Against Ulysses

Abstract Let Us Approach Ulysses as naively as possible, while admitting that in the case of Ulysses this decision can hardly be anything but a ruse. The ruseful naiveté I have in mind will consist in our pretending not to have any extratextual information about the novel—in particular, information about Joyce’s elaborate scheme of Holmeric correspondences and about the geography and history of Ireland’s capital city. In saying this, I of course expose our naiveté as, precisely, a decision: it is only because we know how important Homer and Dublin are in Ulysses that we can refer to a reading ignorant of that importance as naive. I do not mean that it is natural to read any novel in a state of cultural ignorance. I do, however, want to suggest that it would not be naive to set about reading La chartreuse de parme, War and Peace, and Moby Dick without, in the cases of Stendhal and Tolstoy, more than a fairly general, nonspecialist’s knowledge of Napoleon’s campaigns in Belgium and Russia, and, for Melville’s work, cetological expertise.