Ulysses and the Reader - A Fertile Relationship

Exposé Écrit pour un Séminaire / Cours , 2003 , 15 Pages , Note: 70 of 80 Points; First Honour

Didactique de l'Anglais - Littérature, Œuvres

There is a frequently recurring theme in mythological (and most of all in religious) narratives: the sacrifice of a god. The Aztec god Nanahuatl sacrifices himself to give rise to a new sun in the east; Christ sacrifices his body to redeem mankind from mortal sin; Odin sacrifices his physical form to gain superior knowledge. In Ulysses, the omnipotent and omnipresent god of the narrative, the author, sacrifices parts of his power to give birth to a new form of fictional universe. The creator of the artificial reality systematically deconstructs his most powerful means of structuring and ordering the imagined world: the literary device of the narrator. In Joyce’s modern mythology, it is this device which is exposed to the reader as being not reliable, for the narrator becomes subject to the relativity of his position within the discourse of the text, he changes his form, he vanishes almost totally only to come back in the guise of an actual character of the novel, and sometimes intermingles with the thoughts of characters, which renders him hard to be identified at all. This state of the narrator, in combination with Joyce’s effort “…to put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries….”, his use of different stylistic modes, his frequent allusions to other works of literature and his subversion of the conventional notion of time and space, produces an effect on the reader, which is not to be experienced in similar degree with works predating the publishing of Ulysses: the effect of incertitude. Readers see themselves confronted with a seemingly incoherent fictional world, in which the ancièn regime of authorial order has been subject to a literary coup d’ état and has been replaced by a democratic system of polyphonic quality.
To highlight some basic concepts of incertitude, refer to potential patterns of order, cast light on one possible way of handling the fictional universe, which seems to be, in words borrowed from Pope, “a mighty maze, a maze without plan”, and point to the readers role in enacting the play of the text shall be the predominant aims of this essay.

Table of Content

1. Introduction: After the God has fallen

2. Reading Ulysses: Incertitude vs. Order

3. Conclusion: Some Thoughts on the Freedom of the Reader

4. Bibliography

1.Introduction: After the God has fallen

There is a frequently recurring theme in mythological (and most of all in religious) narratives: the sacrifice of a god. The Aztec god Nanahuatl sacrifices himself to give rise to a new sun in the east; Christ sacrifices his body to redeem mankind from mortal sin; Odin sacrifices his physical form to gain superior knowledge. In Ulysses, the omnipotent and omnipresent god of the narrative, the author, sacrifices parts of his power to give birth to a new form of fictional universe. The creator of the artificial reality systematically deconstructs his most powerful means of structuring and ordering the imagined world: the literary device of the narrator. In Joyce’s modern mythology, it is this device which is exposed to the reader as being not reliable, for the narrator becomes subject to the relativity of his position within the discourse of the text, he changes his form, he vanishes almost totally only to come back in the guise of an actual character of the novel, and sometimes intermingles with the thoughts of characters, which renders him hard to be identified at all. This state of the narrator, in combination with Joyce’s effort “ …to put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries….”^[1], his use of different stylistic modes, his frequent allusions to other works of literature and his subversion of the conventional notion of time and space, produces an effect on the reader, which is not to be experienced in similar degree with works predating the publishing of Ulysses: the effect of incertitude. Readers see themselves confronted with a seemingly incoherent fictional world, in which the ancièn regime of authorial order has been subject to a literary coup d’ état and has been replaced by a democratic system of polyphonic quality.

To highlight some basic concepts of incertitude, refer to potential patterns of order, cast light on one possible way of handling the fictional universe, which seems to be, in words borrowed from Pope, “ a mighty maze, a maze without plan”^[2], and point to the readers role in enacting the play of the text shall be the predominant aims of this essay.

2. Reading Ulysses: Incertitude vs. Order

The conventional reader’s approach towards any sort of fictional reality could efficiently be defined in Wallace Steven’s terms as “our rage for order”^[3]. The idea of a meaningful structure per se is perceived as both a necessary prerequisite and essential structural device i.e. the reader supposes that every detail, action, character, indeed every item of the imagined universe has been placed there to create an organic unity, a ‘wholeness’, and a single effect. The teleologic coherence of a literary text is seen as a given and the recipient’s focus tends to be on the combination of overall action and overall meaning, the latter easily to be deduced by means of close observation. Paradoxically we are likely to accept the works of classic realism, which to a large extent are structured according to the principle of given order, as realistic, while experiencing a lack of given order in the fragmentary daily world, which necessitates our attempt to subjectively create it and by that impose meaning on our life. In the following pages, I’d like to focus on various problems the reader might hit upon while moving through the pages of Ulysses. These problems emerge to a large extent from our expectations concerning the issues of meaning and order.

At the outset of the novel, in the first three chapters, the reader is with Stephen, whose interior monologues point towards the reasons for the disruption of overall coherence. In Nestor, Stephen’s reflexions on history rise out of the background of the morning lesson:

Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?^[4]

In looking at the historical persons and incidents, Stephen questions the inevitable quality of the narrative which eventually entered the books of history and points to the other possibilities which never came to pass. Iser remarks that for Stephen

…real life can only be understood as an actuality of one possibility among many. But if what happened did not happen inevitably, then the real is nothing but a chance track left by the possible. And if reality is nothing but a chance track, then it pales to insignifance beside the vast number of unseen and unfulfilled possibilities; it shrinks to the dimensions of a mere curiosity.^[5]

Every moment in life seems to consist of infinite possibilities. Thus, to present the past in terms of neglecting these possibilities establishes a coherence where there was none in the first place, installs a myth of eternal order. Against the backdrop of this insight, Mr Deasy’s belief in one definite solution to the life-and-death matter of the foot-and-mouth disease appears to be born out of narrow-minded ignorance: “I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It’s about the foot and mouth disease. […] There can be no two options on the matter.”^[6] For the reader of Ulysses, Stephen’s

concept indicates that he/she has to deal with the text as being just one possible realisation amongst many; an assumption which questions its inevitable quality and leaves room to imagine other realisations.

In the Proteus chapter, we are presented another insight, which disturbs the notion of prearranged, coherence. Stephen reflects on the modalities of vision and his restriction to his own perceptions: “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, though through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane.”^[7] The objective signatures of things apparently are unreadable since a successful attempt to do so would have to consist in changing one’s own perspective so as to be able to see things from all possible angles as well as taking into account the infinite qualities of the thing observed – obviously two impossible actions. For this reason Stephen resorts to describing objects by means of their colour, thus reducing them to one quality. However, this turn seems highly problematic since the signifying quality is in danger of sliding into opacity, of loosing its potential to stand in for the signified. On a larger scale, this subjectivity of perception seems to indicate that an objective coherence within the fictional universe is impossible since it would have to include the infinite number of possible perceptions at any given moment. Consequently, the reader has access but to a limited number of subjective views, which suggests that no absolute truth is to be found. The problem of subjectivity reaches its climax in the position of the reader as well as the author, who both are confined to only one point of vantage.

[...]

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^[1] Quoted by Ellmann, R.. James Joyce, p. 335.

^[2] Quoted by Ellmann, R.. Ulysses on the Liffey, p.91.

^[3] Stevens, W.. “The Idea of Order at Key West”. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. p.130.

^[4] Joyce, J.. Ulysses. p.30.

^[5] Iser, W.. The Implied Reader. p.206.

^[6] Joyce, J.. Ulysses. p.40.

^[7] Ibid., p.45.

• Université: University College Dublin (Department of English)
• Cours: James Joyce's Ulysses
• Note: 70 of 80 Points; First Honour
• Auteur: Andreas Seidl (Auteur)
• Année de publication: 2003
• Pages: 15
• N° de catalogue: V14230
• ISBN (ebook): 9783638196932
• Langue: anglais
• mots-clé: Ulysses, Reader, Fertile, Relationship, James, Joyce, Ulysses