In the cosmos of "Ulysses" we see different microworIds, that of Ireland, that of the British empire, that of the Catholic Church, that of Homer's “ The Odyssey”.
Temporally and spatially the text is multidimensional.
The presence of the author. There is no customary author here. The author does not merely disappear. Joyce is always present in the book as a self-effacing narrator, as a mischievous, cunning Arranger, the maker of everything. He is powerfully intrusive throughout the novel ( in the name of the arctic goose "the barnacle goose", in Stephen's fear of the thunderstorm, etc.). The Arranger can't be identified with the author. It is some mind, some consciousness, some ideal reader, who keeps track of all the details of the printed cosmos of "Ulysses", the exact forms of words used hundreds of pages earlier. The intrusion of this consciousness is the most radical of Joyce's innovations in "Ulysses". It is something new in fiction. It is not the voice of the storyteller, not a voice at all. Some critics have detected in the Arranger the spirit of Dublin itself endowed with a distinctive personality.
Joyce’s synthesis of styles. Joyce was enchanted by F.Nietzsche’s idea of stylistic pluralism. He realized this concept in distorting proportions of finely balanced styles. Joyce’s prose is an extravagant combination of styles ( lofty and low, poetic and vulgar, etc.). It carries refined lyricism, poetic symbolism, revolting naturalism, blasphemous cynicism. These styles can merge within one paragraph and within a sentence ( The rescuers’ rude shout “Hook it quick” is followed by the lofty quotation from Milton “ Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor”).
Joyce is overtly naturalistic when recording sensual perceptions. Stephen sees green- goldenly lagoons of sand, writhing weeds, he hears vehement breaths of waters, in his imagination he breathes dead breaths of corpses. There are gruesome and naturalistic pictures of a decaying body, the prey of greedy fishes, all presented with revolting faithfulness ("...his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun"). Stephen's reflections are gloomily naturalistic, blasphemous as regards God, whose labour turns out to be futile, as regards humanity, whose fates are so frail. This mixture of styles is in the use of refined and low similes. The poetic and the down-to-earth alternate each other. The cynical naturalism is softened by an amorous allusion-association (a barnacle-goose). Impressionism is an important complementary of "Ulysses", with its microscopic attention to nuances of meaning, its succession of synaesthetic sense-impressions.
Joyce's new language. "Ulysses" is a repository of the author's rare erudition and linguistic attainments. "Ulysses" is written sometimes in a new language, much of it is unintelligible to the average mind. "Ulysses" expands the limits of English. Its vocabulary is enormous. Joyce is experimenting with word-making. He is daringly coining new words and creating echoic language effects. Joyce is continually displaying the knowledge of all the European languages. In his linguistic orchestra there merge the vowels and consonants of all these languages, jargons, vernaculars and dialects. Modern words , coupled with Dante's, Shakespeare's, melt in Stephen's mind. He experiments with the combinatorial potencies of words. Erudite quotations go alongside colloquialisms in many languages, coarse and common words occur in company with rare ones, with the newly-coined words of the writer's composition.
In "Ulysses" sound complexes, grammatical forms, syntactical structures mean very much. The Joycian word is primarily metaphoric, whatever situation it denominates. It is semantically syncretical, as its environment is deeply associative. In the given fragment the words father, moon, loom, sea are richly meaningful.
Joyce operates with monosyllabic words, which are active and pliable phonologically, morphologically, semantically and syntactically. The verb draw, which participates in the creation of the complex image-symbol of the sea, metaphorically refers to the weaving loom , drawing an eternal thread, to the moon, drawing the waters of the sea, to the beautiful woman, drawing the lascivious glances of her lovers, to the goddesses of Fate , drawing the thread of Stephen Dedalus's life. The verb fall in the quotation "Allbright he falls..." from Milton's "Paradise Lost" denotes the flight of the fallen angel, the carrier of powerful intellect, his moral downfall, the fall of Dedalus's son and many other falls, which the labyrinth of the novel offers to decipher. Joyce’ s language is weblike, constantly suggesting a network of connections between similar sounds and images.
"Ulysses’s" imagery. The text is multidimensional sensually. It is stereophonic and stereoscopic, as it reflects Stephen's auditory, visual and tactual perceptions. It is due to metaphoric and synaesthetic images, polysemantic symbols, innumerable allusions, quotations and unpredictable associations. "Ulysses" is a new artistic code, an abundance of new metaphors. The prevalent metaphor is to be found in the title of the book. "Ulysses" is a wanderer in space and time. There are striking and poetical images, presumably mythological in origin. The description of the sea's movement is blended with dark and gruesome fantasies: the water seems to be moving among seasnakes and rearing horses. The atmosphere is animated and musicalized by the living sounds of the sea. The effect of personification is achieved by the combinabilitv of logically incompatible words (wavespeech, sigh of leaves and waves), by the use of the gender-sensitive pronouns (she applied to the moon, he applied to the corpse) .
"Ulysses" is a symbolic network, which gives the novel its incredible complexity. The fragment carries a whole system of polysemantic symbols, which allow competing interpretations. These are the symbolic images of the sea, the loom, the moon, the father, the mother. Joyce’s symbolism is continually shifting. The sea is a synthesis of contradictory symbols. The sea symbolizes fertility and barrenness, creativity and futility, fatherhood and motherhood, life and death, monotony and renewal. As “extremes meet”, the sea is simultaneously the cradle of life and the graveyard of death. Looking at the sea and hearing its” vehement breath”, Stephen perceives the waves, the waters, the weeds, the moon . They all ceaselessly move, symbolizing a ceaseless monotony of life. The sea has inspired poets and writers with visions of grandeur and courage. To Stephen it is a picture of infinite futility, of hopeless monotony, vast and timeless life in its impersonal cruelty. Ceaseless are Stephen's wanderings through life, passionless, dreary and lonely. The moon is compared with a tireless weaver and with “a naked woman shining in her courts”. She eternally “draws a toil of waters “ and eternally “ draws the glances of lascivious” lovers. The moon is also a wanderer, like Odysseus and Odysseus’s son of the 20th century, Stephen Dedalus. Stephen is drifting amid life, like “the barren shell of the moon”( “A Portrait...”).
Allusions, quotations, associations. The metaphoric imagery of the fragment is pierced through by allusions, quotations, associations. Joyce embroidered into "Ulysses" references to science, his previous books, people from his own life, antiquity, Catholicism, Christianity, medieval ages, classical epochs, modernity, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Tennyson. The text abounds in quotations, drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Distant epochs of Stephen's allusions and quotations merge with the gloomy present of his remorse and repentance. In the allusive labyrinth of "Ulysees" most impossible associations are possible. The moon, likened to a loom, arouses associations with Circe, a schemer and a temptress.
As Stephen is obsessed with the idea of spiritual father, and is haunted by his spectral mother, most of the allusions and quotations are pertaining to fatherhood and motherhood, futility and creativity, life and death. His dead mother appears as the incarnation of death.
In the fragment under analysis we distinguish the images of Christ and Lucifer. They are traditionally understood as ideas of goodness and evil. The reader, who remembers the Biblical text, understands that Stephen thinks not only of elementary thirst ("Come. I thirst"). Christ was thirsty before dying. Stephen is ready to get crucified, to live from day to day a senseless and dreary life of a wandering poet. We extract the dichotomies "day :: night", "light :: darkness", "goodness :: evil". When analyzed poetically, in terms of Joyce’s language, Christ and Lucifer represent the same phenomenon - light. Christ is God's son , which sounds as sun . Lucifer means lightbringer. As sun , Christ is indistinguishable from Lucifer, the morning star, who brings light. Lucifer is the fallen angel, driven by God out of Paradise for rebellion. Christ is crucified to rise, ascend to his Father. Lucifer arouses in Stephen admiration, as he is a symbol of rebellion, freedom and quest for knowledge. There is much more to be extracted from the Miltonian phrase “Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect”. Stephen is irritated at his own overreliance on intellect, which imprisons his creativity. In "A Portrait…" Stephen alternates between Christ and Lucifer, the antipodes of goodness and evil. Different dichotomies can be interpreted in terms of images, which are either given on the surface or implied in sounding words.
Joyce sets down the most distant, individual and arbitrary associations that come to his hero's mind in connection with physical things around him. The verb weave arouses associations of Penelope weaving and unweaving her web, of Odysseus telling and retelling his story, altering its particulars, of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", where weaving means dreaming, of Joyce himself, creating his weblike labyrinth of "Ulysses".The text of "Ulysses" takes on a life of its own due to these countless associations.
Syntax. Joyce’s syntax in "Ulysses" is formidably and powerfully new. "Ulysses’s " sentences are varied, from elaborately construed and highly imaginative to clipped, distorted, unfinished, striking , like hammer. Stephen's free associations are expressed by fragmentary, parcellated or segmented structures, elliptical, distorted phrases, that are obscure in meaning, unconventional and ungrammatical ( “A seachange this brown eyes saltblue"). Joyce is not afraid to deform customary structures, to throw out links, to behead sub-clauses. Associations appear in the form of loose, unpunctuated, unfocused sentences with the structural connections slackened. Joyce understood syntax as a compositional device. Melodious and rhythmical, it organizes his fragmentary and plotless prose.
Rhythmicality. There is peculiar music in the book. In Joyce’s onomatopoeic junk we recognize Wagner, who was an enthusiasm of Joyce's late adolescence. Several episodes have a kind of sonata structure ( movement along streets, an indoor lingering, street movement again...). The Joycean word has a melody and a rhythm. We hear the richest palette of the sounds of the real world. These sounds are recreated by sound-imitation words, by monosyllabic verbs with repeated sound complexes, by detached participles with alliterated consonants. Coupled with many other devices, these means express Stephen's auditory impressions. At times his prose has a verse-rhythm.
Character-drawing. The techniques of interior monologue, stream-of-consciousness, free associations serve to create the Joycean characters. "Ulysses" is a vivisection of the artist's mind in action - the drama of cognition. Philosophizing is Stephen's way of life. Hence, the book abounds in cerebral outpourings and verbal pyrotechnics. It is a roaring Niagara of reflections, dreams, reveries, recollections, associations , at times mystical meditations of the modern Irish Hamlet.
There is much information in Stephen Dedalus's name. Joyce believed that our name is the story of our destiny. Stephen’s name is a combination of two polarities, the saint and the heretic. On the one hand, it is an allusion to the name of a Christian martyr, falsely accused of blasphemy and stoned to death. On the other hand, there is a prophetic force in the strange surname Dedalus, the Athenian architect, who built the Cretan Labyrinth and later escaped from Crete by use of artificial wings. Stephen wants to be heir to the vocation of the fabulous artificer. He dreams to create something new and soaring, beautiful and imperishable. His religious fervour is gone. He is rebellious, guilt-ridden, individualistic. He has lost his illusions along with his faith. He strikes the reader with his intellectualism and egocentricity. There is much Hamletic in him (obstinate mourning, self-analysis, soliloquies , indecision). Like Hamlet , he is frustrated by his inadequacy and inactivity as son, lover, artist. He cannot find a happy balance between the self and the world. He cannot reconcile inner and outer reality. He is an introverted figure, who cannot and does not want to realize his personality in action. His mind is that of an aloof artist, playing with the vast corpus of learning. He is weaving the unending web of his interior monologue. He seeks his self-attainment in day-dreams and visions. He is obsessively egotistic, confessional, introspective. He alternates between the roles of Christ and Lucifer. He refused to humour his mother's dying wish. It is an act of disobedience, by which Lucifer rebelled against God.
The author of "Ulysses" shuts himself in his world of visions and dreams. The self-reflective artist, Joyce recreates himself in Stephen. Like his creator, Stephen is overrefined, intellectual and artistic, a walking encyclopedia, freely operating with thousands of quotations from all ages. At the same time Stephen Dedalus is a traditional figure in the European novel. A super-refined artist, a divided self, who cannot reconcile spirit and real life.
Conclusion . "Ulysses", the literary Evangel of the century , is a travesty of the Homeric heroic epic of Odysseus, the dignified splendour of the past, a damnation of sordid unheroic modernity. It is the panorama of anarchy and futility that is the contemporary world. Homeric correspondences and parallels are mocking mirrors. In “Ulysses” Joyce parodies styles, literary trends, musical forms, himself and many other things. "Ulysses" is a kind of encyclopedia, a literary universe, comparable with real universe. It touches upon the larger issues of the modern world and the human psyche. The book poses some of the darkest existential dilemmas facing modern man. Some find the book an embodiment of hopelessness. To others it represents an affirmation of the spirit of life, as it ends with Molly's resounding “Yes". "Ulysses" represents each person's own odyssey, each person's search for the road he must travel.
After the first edition of "Ulysses" the book was considered untranslatable. Even today scholars still argue over the meaning of individual passages in “Ulysses”. It takes several readings to understand "Ulysses", the major imaginative work in English prose of the present century.
“ Ulysses” is said to be the prose for intellectual élite. But it continues to intrigue not only the academic world, the Joycean specialists , but the general reading public as well.