Introduction
Dealing with James Joyce and his works
does not seem to be an easy task though the
bulk of books and essays on him is striking.
James Joyce as a leading exponent of
modernism stands at a great distance from
his 19th century predecessors by the very
elements and techniques employed in his
writings. It is an established fact that
modernism in the realm of the novel was
marked by Joyce's Ulysses, and his use of
the stream-of-consciousness technique. The
need for expressing the truth as perceived by
modernist writers and the fact that the long-held beliefs had no longer any place in their
writings, made the writers employ new
techniques in expressing new things they
had to utter about man, his condition, and
his communication with others. For Joyce,
who breaks away from old patterns in a way
not to be predictable to the reader, the
ordinary conventional language cannot be a
proper means of representing the inner
thoughts, feelings, and experiences of his
characters though by reading Ulysses one is
likely to hear everyday talks, see people and
imagine where they are. In Joyce too much
attention is paid to the details, and the
naturalistic writer's devotion to their
description is obvious while the feeling of
alienation does not leave the characters
alone and changes them into 'keyless'
wanderers who feel the need for spiritual
communication yet find no means of
achieving it. And Joyce, employing new
techniques in a dramatic way, depicts the
matter of soul-lacking communication
among the characters.
As a matter of fact, the possibility of
determinate communication is questioned
and paradoxically through this
indeterminacy one better grasps the status of
modern man and his relationship with
others. This seems to be Joyce's main reason
for presenting the words in the form of
question and answer in order to better
explore the quality of modern man’s
relationship with other fellows between
whom the distance is long and the chance
for satisfying the need too slim.
Freud's theories on man's consciousness and
the meddling of the past with the present
stress the twentieth-century man's ill-condition and his position among his fellow
beings. Novelists such as Marcel Proust
have confirmed the idea by getting help
from the stream-of-consciousness technique
in order to penetrate into the characters’
minds and claim to have discovered all
about a character and his past. What is
implied is that every human being is known
to be imprisoned by a unique consciousness
not understood by others. Accordingly the
possibility of communication among the
members of a society who are imprisoned by
private modes of consciousness, was
questioned. In order to survive, man was
compelled to wear a mask and behave in a
way that accepted by the society and hide or
repress the reality of the consciousness in
which writers were very interested.
The (anti)hero of the twentieth-century
novel then finds it difficult to hobnob with
other members of the society he lives with
and if vestiges of this are found they are
awkward, unnatural, insufficient and
conventional ways of getting closer to
others, and paradoxically the more attempt
is put to it, the wider the existing gap may
become. In order to show the
incommunicability, new methods are
employed by Joyce who uses a relaxed tone,
an ambiguous mode in his novel, and
elaborately plays with the language to better
show the awkward relationship between
Stephen and his friends; Stephen and
Bloom; Bloom and Molly.
Discussion
Ulysses, perhaps the most complicated and
challenging masterpiece of James Joyce, is
one of the, if not the, greatest novels of the
modern era. With all the peculiarities it has,
Ulysses has reasons for being so. As a piece
of literature representing modernism, it
enjoys certain features not practiced before.
It grants its readers no definite conclusions
and the modern reader feels as if s/he is not
sure about anything s/he confronts in the
novel while receiving startling insights and
believing that anything may be possible.
The way ‘Ithaca,’ Joyce's favorite, is
presented is very challenging to the modern
reader. The dramatic structure of this chapter
allows it to contain a series of
interrogatories or “catechism” whose form
resembles an act of drama—the real art in
Joyce’s opinion—with a dialogue between
Bloom and Stephen. The form is as
significant as what goes on between them
and the poor quality of their interchanges is
directly related to the adopted question-and-answer method that reduces the speed of the
narrative. Joyce, appalled by the old
conventions, did not regard social
conventions as important and stable sources
of morality. Through Joyce the English
novel matured as a system of imaginary and
unreal events “against a clearly realized
social background” (Daichess, 1962, p.85).
Joyce, as a modernist writer, enjoyed
making everything new the most obvious of
which is seen in the pattern of ‘Ithaca’
chapter. By breaking of the rhetorical
orthodoxy of the novel, Joyce astonishes his
reader who is very likely to pause and
ponder over the quality of Bloom’s and
Stephen's pattern of conversation.
Without violating our sense of reality, Joyce
moves away from the 19th century novel
tradition, and presents the events and
thoughts in a way that we receive all the
information from the objective authorial
voice who God-like sits in Bloom’s and
Stephen’s minds providing us with the
minute details of their thoughts. The
objectivity of the narration —thanks to the
307 posed questions and answers—is
different from the objective language of
realist writers who use the language to
reveal an aspect of the world. Joyce does not
insist on using hackneyed descriptions of the
world and its inhabitants; in his realistic
description he keeps his eye on the domain
of description and his success is in his
putting a subjective method in an objective
framework. As an instance, when Stephen’s
attention is caught by a rope with
handkerchiefs on, the narrator goes on to
describe it attentively:
What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to
the height of a yard from the fire towards
the opposite wall?
Under a row of five coiled spring housebells
a curvilinear rope, stretched between two
holdfasts athwart across the recess beside
the chimney pier, from which hung four
smallsized square handkerchiefs folded
unattached …. (Ulysses, p. 673)
According to Reichert in adopting such an
unconventional technique with an
anonymous narrator, Joyce was much
influenced by Dante who described
everything to its detail and in its
“uniqueness,” and then placed it “within the
framework of his premeditated system”
(2002, p.57). Joyce's attention to trivial
events of daily life makes him compress
Ulysses to a relatively short span of time—
one day—perhaps to remind us of the
Aristotelian unity of time. Joyce believed
that “everything is significant in human life
… it all depends on how you look at it,” and
interestingly enough selects a “method of
presenting limited tract of time and space as
microcosm, as a small scale model”
(Daichess, 1962, p. 93) to represent the
whole human life and history, yet reminding
the reader that there is no need to abound the
work with facts, and from such presentation
and space a lot is elicited about the modern
man.
Much of the talk between Stephen and
Bloom is about the present, but a short time
is given to the past that shows how
concerned Joyce was with the past as the
base on which the present was founded as
well as the interference of the past with
present as a token of modernism. Based on
the many interchanges between the past and
the present, characters are known by their
pasts, and access to each character's unique
mode of consciousness implies the state of
the modern man and the quality of his
communication with others. This new
condition of the modern man implies losing
sight of the past shown in the
incompleteness and discontinuity of
Stephen’s and Bloom's thoughts. Bloom and
Stephen move from topic to topic discussing
everything and nothing. No sequence or
cause-and-effect can be traced in what they
discuss, and no discussion is continued to
the end. The more one talks, the more
alienated the other feels, and the more aware
he becomes of his consciousness as a zone
not shared by others. All the time we are
kept aware of the fact that while they are
general human beings they are endowed
with their idiosyncratic qualities.
Each character's unique mode of
consciousness transgressed by the thoughts
of the past keeps the person well out of
reach of the other character. This is precisely
the fact that makes their communication
indeterminate; they show no sincerity about
what they discuss; therefore, no matter even
if they are racially different:
Did he find four separating forces between
his temporary guest and him? Name, age,
race, creed. (Ulysses, p. 702)
Did either openly allude their racial
difference? Neither. (Ulysses, p. 705)
Moreover, through the interrogatives
alternating from philosophical to personal,
or scientific to religious Joyce means to
show the absurdity of religious and racial
hatred as well so that he can refer to the
point that nothing can be taken as granted
and the modern man is enmeshed with
topics he does not sincerely believe in and
for which he shows no respect. Bloom and
Stephen agree and disagree, shift from topic
to topic, and leave many talks incomplete
with which the pleasure of reading the
episode tends to be intensified; thus the
uncertain, trivial, and the unknown find the
chance to flourish. Cause and effect is
replaced by chance and the reader comes
across events with no logical nexus between
them just to enjoy reading a new and
complex work different from those of the
previous century.
An avant-garde writer like Joyce allows “the
unconscious of language to rise to the
surface” (Selden, 1989, p.78) which is a
reference to the potentialities of the
language and the bulk of meaning that can
be conveyed, implicitly, through the
language. Joyce believes in the striking
potentiality of the language and tries to play
with it in many ways to be a different
experience. Joyce relates the functioning of
the unconscious of the mind to the
unconscious of the language. The language
in which no difficult, technical, but weird
words are used is compatible with the
changes Dublin and its men undergo. The
strange structures and philosophical words
used offer a new experience to the reader.
The language is open to examination on
different levels of criticism: Linguistics,
Science, and even Psychology when mental
or psychological problems of characters are
referred to. Joyce tries to, based on images
and scenes, depict the alienation of modern
man or the artist and show his state in
modern life: the outer and inner chaos and
confusion on two scales of macrocosm and
microcosm, external and internal.
The characters function as symbolic pictures
of all history, all experience and all
humanity. Bloom symbolizes the citizen
with the sense of futility, and Dedalus
symbolizes the artist or the exiled artist
whose salvation in cutting himself off from
nets of home, country, and catholic religion.
Bloom is endowed with heroic qualities with
the realization that "the contrasts between
the classical world and the modern […]
would inevitably be ironic on the level of
fact," however, "on the level of symbol …
Bloom would prove a worthy counterpart to
the hero of Homer's epic" (Litz, 1977,
p.392). Joyce shows the modern man and his
wanderings in a world where the truth is not
really known and no means offered for
achieving it. Thus, in such a world not much
can be done and the time and energy will be
wasted on wanderings that are to no avail.
Bloom is one of the most well-known
characters in the canon of English Literature
symbolizing modern man marked with
inaction and impotence.
Frequent interchanges between past and
present, discontinuity of thoughts, lack of
discipline in what characters say, their
disturbed mentalities and the chaotic Dublin
as the city of modernity are shown in Joyce's
play with words. Modern life with all its
intricacies requires a different language and
style to present all it has to offer. Bloom is
not Hemingway’s fisherman who leads a
simple life portrayed in a simple style. In
Joyce what originates from the depth of
one’s mind and imagination is at war with
every vestige of simplicity. The language of
Ulysses with its ironic parallels corresponds
to the ambiguities and ironies of the modern
life. The question-answers and dialogues are
not really communication and pass
unnoticed to highlight the unsolved
psychological and mental problems of the
modern man as the (anti)hero of the
twentieth-century who is supposed to,
ironically, undertake heroic actions (un)like
Odysseus.
The odd and incomplete narrative structure
of the episode is like the structure of the
society as perceived by its characters who
no longer believe in long-held beliefs such
as religion or the Christianity of Jesus
Christ. The central notion of religion is
decentered by Bloom when he refers to
Christ as a Jew destabilizing what the public
believes, or even when he doubts about his
Jewish identity:
What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal
form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Bloom
and Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s
thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about
Stephen?’
He thought that he thought that he was a
Jew whereas he knew that he knew that he
was not. (Ulysses, p. 702)
The incomplete, ungrammatical language
with the "poetic magic of unfamiliar names"
(Litz, 1977, p.394) manifests itself in the
confrontation of Bloom and Molly whose
reunion is unconsummated when Bloom
drifts to sleep thinking of “Sinbad the
Sailor” to “Xinbad the Phthailer” (Ulysses,
p. 730) just to show their awkward
confrontation and distance through the use
of such awkward ambiguous words. The
disintegrating state of modern man—Bloom
and Molly—is best shown in a language
with disintegrating words, structures and
complexity unique to itself and, ironically
enough, Bloom is pictured as being in favor
of complex systems and topics such as
astronomy demanding sincere discussion.
The language of this episode is scientific as
well as theoretical with references to
mathematics and astronomy rendering
Bloom’s spiritual conundrums to formulas
and observations. The language abundant
with references to science, mathematics, and
stars is structured to show the adversary
stand against religion as a stabilized
institution and the significance of science in
Joyce’s writing who was influenced by
Bruno, the Italian theologian. The
occurrence of science in Joyce’s writings
shows the victory of science over the
church. Stephen is resolute in turning down
religion, for he finds the rejection sine qua
non in order to become an artist. Getting
help from science and scientific-technical
writings, Joyce had found a way to show
either rejection of what was accepted by the
public or a new way of presenting truth—the
individual perception of truth and value is
one of the themes explored in modernism. In
order to present the truth and his characters’
philosophical thoughts, Joyce needed a
model and that was Bruno from whom he
learned that “complicated philosophical
thoughts could be expressed in a language
full of invention” (Reichert, 2002, p.58) yet
easy to understand and with an easy tone.
The arrangement of answers is a reminder of
"the self-confident language of Victorian
science" (Litz, 1977, p.395) while most of
the answers are simply put forward. The
language is a reminder of the "naïve 19
th
century faith in science, or a serious
application of scientific theories to human
psychology" (ibid., 391). Here is an
instance:
What proofs did Bloom adduce to
prove that his tendency was towards applied,
rather than towards pure, science?
Certain possible inventions of which he had
cogitated when reclining in a state of supine
repletion to aid digestion, stimulated by his
appreciation of the importance of inventions
now common but once revolutionary for
example, the acronautic parachute, the
reflecting telescope, the spiral corkscrew,
the safety pin, the mineral water siphon, the
canal lock …. (Ulysses, p. 693)
Or What did Bloom see on the range? On
the right (smaller) hob a blue enameled
saucepan: on the left (larger) hob a black
iron kettle. (Ulysses, p. 690)
Inventing a new language meant fusing of
forms and the languages of both common
and educated people as well as rebellion
against typical values. In such a language
the eyes of a scientist are adopted and the
style is changed—about the subjectivity and
diversity of his styles, Joyce in one of his
letters refers to the two adjectives
“unknown,” and “undiscovered” (qtd. in
Butler, 2002, p.261) which are in close
relation with his relativist attitude in
manifesting reality—and he likens the work
to poetry and music. For this last point Joyce
owes a lot to Wagner for putting the words
into forms similar to musical pieces not
alien to the themes and characters employed.
Therefore, when a character sings one thing,
a chord, a melody, a rhythm … can make
the listener aware that, for instance, the
character has something else in mind or
something is taking shape in his unconscious
that he does not yet know about or
something or somebody is present in some
layer of his self which he has tried to
repress. (Reichert, 2002, p. 76)
Joyce’s language in ‘Ithaca’ is pleasing to
hear and rhythms and sounds are composed
“according to musical rules” (Reichert,
2002, p.76) and critics have gone farther in
calling Ulysses a poem. The use of myths,
arrangement of words, and specifically
ironies are the major attributes upon which
such a claim is made. 'Ithaca' is a mixture of
symbolism and realism, and realities are
described and in places changed to myths.
As an instance Joyce by referring to water
and its universality does change the fact of
water to the myth of water:
What in water did Bloom, waterlover,
drawer of water, water carrier, returning to
the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic quality and
constancy to its nature in seeking its own
level … its properties for cleansing,
quenching thirst and fire, nourishing
vegetation … its metamorphoses as vapour,
mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail … .
(Ulysses, p. 736)
If Joyce’s style is unique it is because of his
unique way of expressing truth as well as the
amazing unification of music and science
resulting in the feeling of movement
whenever the writer wants us to move and
speed up reading the text, and slow down
where motion is not desired depending on
the purpose of the part and the act of
hesitation. What Joyce requires of the reader
is not to slow down to think too much nor
just go through the lines for the sake of
enjoyment. Joyce tries to tell his reader that
the truth may lie in what seems trivial and
there is nothing wrong with laughing at
something serious. Accordingly a shift of
style or fusing of styles paves the way for
expressing different attitudes and postures
over one point which validates Joyce’s
narration. The tension Joyce created
between serious and comic, significant and
insignificant, fact and symbol, art and
religion, made him never offer one
viewpoint and he is famous for the sundry
viewpoints he offers with regard to different
aspects of life. That is why nothing from
outside but the language of Ulysses itself
can help us understand the text.
Being a stylist of the English language,
Joyce uses a variety of narrative structures
to show realistic attitudes towards human
society and in doing so takes advantage of
the language as the medley of many
languages. Accordingly the new, not-already-exercised style of Joyce with which
he feels at ease, is capable of revealing to
the reader the styles of a consciousness with
which Joyce is much concerned. At the
beginning of the movement, a kind of
freedom was felt by the writers which
served as the license to employment of
experimental styles. New concepts or new
interpretations of old concepts do need new
ways of expression, the result of which is
the creation of an artistic piece that "renders
the bourgeois world in all its detail and
potentiality, uniting fact and myth in a
classical portrayal of Everyman as
dispossessed hero" (Litz, 1977, p. 405).
To enjoy and understand the episode, the
language must be enjoyed and understood,
for modernist language systems, according
to Malamud, “communicate to and through a
world of alienation, confusion, distortion,
acceleration” (1989, p.12) and the art of
rendering such a language requires the hands
of an artist.
Subverting rules of narration, Joyce abounds
his writing with discontinuities of narrative
shifts in words, and their combinations. In
Joyce’s multi-layered structure, words are of
crucial importance, for it is by his play upon
them that Joyce tells his reader not to be
sure about anything. The way mysterious,
odd words are put together and Joyce’s
portmanteau style tell the reader not to take
anything for granted:
‘Kolod balejwaw pnimali’ (Ulysses, p. 698)
‘Particoloured’ (715)
‘Binbad’ (730)
In one part the two words Bloom and
Stephen appear as ‘Stoom’ and ‘Blephen’
which is “an apparent instance of
circumincession, in that father and son exist
reciprocally in one another” (Blamires,
1996, p. 234). The play on words and the
use of puns and ironies or words with more
than one meaning helps Joyce to refer to
many points at the same time or allude to
one point while discussing another to make
it either more serious or comic and
humorous so that the reader is kept aware of
the echoes and links between words “they
drank in [jocoserious] silence [Epp’s]
massproduct, the [creature] cocoa” (Ulysses,
p. 658).
Joyce’s technique of stimulating readers into
adopting new perspectives is related to the
way he sees truth and expresses it. New
perspectives were, for Joyce, the violation of
whatever taken for granted and publicly
believed. As an instance, to Joyce marriage
was not that holy institution dear to
nineteenth-century writers, which shows that
though Molly and Bloom are married much
misunderstanding may exist between them.
Joyce examines what he sees and is not
confined to habits. Therefore, the reader
perceives no borders between what is
publicly regarded as important and what as
minute. Joyce liked to be ambiguous and the
multiplicity of meanings besides ironic
attitudes and parallels with regard to
different works—Homer’s Odysseus on
which the epic and ironic form of Ulysses is
founded —or heroes—Christ—provided the
means for Joyce via which to keep the
reader thinking, hesitating, drawing
conclusions, violating them or accepting
them with a novel viewpoint.
Saving the ‘Ithaca’ chapter, other parts of
Ulysses are heavily based on the stream-of-consciousness technique with little use of
punctuation and not-clearly-marked voices
in order not to let the reader understand
where exactly one voice stops to let another
start. However, it should be taken into
serious consideration that like every piece of
literature enjoying its own logic, Ulysses
and each episode in it is “self-justified,
immune from grafting or dividing.”
Although in many parts “meaning may be
suspended,” (Attridge, 2002, 2) every scene
and image Joyce depicts is projected in the
reader’s mind. It is perhaps by “the
operation of chance” that Joyce controls the
final meaning and “allow[s] meaning to rise
out of” the text and shape itself (ibid., p.3).
This is exactly the quality that gives humor
to the work. The ironic parallels taken from
Homer may, at the first glance, seem
humorous. However, the new perspective
could be a quality of today’s world that
trivial incidents are not less insignificant
than the heroic adventures of Homer’s
world. On the broader sense the quality of
the events is questioned by the reader who in
some parts comes to doubt their reality. ‘Is
this happening in reality or does it come
from the character’s unconscious?’ is the
question frequently posed by the alert
reader. As a matter of fact it is the quality of
undecidability that dominates Ulysses.
Chinitz takes on the act of flickering of stars
as to show their not being fixed and states
that they are “indifferent to humanity and
best understood as observed objects,
whether scientific or aesthetic” (1991,
p.439).
This confirms that though Joyce presents the
detailed description of things and events, he
puts no definite and concluding answer to
posed questions: Bloom stares at the stars
and sees “a mobility of illusory forms
immobilized in space, remobilized in air: a
past which possibly had ceased to exist as a
present” (Ulysses, p. 732). From a Joycean
view to reach new insights, previous beliefs
must be questioned; to become an artist,
religion must fade away; ironic parallels and
‘Ithaca’ abounding with Homeric
correspondences and contrasts accompanied
by ironic references to Bloom’s Jewishness
like “exodus,” “Father,” “wilderness of
inhabitations,” yet references to Jude-Christian traditions are drawn to indicate
Bloom as a hero with the same attributes as
those of Odysseus who is the hero of his
own time with quite different attributes.
Bloom, the satiric counterpart of Odysseus,
is inactive and caught in a place where not
much happens. To the alert reader’s surprise
the protagonist is not introduced in terms of
action and heroism, for Bloom shows no
determination, attempt, purposeful activity
and decisiveness. Bloom’s passivity,
unheroic activities, and weakness are
symbolized by the stars that appear not to be
moving or changing when he cannot make
relations between his thoughts and the
environment. Bloom is remote from reality,
does not have the key to his house, fails in
making true relationships with his wife—
supposed to be the closest person to him—
and the society, and wanders in his own
thoughts and memories. The modes of shift,
relativity, and distortion permeate the work
and the language with all its ambiguities,
ironies, and references.
Levine believes in “the verbal confusion” in
the novel that “match[es] the increasing
drunkenness of Stephen and his friends”
(2002, p.154). After the day is over, Bloom
goes to bed with a feeling of satisfaction,
and showing no jealousy towards his rival
Boylan. If the modern man is after enjoying
a moment’s relief and desires peace in the
hustle and bustle of everyday life, Joyce
asks why should not Bloom be considered as
a hero? Bloom as a modern hero is able to
sacrifice self-respect for the sake of married
stability after all. When a heroic past is
juxtaposed with an unheroic present whose
protagonist is Bloom the hero of the
twentieth-century remaining passive about
his wife’s infidelity, this leads to the
“[reduction of] the past as well as the
present” (Kettle, 1962, p.137) that does not
remain unaffected by the past, and turns the
work into “a comic epic in prose” in
Fielding’s words to describe Joseph
Andrews. And it is no surprise that in such a
city as Dublin, Molly becomes the only
person not suffering the loneliness and
frustration others are exposed to. As a matter
of fact “to be distinctively modern the poet
must be ironic” (Nicholls, 1995, p.5), so that
he can portray the intricacies of modernity.
Joyce abounds his text with characters’
recollections of the past and lets us enter
their minds to see what they are obsessed
with, and keeps us wandering between
reality and their minds. Joyce, intentionally,
keeps everything on a pending state to show
the uncertainty of reality as perceived by
modern people. Such narrative structure best
serves Joyce’s purpose of undermining the
present state of people. While reading, one
gets used to “sudden public manifestations
of what one took to be a private memory”
(Attridge, 2002, p.3) or the apparent
happenings as just characters’ impressions
of the outer world: confusion in the inner
and outer worlds.
Conclusion
‘Ithaca,’ a picture of the soulless modern
man and his incommunicability, contains
many interchanges between past and the
present providing the means for Joyce to
present the disturbed mentalities of
twentieth-century inhabitants of chaotic
Dublin.
Change is important to Joyce as a trait of
modernism for it is the herald to novelty,
destruction, construction, and rising against
the conventions. This is reminiscent of
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words: “the new
continents are built out of the ruins of an old
planet; the new races fed out of the
decomposition of the foregoing. New arts
destroy the old” (1971, p.180). Joyce’s
language is at the service of character
revelation to show the “real self” (Reichert,
2002, p.60) not much involved in heroic
actions yet, ironically enough, after
ameliorating the world and founding either a
Utopian settlement—“Flowerville” or
“Bloomcottage:” “that it was a Utopia, there
being no known method from the known to
the unknown” (Ulysses, p.715) or thinking
of discovering a gold seam: “the
independent discovery of a gold seam of
inexhaustible ore” (Ulysses, p. 731).
The naturalistic depiction of every day
characters helps readers understand the
significance of the trivial or apparently
insignificant and all that abides characters'
consciousnesses. Only such a Joycean
language is capable of presenting the
conscious and the unconscious; the
significant and the insignificant; the
obsessed minds of characters exploring
many aspects at the same time, possible only
through a fusion of forms, and words being
associated or mingled with each other. As a
matter of fact the language of modernism as
a whole is a language that owes more to
implied concepts, silence, and exploration of
the unknown and not verbs indicating action
and adventure which gives the work a
dynamic quality. The onus of interpretation
falls to the alert reader to see how an aspect
of reality is revealed by the writer and which
aspect the writer tries to bring into
consideration.
In granting the readers no conclusions,
Ulysses presents a 'keyless' Bloom who tries
another way to enter the house. A Bloom
with hesitations and not sure whether,
Hamlet-like, to act or not to act, whether “to
enter or not to enter” or “to knock or not to
knock” (Ulysses, p. 448). On the symbolic
level Joyce means to show Bloom's
indecision not quite different from that of
Hamlet in a different state and period of
time, or to show that the there is a great
difference between the protagonists of a
classical work and a modern one. Such a
seemingly trivial incident like forgetting
one’s key has a lot to offer: The key
symbolizes approaching truth and direct
access to what one is looking for. The key
can be an important part to one’s journey in
getting to a destination. The same as the
journey in ‘Ithaca’ and the quest to reach the
truth or the unknown or an ‘everlasting yea,’
Joyce’s language is a quest for the reader to
grasp the concept of it with all its
complexities.
Life is complex and Joyce gets help from
irony and whatever figure to represent its
complexities and shock the reader to elicit
and accept truth from among either minute
events, or characters’ unique modes of
consciousness. Modernism, after all,
originated from self-conscious, was a
projection of the artist's self-conscious, and
takes the reader into the minds of characters
with private modes of consciousnesses. The
language used to describe is so precise in
showing the thought-track of characters that
Edmund Wilson has called Ulysses “the
most faithful X-ray ever taken of the
ordinary human consciousness” (1977, p.
288): A language capable of indicating
structured representations of memories and
fantasies. A text abounding with inner
thoughts and outer events needs a unique
language to represent them simultaneously
and take the reader to a different place while
making him think of yet another different
subject by the rhetoric shifts made. The
catechism form provides the means for exact
“intellectual argument just leading to the
parody of the characters” (Litz, 1977,
p.395), and shows them as twentieth-century
every day heroes dispossessed of certain
attributes, endowed with modern qualities,
in desperate need of a soul, imprisoned by a
unique mode of consciousness, and after
finding a way of satisfying the need for
spiritual communication in a decedent
Western civilization. By learning
experimental techniques and narrative
structures, students can engage in such class
activities as practicing dialogues. This
promotes students’ use of structures in
context. Students can be asked to produce
specific questions and answers in direct
interaction and based on the novel’s content
regarding the modern man.
