Books: Ulysses Revisited

In U.S. intellectual life, James Joyce's Ulysses* has long been a touchstone—and a sacred object. Anyone admitting dislike or incomprehension of it is almost automatically drummed out of any self-respecting literary regiment. Now, writing in the New Statesman and Nation, one of the best critics on either side of the Atlan tic has reassessed Ulysses. Says Britain's V. S. Pritchett:

"We needed a memory as exhaustive as Joyce's [own] as we sink into the bog—so misleadingly called a stream—of Irish consciousness. Joyce is the theologian of the interior morass ... As for meaning, Joyce attempts to replace it by 'pattern,' and, in...

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