Reading Joyce's Ulysses

If you only get one guide to Ulysses, get this one. I find every page illuminating and helpful and revelatory, and keep it closely nearby. I am reading the 1987, and may order this "centenary" re-issue as well, as I have heavily marked my original. You will not regret having this book as guide for reflection and comprehension. YOu will grow to understand and to love Joyce's otherwise easily dismissed brilliance, hidden under the bushel basket of academics on their own agendas. Only a pitifully few books are crucial to the Joyce bookshelf, and this is one.

The title's misleading: this isn't for a first or even second or third-time reader of Ulysses. While many books now offer the novice "training wheels" to steady a ride through the Hibernian labyrinth, fewer meet the demands of intermediate readers in an accessible manner that can be recommended to non-academic, amateur Joyceans. While much freer of jargon than many of his scholarly peers, Schwarz' study is not a book to skim. I'm not even sure that RJU is the perfect answer for the repeat reader--much of the first hundred pages I found very dense, both exhausting and stimulating in turn, and I'm a literature professor! But, as the author insists, Joyce demands more of us than other writers, and we need to work out to meet the challenge and earn the reward. No pain, no gain, indeed. As a coach, Schwarz in his "humanistic formalism" teaches us a sensible interpretation based on Joyce's "metaferocity." This plan charts the metaphorical circles around the Bloomsday core, and explores some of their ripples. His thesis: 'If the result of the action of Ulysses is to enable a more mature and gifted Stephen-Joyce to write Ulysses, the result of reading Ulysses is to enable us to become consubstantial with the plenitude of Joycean voices.'(61) He argues throughout against those critics who claim that the style of the book, especially in its latter half, overwhelms the tale and its characters. To support this, his defense of the difficult chapters such as Eumaeus and Ithaca advances his proof that here the style captures the problems Stephen and Bloom have in establishing a true rapport. Earlier, he draws upon Bloom's Jewishness to illuminate a crucial distinction between the pair: "Joyce is also contrasting a characteristic Jewish turn toward tomorrow and acceptance of today--even while being fully conscious of the frustrations of the present and disappointments of the past--with the Irish preoccupation with a romanticized version of the past and the Catholic obsession wuth dwelling on past sins and measuring every action according to a strict and narrow barometer of sins and grace." (105) Furthermore, although many of Schwarz' suppositions do strain a bit of credulity (I fail to see despite twice being assured that 16 by the term itself clearly symbolizes homosexuality; his reading of Bloom as one of the 36 Wise Men, a lamed vov, of Jewish tradition does not seem supported in Cyclops; or his claim that the pair's relationship fails to be obscured by the prose of Oxen of the Sun), I did enjoy immensely his playful exegesis linking the Citizen and his cronies at Barney Kiernan's to a nearly complete Seder! A couple of drawbacks: a tendency by the author to ask every couple of pages stiltedly "Do we not see" or "Must we then not claim" types of questions when assertions would've strengthened his claims better. Also, once in an endnote and once in the text, paragraphs from earlier in his text reappear verbatim. Added to this a need to proofread for typos