"Ulysses is indeed static, and in its world nothing — absolutely nothing — is great. But this is not due to any technical or ideal shortcoming on Joyce's part, but rather to his subjection to English* society; for Joyce, it is certainly the only society imaginable, although he just as certainly condemns it, through a hyperbolic presentation of its worst features, to a future of paralysed mediocrity (a future that Joyce, with a stroke of genius, places in the past, as if to underline his consummate skepticism: one can always hope never to reach the negative utopias of science fiction, but if a negative utopia came into being twenty years ago, and no one realized it, then the die is truly cast…)" (Signs Taken For Wonders, p. 189)I don't agree with this as an interpretation of Ulysses, but it's brilliantly formulated.
* Weirdly Moretti insists on reading Joyce as an English, rather than an Irish, writer.
