I'd like that part. Learn a lot teaching others,” Leopold Bloom, ordinary man and main character of James Joyce’s Ulysses, muses as he ponders a newspaper’s advice column. Ordinary advice within a forbiddingly complex modernist work? In 1997, Alain de Botton blended these apparent opposites in his short, witty How Proust Can Change Your Life. Now, 12 years later, in his richly provocative but also frustrating Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd (prominent academic scholar of Irish literature and culture, author of the influential books Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation and Irish Classics) makes a long, serious argument for Ulysses as a highbrow self-help manual and guide to living.
De Botton is in Kiberd's mind in his first chapter, How Ulysses Didn't Change Our Lives, which blames bohemian artists and intellectuals in the 1920s for co-opting Ulysses for the European avant-garde and university-based critics for considering it a coded text that only initiates can crack.
Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living, by Declan Kiberd, Faber & Faber, 399 pages, $29
His second chapter suggests How It Might Still Do So: We need to rescue Ulysses from the professional critics and learn from Leopold Bloom, the bourgeois, peripatetic, relatively inarticulate, untutored instructor who “embodies more than he explains” and thereby demonstrates how to live to the younger character Stephen Dedalus (reprised from his central role in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and to receptive readers.
Ulysses and Us discusses Joyce’s 18 unnamed chapters one by one, referring to them not as Homeric episodes, but through such ordinary daily events as Waking, Learning, Thinking, Walking, Eating and Reading. Kiberd gleans relatively ordinary lessons from Ulysses: Celebrate common men and women, connect with real people’s everyday lives, recognize the sort of human beings we should be. In effect, he provides an extended gloss on Joyce’s comment about his writing: “In my case the thought is always simple.”
In a book arguing for the value of doubt and tentativeness, Kiberd asserts with certainty and confidence
Bloom illustrates life as process and in flux, freed from preoccupation with certainty and outcomes. Ulysses “uses the streets as a guide to the received wisdom of an entire community,” Kiberd declares. “Bloom, the street person, achieves a greater vitality when he is neither at home nor away but in perpetual motion between.”
Teaching figures prominently in Ulysses and Us. The over-intellectual would-be poet Stephen Dedalus, whose clotted thoughts provoke many readers to put the book down before they encounter Leopold Bloom, illustrates the dangers of over-education and serves as an overall model of how not to live. With a mind immobilized by abstract theory, he is a bad teacher, unlike the far less educated Bloom. If Stephen can learn from Bloom (whether he can lies beyond Ulysses’s pages), such destructive opposites as traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity, Englishness and Irishness, and elite art and everyday living can disappear.
“Bloom is never certain of anything for long,” Kiberd states. “So also with Ulysses. … Current systems of knowledge may soon be dismantled as new orders emerge in which opposites could be dissolved, whether art and science, bohemian and bourgeois, Greek and Jew.”
