Joyce's Visions

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2004 by Phillips, Brian

And this is the most important conclusion we may draw from our extended reading: that if Joyce's clouded vision is a flaw in the book's presentation, it is a flaw that gives life to its own compensation. Bloom's heavy-falling thoughts-"Just that moment I was thinking"-have a power which is different from, not less than, the power of a more accessible narrative style. Joyce refracts the outside world through the prism of his characters' minds; he strikes style like a tuning fork to sound their constant notes. The direction of a great novelist's innovation is often away from his weaknesses, and by showing us reality in its responsive negative, by implying the world through its presence in the thoughts of his characters, Joyce devises an escape from his limitations as a descriptive writer that fully engages his strength as a writer of character. In the same moment he essentially invents a new kind of reading, in which the note of reality enters, not at once through the visual imagination, but slowly, through flashes of insight in the pause after deductive thought. We must judge fiction not by its success in this or that area, but by its total effect. If the difficulties of Ulysses are the price of the inexpressible joy of reading Mr. Bloom, it is a price we are happy to pay.

Fiction at its greatest allows us to hold a whole world suspended in our minds, bringing into the mind a singular apprehension of what normally lies outside it. Ulysses does this, as Melville writes that fiction should do it, by bringing us nature "unfettered, exhilarated, in effect transformed." It does so with great warmth, good humor, and a compassionate vision of humankind. Pass by the book's detractors. These qualities are too rare in fiction not to cherish them wherever they are found.