Customer Reviews

The Cast of Characters: A Reading of Ulysses

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

THE CAST OF CHARACTERS has made a valuable contribution to the appreciation of James Joyce's ULYSSES. There are books on this subject that are so technical as to be hard to use by the general reader. There are others so rudimentary as to provide little beyond background or plot summaries. Paul Schwaber succeeds in walking a tightrope between these two extremes. To novice readers his book serves as a supportive guide, but even seasoned Joyceans will find much to reward them. The author's psychoanalytic approach is deft and non-doctrinal. He suggests new perspectives but does not push his points. One of the leading book critics of the late 20C, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, found THE CAST OF CHARACTERS to be "a brilliant work of criticism." Judith Butler, a name to conjure with, praises it for "combining psychoanalytic insight with humane wisdom." Enough said?

Apparently not! I have yet to see a book provoke responses so vituperative as this one. The appropriately self-dubbed "Least Helpful Reviewer" finds it to be "a mishmash, unorganized, a useless mess." This toplofty pronouncement comes as no surprise: "Least Helpful" has reviewed so many books on Amazon that it would be unreasonable to expect him to have read them all. The equally aptly named "Virag" finds the book to be "bombastic bull by a tenured professor who has said nothing valid in forty years." (How Virag knows this, who can tell?) Prospective readers are free to ignore such ad hominem rant and make up their own minds about the worth of THE CAST OF CHARACTERS. Only the Joyce Police will decry this encroachment upon their private turf.

As James Joyce warns: never believe a psychoanalyst. It is formalized blackmail, said Joyce.

This overstuffed and tedious work, as with much alleged Joyce commentary, is by an academe more concerned with publishing or perishing than with illuminating our path with Ulysses through the treacherous Dublin of our human psyche. This book reveals more about the inner author than about the characters of James Joyce, whom the author incredibly misreads and misinterprets. I would live to regret having this thickly pedantic person as my psychoanalyst.

Specific passages from Joyce he incredibly misreads according to his own unconcious concerns and prejudice, including the famous Columbanus bestrode Stephen's prostrate mother, which he reads as Stephen going forth on mission rather than the commonly accepted oedipal reading, rare for a psychoanalyst.

A mishmash unorganized, a useless mess. Please see instead Daniel R. Schwarz's excellent and ever brilliant Reading Joyce's Ulysses if you seek actual and rewarding insight into James Joyce's Ulysses and not the page packing and uninformed wordiness of one not expert in the field.