enigma, the disentanglement of an intrigue, or an instructive change of
fortune, the story in which 'everything hangs together' in a very
obvious way—causality, moralizing, verisimilitude and narrative
interest all working together in harness. In the latter part of the
nineteenth century, starting perhaps with Flaubert ('The novel ended
with Flaubert and with James', Eliot remarked in that same essay on
Ulysses) this stable synthesis began to show cracks, as a conflict of
"Originally, in the serial publication of the novel, Joyce gave to each of the episodes a title drawn from the Odyssey (Telemachus, Nestor, Proteus etc.) by which they are still referred to in critical commentary; but he deleted these headings from the text when it was published in book form.
interest between its various elements became evident. For example, the more 'true to life' fiction became, the less likely it was to observe the conventions of the readerly plot. It was the staple complaint of the early modernists against the Edwardian realists that they had not absorbed this lesson, and that their painstaking accumulation of realistic detail was therefore fatally compromised, deprived of authentic 'life'. 'The writer', Virginia Woolf complained in 1919 'seems constrained, not by his own free will, but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole. . . . Is life like this? Must novels be like this?'28 The
modernists found the modes of late Victorian and Edwardian poetry similarly inauthentic in clinging to the myth of a universe that was intelligible and expressible within the conventions of a smoothly homogeneous lyrical idiom. 'We can only say,' T. S. Eliot declared in 1921, 'that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate, if necessary, language into his meaning.'29
The modernist enterprise, however, had its dangers and its problems. The logical terminus of their fictional realism was the plotless 'slice of life' or the plotless 'stream of consciousness', and plotlessness could easily become shapelessness, or randomness. 'Difficulty' in poetry could easily become a cover for self-indulgent incoherence. The post-impressionist painters faced the same problem. Glossing Cezanne's celebrated remark that he wanted to paint 'Poussin from nature', E. H. Gombrich says:
The Impressionists were true masters in painting 'nature'. But was that really enough? Where was that striving for an harmonious design, the achievement of solid simplicity and perfect balance which had marked the greatest paintings of the past? The test was to paint 'from nature', to make use of the discoveries of the Impressionist masters, and yet to recapture the sense of order and necessity that distinguishes the art of Poussin.30
Hence the attraction, to Eliot, of Joyce's mythical method, which, so to s p ea k, 'p ai nt ed Home r f rom na tur e' . Eli ot' s es s a y is ca ll ed ' "Ulysses", Order and Myth' (my italics) and is concerned to rebut the accusation of Richard Aldington that Ulysses was a chaotic, Dadaist work. On the contrary, 'It is . . . a step towards making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr Aldington so earnestly desires.'31 Modern experience, 'the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history'32 is
James Joyce 139 contingency, without apparently being tampered with in the interests of plot; yet the representation proves after all to have a structure, a principle of aesthetic order derived from a quite different source (Homer). The representation of a demythologized world, a world 'fallen into the quotidian' (Heidegger's phrase) is thus ingeniously redeemed by allusion to the lost mythical world—aesthetically redeemed by our perception of the structure, and spiritually re- deemed by our perception of human continuity between the two worlds.
Ulysses, then, is a realistic or metonymic fiction, (about Bloom, Stephen and Molly) with a mythopoeic or metaphorical structure. As Walton A. Litz has shown in his study of the various drafts of the novel,33 metaphorical procedures came to predominate as the novel
progressed and was progressively revised. The Homeric parallel was of course present from its inception, but the idea of each episode having its own set of leitmotifs—its special art, colour, organ, symbol, 'technic', etc.—was decided at a late stage and the earlier episodes were revised to make them consistent with the later ones. This feature of Ulysses must be described as metaphoric in our terms, since it entailed the insertion into the discourse of items on a basis of similarity not contiguity—for instance, allusions to horses, the 'symbol' of 'Nestor', in that episode, or the references to 'heart', the 'organ' of 'Hades', in that episode. These elaborate systems of leitmotifs reinforce the general tendency of Ulysses towards an encyclopaedic allembrac- ingness, away from that concern with individual experience that is typical of the realistic novel. If they do not seem intrusively metaphorical—if, indeed, they are seldom consciously perceived by readers without the help of commentators like Stuart Gilbert34—it is
because what could hardly be contiguous in time or space can very easily be contiguous in a person's 'stream of consciousness'. As Lawrence Sterne had demonstrated in the eighteenth century, the process of association in human consciousness seldom works in a logical, linear fashion, but is characterized by idiosyncratic twists and turns and jumps: the moment of Tristram Shandy's conception was disturbed by Mrs Shandy's untimely enquiry about winding up the clock, 'an unhappy association of ideas which have no connection in nature'.3S Therefore, under cover of plausibly rendering 'the atoms as
they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall. . . [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness'36 (as Virginia Woolf put it)
Joyce could smuggle into his discourse items drawn from the most heterogeneous contexts to make up other, quite artificial patterns, unrelated to the individual psychologies of his characters. Ignoring the signal of the title, it is possible to read the first few episodes of Ulysses (up to and including 'Hades') merely as realistic fiction equipped with psychological hi-fi. It is only with the pastiche headlines of 'Aeolus'
that the discourse openly, verbally, displays its plurality of reference (in this case to journalism as an institution as well as to the Dublin Evening Telegraph). As the novel progresses, the use of parody and pastiche, which place the discourse at some aesthetic distance from the material it is mediating, becomes more and more pronounced, culminating in the virtuoso feats of 'The Oxen of the Sun' (based on a metaphorical equation between the evolution of English prose and the development of the foetus in the womb) and Circe (with its profusion of surrealistic substitutions and transformations), Joyce can afford these metaphoric flights because the metonymic base of his work is so secure; and in the closing episodes he returns us to that base. In Ulysses, the metonymic mode is transformed and enriched but not (as in Finnegans Wake) obliterated by the metaphoric.
One of the great achievements of this novel, unmatched by other exponents of the stream of consciousness technique, is the way Joyce discriminates stylistically between the consciousnesses of his main characters. It is noteworthy that this, too, is achieved by varying the proximity of the discourse to the metaphoric and metonymic poles. Stephen's consciousness is essentially metaphoric—he is constantly transforming what he perceives, the world of contiguities, of nacheinander (one thing after another) and nebeneinander (one thing next to another) 37into other images and concepts drawn from his
reading, on the basis of some perceived similarity or ironic contrast. The more insistently he does this—the more substitutions he makes— the weaker becomes the chain of combination and the more difficult it is for the reader to follow the discourse. Thus 'Proteus', in which Stephen is actively pondering the metaphorical processes of the mind (and stepping up their power artificially by closing his eyes and shutting off one sensory channel to the world of contiguities) is the most 'difficult' of the first three episodes. And all these episodes are more difficult than any of the episodes pertaining to Bloom.
For Bloom's stream of consciousness is by comparison essentially metonymic. We are always much more aware of what he is doing— where he is situated in time and space—because there is a more direct connection between what he is thinking and what he is doing. When his consciousness digresses from what he is doing, his associations still connect items that are contiguous rather than similar. The difference between Stephen and Bloom in this respect may be illustrated by comparing the responses of each to the perception of a female figure. This is Stephen, on Sandymount strand, catching sight of the midwife, Mrs Florence MacCabe:
Mrs Florence MacCabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of Bride Street. One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as
James Joyce 141
gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.
Spouse and helpmate of Admon Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.38