but foolish notion that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny'. 

beginning with a comic pastiche of incantatory prayer and continuing through, among others, the works of Chaucer, Malory, Defoe, Swift, Dickens, Walpole, and Ruskin. Not one female author is included in the tribute: no Eliza Haywood, no Mary Shelley, no Brontë sisters, no George Eliot, none.

They took the language as they found it. Still, if I were to attempt something similar, Julia of Norwich would feature. So would Margery Kempe. Perhaps, if I'd studied Literature at Collidge, I would have some insight into the manner in which Celtic wives changed a Teutonic tongue. I believe this has been very well done for Icelandic. But studies of that sort involve actually using your brain. Sally, it appears, has been spared any such thing.  

Women are in Holles Street to have babies, obviously, not to write books.

They can go home and write books.  

But however much Ulysses may struggle against the conventions of the novel form,

it innovates. It does not 'struggle against'. Nobody was pointing a gun at Joyce's head.  

it is still a novel, and its heritage is anything but patrilineal.

Yet, at that time, lots of 'heritage' was wholly 'patrilineal'. Indeed, the great complaint of the Irish Catholic against the 1704 Popery Act was that it got rid of primogeniture in favour of gavelkind- i.e. equal division of the estate between sons. This directly lead to the huge excess mortality of the Potato famine.  

Like Stephen Dedalus, haunted by ghostly visions of the dead mother he fears he betrayed,

a sentimental note which, at that period, was effective enough. Catholics would say the cure is 'hyperdulia'- praise of the Holy Virgin.  

the text is haunted by the unacknowledged women whose work established the parameters of its own genre.

Because Sally says so. She has an MA and thus must know. But that MA is in shite. 

We might even propose that the structural pressures of the novel form help to force the stubborn masculinity of Ulysses into a more interesting and complicated relationship with gender.

Does it involve sex with donkeys? I suppose so.  

We might propose that, or we might not. My Ulysses is necessarily enmeshed in the history of the novel, because I approach it as a person who studies novels, reads them for pleasure, and even tries to write them. Another reader reads another Ulysses. I can only talk about mine.

Just as I can only talk about it as a damning indictment of the tyranny of Gay, Marathi, Leprechauns who are keeping Iyers from returning to their ancestral homeland in Iyerland. At the very least, they could send me a crate of Jameson from time to time.  

And mine is, of course, a woman’s Ulysses; which means that my love for and admiration of the book has had to take account of the fact that the social world in which it is set is almost exclusively male.

Also Joyce had a dick and didn't have to sit down to pee. How is that fair?  

I do find myself, while reading Ulysses, identifying passionately with the arrogant young writer Stephen Dedalus, and of course with the deeply charming loner Leopold Bloom.

She is 'shipping' them. There may already be 'fan fiction' of that sort. Is Bloom the top or the bottom or do they take turns? What is certain is that Molly, plus a donkey, join them in running a b&b in this like real spooky castle. Did you know Bram Stoker was Irish? That means Count Dracula can make a cameo. He finds love with the donkey. Molly kills herself. But that's because she was secretly bitten by a werewolf. Fortunately she rises from the dead and has a lesbian relationship with Joe Biden who will get gender reassignment surgery later this month so that the US can at last have a POTUS who has to sit down to pee. 

But there is another part of my mind that knows myself to be, in reality, a woman: a class of person absent from or unwelcome in most of the book’s environments.

Nonsense! Women are very welcome in brothels and the lower sort of drinking hole.  

From the novel’s opening, we move through a vast array of all-male settings: Stephen’s lodgings at the Martello tower;

which doesn't even feature a nice female donkey. 

the boys’ school at which he teaches; Bloom’s carriage to the funeral; the newspaper offices; Davy Byrne’s pub; the National Library;

women were admitted there. Indeed, they had entered Universities by then.  

the Ormond Hotel bar and dining room (with the exception of female staff);

Accompanied women were served in the dining room. Drinks were brought to them at their table.  

Barney Kiernan’s pub;

many such pubs had a 'snug' but women would not have been having a drink at four o'clock in the afternoon. 

the drinking session at Holles Street; a brothel (with the aforementioned exception of staff); and a cabman’s shelter. Men access and use these spaces as free agents, browsing, making purchases, eating, drinking, wandering, while women are either present as workers or not present at all. For another reader—a male reader, for instance, or just a woman who isn’t me—this feature of the novel may go unnoticed, or feel insignificant. And why not? But for myself, I can’t help noticing, and so I have to insist on noticing, these absences and silences. I have to read my own Ulysses, and in doing so, make some sense of how it works on me.

I suppose, if this lady read 'All quiet on the Western Front' her big takeaway will be not that trench warfare sucks ass big time but that women were excluded from that marvellous experience.

If we accept for argument’s sake that the “novel” as a genre represents a synthesis of masculine and feminine writing traditions,

we don't.  

can we locate a version of this synthesis in what seems to be the stubbornly male world of Ulysses? We can try.

If we have an MA in utter shit- sure. Otherwise people will think we have lost our marbles.  

Let’s return to the episode set at the maternity hospital, which describes such a rigid gender dichotomy: women give birth and men write books.

Women give birth and also write books. There is no fucking dichotomy here.  

Women are physical, natural, sensuous, erotic; men are cerebral, cultured, rational, intellectual.

Stephen is cerebral. But he spends his money on booze and whores. That may be 'natural' but it isn't particularly 'rational'. Syphilis is little fun.  

Women represent the body, men the mind.

Bloom takes a dump and a wank. He has a body.  

According to this system, Stephen Dedalus is the book’s most rigidly masculine character. In a very basic and literal sense, he surrounds himself almost exclusively with other men: male friends, male enemies, male intellectual and artistic influences.

Young men tend to be surrounded by young men. Young women are a bit wary of them because they are after only one thing. In my case, this was their lecture notes. Seriously, if you want to pass your exams you must use lecture notes taken by a person with a vagina. My own notes featured drawings of boobies and what I imagined might be concealed 'down there'. Also, did it really have teeth, like Mummy had hinted?  

Even the God he doesn’t believe in is a man.

But he had a really nice Mummy who was a virgin just like my Mummy and Daddy. I suppose this is a trait I inherited.  

But Stephen also represents the novel’s masculine “qualities”: logic, intellect, erudition.

If a man wrote that, he'd be cancelled. I think Bloom is presented as a bit feminine because of Otto Weininger's silly book which came out a little before 'Bloomsday'. Back in those days, Jews were considered 'sensitive' and 'emotional' rather than merciless Aryan killing machines.  

In some of the passages presented from his point of view, he hardly seems to have a body at all: we experience his consciousness as a kind of floating perceptual device, an abstract stream of language and images.

Because the cunt is doing aesthetic philosophy of some silly, spoiled Catholic, type.  

“Ineluctable modality of the visible,” he thinks: “at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.”

Which was already out of date because of a Jew named Einstein. I suppose Joyce was aware of this.  

So immersed is Stephen in his ineluctable thoughts

his thoughts aren't ineluctable. Newtonian Space is coz maybe there is an aether or summat.  

that it’s often difficult for a reader to know where he is physically located and what he is actually doing.

He is in Dublin. He is walking, he is talking. That's all we need to know.  

His body is neglected in other ways too: he doesn’t wash himself; he repeatedly shrinks from being touched by other people; and although he drinks enormous quantities of alcohol during the course of the book, he never eats.

In other words, he is a smelly student. But he has a high IQ. Anyway, the whole point about 'Bloomsday' is that it was when he met Norah Barnacle. He had lost a mother but gained a fixed star by which to navigate and ocean of drink. The Irish 'wild goose' was better than anything in Ibsen or Strindberg. That country has produced great men but would any of them deny the greater greatness of their mothers? Perhaps. Still, I don't recommend going into an Irish pub and telling every bloke you find there that their mother was a feckin hoor.  

Bodily appetites are something of a feminine quality in Ulysses.

Women frequently pull their own puddings.  

Appropriately, although Stephen thinks in crudely explicit terms about sexuality, his own desires are muted. His relationship with his housemate Buck Mulligan has erotic overtones,

Fuck off! Gogarty was famous for his exclusive devotion to goats.  

but the pair also resent one another, and spend most of the book avoiding each other’s company. Stephen’s sexual feelings for women are even more abstract and theoretical. “She, she, she,” he thinks to himself on Sandymount Strand. “What she?” He offers himself one possible answer: “The virgin at Hodges Figgis’ window on Monday,”

more particularly a bluestocking probably involved in the Celtic revival. She might want to make him learn Gaelic. Also, girls like that don't put out.  

a stranger he glimpsed in the street. But within a few sentences, he has talked himself into reviling her.

For good reason.  

The only other erotic connection in his life seems to be with a sex worker named Georgina Johnson, but he reproaches himself bitterly for spending so much money on her, and in any case we learn in the course of the book that she now has a husband. (In Stephen’s words, she’s “dead and married.”) Thus Stephen’s attitude toward women offers a miniature illustration of what feminists call the virgin/whore dichotomy.

Men were doing so before women jumped on the bandwagon.  

He bristles with contempt not only for the prudish middle-class women who are his peers,

who won't put out 

but also for the uneducated sex workers who he considers beneath him;

they require payment. Also, you get the pox from them.  

and this contempt is far more palpable, far more emotionally intense, than the desire by which it is apparently provoked.

I've dated women who were deeply ashamed of me. One girl actually typed up and gave me a copy of 'I being a woman and distressed'.  

Interestingly, although Stephen is a regular frequenter of brothels, we never see him—either in the course of the narrative or even in his memories or dreams—getting into bed with anyone.

Because that would meet the legal standard of obscenity. But we know Joyce and Norah exchanged pretty steamy letters.  

Molly Bloom, on the other hand, is pretty much always in bed, and rarely alone. She represents everything that is feminine in Ulysses, and a very horizontal form of femininity at that.

She is an attractive woman. Her mother was Spanish you know. Hot Mediterranean blood. She won't keep asking 'is it in yet?' in peevish tones but make appropriate noises of a very different sort.  

In the morning of the novel, Bloom brings her breakfast in bed; in the afternoon, she goes to bed with Boylan; and at night, she lies in bed awake beside the sleeping Leopold. With a lover, or with her husband, or with her recollections and fantasies of other men, Molly is always in bed with someone; just as Stephen, no matter much time he spends in brothels, never is.

Odysseus's mansion is built around Penelope's bed. She also has a loom but keeps un-weaving the shroud of Laertes. My own Hamlet play is titled Laertes and represents that 'undone' text which is my 'Hamlet without the Prince.' Seriously. In my play the ghost turns up but there is no Hamlet to avenge him. He never had a son- at least a legitimate one. Thus, Polonius wants Laertes to pretend to be the dead King's bastard as part of a complicated scheme to restore Denmark's credit rating. King Claudius is cool with this because he is a pedo and wants to fuck Ophelia who, for some Machiavellian reason, has to go through the appearance of marriage with her brother. Anyway, she pretends to kill herself and Laertes goes mad and starts fighting and eventually slaying himself. Everyone agrees this is because he got an MA in stupid shite from Paris.  

Molly’s appetites are famously erotic, but she also loves to eat, and she makes little distinction between these two great sources of satisfaction in her life. Fantasizing about the men she might meet at the fruit market in the morning, she abruptly breaks off to think longingly: “Id love a big juicy pear now to melt in your mouth.” She is as voluptuous as Stephen is undernourished; as joyously unintellectual as he is grimly cerebral; she is a pagan who believes in God, just as he is an excruciatingly theological atheist. Rather than masculine rigidity, Molly embodies flow and variation.

Okay, okay. We get it. Joyce was a bit shit when it came to creating three dimensional characters. He 'hadn't enough chaos in him to create a world.'  I suppose he was just phoning it in by the time he got to the last part of the book.                                                                                                                                                                           

She spends long passages of her monologue looking forward to another encounter with her new lover, possibly as soon as Monday; but she spends even more time contemplating her husband, known to us as Bloom but to her, lovingly, as Poldy. “what a madman,” she thinks tenderly: “nobody understands his cracked ideas but me.”

They are poor. Putting out to Blazes helps pay the bills. She may as well lie in the bed her husband had made for her.  Perhaps she will get preggers and have a son. 

It’s not so much that Molly is comfortable with contradiction: it’s that she doesn’t seem to experience much contradiction between the erotic excitement of her new affair, and her deep complicated love for her husband. “O much about it,” she thinks at one point, “if thats all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears.” It’s not so easy, for a reader submerged in the seductive flow of her soliloquy, to disagree.

It is hard for anyone much above the age of 30 to disagree. Sometimes, to get a son and heir you have to have recourse to the milk-man or the Pizza delivery guy. Who care's how the sausage is made?  

The control and regulation of erotic life comes to seem like a masculine imposition on the free unbounded nature of female sexuality—at least in the world of Ulysses.

Female sexuality, like male sexuality, or the sexuality of goats, is constrained by ecological or economic considerations.  

Molly is not an “everywoman,” but a living antithesis, an example of femininity completely unmodulated by the qualities Joyce designates as masculine.

He no where does so. He'd have looked a fool if he had.  

Approaching its close, the novel hovers over the possibility of a communion between the two extremes. Stephen admires a photograph of Molly, and after seeing it, he agrees to accompany Bloom back to their house; Molly herself indulges humorous fantasies about having an affair with Stephen. But the two never meet, and Stephen ultimately declines to stay the night. Whatever forms of relation remain in suspended possibility between these characters, Joyce declines to bring their opposing poles into direct contact. A synthesis declined or deferred.

Why? Joyce wasn't going to turn into the Balzac or Zola of Dublin. What would be the point? He had to do down the rabbit-hole of psychoanalysis. His daughter was schizophrenic. Was this, as in Ibsen's 'Ghosts', because of her father's sin? Perhaps. Sadly, the 'talking cure' was fraudulent. Words don't matter very much. The 'linguistic turn' can only end in Grievance Studies.  

Or maybe not. Between Stephen and Molly—between them in more ways than one—we have Leopold Bloom.

Stephen should fuck Leo and then fuck Molly. She should get in a suitably erudite donkey who is supportive of polyamorous relationships and the potential they have to subvert Patriarchy, Neo-Liberalism and the fact that men don't have to sit down to pee.  

He is the book’s central protagonist,

No. He is a foil to the protagonist whom he comes to exceed because the project of a sort of aesthetic intellection substituting for the Eucharist was always fucked in the head. But so was Brentano type phenomenology, not to mention Heidegger's stupidity. There were many ways to be a spoiled Catholic- none of them not shit.  

its organizing principle, and just as the form of the novel itself has an intriguingly androgynous history,

only in the sense that Campbell's Tomato Soup has an androgynous history and a totes gay history and a history involving polyamorous donkeys. 

Bloom is an intriguingly androgynous character. He is, of course, a man: but unlike Stephen Dedalus, he fails to exemplify the book’s masculine values. Bloom is intellectually curious, interested in ideas and the life of the mind; but he also thinks a lot about his body, his appetites, about eating, about washing himself.

Did you know that Jews like bathing? There were female Catholic saints who never bathed. Smelliness is next to Godliness. 

And while Stephen seethes with contempt for women,

he does no such thing. Why not suggest that he hates niggers and makes fun of cripples? After all, he has a dick and thus must be very evil.  

Bloom is capable of looking on the opposite sex with warmth, understanding, attraction.

The men in Sally's life must be real specimens.  

He enjoys their company, even regrets their exclusion from civic life. (Passing a urinal, he thinks sensibly: “Ought to be places for women.”) When the men in Barney Kiernan’s pub are cruelly making fun of a mentally ill character named Mr Breen, Bloom speaks up to say defensively: “Still … on account of the poor woman, I mean his wife.” Mrs Breen happens to be a friend, possibly even an old girlfriend, of Bloom’s, but his remark still draws vitriol from the others present. In an environment where his Jewish heritage already makes him the subject of bigotry, Bloom’s sympathy for women marks him out further as unmanly, suspicious, disloyal. By failing to combine his attraction to women with the proper degree of hatred and distrust, he risks identifying too closely with what he desires, threatening the boundary on which the system of gender domination is built.

Very true. The Taliban don't forbid women from working or going to school. Their system of gender domination is based on discouraging peeps from 'identifying too closely' with women by putting on bras.  

His relations with his fellow men can be even more curious. Though initially his interest in Stephen Dedalus may seem parental—the symbolic Odysseus in search of his son—Bloom’s motivations quickly grow more oblique. When Stephen and Buck Mulligan are leaving the National Library together in the ninth chapter, they stop at the doorway to allow another man to pass out between them. It happens to be Leopold Bloom, who bows in greeting and walks on. “Did you see his eye?” Mulligan whispers to Stephen. “He looked upon you to lust after you.”

Mulligan- that is Gogarty- was a medical man and knew his Havelock Ellis. 

Mulligan may have his own reasons for making this particular joke, but when Bloom and Stephen finally meet later on in the novel, we begin to feel that the joke had a point. Late at night in the cabman’s shelter, Stephen is sullen, even rude and unpleasant, but Bloom doggedly persists in trying to make conversation with him—describing him as “someone of no uncommon calibre.” and “educated, distingué and impulsive into the bargain, far and away the pick of the bunch.” When they leave the shelter together, Bloom unknowingly replicates an earlier gesture of Buck Mulligan’s by offering Stephen his arm—but while Stephen rejected Mulligan’s offer, he accepts Leopold’s. The two continue their journey arm in arm, but the reader stays behind, sharing the perspective of a nearby cab driver as he watches the men “walk towards the railway bridge, to be married by Father Maher.”

Such things did happen then what with the price of hoors and the risk of catching the clap.  

This last phrase is a lyric from a comic love ballad by the Irish composer Samuel Lover. Ulysses’s sixteenth chapter closes with this image of Bloom and Stephen walking away together, an image that puts the onlooker in mind not of a father and son, but of lovers on their way to be married.

Guys might pair off at a cab shelter. Big whoop.  

So Bloom desires women, but identifies too closely with them; and he identifies with men, but also seems to desire them.

But we know he doesn't. Bloom just wants the promising young Varsity man to sober up a bit. Also, the dude might be a literary cove. In Bloom's line of work, that could be useful.  

Back in Barney Kiernan’s, the character identified only as the Citizen asks derisively: “Do you call that a man?” Another agrees: “One of those mixed middlings he is.” Taking up the middle section of the novel, Bloom mediates between the text’s ideals of masculinity and femininity, between the corporeal and the intellectual, between the body and the mind. In this sense, Bloom is something like the personification of the novel as a form: a complicated synthesis of masculine and feminine traditions, a way of mediating between seemingly opposing values.

Making and looking after babies can be done just as well by a man and a woman as opposed to a woman and a donkey. 

He represents what is most compelling and most strange about the novel, its unsettling refusal to be one thing or the other, male or female, insider or outsider, elite high culture or mass entertainment.

Sally thinks Ulysses could be 'mass entertainment'. Failure to include polyamorous donkeys preculded that possibility. This is a damning indictment of Patriarchy, Neo-Liberalism and the fact that women have to sit down to pee.  

From its earliest history, the English-language novel has occupied an unstable position in the gender system:

Very true. People often used to mistake Defoe's book 'Moll Flanders' for an actual woman. They would try to have sex with it and were disappointed when it didn't become pregnant. On the other hand, Jane Austen's 'Northanger Abbey' got elected to Parliament because people were under the impression that it had a dick and was an Anglican and thus entitled to represent one of the less rotten Boroughs.  

a form invented by women who dared to claim a literary authority reserved for men;

reserved by whom?  

a form appropriated by men who struggled to conceal the influence of women;

also the influence of polyamorous donkeys 

a form perfected by a woman who was drawing on the lineage of those men; and on and on.

but it was only perfected by a woman because she was denied the right to marry a polyamorous donkey!  

Whenever the novel has been considered inane and immoral, it has been relegated to the domain of women;

Nonsense! My novels are considered utter shit. It would be a step up for them to be classed as inane. If they were immoral, they might actually earn me some money. Yet I have not been relegated to the domain of women probably because the fair sex has a strong objection to associating with boring, ugly, stupid and very fucking poor men. 

when it comes to be considered important and serious, it is attributed to the efforts of men.

Sally proved the Reimann hypothesis. But Terence Tao insisted on seeing her dick before he would certify her result. She gave up mathematics because she realized that any great discovery she made would be attributed to a man. The same thing happened to me because my dick is really small. Fuck! I didn't mean to tell you that. 

These tensions are present in the structuring principles of the form itself,

only in the sense that these tensions are present in eating a bowl of ice-cream. Did you know that the first ice-cream machine was invented by a woman? This is why you feel a lot of tension to dress up like an early Victorian lady when tucking into a tub of Ben & Jerrys.  

and nowhere more clearly than in Ulysses. Leopold Bloom embodies the formal problems—and the strange subversive pleasures—of the novel itself.

that 'subversive pleasure' has to do with the absence- and therefore the ubiquitous presence- of randy polyamorous donkeys.  Did you know that Joe Biden refused to appoint a randy donkey Treasury Secretary? That's because a donkey in that position would subvert the fuck out of Neo-Liberalism. 

The question of gender, here as elsewhere, is inextricable from the question of sexuality.

Not in my case. I have a dick and nowhere to put it. Sad.  

While undergoing a kind of hallucinated medical exam during the nightmarish scene at the brothel, Bloom is described by his doctors as “bisexually abnormal” and “a finished example of the new womanly man.” The novel itself could be called a bisexually abnormal form of writing: a genre that returns obsessively, from no fixed gender perspective, to the question of sexual desire; an almost intrinsically erotic narrative form.

I suppose, if some big bloke is doing your wife, you might feel a touch inadequate.  

Just as each of Jane Austen’s plots is propelled by the problems of sex and marriage,

Marriage, yes. Sex, no. Nobody gives a shit if Darcy fucks a donkey. However, if Elizabeth does so, people might feel she was 'spoiled goods' and thus not eligible to marry into a fortune.  

the English-language novel that flourished throughout the following century continued to reinscribe the fraught significance of erotic desire.

Fanny Hill came out in 1748. It is said that parts of it may have been written in Bombay. However, the Victorian novel tended to be a lot more staid. Partly this was because not just the women of the house, but even the servants were becoming literate. Smut needed to be in French while the really hard core stuff should be in Latin or Greek.  

In Wuthering Heights, in Jane Eyre, in Middlemarch, in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in The Portrait of a Lady, the novel is a form driven by sexual impulses that cannot be freely spoken of or even thought about.

Yet they are spoken and thought about. It isn't the case that Heathcliffe bonds with Cathy over a shared interest in organic chemistry.  

This inexpressibility provides the form with its own distinct narrative tensions: unlike any of the literary traditions from which it descends, the novel has traditionally concerned itself with the drama of the unsayable, what cannot be articulated in words.

Rubbish! It is easy enough to say 'Heathcliff wants to fuck Cathy's brains out and vice versa.' True, one could put it differently. 'I can't bear to be away from you' which means 'I want to be inside you' or 'I want you to be inside me.' Stuff like this isn't beyond the reach of even an MA in Literature from one of the world's finest universities.  

But by the early twentieth century, literary writing had to contend with the emergence of new social realities around sex and gender.

Hardy's 'Jude' is about the new sexual liberty enjoyed by female teachers. Under the capitation system, schools couldn't be too picky about the morals of their staff. Once a thing becomes a business, money talks and bigotry fades away.  

In the Europe of 1922—in the wake of war, communist revolution, and women’s suffrage—the repressive sexual morality that had provided the dramatic context for the nineteenth-century novel was beginning to fall away.

Women who earned money or who controlled their own inherited property were already free of it. Archbishop Benson's sons had to more careful than his equally homosexual daughters.  

This posed such a problem for the narrative tradition that it might be no wonder it seemed to be facing a crisis: and it’s within this moment of cultural upheaval that we have to position the work of James Joyce.

Sally may have to because she studied stupid shite. I don't have to. I'm an economist and thus understand the subject matter of literature so much better.  The plain fact is, Joyce's book was distinctly 'pre-War'. In a sense, that is its attraction. It was possible to imagine an Ireland which would not descend, in the year in which it was published, into a fratricidal Civil War.  Westminster would fund Irish development. There would be agricultural cooperatives and grants and soft loans for entrepreneurs. Joyce's own scheme for a cinema chain might have turned into a gold mine if such funding had been forthcoming. As it was, Joyce opened the first cinema in Dublin with the help of investors from Trieste. 

Perhaps the most famous thing about Ulysses is that it is a sexually explicit book: a novel in which the characters permit themselves to think openly about erotic desire.

But it is isn't about sex. There was plenty of Victorian porn- a lot of it incestuous.  

Just as they navigate the world around them with their intellectual and moral and aesthetic faculties, they also navigate the world with their erotic faculties, responding to themselves and one another as sensual beings.

Whereas in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and Cathy respond to each other as fellow philatelists.  

They acknowledge the existence of a sexual culture: the prevalence of sex work, varieties of different erotic practices and preferences, the disparity between the edicts of official Catholic Ireland and their own lived realities.

But they don't acknowledge the sexuality of donkeys. This is the fault of Jane Austen. Did you know that in her books, though people ride horses, horses are not allowed to ride people? It is because Austen elided and ignored the sexuality of farmyard animals that Neo-Liberalism was permitted to triumph. As Karl Marx wrote in the Grundrisse- Geschlechtsverkehr  mit Eseln ist die verborgene Logik des Industriekapitalismus. It is the occultation of sex with donkeys which constitutes the hidden logic of industrial Capitalism. 

Sometimes, as with Molly and Boylan, sexual desire pulls Joyce’s characters strongly in one particular direction;

i.e. his putting his pee pee in her chee chee place. This is because under Capitalism, randy donkeys are kept out of the boudoir.  

often, as with Bloom, it turns their attention in multiple directions, toward strangers, friends, women and men, backward into memories, forward into the future, or away from real life into sheer fantasy.

but not to polyamorous donkeys. This is the fault of Jane Austen.  

In a way, Ulysses represents the moment at which sexuality entered into the language of the novel.

Because 'Fanny Hill' was actually a textbook on Actuarial Science.  

On its pages, the novel as a form is forced to collide with social realities it was never designed to accommodate:

designed by Jane Austen who, for some reason, was very prejudiced against polyamorous donkeys with the result that Industrial Capitalism emerged as the hegemonic mode of production.  

and the chaotic, difficult, radical, exciting prose of Ulysses is the result. But like the nineteenth-century novels from which it descends, Ulysses is still driven by the particular formal tension of what cannot be expressed.

Donkey fucking. Jane really should have dwelt more on the topic.  

Throughout the novel, all day long and into the night, the quietly pressing narrative momentum is provided by the fact that Bloom refuses even to think about Molly’s affair.

Freud was famous by then.  

We follow Leopold’s odyssey through Dublin, attending to his every fleeting thought, without ever really understanding why he is going out of his way to facilitate his wife’s infidelity, or how he feels about it, or what he thinks the future of their marriage might hold.

We can guess it easily enough.  

Joyce retrieved the drama of the unsayable from the moral context of the nineteenth century and made it new.

There was no such drama. Nineteenth century authors could use words like fuck and shit but, like Ulysses, they ran the risk of being banned. Nothing was ever unsayable- even tender descriptions of sex with donkeys.  

The narrative structure of Ulysses is still novelistic, still relational, still derived from the distinctive dynamics between its characters: but it is also profoundly changed, even unrecognizable; we might say entirely novel.

Nope. Joyce was avant garde and served an audience who knew their Huysmans from their Dujardin. Joyce could have gone in that direction and ended up writing something as worthless as Valery's Monsieur Teste.  Norah save him from that fate. The Irish are expected to be either witty or as stupid as shit. If the gas on in Valery's vein, people would think the latter was the case. 

Okay, okay, you might be thinking. James Joyce is the successor of Jane Austen, really?

Sally has suddenly remembered she is Irish.  

Ulysses is an updated version of the marriage plot? That’s enough misreading for today, thank you. And indeed, past a certain point I do begin to feel like a little girl who has been allowed to play for too long with her brothers’ toys, and is now surreptitiously making the action figures kiss.

'Shipping' GI Joe & Stretch Armstrong is perfectly normal for heterosexual boys or, in my case, Tambram males above a certain age.  

Ulysses is for girls, I mutter under my breath.

Smart girls- sure. But it isn't really Grievance Studies material.  

I don’t really mean to convince you this evening that Ulysses is a feminist novel; I don’t know whether I believe that it is, or even what that might mean. I do think that it inherits the novel’s formal concerns with gender and sexuality,

There is no such formal or informal 'concern'. You can write a book featuring only animals which don't incessantly mount each other.  

and does so in a way that enriches both Ulysses itself and the tradition of novel writing in which it participates.

Sally can enrich Joyce. Why does she not enrich the Bible? God would be so grateful.  

As a reader, I find the book extraordinarily moving: I care very deeply about Molly’s relationship with Bloom, Bloom’s relationship with Stephen, what they say and don’t say and can’t say to one another.

It seems Joyce has enriched Sally. Good for her.  

This, to me, is the beauty—we might even say the magic—of the novel as a literary tradition: its ability to involve us emotionally in the relationships of its protagonists.

But you could also 'ship' characters on a TV serial. Apparently, there's a lot of homoerotic fan fiction about Castiel and the elder of the two brothers in 'Supernatural'. But one can also do this to Superman and Jose the polyamorous donkey. 'You are my true kryptonite', Clark says after Jose suggests he'd look prettier without his glasses.  

This feeling is produced, of course, by meticulous technical construction, in the work of James Joyce just as much as that of Henry James or Jane Austen.

Of Austen, we would speak of harmonious, not technical, construction.  

But if we are to acknowledge that fiction has any effect on us other than what is strictly intellectual,

which is the case for most of us who only read Robert Ludlum or, in my case, Enid Blyton 

then I think we have to admit that the feeling itself is important. Works of art don’t succeed or fail on their technical or logical merits:

which is why doing an MA in the literature of a language you already know is a fucking waste of time. 

they succeed or fail according to how they work on their audience.

No. They may contain an idea which at least one reader notices and broadcasts.  

Yes, the language of Ulysses is radically inventive; yes, its symbolic structure is dense with significance; yes, it destablilizes textual conventions; but it seems at least to me that it does these things so that we can meet all the more directly, the more vividly and beautifully, with Molly and Stephen and Leopold Bloom.

Sadly, they aren't three dimensional. This is the continuations of a bilgungsroman which has to admit that the bildung in question wasn't particularly useful of fit for a wider purpose. Still, Joyce added some strong meat to the Modern Languages curriculum he had himself studied. This was particularly useful for students whose first language wasn't English. 

Naturally, I lay no claim to objectivity. The Ulysses I present to you this evening might sound suspiciously like a novel about attractive young people in their twenties and thirties hanging around Dublin, doing no work, and thinking about sex; and there may be reasons such a reading appeals particularly to me.

So, Sally is Irish, not stupid. Sadly, her worthless BA and MA cause her to come across like a drooling imbecile.  

But the intervention that Ulysses made—the intervention it continues to make even now—in the history of the novel demands a personal response.

Talk of 'interventions' are the mark of the drooling imbecile.  

It is a book not only worth reading, but worth misreading, arguing with, reinterpreting, even rewriting, making our own.

My nest novel will be titled 'Steve, Leo & Molly's donkey'. Surely that will sell on Amazon?  

In her wonderful new play Joyce’s Women, staged recently here at the Abbey, the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien asks: “Who owns James Joyce?” It strikes me as an endlessly complex and interesting question.

It really isn't. Admittedly, my claim to own the copyright on 'Dubliners' fell down because there is a death certificate showing the bugger died some forty years before he assigned me the rights in return for a pint of Guinness. On the other hand, Shakespeare did introduce me to his agent around the time he did the script for a Mel Gibson vehicle which also starred Glen Close. Sadly, the agent wasn't able to get me the Julia Roberts role in Pretty Woman. Apparently I look too Jewy. Still, my point is, not all the time I spent drinking at Molly Maguires was entirely wasted. I could have been a big star. Sadly, my retrousse nose was, at that time, favoured by Jewish American Princesses getting plastic surgery. Not everything bad which has happened to me has been entirely because I iz bleck. Having what looks like a JAP nose-job has cost me Hollywood stardom.  

But when it comes to the question of who owns Ulysses, I believe the contemporary reader—perhaps particularly the contemporary novelist—must permit themselves to answer: I do.

Which is what Molly's donkey says at the end of my 'Steve & Leo'. Truly, a story for the ages! Once I publish it, I won't have to bother with Socioproctology. I'll be best friends for life with Beyonce and Julia Roberts will be totes jelly.