There are any number of things I disagree with in here, starting Ellmann's prima facie ludicrous belief that Joyce intended everything in Ulysses to lead towards one major philosophical statement:

"To those who lived meaninglessly in a brutal and consuming present, Joyce offered a world of accountability and did not shrink from calling it spiritual. To those who, nursed by locally distorted Catholic doctrines, spoke of spiritual realities as if they alone existed, he pointed to the realities of the body's life," (89).

If that's what Joyce was doing, then I'm fully behind it: he'd be doing negative dialectics decades before Adorno. But Ellmann's argument doesn't stop there. He connects the two terms here (materialism and spiritualism) with two other kind-of-sort-of relevant terms (objectivity and subjectivism), and two philosophers who are relevant, but not in the way that Ellmann seems to think (Aristotle and Hume) to make a grandiose metaphysical statement about how puns represent reality because reality is inevitably doubling and folding in on itself or something. He then claims that this is not mystical.

There's a lot going on there, but there are some pretty obvious points to make. First, Aristotle is not a materialist. In fact, Aristotle holds the very position that Ellmann sometimes attributes to Joyce, of 'form' interacting with matter. Aristotle believes in forms, he just doesn't believe that they can function if they transcend matter. Now, true, this puts him in opposition to Hume, but it also puts him in opposition to actual materialists.

Second, Ellmann goes through all of this without mentioning Kant--you know, the guy who made the problems of materialism vs idealism and scepticism vs dogmatism central to European philosophy. Now, Joyce may not have known Kant. But his not knowing Kant is a pretty good indication that he wasn't making the argument Ellmann attributes to him. Joyce was a knowledgeable guy. If he was making a Kantian argument, he would have known he was doing it.

Third, metaphysics of this kind is always mystical.

More important for most readers of Ulysses, however, is the way Ellmann traces Odyssean and Shakespearean tropes and themes through the book. He makes a number of excellent arguments about small moments (particularly interesting is his take on Bloom/Stephen looking into the mirror and seeing Shakespeare), and you don't have to buy the "Joyce solved all the world's intellectual problems" thing to get a lot out of the book.

So, he hasn't convinced me that Joyce had even one remotely coherent political thought (he might have read some anarchism, but was clearly enamored of the movement's destructive aspects--no institutions! no groups!--rather than its positive, communitarian aspects); nor has he convinced me that Ulysses' is a structural masterpiece. But he makes a strong, reasonable case, one that was worth making, and is well worth reading. ( )