It weighs in at a bit more than five pounds; its dimensions demand a cradle. Yet this book is a handsome and welcome achievement despite its bulk. Its reproduction of the 1922 text, its maps and photos of 1904 Dublin; its list of minor characters in Ulysses; its bibliography of scholarship, both old and new; its timeline of Joyce's life, and its exemplary detailed annotations of the text: everything, harvested from the best sources, has been brought together to create the (...) largest volume dedicated to Joyce scholarship ever produced—a book that celebrates the first printing of Joyce's masterpiece. Given its weight and size, its classroom utility is likely limited; given its monumentality, it is a proper hundred-year tribute.What is wholly original about the book's contents are the essays that preface each of the eighteen episodes of the masterpiece. That Joycean scholarship grows upon itself is amply demonstrated by the sophistication and weight of learning the eighteen writers can now display. Almost fifty years have passed since Clive Hart and David Hayman edited a volume with a similar aim. Each of the new essays reveals just how much more there is now to know and say about Ulysses, how much more there is to praise in how Joyce conceived the book, how much more there is to teach, and how unlikely it is that Joycean scholarship will ever be diminished in either its curiosity or its energy. Given the increasing complexity and density of such accumulated knowledge, it is a pleasure to witness the economy and precision shown by so many of the writers. In particular, Robert Spoo's writing about “Nestor,” Maud Ellmann's writing about “Lotus Eaters,” and Vicki Mahaffey's writing about “Nausicaa” demonstrate how concision can make for valuable illumination.But there is a problem with where these essays are positioned. Coming before each of the episodes they introduce, they might condition the mind of a reader new to Ulysses to look upon those episodes as no more than demonstrations of what the scholars think. Catherine Flynn, the book's editor, emphasizes the need of such professional interpretation when she describes the plight of anyone “struggling through Ulysses” and “the key challenges facing the reader.” She is right about how hard it is for any new reader to “get” the book, but the placement of the essays is at odds with her claim that “grappling with the novel's challenges, the reader is pushed toward one of the most important rewards of reading Ulysses: thinking independently.” The prefaces may well impede the reader from thinking independently.Professor Flynn's focus on challenge and difficulty is widely shared throughout the Joycean community and has become a fundamental preoccupation in Joyce scholarship. Taking Joyce's mastery as a given, many Joyceans assume a Talmudic stance in believing, to quote Spinoza, that “the intellectual love of a thing consists in understanding its perfections.” Facing the formidable Joyce, they turn and turn again to explication. They subscribe to the dictum that the youthful Joyce himself, perhaps self-mockingly, set down: “A man of genius makes no mistake. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” But is Ulysses free of error?Fritz Senn, writing about “Ithaca,” does not put himself in opposition to Joyce but in opposition to the presumed inerrancy of Joyce. He argues that the episode displays a troubling disjunction between what Joyce intended to do in the episode and what he did. Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen that in the episode “not only will the reader know everything and know it in the baldest and coldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze.” But readers do not, indeed, get to know all they should, or see all they should see. Senn notes that they “learn next to nothing about Bloom's mother, his birthday, or the exact nature of his father's suicide, although they do learn a lot about such things as the junk in a drawer, the Dublin water supply system, and the addresses of Dublin shops.” Senn asks: “What does the meeting of the two characters amount to? Will it change Stephen so that he might become the author of the book he is in? Does Bloom find a son? Does he become the father that Stephen is supposed to be looking for? The impassive episode does not seem to answer, or to care.” But these are questions about which many a reader might care.Joyce named “Ithaca” as his favorite among the episodes. Senn demonstrates by his care and attentiveness that he too admires it. But by not limiting himself to dutiful reverence, he instead critically examines the Joycean text. His tribute to Joyce is both unsparing and generous.Equally attentive and yet incisive is Katherine O'Callaghan in her examination of “Sirens.” She recognizes the experimental daring of Joyce's strategy of “conveying music through language” in that episode. But her analysis, as penetrating as it is learned, does not leave the reader persuaded that the episode is entirely successful. As she observes, “the reluctance of the musical art to bend to the critical written voice” is a “stumbling block.”Another problematic experiment, “Oxen of the Sun,” which Joyce himself described as “the most difficult episode... both to interpret and to execute,” presents its commentator, Sarah Davison, with the task of explaining how its grandiose mixture of parody, plagiarism, and sheer celebration of myriad English prose styles over the centuries can function without, as she says, “wrongfooting and dissatisfying readers” who assume that the episode “enacts a historical progression only to find themselves disorientated by so many different echoes and cadences.”Were Joycean scholars more devoted to critical judgment than to explication—even when they are faced with the spectacular imposition of genius—the common reader would more likely find fellowship, and less intimidation, when reading a book that is not a sacred text but a human document, written with the extraordinary self-imposed challenges, as well as the problematic results, that only a most extraordinary human could make. (shrink)

This guest column, written by a former president of Emory University, examines arguments made by Jonathan Cole, a former provost of Columbia, in his book The Great American University. Cole illustrates his history of the modern American research university with a vivid comparison between two eminent academic leaders of the last century, Jacques Barzun of Columbia and Frederick Terman of Stanford. Employing data generated by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Institute for Higher Education and Times Higher Education, Cole shows that (...) universities are today ranked in order of prestige and eminence on the basis of their wealth and the magnitude of the support they receive for research activities. American universities, richer than all others, have greater resources to deploy and therefore are considered “the best.” Among them, Columbia and Stanford are among the very best. But, for Cole, Stanford has lately become superior to Columbia because Terman was more forward-looking, more ambitious in securing external support from government and industry, and more interested in building the strength of disciplines close to industry, commerce, and practical results. Barzun was more traditional, interested in supporting and encouraging the humanities, and “stuck in the historical past.” Cole reports that where Terman saw opportunities in the future, Barzun saw threats. Cole's book leaves many questions unanswered. In universities increasingly funded externally, what stance should academic administrators take toward professors more interested in their disciplines than in their employer? What is the fate of the underfunded humanities? What can be done about the stunning increase in tuition prices? Transfixed by Terman's definition of eminence, Cole ignores these difficult realities. (shrink)

The British journalist Christopher Hitchens has recently noted that the extraordinary excitement created by l’affaire Pound, an excitement sustained for now some forty years, is partly the result of having no fewer than three debates going on whenever the poet’s legal situation and his consequent hospitalization are discussed. As Hitchens says, those questions are: “First, was Pound guilty of treason? If not, or even if so, was he mad? Third, was he given privileged treatment for either condition?”1 I propose to (...) discuss all three issues in a way that fairly reflects the fact that I am neither a physician nor a lawyer. What I know of the state of medical expertise, both today and in the period of time from 1943 to 1958 , leads me, as a layman, to believe that there is an enormous latitude of understanding among medical professionals as to the precise meaning of “insanity.” At one extreme, for some distinguished physicians, the term means almost nothing. They see it as a legal term and as therefore irrelevant to them; some of them follow the line of reasoning developed by Thomas Szasz over his long writing career, namely that “mental illness” if not illness in any ordinary sense of the term.2 For other medical practitioners, it does mean something, but only when it is redefined into much smaller subcategories and enriched with much more precise terminology, and when the given patient and his full range of circumstances are considered.What I know of the legal understanding of insanity is that there has been and is now little firm agreement about “insanity” or “madness.” Equally competent juries and courts have been able to set down findings that are more or less plausible on their face but do not seem to comport at all with each other. I tentatively conclude that whatever “insanity” now is in the United States, and whatever it was when Pound was found unfit to stand trial in 1945, the standard is not the lucid simplicity of the M’Naghten test, namely, the ability of the accused to understand the difference between “right” and “wrong.” Human mind, self-awareness, and motivations are vastly more complicated than such a test would imply. 1. Christopher Hitchins, “American Notes,” Times Literary Supplement, 21 Oct. 1983, p. 1160.2. See Thomas Szasz, Insanity for a synthesis of his ideas as formulated in some eighteen books. William M. Chace is professor of English and Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Development at Stanford University. He is author of The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot , Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics , and scholarly essays on writers including Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and James Joyce. He is now working on a study of the ways in which American culture in this century has been subjected to critical analysis. (shrink)

In seventeen secular sermons, composed in a style at once grave, elegant, and concise, Ignatieff offers us his digest of the wisdom—the wisdom of consolation—that he has sought to find in writings as old as the book of Job and as recent as some of the letters of Václav Havel. Concluding the book, Ignatieff says of the authors he has surveyed that the “consolation they offer, it seems to me, lies in their example, in their courage and lucidity, and in (...) their determination to leave something behind that might console us.” Reduced to its basic argumentative structure, then, the book is about the ways in which the desire to find consolation could itself be consoling.This self-reinforcing rhetorical maneuver, not wholly reassuring, is undermined by what some of the selected writers actually believed. Michel de Montaigne, for instance, came in his later years to think that, provided we have the consciousness of simply being alive, “we would have no need for consolation at all.” David Hume, noting the debilities of reason and seeing much of the world as beyond the grasp of human understanding, concluded that “we should abandon the ground of consolation altogether.” Karl Marx, his mind fixed on a post-revolutionary world, envisioned a “utopia beyond the need for consolation.” Abraham Lincoln, whom Ignatieff presents in the most saintly and tragic of colors, had “no secure footing in faith,” but turned to biblical traditions calling for us “to forswear vengeance and judgment.” And what is consoling about such traditions? “That we are not condemned to live imprisoned in the rhetoric, foolishness, and mendacity of the present.” But that is where Lincoln lived, inconsolably, and where we too live.Ignatieff begins his book, and his most complex of sermons, with Job. Rendered truly miserable by God—his crops and animals destroyed, his family annihilated, his body burning with pain—Job never wavers in his faith. The God who had made him suffer is the God in whom Job places all his trust. Despite advice from friends to confess his wrongs, Job admits of nothing. He wants only to understand, and from God himself, why he suffers. The answer he gets is that he has no right to ask, for to ask is to challenge the almighty authority of God. Ignatieff writes that “God demands absolute obedience as the condition of consolation,” but the text nowhere has God offering consolation of any kind on any terms to Job. His lands and animals are returned to him and he is given a new family, but his inquiries to God go unanswered. Negotiation is out of the question. Compensated, he is not consoled.Wherever he looks—and he looks far and wide in his reading—Ignatieff wants to find consolation. But when in this book he comes to the heroic figure of Primo Levi, who saw with utmost clarity the power of humankind to do evil, Ignatieff at last acknowledges the elusiveness of consolation: “History has no consolations to offer because it never ends and its meaning is never settled.” Nonetheless, he goes on to say, of the writers he has presented, that “we should keep faith with them and defend the truths they bequeathed to us.” Alas, that legacy leads us again and again to see, despite Ignatieff's valiant efforts, just how much of life is inconsolable. (shrink)

Some writers are drawn, almost as if hexed, to pronounce on matters of state, politics, and, occasionally, economic policy. Margaret Atwood is one such writer. Her book Payback suffers from its aspiration to create an idealistic and implausible world to take the place of the one we have. This imaginary world would adopt all currently attractive ecological and friendly principles. In positing such a utopia, Atwood puts aside the admirable acuity she has when investigating the real world of literature and (...) veers away into the world of politics, economics, and social life, where she reveals herself a romantic. In so doing, she takes her place, a modest one, in the ranks of twentieth-century writers (Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Brecht) who also ventured into the construction of unworkable social visions that would supplant what they saw around them. Her adventure, while less ambitious, is no less naive than theirs. (shrink)