ABSTRACT
If ever a book aspired to the status of a diamond rather than a loaf of bread, it is surely Ulysses. ‘I confess that it is an extremely tiresome book,’ Joyce told Harriet Weaver, a loyal and energetic supporter, on 20 July 1919, ‘but it is the only book which I am able to write at present’ (1957-66, I, p. 128). The only book he felt able to write was a novel, but a novel which turned the whole genre inside out. Its tiresomeness was its literary point; and also, in a way, its marketability.
