Ulysses
- ISBN-10
- 149056635X
- ISBN-13
- 9781490566351
- Series
- Ulysses
- Pages
- 828
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2013-06-28
- Author
- James Joyce
Description
An excerpt of the review by Current Opinion, Vol. 73, 1922: THE QUEEREST NOVEL EVER WRITTEN JOYCE'S "ULYSSES" SETS A NEW STANDARD IN FICTION SOMETHING new is troubling the critics of two continents. It is a book over two inches thick, over half a million words long; it is called "Ulysses"; and it was written by an Irishman, James Joyce, now living in Paris. Readers in America who follow the output of good literature are familiar with Joyce's remarkable "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," and may have read his "Dubliners." Even casual readers will recall the fact that, three years ago, an issue of the Little Review, of New York, in which "Ulysses" was running serially, was suppressed by the police. But few, if any, of either informed or casual readers were prepared for the critical hubbub evoked by the publication of the new book. One of the ablest French periodicals. La Nouvelle Revue Française, opens a leading article on "Ulysses" as follows: "With this book Ireland makes a sensational re-entrance into high European literature." To which J. Middleton Murry, of the London Nation, makes the rejoinder: "Ulysses is many things: it is very big, it is hard to read, difficult to procure, unlike any other book that has been written, extraordinarily interesting to those who have patience (and they need it), the work of an intensely serious man. But European? That, we should have thought, is the last epithet to apply to it." Mr. Murry, however, goes on to declare that in part of the story "a genius of the very highest order, strictly comparable to Goethe's or Dostoevsky's, is evident"; while Arnold Bennett, writing in the London Outlook of another part, says: "I have never read anything to surpass it, and I doubt if I have ever read anything to equal it." The distinguishing characteristics of the book are its psychologic insight and a kind of stenographic reporting. Mr. Joyce is said to have pushed the intimate detailed analysis of character to a point farther than that of any other writer. There are only three characters in the story, and its action (what little there is) takes place in Dublin within a period of twenty-four hours. The three characters are Stephen Dedalus (hero of "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"), Leopold Bloom, a Hungarian Jew in the advertizing business, and Bloom's wife, Marion. "One might almost say," Mr. Murry remarks, "that all the thoughts and all the experiences of those beings, real or imaginary, from their waking to their sleeping on a spring day in Dublin in 1904, are somehow given by Mr. Joyce: and not only their conscious thoughts-and they are very differently conscious-but the very fringes of their sentience." More even than that, Mr. Joyce stages, in that part of the book which Mr. Murry specially admires, a kind of Walpurgisnacht of his chief characters. "Bloom and Dedalus are revealed in a kingdom where the practical reactions of life are no more. They become human quintessentialities, realized potencies of the subconscious, metaphysical egos." There is always danger that short quotations may give a misleading and unfair impression of a work, or even of a chapter of a work; but here is an extract from "Ulysses" which Arnold Bennett has conscientiously chosen as representative: "Making for the museum gate with long windy strides he lifted his eyes. Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me? "Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes. "The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold statues; quiet there. Safe in a minute. "No, he didn't see me. After two. Just at the gate. "My heart!" "His eyes beating looked steadfastly at cream curves of stone. Sir Thomas Deane was the Greek architecture. "Looking for something I." ...
