Ulysses by Numbers by Eric Bulson (review)

Abstract

887 placement were never far from questions of identity. Even apart from the “critical commonplace” of treating “Leopold Bloom as an instance of the Wandering Jew figure” (159), it seems that what “most reminds one of Steinberg’s sense of himself as Jew” is the very “ambiguity of Bloom’s Jewishness . . . . Steinberg takes his Judaism as a fact, but his responses to it range from superficial acknowledgment to painful remembrance” (160). Feldman’s study—whose material vehicle, by the way, is a thing of beauty, its typefaces and proportions splendidly right throughout—is somewhat peripatetic in its own way. Though thoughtfully organized into four parts (introduction; Steinberg’s writing, drawing, and reading; Steinberg and Nabokov; Steinberg and Joyce) it seems by intention fluid rather than blocky: the parts are by no means symmetrical, and topics from one chapter frequently surface in others. One effect of this recurrence is a certain tightening, a reinforcement of Feldman’s case for profound interconnections among the elements of Steinberg on which she focuses. But another effect is loosening, the reader feeling carried along on a Steinbergian-Nabokovian-Joycean sort of voyage—a journey, that is, on which one learns a great deal one likely could not have learned on a straighter path from premise A to conclusion B. It’s perhaps fitting in more than one sense, therefore, that the last part of Feldman’s study echoes in key ways the first chapter to follow the two introductory ones. Both concern works that, thanks to the disposition of their components, at once resist being apprehended as unitary and assert the artist’s power to analyze, represent, and organize. Chapter three offers a multilayered reading of Steinberg’s Washington, D.C., 1967, in which an intensely concentrating artist constructs a labyrinthine mini-world with his pen. The last part of the book examines assemblages by Joyce and Steinberg: from the former, Ulysses; from the latter, renderings in several media of the artist’s drawing table, which is sometimes analogized to the page. Both, as Feldman observes, promote a “dialectical reading and viewing process,” inviting “the spatial view from on high and the close-up examination” and wedding “organized grid” to “multivectoral commotion” (269). But both, like Washington, D.C., 1967, also communicate the power of the artist-magician-hierophant, who remains virtuosically present in spite of the work’s overtures to impersonality. Ulysses and Steinberg’s tables “have an aura of magic about them, as if the things of . . . daily life present a ritualistic gathering—and then flicker back to the quotidian” (277). Or as Steinberg himself said of the tables, “In these . . . I am disguised as a painter, a draftsman, a designer, in objects on my table, the pencil, that’s me” (242).