What is so staggering about Ulysses is the fact that behind a thousand veils nothing lies hidden; that it turns neither toward the mind nor toward the world, but, as cold as the moon looking on from cosmic space, allows the drama of growth, being, and decay to pursue its course.
—Carl Jung[208]
In a review in The Dial, T. S. Eliot said of Ulysses: "I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape." He went on to assert that Joyce was not at fault if people after him did not understand it: "The next generation is responsible for its own soul; a man of genius is responsible to his peers, not to a studio full of uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs."[209]
Ezra Pound wrote, "All men should 'Unite to give praise to Ulysses'; those who will not, may content themselves with a place in the lower intellectual orders." He claimed that in writing Ulysses, "this super-novel", Joyce surpassed Gustave Flaubert, Miguel de Cervantes, Henry James, and Marcel Proust, concluding that, besides François Rabelais, he "can think of no other prose writer whose proportional status in pan-literature is not modified by the advent of Ulysses."[210]
The essayist John Eglinton wrote of Joyce's method: "Mr Joyce has wished to devise a species of literary notation which will express the interuptedness of life. We cannot hold our minds to any one purpose or idea for more than a few moments at a time". He interprets Joyce's purpose as "produc[ing] a work of virgin art!"[211]
William Carlos Williams found Joyce's style in Ulysses richer than in his previous works. He called it a "priestly style and Joyce is himself a priest...Joyce discloses the X-Ray eyes of the confessional, we see…the naked soul…[Joyce] has compared up his reader with God."[211]
Ulysses has been called "the most prominent landmark in modernist literature", a work where life's complexities are depicted with "unprecedented, and unequalled, linguistic and stylistic virtuosity".[212] That style has been called the finest example of stream-of-consciousness in modern fiction, with Joyce going deeper and farther than any other novelist in interior monologue and stream of consciousness.[213] This technique has been praised for its faithful representation of the flow of thought, feeling, and mental reflection, as well as shifts of mood.[214]
According to Declan Kiberd, "Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking."[5] S. L. Goldberg has argued that interior monologue in Ulysses is rooted in Joyce's epiphany technique. For Goldberg, the epiphany is "the real artistic (and dramatic) unit of Joyce's 'stream-of-consciousness' writing. What he renders dramatically are minds engaged in the apprehension of epiphanies—the elements of meaning apprehended in life."[215] Another critic has identified four distinct epiphany techniques in Joyce's work, noting their use in Ulysses, from the simplest device, such as the revelation of Gerty Macdowell’s limp, to the more complex, such as the bowl symbolism in "Telemachus". Cited as an example of Joyce’s major epiphany technique—quidditas produced directly—is the revelation of Molly Bloom as "female essence".[216]
Literary critic Edmund Wilson noted that Ulysses attempts to render "as precisely and as directly as it is possible in words to do, what our participation in life is like—or rather, what it seems to us like as from moment to moment we live."[217] Stuart Gilbert said that the "personages of Ulysses are not fictitious"[218] but that "these people are as they must be; they act, we see, according to some lex eterna, an ineluctable condition of their very existence".[219] Through these characters Joyce "achieves a coherent and integral interpretation of life".[219]
Joyce uses "metaphors, symbols, ambiguities, and overtones which gradually link themselves together so as to form a network of connections binding the whole" work.[214] This system of connections gives the novel a wide, more universal significance, as "Leopold Bloom becomes a modern Ulysses, an Everyman in a Dublin which becomes a microcosm of the world."[220] Eliot called this system the "mythic method": "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history".[221] Novelist Vladimir Nabokov called Ulysses a "divine work of art" and the greatest masterpiece of 20th-century prose,[222] and said that "it towers above the rest of Joyce's writing" with "noble originality, unique lucidity of thought and style".[223] Psychology professor Charles Fernyhough called Ulysses "the archetypal stream of consciousness novel".[224]
The book had its critics, largely in response to its then-uncommon inclusion of sexual elements. Shane Leslie called Ulysses "literary Bolshevism ... experimental, anti-conventional, anti-Christian, chaotic, totally unmoral".[225] Karl Radek called it "a heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema camera through a microscope".[226] Sisley Huddleston, writing for the Observer, wrote: "I confess that I cannot see how the work upon which Mr Joyce spent seven strenuous years, years of wrestling and of agony, can ever be given to the public."[227] Virginia Woolf wrote, "Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster."[228] James Douglas, in the Sunday Express, said it contained "secret sewers of vice ... canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images, and pornographic words" and "revolting blasphemies" that "debases and perverts and degrades the noble gift of imagination and wit and lordship of language".[229] Writing in America Magazine in 1934, the Jesuit Francis X. Talbot vehemently decried Judge Woolsey's recent decision that Ulysses was not obscene, adding, "Only a person who had been a Catholic, only one with an incurably diseased mind, could be so diabolically venomous toward God, toward the Blessed Sacrament, toward the Virgin Mary."[230]
In his review in The Outlook, Arnold Bennett expressed his lack of admiration for Joyce detailing one day in 700 pages. He wrote, "Given sufficient time, paper, childish caprice, and obstinacy, one might easily write over seven thousand pages about twenty hours of life." Bennett also opposed Valéry Larbaud's view that Joyce elaborately planned and organized the day he wrote about. Bennett wrote, "[Joyce] apparently thinks there is something truly artistic and high minded in playing the lout to the innocent and defenseless reader. As a fact, there isn't…After all, to comprehend Ulysses is not among the recognized learned professions, and nobody should give his entire existence to the job." Bennett acknowledged that Joyce's "verbal method can be justified" since he is "trying to reproduce the thoughts of personage", but called the details "trivial and perfectly futile in the narrative".[211]
