NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN THE LAST HALF OF "ULYSSES": THE CASE FOR JOYCE'S "DOOMED" EXPERIMENTS

In his seminal essay on Ulysses, Edmund Wilson called such episodes as The Oxen of the Sun and Eumaeus "artistically absolutely indefensible," and he wondered if Joyce had forgotten, in his flights of technical virtuosity, the "drama which he had originally intended to stage." Friendlier judgments have occurred since then, but rarely have critics taken the late narrative strategies as seriously as did Joyce. The difficulty lies in what seems a widespread assumption that Joyce's youthful aesthetic bears little relation to his advanced narrative art in Ulysses. Yet the aesthetic holds clues to the later performance--the clamor of debased viewpoints, the ridicule, the ferocity, the swift disruptions of mood and manner, the disorienting strains of unrhymed poetry that appear when least expected. We learn that Joyce will work through indirection: that he will portray people and events as they are not, the better to define what they are. He will purge from his art unsuitable moods of "desire" and "loathing"; will fashion a poetry which "transcends the mode of its expression," thus helping to liberate the reader from avenues of pedestrian response. While the aesthetic should be construed as a roadmap, rather than a destination, it can reveal thematic profundities in such late episodes as Eumaeus, Oxen, and Sirens--principal targets for hasty critical response over the years--and whose sequence in this dissertation I have reversed to suit my exposition of fraudulence, purgation, and poetic intensity foreshadowed by the aesthetic. The Eumaeus chapter has been condemned as a relinquishment to "expressive form," a projection through rambling style of the fatigue felt by Stephen and Bloom. Yet wider implications lie beneath the verbal drizzle: Through a hopelessly vagrant narrative voice, Joyce has dramatized the pathology of exhausted minds and spirits; has amassed an encyclopedic digression upon a civilization in decay. Joyce has challenged his reader to navigate through shoals of false, tasteless and inhumane sentiments, on a negative journey towards ethical truth. While layers of archaic style obscure our vision of the Holles St. hospital's "action," The Oxen of the Sun can profitably be viewed as a study in mixed tonalities. The past authors cast shadows of mortality upon the young revelers. In turn, the rowdies disturb the repose of the sober dead. Consequently, the term "parody" fails to characterize the double-edged thrust of Joyce's burlesque. Further, a reading of Oxen which is confined to the immediate text can prove short-sighted: Unspoken thematic dialogues exist between this chapter and (1) Joyce's prose models found in George Saintsbury's A History of English Prose Rhythm, and (2) earlier moments in Ulysses which Joyce has recollected "subtly" in Oxen. With Sirens, scholarship of a literal sort has dwelt upon Joyce's success in imitating an art other than writing. But only upon an analogous plane of poetic intensity does the author achieve the inarticulate eloquence of music. Such poetry has little to do with a tradition of versification as Joyce knows it, and ridicules it, in Sirens. Rather the author employs such poetic tools as synaesthesia, oxymoron and archetype to force our irrational identification with fallible Bloom. Even so brutal an early chapter as Lestrygonians contains subtle hints of the fraudulent, purgative, and poetically intense techniques to follow. And noting that Bloom's bodily organs are personified--only to be figuratively "cannibalized"--we sense, too, the creative dissolution of meaning, prevalent in the late chapters, whereby Joyce will use a variety of narrative ambiguities to create new dimensions of doubt--a doubt which Joyce believed held mankind together. *Author completed requirements in 1980, but degree to be granted in 1981. UM