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The Martello Tower with its “gloomy,
domed livingroom” is where Stephen
Dedalus pursues a writer’s life with
“stately, plump Buck Mulligan” and
“ponderous Saxon” Haines.him apart from the cerebral, spiky
Stephen, whose monologue on the
beach in the third episode begins:
“Ineluctable modality of the visible:
at least that if no more.” Compare
the first sentence of Bloom’s stream
of consciousness: “Another slice of
bread and butter: three, four: right.
She didn’t like her plate full.”Panoply of styles
As the novel progresses, many
other prose styles interweave
with stream of consciousness and
naturalism. Episode 13, for instance,
parodies sentimental women’s
fiction, beginning with the words,
“The summer evening had begun
to fold the world in its mysterious
embrace.” Bloom, relaxing at dusk
on the beach, masturbates at the
sight of a young woman knowingly
revealing her legs. The narrative’s
formulaic, rose-tinted romanticism
provides an ironic counterpoint to
his seedy voyeurism.
In the following episode, when
Bloom visits a maternity hospital,
Joyce uses a sequence of differentliterary styles, a pastiche of English
literature that draws on Anglo-
Saxon, Chaucer, Samuel Pepys,
and Thomas De Quincey. For some
readers, this is Joyce at his most
alienatingly erudite.
Episode 15 is a phantasmagorical
play set in Dublin’s red-light district,
Nighttown, where Bloom’s repressed
masochistic fantasies and Stephen’s
guilt over his mother are reflected
in vivid, dreamlike tableaux. In its
dissolution of space and time and its
rapid succession of hallucinations –
for example, Bloom giving birth
to “eight male yellow and white
children,” and the poet Tennyson
appearing in a Union Jack blazer
and cricket whites—the fantasy
is deeply unsettling. In a nightmarish
scene, Bloom acts as Stephen’s
protector when he is gripped by a
petrifying hallucination at a brothel.
In part, Joyce was inspired by
Dada—a surrealist movement that
rejected reason and logic, which
the young artists of the Cabaret
Voltaire founded in Zurich (Joyce’s
home at the time) in 1916. The
influence is particularly evident
in this episode. Like the Dadaists,
Joyce set out to shock the public
with a deliberate offensive against
conventional standards of taste
and propriety.BREAKING WITH TRADITION
There follows an episode that
takes the form of a catechism—
an extended question-and-answer
dialogue—that is used to convey
an account of Bloom and Stephen
repairing together to Bloom’s house
for cocoa. It is here that Bloom and
Stephen come closest to empathy.
The analytical, exhaustively
cataloguing manner in which
events are related acts as a
counterpoint to the subtle affinity
the two feel toward each other.Molly Bloom’s soliloquy
The final chapter of Ulysses
is a masterpiece of stream-of-
consciousness writing. It reveals
the intimate thoughts of Molly
Bloom in the night, lying in bed
on the verge of sleep. Until this
point, Molly has been seen through
the eyes of her jealous husband,
Leopold. The shift in viewpoint,
to the feminine, is one of the most
brilliant in modern literature.
Having depicted the city’s
patriarchal culture, in which
women play an indispensable role
as wives, mothers, and prostitutes –
sources of emotional nourishment
and physical satisfaction—without
their voices being heard, Joyce ❯❯Id have to get a nice pair of red
slippers like those Turks with
the fez used to sell or yellow
and a nice semitransparent
morning gown that I badly
want like the one long ago in
Walpoles only 8/6 or 18/6...
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