I Hate the Smell of Literary Criticism in the Morning
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Loading... - Elijah Hughes
- 10 Mar 2023
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At the butt-crack of dawn, I hoofed it down Palm Canyon Drive to beat the crowd at the Schultzbucks coffee dispensary. This was a “Reserve Roastery” where java sommeliers elegantly poured foamy masterpieces too resplendent to slurp. I ordered a drip.
I snagged a sun-scorched table outside and hid from humanity behind my book, Hugh Kenner’s “Ulysses.” Yep, the good professor title-jacked Joyce’s novel for his own 182-page critical analysis of said novel. Cute one, Hugh.
I gulped my scalded bean water and bushwhacked through Kenner’s riff on the Circe episode. The Nighttown episode, for all you Nabokovian Homerphobics.
Circe is a Surrealist wet nightmare. It makes The Rocky Horror Picture Show look like Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. The border between Leopold Bloom’s imagination and the cobblestone reality of a Dublin whorehouse collapses. The exterior world and sadomasochistic fantasies comingle into a mutating vortex of lunacy. Everything shifts and twists: space, time, Bloom’s gender. The scene undergoes impossible transformations like a werewolf snared inside a time machine repeatedly jumping back and forth between moonrise and sunrise. Ulysses’ 15th episode is physically impossible, intellectually indiscernible, and emotionally damaging. You will be triggered.
Circe is also the funniest section of the funniest novel ever written. If Circe were a stand-alone novella, stage play, comic book, what have you, it would still be the funniest work of art in the Western Canon. Hands down.
“Ulysses?” somebody mumbled. Read More…
