Posted By BillHeise on June 12, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “15 Memorable Books.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
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This will probably always be my favorite novel. In it, we follow Leopold Bloom through a day in Dublin. His wanderings are correlated to the “deep structure” of the Odyssey.

It was extremely experimental novel, and that was what I liked about it. It was also an attempt to render the individual as a carrier of a personal mythology which could radiate outwards throughout history, touching at last upon the archetypal myths that were available to each of us, if only we could look past our superficial experience–rendered for us in Joyce’s “stream of consciousness” narrative–to the deeper structures that awaited us within.

This was the dream of the Romantics, and when I was not yet back in the college, I thought that I was going to be a James Joyce scholar. The problem with studying James Joyce, however, was that I had no interest in any other modern work; and I soon changed to another allegorical work, the Romance of the Rose [see entry #8].

One of my favorite passages in Ulysses is at the beginning of the “Proteus” chapter when Stephen Daedelus is “walking into eternity” on Sandymount Strand. He forgoes the transient and superficial view of the world and decides instead to pursue the “ineluctable modalities,” those permanent features by which the human consciousness’s portrays the world to itself.

Of course, these are the “higher” functions of the mind. As an idealist, Joyce decides that the intellect gives him some ability to peer through the “diaphane” into the “deepest” recesses of the human mind. Later on in my life, I would come to doubt that proposition as an axiom of human life and I would search for another answer than Campbell and Joyce had tried (and failed in my opinion) to foist on me.

Despite the fact that I lost interest rather quickly in the “deep structure” of the novel, I found its breadth breathtaking. As Joyce progressed through his novel, the ploy is increasingly experimental passages. His interest in the forms of rhetoric in the “Aeolus” chapter fascinated me, and when I was back in school I tried to learn everything I could about the rhetorical tropes.

So perhaps I agree with this guy that the book is unreadable for pleasure, I had long ago given up reading pleasure. I was looking for “the truth.” And Joseph Campbell had pointed me to this book as one of the major instances in which the human mind to come dangerously close to joining itself with that truth.

Now this was the essence of the Modern dream. As Modernism has faded into postmodernism, so has the reputation of Ulysses faded. But even as it has faded as a modern work, it has been valiantly revived by postmodern scholars. Just like my preference for the works of Shakespeare as the arch humanist in drama, James Joyce’s work will, I suspect, always be my favorite novel.

Categories: Books, Personal, Philosophy
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