James Joyce
(1888 — 1941)
ULYSSES
(1922)
Joyce exercised a considerable influence upon English and American literature.
Ulysses was the first of Joyce's books to bring him both fame and notoriety. Its unprecedented frankness in treating the physiological aspects of human existence was the reason it was banned for obscenity; on the other hand, it was proclaimed an entirely original work, the beginning of a new era in the history of letters. The novel is an exhaustive, 700 pages long, description of a certain day in the life of two Dubliners. The day is June 16th 1904; the men are Leopold Bloom, an advertizing agent, and Stephen Dedalus, a philologist, poet and teacher. Bloom is the embodiment of the common, the less than average, the man in the street, stripped to the skin and presented in the naked ugliness of his longings and appetites. Dedalus, on the contrary, is supposed to be refined, sensitive, cultivated and artistic. And yet both are equally frustrated, equally lost in a world inimical to them both. Their story is an allegory: in his loathing for modern civilization Joyce ironically compares Bloom and his day's wanderings in the city of Dublin to Ulysses's voyage. The book is a travesty of the heroic epic, a sneer at and a damnation of the unheroic modernity.
The day in their life that Joyce records is perfectly uneventful, "the dailiest day possible", as one of Joyce's fellow writers puts it: it consists of a dreary enumeration of utterly insignificant actions, words and thoughts, set down in a seemingly objective manner. But at the back of this manner is despair at man’s degradation and a cynical disbelief in whatever is fine and noble, in whatever makes life worth living. "History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
A disciple of the Austrian scientist Sigmund Freud, who considered man’s conscious mind of less importance than his subconscious mind, Joyce reproduces the innermost workings of the latter for the reader’s benefit, revealing the barrenness of his heroes, their futility, their obsession with sex, their petty individualism. The book has been most appositely called an epic of decay and frustration.
The form of the novel is accordingly suggestive of decay too. Ulysses is shapeless. It is a continuous flow of undifferentiated experience. The book is chaotic, obscure, being an attempt to find an adequate form for expressing the author's conception of life as a crazy and hideous nothingness: Joyce sought for relief in an art that shelved the most vital social problems of his time and was more preoccupied with manner than with matter. He never realized that this kind of preoccupation spelt ruin to artistic form and to art itself.
In the excerpt given below Stephen is gazing at the sea and brooding.
Chapter II
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In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed lull, covering green-goldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant1 will float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing chafing against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss ooos.2 Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks3 it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool,4 flower unfurling. Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats,5 in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds.6 Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary: and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose7 heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniursia patiens ingemiscit.8 To no end gathered:9 vainly then released, forth flowing, wending back: loom of the moon.10 Weary too in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a toil of waters.
Five fathoms11 out there. Full fathom five thy father lies.12 At one he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar.13 Driving before it a loose drift of rubble,14 fanshoals of fishes,15 silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow,16 bobbing17 landward, a pace a pace a porpoise.18 There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor.19 We have him. Easy now.
Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine,20 A quiver of minnows,21 fat of a spongy titbit.... God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose22 becomes featherbed mountain.23 Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal24 from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale25 he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.
A seachange this brown eyes saltblue.26 Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man. Old Father Ocean. Prix de Paris:27 beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there? Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect,28 Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum.29 No. My cockle hat and staff30 and his my sandal shoon.31 Where? To evening lands. Evening will find itself.
He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make their end. By the way next when is it? Tuesday will be the longest day. Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum.32 Lawn Tennyson,33 gentleman poet. Gia.34
(J. Joyce, Ulysses, Paris 1930, pp. 48-50)
Comments
The chief peculiarities of Joyce's style are to be traced to his outlook. Since he regarded all human experience as a senseless horror, having no objective and coherent meaning, he thought it the author's first duty to abandon all attempt at logical and consistent presentation of facts. He does not, like Huxley, analyse the chaos of life. His one ambition is to render man's sense of painful bewilderment at what he believes to be an insolvable riddle. His undivided attention is given to his characters' sensations and reactions; he endeavours to reproduce the flood of their half-conscious thoughts just as they arise (the so-called "stream-of-consciousness method").
The author's own speech is not only blended with his heroes’ inner speech, but is quite submerged by it. It is always obscure and often unreadable, because Joyce sets down the most distant, individual and arbitrary associations that come to his heroes' mind in connection with the world of physical things around them.
His style is therefore very concrete and naturalistic in depicting physical feelings, and very abstract when he tries to suggest the literary, philosophical and religious associations to which his heroes are led by their five senses.
The above extract opens with a description of the sea as observed by Stephen, a soul in pain, tortured by remorse for having been cruel to his late mother. The sea is to him an embodiment of infinite life, vast and timeless in its impersonal cruelty. Joyce compares the coming tide with "long lassoes... rising, flowing". The second sentence and the whole of the paragraph is an abrupt transition from the author's own impressions to his hero's. Joyce does not resort either to the usual "he thought" — and then the character's reflections given in quotation marks, — or to the traditional inner speech generally given in the Future-in-the-Past tense. Stephen's thoughts are rendered in the first person, without quotation marks. He knows the waves will move on and on eternally, leaving him passive and alone.
Joyce's vocabulary is enormous (almost 30 thousand words). He finds a great many synonyms expressing that onward motion of the waves (swirling, passing, flowing, purling, floating etc.). The exact description of the sea's movement is blended with dark and gruesome phantasies: the water seems to be moving ("breathing", in Joyce’s apt metaphor), among "seasnakes, rearing horses", probably standing here for seeweeds and rocks. From these striking and poetical tropes, presumably mythological in origin, Joyce suddenly turns to the “low” comparison of the sea, beating against the rocks as if "bounded in barrels". He introduces a great many sound-imitative words: "flop, slop, slap", expressing Stephen's auditory impressions. These become associated through onomatopoeia (sound-imitation) with other tropes, distant and artificial, such as the comparison of the moving waters with a "flower unfurling" ("It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling").
The picture of the sea that has inspired poets and writers with visions of grandeur and courage, of depth and beauty, is to Joy (and Stephen) a picture of infinite futility, of hopeless monotony. In the second paragraph the author notices the "writhing weeds lift languidly (an interesting case of personification) and sway reluctant arms." Their long leaves are compared with petticoats swaying in the whispering water, they "sigh", they are "weary" — here the author is again superseded by his hero ("Lord, they are weary"). The notion of weeds, writhing as though in agony, "lifted, flooded, and let fall” by the waves, is to Stephen's lacerated mind a symbol of life's endless and recurring misery; just as the waves themselves are gathered to no end, vainly released — only to go under the influence of the moon.
Again this seemingly objective, almost tangible description is dominated by the author's melancholy, and by highly complex learned and religious associations — with Saint Ambrose who also heard the sighing waves, and with erotic visions of lascivious men and women. The syntax is peculiar and greatly adds to the difficulties of any readers but those well-trained in the mannerisms of modern art: there is for instance, the great space between the first "weary" ("Lord, they are weary") and the second ("Weary too in sight of lovers" etc). It is only with difficulty one can realize that the second "weary" also applies to the weeds. And even that is mere guesswork.
Stephen's broodings about the sea are indissolubly linked with ideas of death. He thinks of a man who was drowned at that spot nine days before. This thought turns up quite casually, being suggested first by the chance recollection of a boatsman's words about the depth of the water ("five fathoms") and next by the line of a famous quotation ("Full fathom five thy father lies"): "At one he said. Found drowned." — That is probably supposed to mean "he said he would come at one but was drowned".
From these reminiscences Stephen switches to the sight before him — of the cruel sea, driving all manner of trash before it — and concealing a corpse "beneath the watery floor". This last quotation is ironical and is meant to display Stephen's light manner of speaking and even thinking of things that hurt him too much to hear serious reflection. With the same end in view Joyce depicts him as imagining a drowned body drawn out to the shore with hooks — and the usual sort of commands uttered by the rescuers of drowning men. At another moment ho calls up gruesome and naturalistic pictures of a decaying body, the prey of greedy fishes, all enumerated with revolting faithfulness. This naturalism is the starting point for abstruse and mystical meditations, with words left out to render the swift thinking process of man. "God becomes man [man] becomes fish [fish] becomes barnacle goose [barnacle goose] becomes featherbed mountain." The idea is ever the same Joycean idea of gradual disintegration, of dissolution into nothingness, or a something that is worse still — into triviality. The living, Joyce states, breathe the breath of the dead, tread on the dust of the dead — and even feed on their remains.
The text is shot through and through with allusions and quotations, jolting unpleasantly with ghastly naturalistic details: e.g. "he [the drowned man] breathes upward the stench of his green grave [the sea], his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun". By-and-by Stephen makes up his mind to return to Dublin: a Latin quotation comes to his lips and is followed by distorted quotations from Childe Harold, from Tennyson, the latter unfinished and completing itself by half-chanted nonsense-words of a song. These mark the final turn in Stephen's mood from brooding and philosophizing to mockery and self-contempt that are so typical of Joyce's decadent characters.
Poetic images are mixed with naturalistic details; erudite quotations, Latin and English, go alongside colloquialisms in many languages (in the present instance French and Italian); coarse and common words occur in company with rare ones or words of the writer's composition ("foampool", "saltwhite", "seadeath", "wavespeech"); these appear together with newly-coined sound-imitating words "seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss ooos"; elliptical phrases that are more often than not obscure in meaning and unconventional to the degree of being ungrammatical ("A seachange this brown eyes saltblue"). All these peculiarities of Joyce's style are the outcome of his contempt for the moral and artistic conventions of his time. They are meant as defiance hurled at the contemporary world, as a way of expressing the author's dismay and horror at sight of a society far gone in decomposition. But at the same time they are the result of extreme, antisocial individualism, a symptom of a dying culture, of art wilfully giving up its main function — that of universal appeal—and addressing itself to the learned, artistic and literary minority.