Chapter 5 - Prose fiction

Summary

“It is a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape,” wrote T. S. Eliot of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Joyce's novel describes a day in the life of an advertising canvasser in prewar Dublin, drawing implicit parallels between his adventures and those recounted in Homer's The Odyssey. Joyce began the novel in a stream-of-consciousness or “interior monologue” technique that developed naturally out of his experiments in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) (see Chapter Three). During the course of writing Ulysses, however, he largely abandoned this method and replaced it with a vast array of styles, so that the reader's attention is directed as much to Joyce's use of a variety of literary techniques as to the events he describes. Ulysses demonstrates most of the notable characteristics of the modern novel. As an exploration of consciousness or the inner life, it inspired Virginia Woolf's injunction that the novelist should “consider the ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” For Joyce this entails a preference for an antihero, or at any rate a hero who does not resemble the heroes of earlier novels, as well as an exploration of subject matter that, while a part of ordinary consciousness, is often taboo in art, such as defecation and masturbation. As a notable experiment in the rendering of time, Ulysses displays a modernist skepticism about the linear or sequential arrangement of events into traditional plots.