Reading the Ulysses, I cannot help but notice how Joyce weaves madness with myth in order to create a narrative simultaneously fragmented and unified. If literature is the art of expressing the two sides of an extreme contradiction, then the Ulysses is a form of perfection of modern madness.
But I can't wholeheartedly support Joyce for doing this. Sure, Ulysses is real. Real, in the sense that our increase in "intelligence" triggers a corresponding degree of madness. But the Ulysses doesn't offer a way out of this crazy situation. Instead, the novel asserts the whole thing with a capitalized "Yes" at the very end. Joyce, in the Ulysses, is thus a realist without an ideal: he fails to improve the situation he so aptly describes.
I think that deep down humans intuitively know what the most fulfilling life is, and that is the life in nature. Eating good food, drinking good water, breathing fresh air, working hard under the open sky, bath in natural water, and perhaps carve, write, sing, or strum when opportunity presents itself. The problem since Plato is that reality is so far away from the ideal that "mature people" rightly abandon all hope of living the natural life.
Novels, I think, must give strength to those who are at the borderline of abandoning their ideals. Fiction should be a way of asserting a better future even if that future seems impossible. And Joyce doesn't do that. Joyce says that the here and now is all we have, and we either have the choice of affirming it or denying it. He doesn't see the fact that lives can change in good or bad ways depending on whether or not life heads towards a higher ideal or a lower situation.
Many writers don't bother writing about childish ideals. But that's not because they somehow devalue them. Rather, (and this is just my intuition,) writers have read so many stories that praise courage, honour, love, friendship, etc. that they are no longer able to consciously assert the value of these human qualities. It is so ironic. Reading more good stories making a human less good. Joyce probably experienced this sense of detachment from the good more than most other writers. And that's what makes Joyce's stories unappealing.
