What Did James Joyce Mean When He Wrote Ulysses Anyway ? Part II
with the descent into Hades, episode seven with the howling winds of Aeolus, eight with the puzzle of the Lestrygonians. The following other segments that make up the other pages of Ulysses are no different. Episode nine describes Scylla and Charybdis, ten moves past the moving Wandering rocks, the haunting song of the Siren composes the eleventh part of the novel, episode twelve encounters the dream of they Cyclops, thirteen surfaces into Nausicia. The myth of the oxen of the sun composes episode fourteen, while Circe fills the pages of episode 15. Eurideus forms the framework around episode 16, and Ithacus episode seventeen. The idea behind studying ancient myth is that there are certain ideas, thoughts, and concepts existing in the subconscousness of the human mind. These ideas are passed down from generation to generation sometimes by story, but other times through patterns lying in the strains of thought lying inside the mind of human perspective. These symbols are passed down through cultures and individuals, often without the knowledge of the participants. Thus, the idea of syncronicity first proposed in the l920's by Jung becomes apparent as the art form of the story is discovered. Joyce was taking some of the most common form of allegory, the art of the paradigm, the generational shift of symbolic perspective and placing it on the printed page. Ulysses became an art form because he was able to take some of the dominant genres of his day, tie them to the ancient concepts of our own human past, and place these images inside the printed page of a novel. Joyce, with his normal wit, made light of the entire subject. Nora Tully describes his literary satiric charm in her own lively poignant terms.
"The only thing that interests me is style," Joyce reportedly said. He referred to interior monologue as the stylization of consciousness. "From my point of view, it hardly matters whether technique is 'veracious' or not; it has served me as a bridge over which to march my eighteen episodes, and, once I have got my troops across, the opposing forces can, for all I care, blow the bridge sky-high." (9)
Joyce may have been making gentle light of his subject matter, but the literary world was not, and were beginning to take his ideas seriously. He had created a firestorm that was spreading among the avant-guard, and as the fires from his breath grew, the excitement of the moment was lost in the sudden flame of genius burning in the darkness of a modern world. World War one had ended, but as the storm of another war began to grow, his mural of
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