ti¤cation between Conrad and the notorious Kurtz. But in its zeal to un-
mask the hidden ideologies of these and related novels, critics seem to have
forgotten what brought them to Ulysses or Heart of Darkness in the ¤rst
place—namely, the uniqueness of these novels as works of art. Plenty of nov-
els, poems, and plays deal with Irish nationalism and British oppression, but
they have little of Joyce’s appeal. Indeed, Ulysses, read as it is around the
world by a steadily growing audience, is admired ¤rst and foremost for the
brilliance, inventiveness, and power of its language and rhetoric, beginning
with those absurd advertising jingles that go through Bloom’s mind as he
wanders the Dublin streets—jingles like “What is home without Plumtree’s
potted meat? Incomplete.” And these slogans are never merely fortuitous:
Bloom’s own home, after all, is “incomplete” without Molly’s “plums” and
“potted meat.” And the rhyme echo relates to the musical motifs associated
with Molly and her lover, Blazes Boylan.
Then, too, despite all the “newness” of postcolonial theory, it is a ques-
tion whether most discussions of nationalism and imperialism in Ulysses are
really all that different from such early Joyce studies as William T. Noon’s
Joyce and Aquinas or Kevin Sullivan’s Joyce Among the Jesuits. Of the former,
a recent reviewer, Cary Makinson, for Amazon.com writes:
This book has been a classic in Joyce studies for many years. Joyce had
said famously that if you wanted to understand his writing, you ¤rst
had to understand Aquinas. Jumping off from this typically Joycean
hyperbole, Noon explicates Joyce’s Catholicism from the angle of Tho-
mistic Aesthetics. A technical/theological subject made very readable.
A must for any wannabe Joyce scholar.Joyce and Aquinas was published in 1957, a time when it was still assumed
that to understand a novel meant to understand its author’s “ideas.” In the
wake of structuralist and then post-structuralist theory, such notions went
out the window: after all, it is argued, we cannot trust the author to under-
stand the ideological formations that have shaped his consciousness, and it
is hence up to the critic to unmask these. Yet, in the long run, the Thomis-
tic philosophy on which Joyce was raised probably ¤gures just as largely in
his verbal universe as do his representations of nationalism or imperialism.
Ulysses is, in any case, sui generis in its fusion of particular motifs and ideo-
logical markers. Even Finnegans Wake has a different radius of discourse.
It is this uniqueness of the artwork that cultural studies downplays. In-
deed, in its more extreme incarnation, cultural theory can dispense with
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