What Did James Joyce Mean When He Wrote Ulysses Anyway ? Part II
That Joyce took the classical text of Homer's Odyssey and transposed it with the trappings of daily life in early twentieth-century Dublin, giving epic proportion to a prosaic day in Dublin, is a feat unto itself. That he set himself the task of writing a book from eighteen points of view and in as many styles is impressive. But more than anything in portraying man, the ultimate everyman, and depicting life in its richest detail; the mundane, the ordinary, the mundane, the ordinary, the spectacular; the history of the English language--is most human---Joyce surpassed what had been done before in the English novel." (3)
But, the beauty of this novel lies in the depths of the language itself. Joyce not only borrowed from Homer, the original Irish tongue, or the local English tongue to compose the novel. He also worked with allegory, symbolism, and the ancient myths supporting the basic foundations of literature. Joyce was able to combine the best of popular folklore and the high arts and place them in a novel that operates on several different levels attracting the attention of the reader of various perspectives forming a rapidly evolving image rotating spherically for the observation of the mind. Underneath the basic plot and storyline is displayed a novel of complicated dimenstions falling within layers upon layers of dialect, myth, and story.
"Ulysses opens with Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan in a game of intellectual sparring and establishes an authorial strategy. Joyce was working with and against all that had preceded him, in full control of the elements he employed. His model in youth was Ibsen, whose restraint he would imitate, and then work against. Moving beyond his nineteenth-century predecessors, James and Flaubert, Joyce used what had already been done to establish a new narrative style. He borrowed from religion; his epiphamies imbued the eucharistic with secular meaning. He juxaposed the high and the low. He used vividness, which he understood as the inclusion of all detail, a tenet of Greek literary style. With heroic and mythic allusions he ennabled the common place, and in inserting himself intoan ancient tale, Joyce transformed its qualities into a modern myth." (4)
James Joyce had indeed created a novel of genius, and as a writer had broken the boundaries of the scope covered by the standard literary novel of his day. Along with his use of myth and dialect, he had placed several jokes meant as harmless puns, many of whom
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