Landmark: the ruined monument

When Wyndham Lewis attacked Ulysses in 1927, his appeared to be the most unlikely accusation: an excessive simplicity of mind. Forced underground by censors during its serial publication, smuggled out of France on pages folded into letters and parcels, freighted with those expectations of secret wisdom that attend a forbidden book, this was a cryptoclassic already before it was read, a subversive colossus; it could hardly fall to Lewis's charge that it had no ideas at all. Yet a critical description of Ulysses might well bear out Lewis's critique. Here is the story of the average sensual man, Leopold Bloom, whose middling fortunes in middle age remain ostensibly unchanged in the novel, which runs the short course of a single day. Canvasser for newspaper advertisements, he crosses paths with Stephen Dedalus, a 22-year-old who has already outlived his promise as Dublin's scholastic prodigy, whose career as artist remains wholly unrealized. Mr. Bloom rescues Stephen at the end of a day of debauchery, yet the quality and significance of their exchange is at best indeterminate. The older man returns in the end to the bed of his wife, Molly, whose (mostly) mute exchange with him does little to redeem the fact that she has entertained another man there during the day. If narrative generates and sustains the potential for meaning in a novel, if the plot is indeed the load-bearing element in the structure of significance, then it seems that Joyce has used a pennyworth of tale to hang a hundredweight of – well, of details, minutely recorded circumstances, but not those eventualities and changes that define the salient themes and values of a major work.