Literary Criticism: For sticking close to the text of 'Ulysses' and resisting theory, Terence Killeen is your only man.
If sections of Ulysses are ever placed on the Leaving Cert course - and stranger things could happen - then Terence Killeen will be your only man. His analysis keeps close to the action in the text, eschewing all of the more wide-ranging interpretations, whether feminist, psychoanalytic or post-colonial. As far as he is concerned, this is an experimental narrative about a single day in the lives of certain Dubliners and not a treatise on feminist theory, the psychoanalytic process or the post-colonial condition.
Killeen does allow himself some extended, interesting passages on those paragraphs in which Stephen Dedalus or Leopold Bloom veer away from the actual world into fantasy. Being a newspaperman - he is a sub-editor on this paper - he has clever, caustic things to say of the Aeolus episode, set in the offices of the Freeman's Journal. This, he says, "gives the impression of people existing in a cut-off world of their own, unaware of anything outside the confines of their own circle - and this despite ostensibly being the people with their fingers on the pulse of public opinion".
The most ingenious - and contestable - analysis concerns the Scylla and Charybdis episode. Killeen sees Stephen's theory about Shakespeare as a meditation on paternity, animated by an intense misogyny (in the sense that Stephen seems to resent his mother for giving birth to him and then for leaving him alone in the world after her early death). This would explain the "hysterical" element in Stephen's analysis. The analogy with Hamlet would then work as follows: Bloom is both Shakespeare and the usurped King Hamlet, Stephen is Hamnet, Shakespeare and the avenging Prince, while Molly is the unreliable Ann Hathaway and Queen Gertrude (with Boylan doubling as the cuckolding brother of Shakespeare and as Claudius).
Many readers will find this the most interesting section of the book - but it is itself a theory (Killeen's) about another theory (Stephen's). In general, however, our guide restrains himself to humbler points-in- passing about this or that episode. On these matters he is unfailingly accurate and sensible. He notes that the singers in Sirens are men, not women (as in Homer), and that they are seduced by what they themselves sing. He astutely remarks on the sudden appearance of charged poetic lines in the midst of the technical language of the Ithaca episode ("The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit"). And he rightly rebukes those early interpreters of Penelope who were so taken aback by the generalised nature of Molly Bloom's sexual desire "that they decided she had to be a slut".
These are all worthwhile insights which might have been more fully developed, but Killeen is too cautious a textualist to extend such commentaries. Doubtless, he goes in fear of that moment when the pursuit of a theory might seem manic.
While it's true that many theorists of the past two decades have lost all touch with the texts they claim to illuminate, it must also be said that the resistance to theory can itself become an obsession. Before the publication of this useful and cogent book, Killeen was known for a series of bitter attacks in this newspaper on such gifted Irish critics as Seamus Deane, Emer Nolan and others. It's good to read in his preface that he now feels he may have derived inspiration from reading critics whose work and reputation he once so violently attacked. I hope that readers will profit as greatly from his commentaries as he has from the work of fellow Irishmen and Irishwomen who try to understand the writings of Joyce.
Declan Kiberd is the author of Inventing Ireland (Vintage) and Irish Classics (Granta)
Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses By Terence Killeen Wordwell, 258pp. €15