by Daniel D’Angelo

Michael Groden is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Ulysses in Progress (1977) and Ulysses in Focus: Genetic, Textual, and Personal Views (2010), general editor of The James Joyce Archive (63 vols., 1977-79), and coeditor of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (1994, 2nd ed. 2005), Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes (2004), Praharfeast: James Joyce in Prague (012), and Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The Johns Hopkins Guide (2012). He is currently writing a memoir about spending a life with Joyce’s Ulysses.

Daniel D’Angelo: You first read Ulysses as an undergraduate student at Dartmouth in 1966. Forty-six years later, you’re an internationally prominent Joyce scholar who has taught the book pretty much every academic year, including summers, since first teaching it in the ’70s. How many times have you read it, cover to cover, for pleasure—and how has your appreciation for the text changed over the years?

Michael Groden: For my studies, mostly I skim it for the details—I reread sections, chapters. I recently read it again for a memoir I’m writing. I’ve read it, beginning to end, over forty years, probably ten times. Every time it’s significant. Every time it’s somewhat different. And every time I just needed to get back to the text. The book gets different as you age—your relationship to the story changes as you change. When you’re younger than the characters, or the same age, or older, it changes. I teach Ulysses to students who are close in age to what I was when I first read it. And every year I also teach it to adults at the 92^nd Street Y in New York City—folks in their forties, fifties, and sixties. I love reading it myself, and having the experience of watching and teaching others as they read it.

When I first read it as a sophomore in college, the first novel in a course in a Fall term, I had come back to college from summer break. We spent four lectures a week for three weeks discussing it. And I didn’t love the Stephen Dedalus stuff at the start, but as soon as we got to Leopold Bloom… I was transformed. I was already considering changing my major from Mathematics to English, and this experience changed everything. I read it once more as an undergraduate and twice more at Princeton in graduate school.

D’Angelo: Why did it hit you so strongly?

Groden: The memoir I’m writing now is trying to figure out why that happened. In the book, as readers, we’re going so deeply into Leopold Bloom’s mind, a mind where nothing is censored. Reading Ulysses solidified everything about pursuing my current career. Mathematics gave me a lot of satisfaction back then, but there was something about the access to humanity and human lives that fiction offered.

D’Angelo: Is it the greatest novel of all time?

Groden: For me, yes, it is. I’m very skeptical and suspicious of value judgments that seem to be objective, because they aren’t. And what makes it great for me is also what turns a lot of people off.

D’Angelo: In your opinion, what’s Ulysses about?

Groden: To me, it’s largely a book about three flawed people trying to make their way in life: a married couple, Leopold and Molly, where each person is devotedly in love with the other, and the younger character, Stephen, who has ambitions to be a poet, but those ambitions are thwarted by drinking and partying. It’s open-ended; it doesn’t get resolved. It is set in only one day. Even if it presents itself in so many different and strange ways, it still functions as a novel.

D’Angelo: How do you develop and exercise your expertise with Joyce’s work?

Groden: I’m primarily a manuscript scholar. I analyze Ulysses in progress. I love to watch Joyce at work; to watch him revise and figure out how changing one word makes such a huge huge difference. I don’t find him to be an attractive person, and I don’t like reading about him. But, I find him fascinating as a writer. Watching Joyce write, by looking at his drafts, notes, and correspondence, can be a lot of fun. I was one of the first people who got to see the manuscripts when they were purchased by the National Library of Ireland. I’ve looked at the page where he applied a major revision to the last line of the book: “and I said I would (Joyce crosses out “would” and writes “will”) Yes.”

The difference between Joyce and a writer like me, an ordinary writer… it’s not just that he can quote Aristotle and whoever else. He also knew the power of grammar, syntax, and word choice. He could really control those changes.

D’Angelo: To put it flatly, what’s so great about Ulysses?

Groden: It’s a great book because it’s about a character you really care about, Leopold Bloom, who you follow in incredible detail through a day of his life. You watch him respond and react with such an openness and generosity to experience. And you have all these storytelling devices, style changes, and methods of literary conveyance. Joyce puts you on a magic carpet ride. You’ll either enjoy it or resist it. And if you enjoy it, you’ll never get anything quite like this. The story is strong enough that it can be told in so many ways. Even if it were just one of those styles, it would be great, but not this great.

One of the strangest and greatest things about Ulysses is that it still feels like it takes place in our time. The issues haven’t changed that much: there’s very little real poverty, but very little real comfortable living. There are so many people not quite getting by, or just getting by. And Bloom seems to be almost comfortable. The book deals with a group of people whom readers can still relate to in times like now, when the economy is so bad in so many places in the world, including in Ireland.  Setting the book in Ireland is so significant.

D’Angelo: What’s the best part of Ulysses?

Groden: Where Bloom remembers the time he was lying on the hill outside of Dublin and he proposed to Molly, and she remembers it too at the very end of the book. At the end of Bloom’s recollection of the memory is the statement: “Me. and me now.” This beautiful memory is made quite sad. It’s in the Lestrygonians section, on page 167 and 168 in any printing of the first edition.

One of my favorite episodes is Eumaeus, the episode that is written badly, intentionally. I just love the style. It’s quite hard to write really badly when you are a good writer, and Joyce does an amazing job of it, stretching sentences out beyond belief, using two clichés in the same sentence to say the same thing. He worked really hard at writing really badly.

D’Angelo: Why do you study this? Why do this for over forty years? Why not focus more on other works and other authors?

Groden: Ulysses is the rare kind of book that has withstood every change in the way critics, students, and scholars talk about literature. Everything from deconstructionism to feminism came to find Ulysses worth talking about.

When I first read it as a student, I had taken class after class that implied that literature led up to Modernism and then fell off from it. By the time Structuralism and Post-structuralism had come in, the whole emphasis had shifted to Romanticism. And at that time, in the late ’60s and ’70s, Ulysses just wasn’t as central. And when I moved to Canada, it really wasn’t very central. I went from taking for granted that people did want to read and know Ulysses to needing to fight for it.

I fell into deciding to teach Ulysses not as something that just had to be read, but something I needed to convince people that they needed to read it. I expected them to just want to know this book, and that didn’t work. I’ve made it my job to 1) get students through the book, 2) get them to enjoy it, and 3) to love it. Out of every twenty students, there are usually two or three who will say they love it by the end, and half will say they enjoy it.

D’Angelo: You mentioned that Ulysses found relevance in feminism. Can you explain that?

Groden: Well, it is a very male book. You have to read a lot to get to Molly Bloom’s chapter. And not everybody considers Molly an admirable portrayal of a woman. But there are ways in which people find what she says really startling. I’ve heard more than one female writer say that Joyce made it OK for women to write by opening up the possibility that a woman’s experience is as important as a man’s, by being only exactly what it is. This is also true of anybody who’s part of a minority.

I find Ulysses to be very interesting as a picture of masculinity and a redefined sense of what it is to be male. Bloom is kind of passive and in some ways, feminine. Some people are really bothered by his lack of will and assertion.

D’Angelo: What is Joyce’s greatest impact on literature?

Groden: He opened up the notion that anything can be written about. Almost any city and any cultural group in a city could be the subject of a big work of fiction. His impact on stylistic experimentation was also huge. And he showed, uniquely, how you could use the styles from the past to tell a current story.

T.S. Eliot, who wrote one of the first reviews of Ulysses, said that Joyce made the modern world possible for art. Eliot also wrote that the book is all about the futility of life. He got that wrong. Eliot saw Ulysses as a fictional equivalent of “The Waste Land,” and felt that Joyce used The Odyssey to illustrate the futility of storytelling, that the best stuff was all behind us. I don’t think that’s why Joyce used The Odyssey. It wasn’t about making a value judgment, or about showing a culture that appeared to be beyond being redeemed by art. I think that Ulysses offers as profound and full a picture of modern life as fiction can give.

Michael Groden’s suggested critical reading, all available for purchase online.

• Ulysses by Hugh Kenner, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Ulysses and Us by Declan Kiberd, W.W. Norton.
• Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses by Margot Norris, Palgrave Macmillan.