THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Stephen Dedalus’s admiration for Newman’s prose style becomes a contentious issue in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (1916) it is the eucharistic theology of Thomas Aquinas that most determines the complex aesthetics that
Stephen expounds. Although his faith is replaced by scrupulous doubt, Stephen retains an insistent Jesuit
authoritarianism in his arguments about definitions of beauty. As the latter stages of the story affirm, Stephen assumes
a new priesthood, that of the artist. In a crucial sense, he also fulfils the implications of his pointedly un-Irish name.
He is Daedalus, the builder of Cretan
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mazes and the ingenious feathered escaper from islands. It is to this symbolic artist, the ‘old father, old artificer’, that
Stephen finally dedicates himself. But if the second half of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is taken up with
debate and definition, its opening sections attempt to describe, in an extraordinarily original manner, the growth of an
artist’s mind. There was obviously nothing new about the fictional autobiography, especially the kind that dealt with
the emotional and intellectual development of a prospective writer. Its last conventional fling came in 1915 with
W(illiam) Somerset Maugham’s hugely popular account of a lonely boy’s metamorphosis into responsive adulthood in
Of Human Bondage. Where Maugham (1874-1965) ploddingly adapts formulas which would have been familiar
enough to readers of David Copperfeld, Joyce challenges received ideas of literary decorum. He plays even in his
opening sentences with fairy-tale phraseology, nurserv-rhyme rhythms and baby-talk and he deftly suggests how an
infant’s experience is shaped by sensual stimuli (Stephen hears a story; he smells his mother and the oil-sheet on his
bed; he tastes lemon platt (a kind of children’s sweet); he feels warm and wet). The narrative moves him forward from
being the passive feeler, hearer, and observer to being the doer, reader, writer, and maker. It later seeks to express the
process of Stephen’s adolescent exploration of his personality and the flexibility of his mind. Above all, it describes
him trying out the poses of the would-be priest, the lover, and the intellectual before finally breaking the narrative into
a series of diary entries as the potential artist prepares himself for flight.
In Ulysses, once conceived of as a story for Dubliners, a troubled Stephen Dedalus has returned to his birthplace,
to his circle of intellectual friends, and to the dangerously outstretched tentacles of his family. Portrait was focused on
a single personality; Ulysses, by contrast, has a multiple focus. Stephen’s refined perceptions are played against the
earthier preoccupations of an homme moyen sensuel — the Dublin Jew, Leopold Bloom — and the consciousness of
both is finally contrasted with that of Bloom’s wife, Molly. The thought and actions of all three are interwoven with
the diverse life of Dublin on a single day, 16 June 1904. Characters cross and recross the city (though Molly remains
seemingly marginalized in her bed; she sleeps, entertains a lover, and ultimately moves centre-stage as she muses on
her life and loves in an extraordinarily unpunctuated monologue). When Stephen and Bloom finally encounter one
another, and drunkenly discover a brief intimacy, they have taken separate voyages of exploration through the city.
Underneath each of the eighteen extended episodes around which the novel is built lies a Homeric precedent. Bloom is
a latter-day Odysseus/Ulysses; Stephen his lost son Telemachus; Molly his Penelope. Mr Deasy, the opinionated
Protestant schoolmaster with whom Stephen has an uneasy morning interview, corresponds to Nestor; Bloom’s
attendance at Paddy Dignam’s funeral has overtones of the Homeric descent to Hades; the fantasizing Gerty
MacDowell, whose sighting on the beach sexually stimulates Bloom, is a Nausicaa; and the xenophobic ‘Citizen’ in
Barney
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Kiernan’s is a type of the blinded giant, Cyclops. Beyond the explorations of the fluid consciousnesses of his major
characters, and beyond the Homeric underpinning, Joyce ingeniously attempts to expand certain of the later episodes
into experiments with form. In the ‘Wandering Rocks’ sequence, for example, the peregrinatory Father Conmee links
together a series of brief scenes by crossing Dublin by a route meticulously plotted and timed by Joyce (with the aid of
maps and of his Dublin-based brother) and by finally coinciding with a vice-regal cavalcade (representing a meeting
of the Roman and the British domination of Ireland). In the ‘Sirens’ episode an attempt is made to reflect the musical
form of a fugue and in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (set in the Holles Street maternity hospital) an extended pastiche of
English prose style, from its beginnings to the present, parallels the embryonic development of a child in the womb.
Ulysses is, however, far more than the self referential series of echoes or the cryptogrammatic integration of puns,
acrostics, and dense literary and historical allusion which its successor, Finnegans Wake, threatens to become. It
rarely needs to be exactly untangled before it communicates. It is eminently readable rather than narrowly studiable.
Reading Ulysses is a process of refamiliarization with a variety of adapted styles, modes, and techniques. In one sense,
it stretches fictional realism almost to a point of absurdity, for example, in the ‘Ithaca’ section by subjecting Bloom,
Stephen, and the objects in their immediate ambience to a process of forensic listing (Joyce himself called it a
‘mathematical catechism’). In another, it consistently attempts to observe more intimately and precisely than any
earlier novel. It follows the extraordinary vagaries of Bloom’s mind as he shops, lusts, cooks, eats, relieves himself in