This great modernist masterpiece, which for many readers seems so
intimidating, is one of the great books that can teach us how to live
better lives.
Declan Kiberd shows that Ulysses, far from being the epitome of elitism, was always
intended as a book for the common people, rooted in their experience and offering a
democratic and humane vision of a tolerant, decent life under the dreadful pressures of
the modern world. Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the book’s hero,
shows the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and
mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with
contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of
the people he encounters in the streets of Dublin. In his apparently banal way he sees
deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd
argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of Homer,
Dante and the Bible - all sources that Joyce drew on in the writing of his book. Ulysses
and Us can also be read as a guide to Joyce, his novel and its context in the history of
Ireland, and of Dublin, where the action of Ulysses takes place over a single day. Ulysses
continues to be one of the central books of the twentieth century and this is an
audacious new take on it, designed to remove it from the claustrophobic atmosphere of
the Joyce industry and restore it to its shocking, democratic origins. Kiberd has written a
moving and controversial book, free of literary-critical jargon and specialist concerns.
With it he confirms his position as one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals.
