Volume 8, Number 11 · June 15, 1967
Bloomovie
By Richard Ellmann
Ulysses
produced by Walter Reade, directed by Joseph Strick
That Ulysses should resist adaptation to a film is the latest instance of the book's refusal to conform. Obsessed by language, it refuses to acknowledge that the age of reading is over and that the age of viewing has begun. Joseph Strick's pious program note discovers Joyce's contribution to modern literature in 'the idea that there are different sorts of reality,' 'that the life of the mind—ideas, dreams and fantasies—is no less real than the life of the body.' But all literature has battened on this idea. If it is new to the studio, that is because the camera has to assume, as words do not, that palpable surfaces are primary. What Joyce, distinctively, presented was a multiplication of linguistic perspectives, which included the questioning of its own method, of language itself. Through this Babel his characters scarcely move, conserving their energy to affirm only the power to express.
Review, 1444 words
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