James Joyce's Jerusalem

Introduction

Ulysses is not an easy book to read, even today a hundred years after its appearance. It is dense and does not unfold like stories told before it. Joyce was breaking new ground in a way that he thought would serve his artistic purpose. His use of the dialogue of inner consciousness went farther than others doing the same at the time. Everything about it broke ranks with what had come before it in English literature. Joyce was a master literary magician, and the world he conjured up in Ulysses changed literature forever. It has “kept the professors guessing for a hundred years,” as Joyce famously predicted. The seminal nature of Ulysses became evident during the decades after its appearance, when professorships and chairs dedicated to James Joyce were established in prestigious universities around the globe. With all these centers of learning, criticism of Ulysses was widespread and varied to the point where over the years its extremes reached absurdity. It expanded and then collapsed back in upon itself, and today Joyce is just another dead white European male, made irrelevant and committed to the dustbin of literary history.

One of the reasons Ulysses and other monumental literary achievements by dead white males are ignored today, is that few if any can create anything with similar artistic merit. Today, the default reaction to that reality is to claim that the playing field is tilted. Keep that in mind when considering the reality facing the great writers of the early twentieth century such as Joyce. They were following the great Russian novelists. If ever there was a time when aspiring writers should have hung up their pens thinking “what’s the point,” it was then. They tried regardless, and the world of literature is richer for it. Strive to surpass the best that came before you. Who would have thought that this simple truth would need to be relearned in 2023? Here we will be dedicated to resurrecting the dead white males, and females, and black and tan and all who strove and sometimes emulated and sometimes surpassed others who came before them.

The project at hand is a series dealing with Jewish themes in Ulysses.

Some of the topics:

1. The Jewishness of Leopold Bloom. He was not Jewish and Joyce goes to great lengths demonstrating that fact, while knowing that readers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, would consider him a Jew.

2. The Treatment of Antisemitism in Ulysses. The Citizen, and Joyce’s deconstruction of Jew-hatred.

3. The Jewish Structure of Ulysses. I propose a Jewish schemata, like Linati’s and Ellman’s, based on the structure of the Jewish prayer, the Amida.

It will be fun. The first installment will be in a week. Join me!