What Did James Joyce Mean When He Wrote Ulysses Anyway ? Part IV
in action. There is a great deal of his art operating in this segment of dialogue, and sometimes it helps to take a piece of the text, slowly taking the sentences contained in that text apart, and then placing them back together again, so that the full notion and meaning of the narrative can be grasped. Anthony Burgess, a prolific writer in his own right, a novelist who has excelled at the written prosaic form of fiction, mainly known for his cyberpunk science fiction classic, "A Clockwork Orange", captured the difficulties that Joyce had to surpass with this piece of literary commentary.
"Epic length and the structures of dramatic form can be reconciled not merely by imaginative 'loops' but by a more detailed examination of the characters' acts and motives than traditional novelists thought either necessary or descent. Bloom must not only eat but defecate; Molly Bloom must meditate not only on her lovers but also on what her lovers are like in bed. With so large a canvas no human detail may be left out. But the traditional techniques for expressing unspoken thoughts are bound to be insufficient. Hence the 'stream of consciousness' or the 'interior monologue'-- an endless commentary from the main characters on the data thrown at them by life, but unspoken often chaotic, sometimes reaching the thresholds of the unconscious mind. This device had been used before--- by Dickens and Samuel Butler, even by that great primitive Jane Austin---but never on the scale or to the limits employed by Joyce. Joyce, after all, lived in the psycho-- analytic era: he liked to joke about his name's having the same etymology as Freud's." (3)
Joyce was able to walk across this literary tight rope, with the ease that a soaring acrobat crosses the heavenly skies of unearthly natural wonder. His words soar into those heavens of discovery, carrying the eyes and minds to undiscovered heights; but then never failing to bring these dreams into the neatherlands of a world bound by the reality of a material world, covered by the recesses of another day's silent litugery. This conflict between the flesh and the spirit occurs over and over again in Ulysses, is seen throughout the dialogue, and eventually becomes an important aspect of the epic form of the narrative, and the subtle but ever-present interplay between the lofty dreams of the human spirit caught in the smothering embrace of the material natural world.
"What applies in this chapter applies nearly everywhere in the book:
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