Sep 21, 2009

O, that Joycean Rag!

Joyce is a fictional realist. This is a funny and complicated term in literary studies, applied to figures as diverse as Emile Zola, Balzac, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and John Updike. In Joyce's case it means that, especially in Ulysses, he goes to extremes to expose the physical and psychological realities of life.

The author is not an explicit presence in Joyce. He creates doubles of himself and puts them in the story, but we rarely feel the presence of "James Joyce."

Joyce uses a passive style - objects doing things - to emphasize physical realities. This applies to thoughts too: he flatly states what a character may think. His descriptions are often dispassionate and clinical. He hated sentimentality - makes fun of sentimental prose a lot in Ulysses.

In a way he is an anti-rhetorician. In Ulysses he spends an extravagant amount of time making fun of high-flown rhetoric. He seemed to feel, like Shakespeare, that persuasive speakers are an evil influence. Therefore, his writing is free of the emotive words and rhythms fiction writers use to make us feel things.

A rare exception is from the first pages of Ulysses, when Buck Mulligan tells Stephen Daedalus that death does not matter and people are essentially like cattle that go to the butcher shop upon death. Joyce refers to the "gaping wound that the words had left in [Stephen's] heart." But Joyce seldom does this.

Joyce has a subtle awareness of sound and rhythm and uses it to evoke what he is describing. Here's an example, again from Ulysses.
Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and
sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside
him. Then he carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set
them down heavily and sighed with relief.
Notice the long vowel sounds that accentuate Stephen's action; the quick rhythm of Buck Mulligan tossing the fry onto the dish; and the extended rhythm of carrying the meal to the table, ending with an almost-audible sigh.

Like Nabokov's sentences, Joyce's often piles independent clauses together paratactically. However, as Anthony pointed out, there is a suspensive quality to many passages as well. As a storyteller, Joyce uses a kind of metonymy a lot. He gives us details that imply a lot of things about the character.

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