What Did James Joyce Mean When He Wrote Ulysses Anyway ? Part II
art form. Joyce seems to have accidentally fallen into a greater art movement than himself, in much the same way a swimmer may find himself drawn towards the ocean by a rather strong oceanic current. Needless to say, Ulysses made quite a splash in the literary art world.
The experimental nature of the work grabbed the attention of the reader from the modest beginnings of the novel. Joyce was able to use the literary subconscous narrative form of composing prose in the same nature that a film director might place a story on film. Ulysses flows from the printed page in the same manner that a movie might cross the theatrical screen. Images and ideas cross the pages of the novel in a spectacular flux of energy. The mind is turned on by this combination of thought and description.
"In Ulysses, James Joyce eschews action in favor of the pschological narrative. Joyce relied on epiphanies, symbols, images, impressions, and dreams for meaning. By telescoping and fragmenting time, the presentation of experience becomes layered, allusive, discontinuous. Through the use of a transformational language, stream of consciousness, free association, interior monologue, and montage, Joyce constructed a new reality of time and space: contracting and expanding, kaleidoscopic and hallucinatory. With the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, the world gained access to a new visual language. In capturing 1/125 of a second, the photograph isolated aspects of temporality that exist in the fractional moment. Time and space were interrupted, fixed, enlarged, or reduced. Motion pictures, the automobile, and the radio subsequently opened the realm of the mechanized killing, shattered the moral underpinnings of European society. By the end of the war, the age of romanticism had ended----industry, science, psychology were the new gods and for Joyce and many of his contempories, aesthetics outranked ethics." (2)
It has been stated that the annals of literary text are composed of seven basic storylines. Writers have simply been telling the same stories over and over again throughout the generations, but using a different form. Joyce was no different from writers of earlier eras. In "Ulysses" can be found several of the major plots in western literature. There is love, anger, jealousy, the search for the self, etc. all told in the framework of the narrative journey towards the inner human soul. James Joyce, however, did perform some rather creative devices in his literary narrative.
"Ulysses exceeds seven hundred pages in length but its subject is one day in Dublin. That
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