Jeffrey Longacre is Assistant

Professor of English at the

University of Tennessee at
Martin. He is currently working
on a project exploring the slacker
in twentieth-century literature
and film.
The Word Known to All Men; or,
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love James Joyce
Jeffrey Longacre
Kiberd, Declan. 2009. Ulysses and Us: The Art of
Everyday Life in Joyces Masterpiece. New York:
Norton. $28.95 hc. $17.95 sc. xi + 400 pp.
Utell, Janine. 2010. James Joyce and the Revolt
of Love: Marriage, Adultery, Desire. New York:
Palgrave. $75.00 hc. x +177 pp.
J
ohn Lennona closet James Joyce
scholar who even subscribed to the James
Joyce Quarterly in the 1970sclaimed in
the 1967 hit song by The Beatles that all you
need is love. Since its original publication in
1922, some critics have suggested that love is
all you need to break through the thorny
thicket of complexity presented by Joyces
experimental style in Ulysses (not to mention
the subsequent, and even more daunting,
Finnegans Wake in 1939), a style that shifts and
evolves from episode to episode. Joyce him-
self hinted that the novel was his epic affir-
mation of that [w]ord known to all men, as
College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012] 132
his literary alter-ego Stephen Dedalus puts it in the Scylla and Charybdis
episode of Ulysses (Joyce 1986,429-430). That word is widely interpreted
as love, and love is the subject of Joyces great, human epics.
Reading Ulysses simultaneously as Joyces treatise on the nature of love
and as a kind of love letter to love is nothing new. The most widely accept-
ed theory on why Joyce selected June 16, 1904 as the date his epic of a sin-
gle day takes place is because that was possibly the date that he first went out
with his lifelong partner and future wife, Nora Barnacle. Such a reading
makes the book, on one level, a kind of anniversary present, a token of love
for the love of Joyces life. One of the originators of the theory that the date
of Ulysses had this biographical origin, Richard Ellmann, is also one of the
first proponents of the idea that, in spite of all the stylistic bells and whistles,
the theme in Ulysses was simple (Joyce 1986, ix). Ellmann and others have
established an interpretive tradition that Ulysses is essentially about love, the
entire spectrum of love from the eros to agape. According to this interpreta-
tion, Joyces epic fits into a tradition of narratives of love and reconciliation
in an attempt to apply epic conventions to subject matter that is all-too-
human. Or, as Ellmann himself puts it, Ulysses revolts against history as
hatred and violence, and speaks in its most intense moments of their oppo-
site (xiv), namely Stephens word known to all men. Despite ostensible
differences in tone, style, and method, Declan Kiberd and Janine Utell both
recognize that Ulysses is concerned with love as the most complex and the
most human of emotions. Each text offers a critical reappraisal of Joyces
work emphasizing what one can still learn from reading Joyce in the early
twenty-first century, and how one might learn again to love reading Joyce.
As a result, their books represent an important step in restoring a sense of
humanity to an author whose texts have been relegated to the status of relics
for specialists.
Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyces Masterpiece, Declan
Kiberds ode to the ordinary in Ulysses, attempts to find some middle ground
between the extremes of unabashed praise and unqualified contempt by
arguing that what makes the book great is exactly that which it celebrates:
its humanness. Kiberds task, taken up by others before him, is to save Joyces
book from its abstraction into inscrutable theory by specialist elites (2009,
10) and to return it into the hands of the ever-elusive common reader (17).
He argues that Ulysses should be accessible to ordinary readers as once were
the Odyssey, the New Testament, the Divine Comedy and Hamlet (21). Making
an argument that Joyce was as much Romantic as Modern in his celebration
of the minutiae of everyday life, Kiberd claims that [i]t is time to reconnect
Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people, for itaccording to Kiberd
still has much to teach real people (11). With this goal in mind, Kiberd
attempts to forge a middle path between conventional academic writing and
the kind of informal, but intuitive, observations that might surface in a good
graduate seminar on Joyce. In short, Kiberds book reads like a series of lec-
tures on Ulysses aimed at a relatively broad audience, which would, I suppose,
include the common reader.
Altogether different in tone and style from Kiberds relaxed, readerly
approach, Janine Utells work in James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage,
Adultery, Desire follows the conventions of a more traditional academic study,
which might seem to place her text in the rarified air of specialist elites that
Kiberd warns us about. Utells book does in fact read a bit too much like a
dissertation to be readable in the way that Kiberds is, and she occasionally
defers a bit too much to her critical and theoretical sources, unlike Kiberd,
who is the primary authoritative voice in his text. Ultimately, though, her
prose is generally readable, and she provides valuable and informed critical
insight into an essential question that must be faced in any interpretation of
Joyces body of work: Why does Joyce write about adultery over and over
again? (2010, 16). That is an excellent question, and Utell provides some
compelling answers that genuinely advance the scholarship in this area.
Unlike Kiberds single-text study, Utell reads the whole of Joyces work as a
kind of continuity, a movement toward a more complex understanding of
love and desire (13). She begins her reading of Joyces literary output with
the relatively minoryet transitionalworks like Exiles (1915), Joyces gen-
erally unsuccessful attempt at drama, and Giacomo Joyce, a posthumously pub-
lished notebook written in 1914 but not published until 1968, and she con-
cludes with a chapter on Finnegans Wake. But the centerpiece of her study is
Ulysses: Joyces narrative of a man, Leopold Bloom, who facilitates his wifes
adultery. Beginning with the critical tradition of the novel of adultery,
writes Utell, I look at Ulysses as the culmination of Joyces play with the
questions and complexities that riddle married love; Ulysses forms his ulti-
mate argument for an ethical loveeven as he acknowledges that such love
might be impossible (14). As divergent as Kiberds and Utells texts might
seem at first glance, not only in tone and style, but in critical and theoretical
focus, there is an underlying commonality of purpose that perhaps signals a
shift in the winds of Joyce criticism, or at least a continuation of a trend over
the past decade or so to reclaim Joyce from the netherworld of literary the-
ory. Kiberd and Utell are each interested in what Ulysses means to us as
human beings at the beginning of the twenty-first century, not especially as
academics or specialists.
Kiberd opens his case for Ulysses as a text for everybody by describing
what it did not do. In a chapter titled, How Ulysses Didnt Change Our
Lives, he notes how [t]he book which set out to restore the dignity of the
133 Jeffrey Longacre
middle range of human experience against the false heroics of World War I
was soon lost to the common reader (2009, 6). After explaining why and
how Joyce lost his connection with ordinary readers, and implying that this
culture is part of what led to the horrors of World War II, Kiberd contends,
The need now is for readers who will challenge the bloodless, technocrat-
ic explication of texts: amateur readers who will come up with what may
appear to be nave, even innocent, interpretations (15). This plea for flesh
and blood readers to rediscover the humanity of Joyces book through a fresh
approach, in order to save it from its institutional purgatory, leads directly into
his next two chapters. Here Kiberd rounds out the preliminary arguments for
his episode-by-episode close reading of the novel, which constitutes the bulk
of his book. In these subsequent two chapters, titled How It Might Still Do
So and Paralysis, Self-Help and Revival, Kiberd makes a case for how
Ulysses might yet change our lives by offering much still to teach us about
the world, including:
Advice on how to cope with grief; how to be frank about death in the age
of its denial; how women have their own sexual desires and so also do
men; how to walk and think at the same time; how the language of the
body is often more eloquent than any words; how to tell a joke and how
not to tell a joke; how to purge sexual relations of all notions of owner-
ship; or how the way a person approaches food can explain who they real-
ly are. (Kiberd 2009, 21)
In arguing for a reading of Ulysses (and by association other great books in
the Western canon) as a kind of self-help volume, Kiberd elides the notori-
ous difficulty that shadows the novels reputation by claiming that [t]he dif-
ficulty of Ulysses is not based on snobbery but on a desire of a radical artist
to escape the nets of the market (20), a claim that seems a bit too quaint and
oversimplified to stand, as it does here, as uncontested fact. Indeed, perhaps
as part of Kiberds strategy of reaching out to the common reader, this book
lacks much of the scholarly apparatus of most literary criticism, a fact that is
alternately refreshing and frustrating.
All of this, though, leads up to the questions that Kiberd is primarily
concerned with addressing: How can a book like Ulysses have been so mis-
read and misunderstood? How was it taken as a product of a specialist
bohemia against which it was in fact in open revolt? Why has it been called
unreadable by the ordinary people for whom it was intended? (30). The for-
midable strength of Kiberds book lies in his answer to these questions:The
legend of [Ulyssess] forbidding difficulty has scared readers off, but so has the
silly notion of its monumental perfection (30). This mindset is what Kiberd
rightly criticizes as the biggest problem with the reputation of Joyces novel:
its reputation of near infallibility, a reputation that has been built up around
134 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]
the novel since its publication. What makes Ulysses great, what makes it a
truly human and living text, argues Kiberd, are its imperfections, its mistakes,
and we (he seems just as interested in admonishing professional scholars as in
winning over new converts) must redirect our approach to Joyces novel
we must learn to come at it anewif we are to get out of it what Kiberd
believes we still can.
After establishing the contextual foundation for his reading of Ulysses in
the tradition of wisdom literature, a tradition that includes the big guns of
the Western canon like Dante and Shakespeare, Kiberd guides us through a
close re-reading of the book, through the lenses of our newly cleansed per-
spective, by devoting a chapter to each of the novels eighteen episodes. Each
of his corresponding chapters are labeled with a gerund verbsuch as
Waking, Learning, Thinking, Dying, Eating, and Wanderingall
the way to the ultimate lessons we are to take away from Joyces book: les-
sons on Teaching and Loving, which correspond to the last two episodes
of Joyces novel, Ithaca and Penelope, respectively, and which together
represent the biggest idea of this biggest of books: the idea that Ulysses can
effectively teach us how to love one another better. Each of these verbs sig-
nifies Kiberds focus for his reading of each episode, like an organizing prin-
ciple for a lecture. As is often the case with episode-by-episode guides to
Ulysses, there is much to learn from Kiberds readings, and from gaining a
perspective on such an important work by someone with his credentials, but
there are also times when one is left scratching ones head or wishing that a
point might have been developed a bit further or substantiated more fully.
Perhaps, though, this just works to make Kiberds central point stronger inso-
far as the imperfections of his readings mirror the imperfections in Joyces
text, skewing stale, conventional readings in ways that humanize both and
provide new avenues for critical exploration of Joyces text. Or, as Stephen
Dedalus states the case in Ulysses, A man of genius makes no mistakes. His
errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery (Joyce 1986, 228-29).
Kiberds last five chapters complete the contextual framework he began
with his first three chapters by illustrating how his reading of Ulysses places
it within the tradition of wisdom literature, which seems to be comprised
of a handful of the great books of the Western canon that transcend time,
place, and genre by attaining a level of universality in their appeal. These are
texts that ultimately go beyond merely describing or reflecting the human
condition in a specific time and place by eventually coming to play a role in
defining the human condition itself. By devoting a chapter each to how
Joyces text compares and corresponds to these great books, The Odyssey, The
Bible, The Divine Comedy, and Hamlet, followed by a brief conclusion, Kiberd
makes his final case that Ulysses belongs with these other texts, not because
135 Jeffrey Longacre
of their institutionalization in the academy, but because these are texts that
have been able to fly by the nets of institutionalization and still remain liv-
ing and breathing books in Western culture. Though a beautiful thought, this
is where, perhaps, Kiberds reach exceeds his grasp. In arguing for the cele-
bration of the everyday in Ulysses, he has trouble avoiding reductive general-
izations about what Ulysses, and other great works, can still mean to the dis-
tracted masses. For example, Kiberd writes, The story of Odysseus was a
parable of how you can use your ordinariness and anonymity to win a final
victory, the technique of the everyday (281). This may have the ring of
truth in it, but can the complexity of Homers epic really be so easily
reduced? A few lines later Kiberd argues that Joyce seized on this anti-
mythological element in the Odyssey to free his own generation from their
cult of war (281). This may indeed have been part of Joyces ambition, but
isnt that a pretty heavy burden to place on a book? Or what about the nar-
row and reductively heterocentric point of view expressed in this general-
ization: The wisdom to be gleaned from The Odyssey is clear enough: that
there is nothing better in life that when a man and woman live in harmony
and such happiness, though felt intensely by the couple themselves, can never
be fully described (288). Despite this tendency to generalize, Kiberds book
is still highly valuable for the refreshing approach it takes to its subject. In
fact, reading Kiberds book has renewed my own interest in Ulysses, and, even
if it does nothing more than that for others, then it has succeeded in its pur-
pose. Kiberd had to take risks since he set himself to the lofty goal of saving
Ulysses from its mummification in the academy. As he himself concludes,
The aim of art is not to depict a set of incidents, for that would be no more
than information. It is rather to relate each event to the life of the storyteller,
so that it can be conveyed as lived experience (357). Ulysses, implies Kiberd,
is a labor of lovein every sense of that expression.
Despite the fact that it is a more conventional academic study than
Kiberds text, Utells book is no less useful in its reading of Joyces later work
as indicative of his efforts to work out an ethics of love. Leaning heavily upon
the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and extending the excellent work
begun by Marian Eide in her definitive analysis on the subject, Ethical Joyce
(2002), Utell provides a fascinating and well-argued analysis of Joyces evolv-
ing attitudes toward love in the contexts of marriage and adulteryhis lit-
erary obsession from Exiles through Finnegans Wake. Noting Joyces resistance
to marriage as an institution that he found oppressive (Joyce did not legally
marry his longtime partner, Nora Barnacle, until 1931, long after their orig-
inal elopement in 1904, and only then because of concerns regarding inher-
itance), Utell claims that marriage and all its complexity is the crucible in
which Joyce formulates a conception of ethical love (2). As a critic of mar-
136 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]
riage as an institution, Utell argues that Joyce was interested in adultery as a
challenge to the hegemony of marriage. She writes:
Illicit desire becomes a space in which to explore questions of autonomy,
selfhood, and value; it is a revolutionary move against conventional utilitar-
ian understandings (or lack thereof) of the erotic. It is precisely this revolt
that Joyce is staging in his work: a revolt against conventional frameworks
of marriage that stifle desire, restrict individuals, and keep men and women
from seeing the person they love and recognizing that person as
autonomous and separate. (Utell 2010, 3)
This passage describes the revolt of love that she alludes to in her title. If
Kiberd finds a revolution of the everyday as the essential humanity animat-
ing Ulysses, then Utell also reads Joyces later work as revolutionary, pitting
the most human of qualitiesloveagainst the artificiality and mechanical
rigidity of social institutions like marriage.
After an introduction outlining Joyces Sexual/Textual Ethics, which
clearly establishes the theoretical and scholarly foundation of her argument,
Utell provides some very informative contextualization in her first two chap-
ters: Nora and Marthe and Katharine and Parnell. The latter chapter
explores the influence that Charles Stewart Parnells relationship with
Katherine OShea imposed upon Joyces views on the oppressive nature of
marriage in the Victorian era and on adultery, not as a taboo, but as an under-
standable revolutionary gambit against the hegemony of the institution.
Although the influence of the Parnell incident on Joyce has been well-doc-
umented, Utell should be commended for identifying an aspect of this story
that has not been given the proper attention until now, the example that
Katherine and Parnells illicit love provided for Joyce as a way for thinking
through the ethics of marriage and adultery. The former chapter, Nora and
Martha, establishes an important biographical foundation for Joyces later lit-
erary obsession with marriage and adultery in his correspondence with his
life-long companion (and subsequent wife), Nora, as well as a kind of
voyeuristic fantasy he indulged in with one of his English students in Trieste,
Marthe Fleischmann, which Utell describes as a liason (17), emphasizing
the unconsummated nature of the affair. Joyces liason with Fleischmann
would become the basis for his posthumously published Giacomo Joyce, which
Utell discusses in the next chapter along with his only surviving play, Exiles,
as crucial, experimental, and transitional works, signaling a shift in Joyces
subject matter from the satirical vignettes of Dubliners (1914) and the isola-
tion of Stephen Dedaluss coming of age in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man (1917) to the thematic centrality of love and marriage in all of his sub-
sequent works. It is in Giacomo Joyce and Exiles that [a]dultery becomes,
according to Utell, a key trope, a vital site for exploring such a rich
137 Jeffrey Longacre
moment (60). Both texts, however, are failures in the sense that Joyce has not
yet conceptualized a truly ethical love, one that fully imagine[s] the desire
of the beloved, even her separateness (65).
Although her approach cuts across all of Joyces later work, the heart of
Utells study is Ulysses, which the next two chapters cover. In these chapters,
she explores the biggest question confronting any reader of Ulysses: what
would compel a man to facilitate his wifes affair? (69). Utells answer is that
[i]n facilitating his wife Mollys affair, Bloom acknowledges the centrality of
desire to her being and the impossibility of fulfilling a complete connection
to her, and thus opens the space of his marriage to the potential of ethical
lovea love that is a recognition of the separateness of the other (75).
Although not the episode-by-episode guide through Ulysses that Kiberd
leads us through, Utell does a thorough and admirable job of substantiating
her argument with specifics from Joyces text and ultimately provides a very
convincing argument that Blooms quest is a quest for a genuinely ethical
love through her careful analysis of selected episodes. Finally, she argues that
Ulysses teaches us about love, paradoxically, by emphasizing the essential
unknowablity of love. Ulysses, Utell implores, teaches us a new way to read
and experience the life of the other (125). Turning from Leopold and Molly
Bloom in bed at the end of Ulysses, reunited yet apart, separate but equal, as
a vision of the potential for an ethical love between a man and a woman,
Utell concludes her book with a discussion of Finnegans Wake in her final
chapter. This is the weakest section of the book, and much of the chapter
simply covers familiar readings of the Wake, although she does do a good job
of showing how Joyces last book fits into her larger argument that Joyces
later work is all about defining what a truly ethical love might look like.
This, Utell concludes, is the revolt of love, a radical affirming of a new
kind of transformative erotic experience, a deep acceptance of alterity in
erotic life (149). Joycean ethics, she argues, celebrates the otherness of the
other; true love is accepting the essential unknowability of the other and
allowing the space for her desires. Textually, this can also mean accepting the
essential unknowability of Joyces text and accepting and celebrating its oth-
erness as manifest in its radical style. To love Joyce is to accept him for what
he ison his terms.
Although representative of two distinct approaches to scholarship and
literary criticism, Kiberds and Utells books are both encouraging for the
future of Joyce studies. Utells book will primarily be of interest to teachers
and scholars of Joyce, and it is a very useful book for anyone interested in a
compelling examination of the important subjects of marriage and adultery
across Joyces work. Kiberds book aims for a more general audience, and
while I am skeptical that he will find the common reader for Ulysses that he
138 College Literature 39.1 [Winter 2012]
seeks, I applaud the effort and would still recommend his book for anyone
interested in a fresh perspective on an aging classic. Each of these books is of
value to those who teach Joyce, Irish literature, or modernism. Maybe it is
time we turned away from theorizing and contextualizing every nuance of
Joyces work and instead try to remember why we might have loved reading
him in the first place. What, after all, can Joyce, and especially Ulysses, still
teach us? Kiberd and Utell both provide a clear answer: much, much.
Works Cited
Ellmann, Richard. 1982. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Joyce, James. 1986. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage.
139 Jeffrey Longacre
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