That seems to be my professor's take on Ulysses for today. Except every class he's telling us that the episode(s) we're covering that day is (are) a radical departure from everything that has gone before. That may be true, but it's really starting to sound like not a big deal anymore. I love the book, and the course, and the teacher (dude bought me tea and biscuits, yo), but I swear it's like every week we're starting a whole new course and we're supposed to throw everything we learned before out the window. It's starting to get a bit frustrating, considering all the reading and work we've been doing--at least, that I know I've been doing.

Today's theme seemed to be, 'Nothing means anything and everything is an illusion (Michael--a trick is something a whore does for money). And that you can't really say anything.'

But

a) I don't believe that.

b) I doubt Joyce believed that.

c) I even doubt my professor believes that.

Also, it seems like a hell of a lot of work and pain for Joyce to go through (seven years and seven hundred pages of writing and research and revision, and then litigation and court cases in the US and charges of obsecenity, etc.) all to say that, really, it's impossible to say anything and all that malarky.

I am reminded of Gardner's remark that no one would bother to write a book if they thought writing a book was not worth the bother.

So, no, I don't think Ulysses is a book that eats itself alive or destroys itself and deconstructs itself, per se. Joyce had much too big an ego to undermine the fruits of that ego.

Also, how exactly would one write a novel 'without any characters'--that had 'abandoned characterization'? Hawkes tried it and got probably as close as anyone will ever get (someone will prove me wrong, mayhap, eventually): but even he ended up having characters in his novels. Because one of the quirks of the novel is that it requires characters. In order to be a novel.

So now I have to do what I did when I read The Confidence-Man and learn to see past all the apparent tricks and apparent deconstruction, etc.

Yeah. My thesis is on Thomism in Ulysses, essentially comparing the famous 'Yes' soliloquey of Molly Bloom and the other 'Yes' statements scattered throughout the book to Aquinas' dictum that being is convertible with the good.