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Originally published in 1982.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691609836 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #663 |
| Pages: | 244 |
| Sales rank: | 891,656 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.40(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses
By Karen Lawrence
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1981 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06487-1
CHAPTER 1
Dublin Voices
Of his purpose in writing Dubliners, Joyce told his publisher Grant Richards in 1906:
My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. ... I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard.
The letter, written in response to Richards' desire for Joyce to alter certain "troublesome" words in his stories, suggests that he saw his artistic choices as both aesthetic and moral. In the phrase "scrupulous meanness," Joyce implies both an aesthetic and moral meticulousness. He defends his diction on the grounds that it is already as pared and carefully chosen as possible (so that no word is arbitrary or dispensable) and that it records the "truth" about Dublin. In the last line of the quotation, Joyce directly links the style of his stories with his moral duty to represent his subject faithfully.
In this description of his technique in Dubliners, Joyce articulates what is apparent from reading the stories: that "truth" depends not on the mediation of the storyteller but on the precision of the prose. The style of scrupulous meanness involves restraint, both in terms of narrative stance and prose style. It implies a reduced role for the narrator, who would present rather than exhort. Six years earlier, in his essay on Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken, Joyce had praised drama as the highest form of art because it could present, directly and without alteration, what the artist saw and heard. In Ibsen's play, Joyce said, "the situation is not stupidly explained": the play expresses its own ideas as "briefly and concisely as they can be expressed in the dramatic form," with "from first to last hardly a superfluous word or phrase." In Dubliners, Joyce attempted to apply this aesthetic of economy and restraint to a prose medium. "Joyce ... seldom raises his voice as he examines the less overt manifestations of human behavior," Marvin Magalaner and Richard Kain observe in Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation, and this restraint, characteristic of Dubliners, reveals Joyce's confidence that one does not have to shout to be heard.
Paradoxically, the lack of authorial intrusion seems, at times, to be an announcement of a narrative feat: with his hands tied behind his back, the author seems to say, he will wrestle with and pin down his city and his characters. Richard Ellmann describes this narrative stance in his biography of Joyce:
Arrogant yet humble too, it claims importance by claiming nothing; it seeks a presentation so sharp that comment by the author would be an interference. It leaves off the veneer of gracious intimacy with the reader, of concern that he should be taken into the author's confidence, and instead makes the reader feel uneasy and culpable if he misses the intended but always unstated meaning, as if he were being arraigned rather than entertained.
The clarity and brevity of the style of scrupulous meanness also implies this kind of confidence. In The Motives of Eloquence, Richard Lanham discusses clarity as a stylistic ideal: "Clarity," he says, "must not show off. But serious prejudice aside, clarity contains enormous show-off zest. Clarity signifies, after all, an immense act of exclusion, of restraint. It is an affair of timing, potentially — like brevity — of wit."
The style of scrupulous meanness, in conjunction with Joyce's theory of epiphany represented fictionally in Stephen Hero, expressed a certain basic confidence in the powers of language as well as in the author's abilities. Joyce's view in Stephen Hero (expressed through Stephen) that the artist should very carefully record epiphanies or "sudden spiritual manifestation[s], whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself" suggests a general belief: a confidence in the adequacy of language to capture an image or emotion or to pinion Dublin lives smartly in a phrase. The burden and the faith of notions such as "le mot juste" and the "objective correlative" (a later version of this faith) are evident in Joyce's idea of the "supreme artist" who could "disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and «re-embody» it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office" (SH, p. 78). These formulations express a belief in style as a kind of perfect expression of an emotion, thought, or type of mind. The mode of scrupulous meanness in Dubliners implied, then, narrative restraint, precision and economy of prose style, and a faith (also expressed in the theory of epiphany) in the ability of language to capture reality.
In his notebooks, Joyce himself had attempted to record epiphanies of the "vulgarity of speech" of the Dubliners. The direct reporting of speech in these epiphanies provided Joyce with one method of presenting, without deforming, "whatever he had seen and heard." But, as Stanislaus Joyce says in My Brother's Keeper, these epiphanies were "brief sketches, hardly ever more than some dozen lines in length, but always very accurately observed and noted, the matter being so slight. This collection served him as a sketchbook serves an artist." For the longer form of the stories, Joyce experimented with a narrative technique that allowed him to place the sound of Dublin voices in a new narrative context: the technique of free indirect discourse used extensively by Flaubert. This technique renders a character's speech or thoughts in the character's own idiom, while "maintaining the third-person reference and the basic tense of narration" but not the introductory phrases (such as "he said that") of indirect discourse. Providing an alternative between direct and indirect reporting and a chance to present the character's mental as well as spoken idiom, this technique suited beautifully Joyce's aims of precision, subtlety, and narrative restraint. In free indirect discourse, the characters would betray their own paralysis. If people could be deposited in the narrative, "formulated, sprawling on a pin," why not allow them to impale themselves?
In Dubliners, Joyce extended Flaubert's use of the technique of free indirect discourse to suit his own narrative purposes. Whereas Flaubert's narrator tended to shift from the borrowed mental speech of his characters to his own more literary prose, Joyce strengthened the link between character and narrator. In the following example from "A Mother," Joyce creates a narrator who is less intrusive, more disguised, than Flaubert's:
Everything went on smoothly. Mrs Kearney brought some lovely blush-pink charmeuse in Brown Thomas's to let into the front of Kathleen's dress. It cost a pretty penny; but there are occasions when a little expense is justifiable. She took a dozen of two-shilling tickets for the final concert and sent them to those friends who could not be trusted to come otherwise. She forgot nothing and, thanks to her, everything that was to be done was done.
Technically, the third sentence is the obvious example of free indirect discourse, since we are suddenly given Mrs Kearney's mental idiom without any narrative introduction. However, the word "lovely," the English expression "to let into the front of Kathleen's dress," and the self-congratulatory "thanks to her" are all obviously extensions of the small, calculating mind of Mrs Kearney (indeed, both Flaubert and Joyce seem to be particularly hard on overbearing mothers). The entire passage, then, represents Joyce's extension of the technique that he found in Flaubert and his creation of a narrator who borrows wholesale his character's idiom. A look at specific stories in which a third-person narrator "borrows" the language of his characters will illustrate how Joyce created a series of narrative voices that functioned as stylistic masks.
In the stories told from the point of view of a Jamesian, "centered" consciousness, Joyce uses free indirect discourse to reveal the quality of ordinary Dublin lives. The bankruptcy of the lives of Little Chandler, the failed artist in "A Little Cloud," and Maria, the spinster in "Clay," is epiphanized in their language and is made clear to the reader, but not, for the most part, to the character. In the following example from "A Little Cloud," Joyce presents the sound of a Dublin mind thinking and suppressing the realization of its own pain:
He looked coldly into the eyes of the photograph and they answered coldly. Certainly they were pretty and the face itself was pretty. But he found something mean in it. ... He found something mean in the pretty furniture which he had bought for his house on the hire system. Annie had chosen it herself and it reminded him of her. It too was prim and pretty. (P. 83)
In the repetition of the word "pretty," Joyce appropriates a word from the little domestic world of "bliss" that Little Chandler and his wife inhabit and transforms it into half-conscious accusation. The deliberateness, the tightness of the neat little sentences, reveal the essence of Little Chandler's mind. Through the sterile, obsessive repetition, Joyce captures the frustration of the character's life.
In "Clay," the narrator adopts Maria's language: her tenses, her pronouns, her clichés are all appropriated, and with them her limitations. He borrows the assumptions of her world and seems to expect that we will sympathize with these assumptions. Maria's world is composed of "nice" people, habitual actions, and familiar faces; it is a world in which children are "tired and sleepy," because in the happy bed-time story Maria has made of her life, the mundane and redundant are comforting friends.
The following is an example of the narrative style of the story:
The kitchen was spick and span: the cook said you could see yourself in the big copper boilers. The fire was nice and bright and on one of the side-tables were four very big barmbracks. These barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer you would see that they had been cut. (P. 99)
What we are shown here is a representation of a lonely and repressed adult mind that operates on the level of childlike simplicity. By donning language appropriate to Maria, the narrator appears to concur in her observations. And the second-person pronoun, "you," seeks to draw the reader into this chummy association. Irony results from the disparity between the "you" in Maria's thoughts and the reader who recognizes the processes of repression and rationalization that lead Maria to organize her world in this way.
The language of Maria, like that of the other Dubliners, is a pastiche of unacknowledged quotations, "received ideas" about life that help her "control" her world. Like the other characters in Dubliners, Maria composes a story about her life. Just as Flaubert used the technique of free indirect discourse to reveal the romance-ridden mind of Emma Bovary, Joyce used it to reveal the minds of characters who tend to see themselves as central characters in various types of stories. Maria's unconscious image of herself as the good fairy godmother in a tale for children is only a more plebeian and naive version of Little Chandler's romantic image of himself as a Byronic poet, a poet who fantasizes the review of his poems ("Mr Chandler has the gift of easy and graceful verse. ... A wistful sadness pervades these poems. ... The Celtic note" [p. 74]). Mr Duffy in "A Painful Case," in fact, represents all the Dubliners who consciously or unconsciously have "an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense" (p. 108). Like Don Quixote, who literally attempts to chronicle his own exploits, these characters wish to "write" their own stories.
But through the use of free indirect discourse, the narrator does this for them; he borrows their self-images, their fictions, their clichés. He masquerades as a participant in the world of his characters and appears "unreliable" because he seems to accept his characters' limitations. Free indirect discourse allows him to seem to accept the self-image a character has created for himself, while pointing to the insufficiency of that image. The characteristic irony of the stories originates in this masquerade. As Dorrit Cohn puts it, narrated monologues (free indirect discourse) "amplify emotional notes, but also throw into ironic relief all false notes struck by a figural mind."
The wish to present the self-deluded minds of ordinary people is not a new one to the writers of short stories or novels. What is important and unusual in Dubliners, however, is Joyce's strong interest in the language of the characters' thoughts. Stephen Ullmann's emphasis on the fact that free indirect discourse is essentially "mimetic" (it "retains the expressive elements of speech, and tries to imitate the inflexions and intonations of the speaking voice") and "oblique" (it is "reported speech masquerading as narrative") is particularly germane to a study of Joyce's use of the technique. Through the use of free indirect discourse, style becomes an indispensable tool of irony; as a mirror of a type of mind thinking, it can quickly shift from imitation into subtle mockery. Thus, the irony of the stories depends upon a form of stylistic parody. And with the technique of free indirect discourse, style becomes mask — the author becomes a mimic, speaking in someone else's voice.
Thus it is the obliqueness of the technique that makes free indirect discourse a more important antecedent of the radical stylistic developments in Ulysses than the stream-of-consciousness technique, which purports to give a more direct transcription of the mental process without narrative intrusion. The mimicking in the narrative of the second half of Ulysses in part grows out of the mimicking begun in Dubliners. But in Ulysses, the unreliability of the narrator gives way to the unreliability of the narrative — the mimicking no longer parodies a particular type of mind.
It was this tendency to parody, this very distance between the author and the rather pathetic characters he could so easily pinion, that contributed to a growing ambivalence Joyce felt toward his "betrayal" of Dublin's soul. The suspicion that he might be reaching an artistic cul-de-sac in the stories first surfaces in Joyce's letter to Stanislaus on July 19, 1905:
Is it possible that, after all, men of letters are no more than entertainers? These discouraging reflections arise perhaps from my surroundings. The stories in Dubliners seem to be indisputably well done but, after all, perhaps many people could do them as well. I am not rewarded by any feeling of having overcome difficulties. ... The Dublin papers will object to my stories as to a caricature of Dublin life. Do you think there is any truth in this? At times the spirit directing my pen seems to me so plainly mischievous that I am almost prepared to let the Dublin critics have their way. All these pros and cons I must for the nonce lock up in my bosom. Of course do not think that I consider contemporary Irish writing anything but ill-written, morally obtuse formless caricature.
This letter, written about midway through the composing of the short story collection, was sent to Stanislaus only seven days after another in which Joyce said: "I am uncommonly well pleased with these stories. There is a neat phrase of five words in The Boarding-House: find it." Obviously the July 19 letter was written in a rather harried frame of mind and is not to be regarded as a final pronouncement. Throughout the letters, the alternation is evident between Joyce's glorification of his achievement and his fear that it had all been too easy. But what is obvious is that Joyce began to worry about the facility with which he could use the weapon of his style to pin down the little people of Dublin, and the phrase "well done" in his letters begins to read as "too easily done." In another letter to his brother, written in September 1905, Joyce, in a more flamboyant but still harried mood, wrote:
Give me for Christ' sake a pen and an ink-bottle and some peace of mind and then, by the crucified Jaysus, if I don't sharpen that little pen and dip it into fermented ink and write tiny little sentences about the people who betrayed me send me to hell.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses by Karen Lawrence. Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- Acknowledgments, pg. ix
- Introduction, pg. 1
- Chapter I. Dublin Voices, pg. 16
- Chapter II. The Narrative Norm, pg. 38
- Chapter III. “Aeolus”: Interruption and Inventory, pg. 55
- Chapter IV. "Wandering Rocks" and "Sirens": The Breakdown of Narrative, pg. 80
- Chapter V. “Cyclops,” “Nausicaa” and "Oxen of the Sun": Borrowed Styles, pg. 101
- Chapter VI. “Circe”: The Rhetoric of Drama, pg. 146
- Chapter VII. “Eumaeus”: The Way of All Language, pg. 165
- Chapter VIII. “Ithaca”: The Order of Things, pg. 180
- Chapter IX. “Penelope”: A Coda, pg. 203
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 211
- INDEX, pg. 225