Jocoserious Joyce

...When Ulysses isn't fooling us, it is likely to be setting us up...

...Joyce's Ulysses is not the Piltdown Man...

...Joyce's detailed and definitive undermining of the traditional notions about identity of character, the relationship between author and text, reader and author, reader and text is also manifestly true...

...It's Mr...

...I don't happen to be one of those who regard such a prank as hilariously amusing...

...This book tells a similar story, not about the location of the house but the location of the character of Leopold Bloom himself, and the joke is on every person who has read the book "seriously" since its publication...

...Mark Patrick Hederman There is a story told at nearly every Joycean occasion in Dublin: Tourists trying to establish the exact location of Leopold Bloom's house on Eccles Street are met by a local street vendor who tells them: "No, it wasn't that house, it was the one down the road...

...I tend to agree with Harriet Shaw Weaver who wrote to Joyce: "You are very good for the soul, I think, medicinal, you are so unflattering to our human nature...

...Sure me mother knew him well...

...Because Bell sees Ulysses as a hoax, he describes it as a festival "mocking authority and celebrating folly" and envisages the whole Joycean project in "the spirit of Mercurial Malachi, that enigmatic, potent blend of malice, wit, acumen, and horseplay...

...She was always in and out of that house as a kid...

...I accept that Ulysses is a hoax, a Trojan horse in the citadel of the novel...

...Bell sees this festival of fools as the last word in Joycean criticism and regards readers who look for a traditional narrative, characters with continuous homogeneous identities, or some thematic significant purpose in the novel as victims of the Joycean hoax or predatory egotists foisting personal obsessions onto an inimical and refractory screen, ingeniously designed to trap such foolishness...

...he is only paring his fingernails while we are busily, foolishly misreading signs and contriving meanings...

...So, though you are neither priest nor doctor of medicine, I think you have something of both—the Reverend James Joyce, S.J., M.D...

...And the seminar collapses in knowing laughter...

...If I am to take Professor Bell's analysis of Ulysses to what appear to be his ultimate conclusions, I get the impression that he does see analogies in such cases and does regard such a hoax, in the case of this novel at least, as hugely funny...

...It is described in Finnegans Wake as Joyce's attempt to "utter an epical forged cheque on the public for his own private use...

...But I cannot agree with the rehabilitation of Buck Mulligan as the impetus, spirit, and all-pervading inscape of the novel...

...For those who do not remember, this was the name given to remains, brought to scientific notice in 19I2, which had been artificially treated to simulate a primitive form of man...

...I disagree with Robert Bell about the "private use" for which such work was undertaken...

...The game is to "discover a minute hint or network of connections revealing the novel's ultimate meaning...

...He sees Joyce as a "fabulous mountebank" who invented a game for readers called Eureka...

...which can be played on the monopoly board of Ulysses by any number of readers for any number of centuries...

...Even such famous critics as Harold Bloom are caught describing his namesake Leopold as "the most lovable person in Western fiction," while Joycean critics of more recent vintage dissolve with laughter because, as in the story of the emperor's new clothes, the truth of the matter is there was no Bloom there at all...

...Professor Bell, once a columnist for Commonweal, maintains that there is no meaningful purpose to this work other than that of humiliating and ridiculing anyone searching for such a meaning...

...Joyce remains adamantly neutral, content to let his characters and readers struggle to impose theories and interpretations upon his creation...

...Joyce, as author, is hiding behind the text doubled up with laughter at the hilarious efforts of would-be disciples to scrape some message from it...

...The author would have us relish such hoaxes played by the "Irish clown," the "great joker at the universe...

...This book is cogently argued, scrupulously annotated, and written in a vigorously readable style...

...The hungry sheep look up and are tickled to death...

...38: 13 March J992 Commonweal...

...Leopold Bloom's house you're lookin' for...

...I also sympathize with Richard Ellmann's perception of Joyce as an explorer for humankind with whom we are still trying to catch up...

...In terms of the title of this book, Jocoserious Joyce, I am grateful to Bell for his brilliant elaboration of the first two syllables and the first half of Joyce's "oxymoronic vision," but I would hope for more openness toward the second half of both...

...If this were all, I think I would prefer to watch The Three Stooges than wade through Ulysses for my "seriocomic" laughs...

...Real readers have been cautioned or humiliated to the point of disintegrating laughter...

...The forgery was sufficiently convincing to generate scholarly attention for over forty years...

...As well as its own impressive argument it gives a panoramic overview of Joycean scholarship in the last decade...

...Bell's view is that Joyce wrote a celebration of "folly" in the tradition of Cervantes, Rabelais, Sterne, Swift, etc., that the medium is farce which "merrily defies logic, common sense, decency, probability, and propriety," and "with its comic preference for flux instead of form, folly instead of logic, it...punctures certainties, mocks identity, and plays havoc...

...I would agree with the attempt to dissociate the Stephen of Ulysses from the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...