Corbyn as Joycean

  Another good thing about Jeremy Corbyn is that - as revealed in today's Evening Standard - his favourite book is Joyce's Ulysses. One would hardly expect the Standard to be awash with Corbynistas, but the way they wheel out some faux-academic who clearly hasn't read the book to beat the embattled Labour leader over the head with it is shameful.
   The blatant inaccuracies come thick and fast, more demeaning to Joyce than they are to Corbyn. How can anyone think Ulysses "a novel without a single working class character", that most of the text "is about sex and crapping" or that Leopold Bloom is "an old man who is disappointed in life"? John Sutherland, a Professor of Modern Literature at UCL who hasn't read the key novel of Modern Literature, wants to imply that Jeremy Corbyn's choice of reading-matter is as overrated as his performance as leader of the Opposition and somehow unconducive to his leftist political agenda. However, anyone who has seriously engaged with Ulysses will understand the novel as a profound embodiment of Joyce's life-long socialism in theme, form and linguistic range, an unparalleled celebration and vindication of the lives of the ordinary working people Corbyn has always spoken of defending.