Ulysses and language

James Joyce’s Ulysses is a seminal literary production in the 20th century on many counts. One among many is the author’s playing of the language.

As observed by Declan Kiberd, Joyce has used language not merely as a mood of expression but also as a means to achieve diverse objectives. For instance, Joyce effectively uses language to extend the self-mockery or self-critical aspect of the novel.

Kiberd says, “That mockery extends even to the notion of written word itself. ‘Who ever anywhere will read these written words?’ asks Stephen Dedalus, in what may be one of the few lines written by Joyce with a complete straight face. He foresaw that the written word was doomed to decline in an age of electronic communication (which he himself had helped to usher in by opening one of the first cinemas in Dublin).

This was yet another reason why he chose to base his work on a Greek legend which was told in oral narrative long before it was committed to writing. It was the fact that the words had to be written which bothered Joyce, who fretted over all that was lost in the transition from ether to paper. He myself would have preferred a musical to a literary career, and his works all gain greatly from being read loud. For example, in the Nausicaa chapter, Bloom’s ecstasy at the sight of Gerty MacDowell’s legs is captured by a rising crescendo of ‘O’ sounds, after which she walks away, prompting him to ponder. “

One of the reasons which prompted Joyce to experiment with language is that he was dissatisfied with ‘previously writerly styles’. Kiberd observes, “Ulysses, therefore, pronounced itself dissatisfied with previously writerly styles, offering pastiches of many, especially in the Oxen of the Sun chapter, in order to clear the way for a return to oral tradition with Molly Bloom. (This is one possible meaning of the massive full-stop at the close of the penultimate chapter.) By incorporating within its self-critical structure a sense of its possible obsolescence in a post-literate world, Ulysses is at once the consummation and the death knell of the age of print. In that respect too, it is very much of its time.

When a concerned friend told Picasso that the cut-price canvas on which he worked would be rotting fifty years later, the artist simply shrugged and said that by then paintings would have cease to matter. The post modern novel is now conceding, if not its absurdity, then its limited durability. If nervous authorial interventions marked the novel’s beginnings as a literary form, they may also signal its end.”

Distrust of written English

Kiberd points out from the very beginning Joyce’s distrust the written English and that distrust is, in a way, predictable partly due to Joyce’s upbringing in a linguistic environment which was dominated by ‘oral culture’ and partly , it was due to ‘loss of native language’; “ Joyce’s distrust of written English might have been predicted of a man who grew up in an essentially oral culture, but it had its source in his sense of trauma at the loss, in most parts of Ireland through the nineteenth century, of the native language. The fate of a sullen peasantry left floundering between two languages haunts the famous diary entry by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”

In A Portrait, Kiberd says that Joyce would have been mocking ‘the widespread hopes of a language revival’ and he is also not ‘fully happy about the English-speaking Ireland of the present.’ Kiberd also notes that Joyce expressed his dissatisfaction of the fact that ‘English did not provide a comprehensive expressive ensemble for Irish people either’.

“This is part of the tragicomedy of non-communication pondered by Stephen during a conversation with the Englishman who is dean of studies at his university; ‘The language in which we are speaking is his before is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.”

Irish writers

Kiberd notes that ‘Joyce found himself probing its limits’; “Living, like other Irish writers, at a certain angle to the English literary tradition, he could use it without superstition, irreverently, even insolently.”

Kiberd observes that words in Ulysses have been used in a manner to ‘reveal and to conceal’: “The interior monologues of Ulysses permitted Joyce to contrast the richness of a man’s imaginative life with the poverty of this social intercourse. Compared with the tour de force monologues, the recorded conversations are mostly unsatisfactory, a bleak illustration of Oscar Wild’s witticism that everybody is good until they learn how to talk.

Words in Ulysses are spoken as often to conceal as to reveal. The deepest feelings are seldom shared, and usually experienced by isolates. Bloom never does forgive his wife’s infidelity in an exchange of words, as he has already forgiven her in her mind. Joyce critically explores the equality of conversation among Irish men in groups, finding them fluent but all too seldom articulate. It goes without saying that they go without saying what is true on their minds. They are as inarticulate in the face of Bloom as he will later be in the presence of Stephen and Molly. Only in solitude does Bloom scale poetic heights.

Yet unlike other men, Bloom shows redemptive awareness of his own inarticulacy. He feels a real empathy with all dumb things. Kind of animals, he tries to translate the household cat’s sounds into human words like ‘Mekgnao’ or ‘Gurrhr’. The machine in the Newspaper office is ‘doing its level best so speak’ and so, frantically, he coins the word ‘sllt’ to render its sound. Like his creator, Bloom too is seeking to extend the limits of language, so that it can encompass signals from previously inarticulate world. His sympathies with human flow naturally to those as lonely as himself; and such encounters, as with Gerty MacDowell, are often wordless, conducted in the language of the body. ”