Joyce as “Lord and Giver” of Language: Form and Metaphor in Ulysses

Abstract

I begin from the premise that literary criticism must first pose the necessary questions about a work and that each work generates its own line of inquiry. The major questions to ask when teaching or writing about Ulysses are what does it signify and how does it signify? Can we reconcile its symbolic implications and its vast historical and literary scope with its nominalistic texture of experience — experience that often has its origin in the life of Joyce? How can a novel that takes its significance from the author’s biography be discussed? Does it have aesthetic autonomy? Can we discover something about its form that tells us what kind of novel we are reading and helps us define its approach to representation? Is the naturalistic novel of the experience of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus on one ordinary if possibly important day at odds both with the novel’s pretensions as the modern epic and its insistence that the experiences of Stephen and Bloom reiterate those of major figures of the past? How does Joyce’s obsession with the scheme of the novel — with each chapter’s organs, colours, techniques, symbols, and correspondences to mythic and historical figures — reinforce, but also at times undermine both the metaphorical implications and the basic story and characterization?