JAMES JOYCE

Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So

timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood,
that all ages were as one to him. [] Now, at the name of the fabulous
artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form
flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was
it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and
symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the
end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of
childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop
out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable
imperishable being? (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 192)
His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes.
Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his
soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and
soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable. (A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, 193)

Some of its original readers, Virginia Woolf or T.S. Eliot, hailed Joyces
work as the most important expression which the present age has found. 1
Others, like Bennett or Aldington, were repelled by it, seeing it as a
tremendous libel on humanity.2 Yet, no matter if they praised it for being able
to come closer to life 3 or loathed it for being indecent, obscene, scatological
and licentious4, all agreed that Joyces work was remarkable, technically
successful, an astonishing literary phenomenon.
1

T. S. Eliot, Ulysses, Order and Myth, 222.

Richard Aldington, The Influence of Mr. James Joyce, The Idea of literature. The Foundations of
English Criticism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979) 211.
3
Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 199.
4
Arnold Bennett, James Joyces Ulysses, 209.
2

Of the English modernist novelists works, Joyces most strikingly asserts

itself as art, the art of fiction - art as a form of knowledge, art as autonomous,
art as a form of expression enjoying the advantage of a medium of its own. Of
all the English modernists works, Joyces is the indubitable evidence that if
there is any difference at all between realism and modernism in literary terms,
it does not reside so much in the sense realism and modernism make of the real,
but in the new status assigned to literature. Thus Joyces work may be seen as
an unparalleled artistic answer to the essential modernist questions relating to
the essence of the literary act.
What is the proper stuff of fiction?
The proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is a proper stuff of
fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of the brain and spirit is
drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of
fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us
break her and bully her, as well as honour her, for so her youth is renewed and
her sovereignty assured.5
How is the material that life provides to be made into art?
Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish
to express, if we are writers; that brings us closer to the novelists intention, if
we are readers.6
What Joyce demonstrates through his work is that, if fiction is to be raised
to the status of art, this can be done only through focus on the potentialities of
what gives the art of fiction its specificity in relation to the other arts, that is
language and technique. This does not mean that Joyces narrative strategy
necessarily, and exclusively, implies the adoption of completely new
techniques, that is techniques that had not been also used by his predecessors.
Joyces originality, much of the difficulty presupposed by the reading of his
texts being caused by it, resides in the variety and the combination of
techniques. For Joyce, each method is seen as a pathway to knowledge. The
more variations on a method he could imagine, the deeper the meaning that
began to surface. The less expected the combination of methods, the richer the
aspects of reality that were likely to be revealed. By this strategy, Joyce did in
5
6

Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 202.

Ibid., 200.

no way attempt to destroy the illusion of reality or to discard as useless the

methods employed to create this illusion. He rather tried to heighten our
awareness of the techniques he so skilfully deploys by raising questions about
our strategies of interpretation.7
Understanding Joyce always means more than just reading his novels for
the sheer pleasure of the reading act. Understanding Joyce requires from
readers, if not a level of erudition similar to Joyces when he created, at least
familiarity with aesthetic and ethical concepts and principles on which much of
Joyces philosophy of life and art was built. One such concept, indispensable to
the understanding of Joyces work as a whole, is epiphany, which Joyce defined
in Stephen Hero, the novel from which A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man
emerged.
By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the
vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.
He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with
extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and
evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office
was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the
Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance.
Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it,
catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublins street
furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.
What?
Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which
seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached
the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany I find the third, the
supreme quality of beauty. (Stephen Hero, 216)

Beauty resides in the perceiving subjects ability to move beyond

surfaces, of things and beings. Depending on the intensity of focalisation, the
perceiving subject starts resonating with the perceived object and has, thus,
access to the objects essence and understands it as integrated within a system
7

Derek Attridge, Reading Joyce, The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 8.

of universal meanings relating to life. Epiphany enables Joyce to make the

trivial and the spiritual, the ordinary and the extraordinary into the proper stuff
of fiction. Aesthetically, the work of art can include one or an infinity of
meanings, the single item or the universe, based on the quality of the
perception.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is generally considered to be a
Bildungsroman, following the development of Stephen Dedalus, its hero, from
childhood into adulthood, through a tormented, at times traumatic, quest for
identity. Since the novel simultaneously focuses on Stephens becoming as an
artist, the novel may be also understood as a Knstler-roman (an artist-novel),
although, due to the coincidence of trajectory between Stephens evolution as
an individual and his evolution as an artist, the two species tend to overlap.
This is a reading of the novel that is clearly encouraged by the title of the novel
itself, with all the ambiguity created by the alternate use of the definite and
indefinite articles, which definitely opens up various horizons of expectations
and paths of interpretation. The episodic structure of the novel also creates the
illusion that the reader is provided with a plot, on whose solidity he may rely in
his interpretative effort. The effect of chronological succession is enhanced by
the fact that each of the five parts starts by an apparently neutral presentation of
events in the outer world from the standpoint of a narrator who keeps aloof
from the narrated events. These events are not, however, related
chronologically. They simply create a pattern for Stephens development and
help orient the reader in the movement from the outer to the inner world of
Stephens mind. Each part deals with one stage in the process through which
Stephen acquires self-knowledge. Stephen tries to define himself in relation to
the other and to himself, to religion, family and art. In each of the five parts,
Stephen achieves a momentary insight and intensity through a transforming
experience.8 Technically, the process of Stephens growing self-awareness is
rendered through an artful combination of psycho-narration, i.e. the narrators
discourse about the characters thoughts and narrated monologue, i.e. the
characters thoughts under the guise of the narrators words.

John Paul Riquelme, Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man: styles of
realism and fantasy, Derek Attridge, ed., op. cit., 117.

Could it be that he, Stephen Dedalus, had done those things? His conscience
sighed in answer. Yes, he had done them, secretly, filthily, time after time,
and, hardened in sinful impenitence, he had dared to wear the mask of
holiness before the tabernacle itself while his soul within was a living mass
of corruption. How came it that God had not struck him dead? The leprous
company of his sins closed about him, breathing upon him, bending over
him from all sides. (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 156)

Through this combination, an increased textual continuity is obtained and

the passage from the exterior world to the inner world is not perceived as
abrupt. The characters mental processes become visible and significant by the
authority that the narrators lending his language to figural consciousness gives
them.
Critics have often pointed to Joyces preference for the interior
monologue as a more direct method for expressing the figural mind. Yet, in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce preserves psycho-narration as a
means of access to the indeterminate, confuse, not yet crystallised states of
mind of the character. The narrators language, however, is never neutral. It is
contaminated by the characters idiom. Thus, the main quality of Joyces
narrator in A Portrait is his obvious chameleonic nature. He persistently
adapts his style to the age and mood of his hero, colouring it with baby-talk in
the beginning section, with the bathos of the budding artist-in-revolt at the end,
and in between with a spectrum of psychological states and developmental
stages.9
The narrators discourse about the characters consciousness seems to
coincide with the characters discourse about himself, which makes the reader
assume that there also is an overlap between the narrators knowledge of
Stephens psyche and Stephens own knowledge of himself. 10 The major
outcome of such a narrative strategy is a proper balance between exacerbated
subjectivity and dry objectivity. By using it, Joyce managed to express
subjectivity while preserving that degree of impersonality that is the necessary
condition for a work of art to come into existence.
9

Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 30.

for more extensive reference to consonant psycho-narration, see Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 30-33.

10

Surprisingly, though Joyce is acknowledged as the most daring and direct

investigator of the mind, he only seldom resorts to the quoted interior
monologue in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. One reason why this
mode of rendering consciousness is avoided is that it can only superficially
account for the profusion and complexity of the young mans states of mind.
Once these states of mind have been put into the characters limited and
limiting idiom, much of their original depth has been sacrificed. This is even
more likely to happen in the case of characters in development, who have not
reached yet a condition of self-awareness. The second reason why the quoted
interior monologue is infrequently used is because it is felt as hardly miscible
with psycho-narration. In combination, the two techniques create arbitrary
shifts and discontinuity in perspective, which is clearly demonstrated by the
quotation beneath. Mention should be also made of the difference in
investigating power between the two techniques, especially in situations when
the development of the characters language cannot keep pace with the
characters inner change.
A film still veiled his eyes but they burned no longer. A power, akin to that
which had often made anger or resentment fall from him, brought his steps
to rest. He stood still and gazed up at the sombre porch of the morgue and
from that to the dark cobbled laneway at its side. He saw the word Lotts on
the wall of the lane and breathed slowly the rank of heavy air.
- That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to
breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.
(98)

Stephens development as an individual follows, more or less, a natural

trajectory. Stephen is a child who becomes an adult as a result of several factors
that contribute to the shaping of his personality: family, church, school,
country, the exterior forces at large. Stephens development as an artist, central
to the novel, becomes an aesthetic act. The process of Stephen defining himself
as an identity and of becoming self-aware is similar to the processes taking
place in the artificers workshop. In an epiphanic sense, A Portrait is the
expression of Stephens learning to adjust his vision to an exact focus, his true

self, and, more importantly, to forge, out of the ordinariness of his material,
language, the imperishable being, the artists and the artists art.
A Portrait alternates between two antagonistic styles of visionary
intensity and grim realism [] both characteristic of Stephens consciousness
in Joyces unusual attempt to represent the mental act of aesthetic creation. 11
Thus, we could also see in A Portrait less an intention to come closer to life
than a sustained effort to create an autonomous, self-sufficient alternative to
life. A Portrait would be in this sense less the work of a novelist than that of an
aesthete.
- Look here, Cranly, [Stephen] said. You have asked me what I would do
and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not
do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself
my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in
some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for
my defence the only arms I allow myself to use silence, exile, and
cunning. (281)

This may be seen as a synthesis of Joyces outlook on life and the status
of art. For him, life and art tend to overlap. Art is a form of expression of the
self through depersonalisation. The self, a receptacle of extraneous influences,
has a chance to self-knowledge only through art. And it is also through art that
the self can capture the meaning underlying all things, can catch a glimpse of
the universal wholeness. Art as an end, as a mode of life, not as a means to life,
presupposes, from Joyces point of view complete freedom of choice, of value
standards and of method. Joyces view of life-art is completed by his theory of
beauty and aesthetic pleasure. Beauty, according to Joyce, is dependent on the
artists imagination and his ability to capture the whatness of a thing in an
aesthetic image.
When you have apprehended that basket as a thing you make the only
synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is
that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which [Aquinas]
speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme
11

John Paul Riquelme, op. cit., 121.

quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his
imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully
to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the
clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind
which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is
the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure [] (242-243)

With these ideas in view, it would be difficult to decide whether A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a novel about life, or a novel on art.
What we know for sure is that A Portrait is a piece of prose fiction. Yet, if we
agree to Northrop Fryes theory, A Portrait comes closer, in intention and
realisation, to confession, that is an autobiographical writing produced as a
result of a creative, thus fictional impulse to operate selections on the events
and experiences in a writers life. 12 This view is further supported by the
explicit theoretical and intellectual interest in art and religion that is central to
A Portrait. When confession enters a novel, as a matter of fact flows into it, the
end product is fictional autobiography or the Knstler-roman, the mixture being
favoured by the use of the consciousness investigating techniques.
Ulysses lends itself, with even more difficulty, to straightforward
categorisation. As a matter of fact, it is Ulysses that has generated most of the
contradictory responses, either from Joyces contemporaries or from
succeeding generations of readers. The differences of views range from
deciding whether Ulysses is Symbolist or Naturalist to assigning it to a specific
genre. No other text has so generously offered material of discussion to critics
of all imaginable orientations. Yet there is a paradoxical situation about
Ulysses. The more it is written about, the less it is read. Ulysses is a difficult
and unpleasant reading, no matter how presumptuous we would be to claim the
contrary. Its reading requires knowledge, literary and cultural, not of one time
and one space, but of the whole Western literary tradition and of the whole
history of mankind. There is literary knowledge that Ulysses draws on,
Homers epic, the Western literary tradition, Joyces work. But there are also
other worlds, beyond the literary, by which readers have set their course
12

see Northrop Frye , Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973) Theory of
Genres.

through Ulysses. The range of languages and codes within which Ulysses is
inscribed has a great deal to do with Joyces sense of himself as a citizen. Irish
history, Catholicism, the Celtic Revival, popular culture, Dublin geography, and
a certain slice of middle-class Dublin life in the years before and after the turn
of the century all play their part.13 Ulysses embodies Joyces ambition to
include everything in one book, the trivial and the extraordinary, the particular
and the cosmic, present, past and future. He seems to have found the mode of
life or art through which he could express himself as freely as he could and as
wholly as he could. He allowed himself, to this purpose, the freedom of all
narrative or expressive techniques, risking at times to violate the very limits of
intelligibility. Yet, no matter how agreeable or disagreeable it might be to
individual readers, we have to acknowledge Ulysses as the mankinds book.
Ulysses would rather be called a fictional prose book than a novel. Joyces
intention of reaching completeness translated itself into the books
encompassing more than one form of prose fiction. If we accept this as a
premise, we may find it easier to identify the pattern underlying the
organisation of Ulysses beyond its formal shapelessness.
For one possible way of looking at Ulysses, we will adopt the model of
analysis that Northrop Frye proposes in his Anatomy of Criticism according to
which Ulysses is not a novel, but several forms of prose fiction at once. Frye
starts from the assumption that, once the distinction between non-fiction and
fiction has been made and fiction has been generally equated to the novel,
there have been productions, in the history of Western literature, that, though
fictional, resisted the categorisation as novels. This leads to Fryes concluding
that the novel is not to be seen as the only form of prose fiction, but rather as
one functioning alongside other forms, combinations between them being
always possible. Frye distinguishes thus the novel from romance, confession
and anatomy.
Novel versus romance. While the novel attempts to create the illusion of
real people, the romance produces more stylised figures, likely to expand into
psychological archetypes. The characters in a novel exist as personalities,
whereas those of the romance are seen in their individuality in vacuo, rather
13

Jennifer Levine, Ulysses, Derek Attridge, ed., op. cit., 136.

than within the framework of a society. In its tendency to allegory, the romance
deals with heroes, which makes it function as an intermediate between the
novel, which centres on men, and the myth, which deals with gods.
Novel versus confession. Having an autobiographical character, the
confession, though it implies selection of events and experiences of a writers
life, always foregrounds a theoretical and intellectual interest in various issues
such as politics, religion, art from a subjective standpoint. Unlike the
confession, the novel, through its technique, presupposes a process of
depersonalisation, ideas and theories being hidden, or rather dissolved, in
personal relationships.
Novel versus anatomy. The anatomy dissects or analyses intellectual
themes or attitudes by always displaying exhaustive erudition of treatment.
Developed from the Menippean satire, the anatomy deals less with people than
with mental attitudes. Various categories of villains are dealt with not in terms
of their position in society, but in terms of their approach to life. The novel
characterises people, while the anatomy makes them exponents of different
ideas.
Frye sums up the differences among forms showing that the novel is
extroverted and personal, the romance is introverted and personal, the
confession is introverted and intellectual, whereas the anatomy is extroverted
and intellectual. We should add that the two former forms deal with people, the
latter deal with ideas and attitudes.
According to Frye, his view being supported by the actual writings in the
history of Western literature, there are no pure forms. When the confession
enters the novel, the fictional autobiography is obtained. The anatomy merging
with the novel may end up in the roman thse, for instance.
Following this line of argument, Ulysses is a synthesis of all these forms.
It is a novel on account of the accuracy with which it represents the life of
Dublin, with all its smells, sounds and sights, and its inhabitants, by skilfully
portraying the characters and bringing them into dialogue. It is a romance if we
judge it by the way in which the story and the characters are placed,
parodically, against the archetypal heroic patterns found mainly in the analogy
with Homers Odyssey. It is a confession if we focus on the use of the

consciousness techniques for the revelation of character and incident. It is an

anatomy in its intellectual, encyclopaedic and erudite handling both of
technique and of subject matter. Frye sees Ulysses as a complete prose epic
with all four forms employed in it, all of practically equal importance, and all
essential to one another, so that the book is a unity and not an aggregate.14
Another possible way to look at Ulysses, which will certainly bring us to
similar conclusions as regards Joyces ambition to make this book include
everything, is to consider it beyond any limitations that its being assigned to a
specific genre may impose.
We will follow a line of argument according to which Ulysses should be
understood across genre boundary or, better said, at the intersection of different
genres. What we will discover, not in surprise given the complexity of Joyces
work, is that, though different from Fryes, this view may hold equally valid.
For Frye, Ulysses not being only and exclusively a novel did not mean that it
was not a work of prose fiction. Yet Ulysses can be also read as a novel and a
poem at the same time. It can be seen as belonging to the dramatic genre as
well, if we consider uniquely the Circe episode, as a dramatisation of
irrational thought. What is certain is that Ulysses refuses to be contained in the
ill-fitting vestments that the traditional genre division provides. It cannot be
restricted to the realm of fiction, it transgresses the boundaries of one single
genre. What kind of a literary object is Ulysses? Three implicit answers have
been offered: that it is primarily a poem; that it is really, still, a novel; and, most
recently, that it is text.15
Ulysses is a poem to the extent to which it uses syntax and diction freely
or replaces the narrative logic with a metaphorical and allusive one. The strict
sequencing of events of the narrative is embedded into a broader texture of
symbols, allusions and archetypal patterns, whose repetition and intermingling
convey a sense of formal perfection, characteristic of a poem. It is only by
reading Ulysses as a poem that Stephen and Blooms meeting, in all its
triviality, acquires significance. Their actual encounter is thus symbolically
interpreted as mans reaching wholeness in a flesh and spirit union, as well as
the final meeting of father and son after a spiritual search for each other
14
15

Northrop Frye, op. cit., 314.

Jennifer Levine, op. cit., 137.

constantly carried out throughout the novel. In this version of Ulysses,

sequence is less important than a synchronic and spatial mapping based on
repetition: allusions, echoes, symbols, and archetypal patterns all being,
essentially, modes of repetition which forestall the onward moving logic of the
narrative.16
The method Joyce employed in the Penelope episode offers a strong
argument in favour of our considering Ulysses a poem. Within the limited
corpus of autonomous interior monologues the Penelope section of Ulysses
may be regarded as a locus classicus, the most famous and the most perfectly
executed of its species.17 Very much like a poem, Penelope, unlike the other
sections of Ulysses, functions outside its context as a self-sufficient text. Its
main characteristic is its formal independence, as it is the only section in which
the fictional characters voice is never interrupted by an authorial narrative
voice. All effect of chronology is suspended, as, in the absence of a time
manipulating narrator, the narrated time is totally dependent on the time of
narration. In Molly Blooms autonomous interior monologue, time exists only
to the extent to which it exists through Mollys words and advances only as
long as Mollys thoughts are articulated. And, given Mollys unawareness of
time passing, the reader is unable to see at what pace time flows or whether it
flows at all. The effect of continuity of Mollys thoughts is increased further
more by the omission of punctuation. Mollys thoughts are interrupted just by
brief moments of silence, graphically marked by blanks that would correspond
to Mollys mental breath and would convey both the sense of time passing and
of Mollys interruption of thoughts. Mollys mind is represented as involved in
self-address. And since language-for-oneself is by definition the form of
language in which speaker and listener coincide, the technique that imitates it
in fiction can remain convincing only if it excludes all factual statements, all
explicit report on present and past happenings. 18 Thus, Mollys monologue
conveys the illusion of existing outside any external determination, severs any
connection with the real, unless reality is projected and distilled in her mind.
The Penelope episode has, in this sense, a marked non-narrative and non16

Jennifer Levine, op. cit., 141.

Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 217.
18
Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 226.
17

communicative character enhanced by the high referential instability of the

pronouns. Except for the personal pronoun I that incontestably refers to
Molly, pointing to the egocentricity of the monologue, all the other pronouns
are used as if knowledge of their referents were implicit. This is true if we
consider the fact that Molly addresses herself, but the ambiguity bewilders even
more the reader who contemplates the thinking mind.
Even if it is rendered in prose, Mollys monologue could come closer in
interpretation to a poem for several reasons. Its clear egocentricity determines a
high degree of subjectivity, heightened even more by the absence of an
authorial narrative voice that would point to the monologue being part of a
representation of reality. Time is suspended and it exclusively depends on the
thinking mind. And above all, Penelope is an independent form, selfgenerated, self-supported and self-enclosed 19, existing even if not referred to
Ulysses as a whole, view which coincides with Joyces own perception of the
episode. It [the Ithaca chapter] is in reality the end as Penelope has no
beginning, middle or end.20 It begins and ends with the female Yes. It turns
like the huge earthball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning.21
Ulysses is a novel inasmuch as it deals with characters and accurately
represents the society in which these characters live. Yet it is just about one day,
16 June 1904, in Dublin. In terms of external events, nothing significant
happens. Stephen and Leopold are wandering, in parallel, through Dublin in the
company of other characters who happen to cross their paths at one moment of
the day or another until they meet in Dr. Hornes maternity hospital. Stephen
and Leopold go then to Bella Cohens brothel, where Stephen is attacked by the
British soldiers and Bloom takes care of him. After a stop in the cabmans
shelter, where they talk and drink coffee, Dedalus and Bloom reach Blooms
house, where Stephen is welcomed with a cup of cocoa. Yet, in spite of the
paucity of events in the external world, Ulysses offers his readers an
unparalleled richness of the characters inner life. In a third-person narrative
context, the various techniques used to investigate the mind, from the conscious

19

Ibid., 218.
Letters of James Joyce, quoted in Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 218.
21
Ibid.
20

to the unconscious, bring readers into immediate contact with a far richer
world, that of the characters thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations.
The most often employed is the technique of the quoted interior
monologue, though not in a conventional manner, but in a typically Joycean
one. The quotation marks that used to signal the passage from the authorial
narrative voice to the characters consciousness are omitted. The entry into the
fictional characters mind is smooth and almost imperceptible, marked
grammatically by the change of person and tense and stylistically by adopting
the characters idiom, which significantly reduces the distance between the
outer and the inner world.
Mr. Bloom stooped and turned over a piece of paper on the strand. He
brought it near his eyes and peered. Letter? No. Cant read. Better go.
Better. Im tired to move. Page of an old copybook. All those holes and
pebbles. Who could count them? Never know what you find. Bottle with
story of a treasure in it thrown from a wreck. Parcels post. Children always
want to throw things in the sea. Trust? Bread cast on the waters. Whats
this? Bit of stick. (Ulysses, 403)

The undoubtedly monologic pattern of the fragment is, however,

unobtrusively altered by psycho-narration (Children always want to throw
things in the sea.). This strategy is frequently used by all the modernists who,
while giving readers unhindered access to the characters consciousness, still
want to maintain control over the narrative by an impersonal narrators veiled
presence.
The same effect is obtained by the use of the narrated monologue. Though
Joyce had a clear preference for the use of the interior monologue, he never
discarded the possibility of combining psycho-narration and the narrated
monologue, combination in which all modernists saw the proper narrative
solution for conveying a sense of continuity between the outer and the inner
world. Due to the fact that the characters thoughts are presented in the guise of
the narrators discourse, the narrative voice being thus continuous, the
movement in and out of the characters mind passes almost unnoticed, as the
following excerpt proves.

Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton

probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at
Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that.
And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to be
sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed. Yes, it was very
probable that Father Bernard Vaughan would come again to preach. O, yes:
a very great success. A wonderful man really.
Father Conmee was very glad to see the wife of Mr David Sheehy M. P.
looking so well and he begged to be remembered to Mr David Sheehy M. P.
Yes, he would certainly call. (231)

What is, however, worthwhile noticing is that Joyces use of psychonarration comes closer to the realist convention than to the manner the same
technique is employed by Lawrence, for instance, i.e. to reveal the sub- or
beyond verbal layers of human consciousness. The fact that he did not give it
up, rather unexpectedly if we consider that he was the most radical
experimenter of all, can only point to Joyces intending to preserve, through it,
the illusion of the narrative being kept under control by a superior instance. As
the characters in Ulysses represent mature consciousnesses capable of
expressing themselves, psycho-narration could have been easily dispensed with
if it had not been for Joyces intention to preserve the illusion of realism.
That this idea is correct is proved by the fact that, when dealing with the
deeper strata of being, the sub- and the unconscious, Joyce resorts to devices
that do not pertain to the narrative art, but rather to the dramatic one. In the
Circe episode, he adopts the technique of the expressionist drama to objectify
an inner world violently distorted under the pressure of intense personal
moods, ideas, and emotions.22 Language no longer refers to a reality outside
the characters mind, it is exclusively used to express feeling and imagination.
ZOE

What day were you born?

STEPHEN

22

Thursday. Today.

Chris Baldick, op. cit., 78.

ZOE

Thursdays child has far to go. (She traces lines on his hand.) Line
of fate. Influential friends.

FLORRY
ZOE

(Pointing.) Imagination.
Mount of the moon. Youll meet with a (She peers at his hands
abruptly.) I wont tell you whats not good for you. Or do you want
to know?
(Ulysses, 554)

With Joyce, we could see in the combination of these modes of expressing

consciousness a form of scepticism about the subjective and the individual
truth. The individual truth is just one aspect of truth and, no matter how directly
it is presented to the reader, Joyce points to it being limited.23
To the question whether Ulysses is a text or not, the answer could be
affirmative if by text we mean a theme or subject on which one speaks, a
statement on which one dilates: never autonomous, never fully complete in
itself, but always awaiting a reader/ speaker who will call it out into life. 24
Textuality, or better intertextuality, always implies play or, better
interplay. In a rather postmodernist perspective, the meaning of Ulysses lies at
the confluence of the meanings of other texts. Ulysses as a text establishes
relationships with other texts, through allusion and parody. Homers Odyssey
and Shakespeares Hamlet are the first texts that the reader is expected to
recognise for part of the meaning of Ulysses to come to life. In Oxen of the
Sun, through parody, Joyce asserts and subverts all meanings, the process
always presupposing a necessary involvement on the part of the reader.

Paradoxically, instead of tearing Ulysses apart, all these contradictory

views help us see more clearly Ulysses novel, poem, text, romance, anatomy,
Naturalist or Symbolist as a perfect embodiment of Modernism.
Written in an age whose main characteristic is relativity, which generates
mans scepticism about immutable truths, Ulysses operates a shift of interest
from the outer world of events to the inner world of the mind. The new interest
23
24

see Rodica Kereaski, op. cit., chapter James Joyce.

Jennifer Levine, op. cit., 147.

in the individuals mind accounts for the use of those techniques meant to help
move closer to the essence of what the modernists understood by life, not
exterior reality, but the individuals subjective response to it. Reality is thus
decomposed through numberless subjective centres of consciousness. The
change of focus from the outside to the inside is accompanied by a new view of
time, understood not as chronology, but as duration. The subjectively distilled
present moment expands into infinity. Time and timelessness fuse. Ulysses is
essentially a modernist work in its effort to reach completeness out of
fragments, to cast coherence upon a dismembering system.
Yet, through an artful assimilation and reprocessing of tradition, Ulysses
connects the literary tradition, of which it becomes part, to postmodernism. By
its highly unusual use of language, Ulysses draws attention to language itself as
the specific medium of literature, pointing thus to the status of literature as art.
Drawing on other books and other ways of writing, Ulysses asserts and denies
simultaneously, being at the same time confident in and sceptical about each
and all truths.
Ulysses is in essence the expression of the modern, with language lying
central to it, either in its modernist or in its postmodernist manifestations.
Ulysses is modernist in its search for a meaning, in its striving to reach stability,
to shape a disordered world - not, in the first instance, either to reform or
escape it but, instead, to establish, if only negatively, a relationship with it. 25 It
is postmodernist in its distrust of all meanings, in its turning upon itself and
asserting the fictional truth as the only one valid. We would agree thus to
Faulkners evaluation of Ulysses, under the reserve that his modernist
literature should be read as modern literature, which would comfortably
include both the modernist and the postmodernist enterprise.
Ulysses manifests pre-eminently the self-consciousness characteristic of
modernist literature. Sceptical of the truth of all else, its attention must rest
initially and ultimately upon itself, upon its own paradoxical actuality of
fiction, a reality which is not true, a truth which is not reality. This selfconsciousness [] involves the recognition of a disparity [between self and
world], a disparity contained however within an integer, the work of art itself.
25

Alan Wilde, op. cit., 19.

Ulysses thus insists, first and last, upon its status and quality as artefact and
fiction.26

26

Peter Faulkner, op. cit., 50.