It hard to know where to begin, this alone distinguishes Joyce’s Ulysses as a feat of technical engineering. Gifford begins his introduction with a discussion of time in Ulysses. There are apparently two types of literary time: a ‘real’ time and an epic time. It is within this epic time that the action of the novel takes place. Gifford points out that rather than a long unending story of every moment of a character’s life the story begins in medias res, and all 800 pages recount no more than one day! This is astonishing considering the length of this’ day’. It seems that Joyce’s themes and tentative structure are formal and classical in their origins, Shakespeare for instance employed time, and Homer’s Odyssey is a big influence on dominant themes and characters. Stephen Dedalus is compared to Odysseus’s son Telemachus, and his coming age Bloom is compared to Odysseus’s (The father figure) and finally Molly is compared to Penelope and her affirmation of her husband (and in this case Dublin). It is with this framework and time schema in place that Joyce provides himself with the leeway to break other conventions within the text. This might be the reason why two other massive books are required to explain what “isn’t said” in this gargantuan novel. It is thus that time has another important role in the novel. It contains many political, historical, and geographical references, some of which would have been in the culture of 1934, however a great deal of the references are to ancient Greek tragedy or philosophy.
After reading the first section, Telemachus, the identity of the narrator immediately becomes a question. Dialogue is dealt with in a semi-unconventional way and with a somewhat confusing manner. Dashes are supplied to denote when a character is speaking, however the narrator’s comments like “he said” are included next to the speech. Sometimes the text has an all consuming and dizzying effect on the reader. Who is speaking, and what, exactly, are they saying? The narrator must indeed be an educated character since half, or more, of the obscure or technical references are the author’s. So what role does he play? He is after all THE bard. And bards are of great significance in a novel where characters address one another as bards and one which has roots in the Odyssey penned by Homer- the original bard.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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