Strategies in Ulysses: Reading and Re-reading the Novel
Keywords:
James Joyce, Ulysses, naïve reader, Leo Bersani, re-reading, narrative strategyAbstract
Taking Leo Bersani’s proposal for a “ruseful naïveté” in reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, this study considers how a theoretical “naïve reader” would read and re-read Ulysses. Such a reader would journey through a first stage of identifying the core story of the novel, which requires resolving narrative complications, and also a second stage of constructing the life stories of the main characters, which requires integrating the huge amount of information not needed to tell the core story. Ulysses is a good example of a novel that demands to be re-read, and as such this study turns to the early novel theorists György Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin to consider how the reading experience of Ulysses compares with the theory of the novel. Within this structure, and from today’s perspective, Ulysses can be seen to be relatively coherent in that the naïve reader can eventually gain mastery over the preponderance of the text. However, Ulysses certainly changed our concept of reading and re-reading a novel.
References
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