Reorganizing a book-shelf, it occurred to me to check the Index of "Empire of Words - The Reign of the OED" (Princeton, 1994),by John Willkinsky, for any reference to Vladimir Nabokov.

 

Sure enough, there was a footnote to Chapter 9 ("Modern Citation"). Its subject wasn't what I expected to encounter in connection to VN and that great dictionary. The note reads:

 

" Joyce's sympathetic portrait of the twice-baptized and yet still self-regarded Jew, Leopold Bloom, occupies the very center of Ulysses, which in all of its inventiveness is the most-cited piece of literature in the Supplement.. There is something in Vladimir Nabokov's remarks, made while teaching Ulysses to undergraduates at  Cornell University, that 'Joyce is sometimes crude in the way he accumulates and stresses so-called racial traits' [1980, p. 287]*.... But the crudeness of this stress seems to be the very thing that lies deep within the art and language of the age."

 

.....................................................................................................................................................................

* In Nabokov's lecture we read, just before the citation: "Joyce's intention was to place among the endemic Irishmen in his native Dublin someone who was as Irish as he, Joyce, was, but who also was an exile, a black sheep in the fold, as he, Joyce was. Joyce evolved the rational plan, therefore, of selecting for the type of an outsider, the type of the Wandering Jew, the type of the exile.  However, I shall explain later that Joyce is sometimes crude in the way he accumulates and stresses so-called racial traits. Another consideration in relation to Bloom: those so many who have written so much about Ulysses are either very pure men or very depraved men. They are inclined to regard Bloom as a very ordinary nature, and apparently Joyce himself intended to portray an ordinary person." [...]