It has become a museum piece.įrom the point of view of audience and importance, one might well compare the fate of “Ulysses” with the fate of other novels that came out at about the same time. People acknowledge its value, but they don’t read it. (Some wag once said of “Ulysses” that “It’s the greatest novel nobody’s read.” And indeed, it took me fifty years to finish reading it.) But the fact that nobody’s reading it sends a message: by his herculean compositional effort, James Joyce may have outsmarted himself. Does anybody read “Ulysses” any more? Is the novel still important? I have the feeling that not very many readers, certainly not very many young readers, are pushing their way through the nearly 600 pages of “Ulysses” these days. Gilbert’s book is like a planetarium, where a skilled guide points out to us the various stars, planets, and constellations, so that the next time we are outdoors at night and look up, we will have increased understanding of what is above us. Valery Larbaud, ‘at night, after one has been contemplating the sky for a little while, the number of stars seems to have increased.’ ” So Mr. “At a first and casual reading, these are perceived vaguely, as a misty nebula of light in the course of a more attentive perusal their number and permanence will gradually become apparent, ‘as,’ to quote the admirable metaphor of M. Gilbert in his introduction brings out the way the the internal structural relations, of “Ulysses” reward study. This book is about the STRUCTURE of “Ulysses.” Joyce’s major themes were already well known to the readership what this book does is show us some of the detailed structural mechanisms through which the themes are expressed in the novel. Apparently even literate readers weren’t apprehending the nuances that Joyce had so carefully salted into his text, so Joyce felt the need to clue them in. It’s noteworthy that Joyce realized that “Ulysses” needed to be explained.
The book is basically James Joyce explaining his novel through the agency of another man. Gilbert, a close friend of James Joyce, wrote this book based on lengthy conversations he had with the novelist.
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