SOURCE: Trotter, David. “Analysing Literary Prose: The Relevance of Relevance Theory.” Lingua 87 (1992): 11-27.

[In the following essay, Trotter discusses Relevance Theory, a version of pragmatics, as applied to Mansfield's “A Cup of Tea” and James Joyce's Ulysses.]

1. INTRODUCTION

From Aristotle to Roland Barthes and beyond, literary criticism has been based on a code model of communication. It has been preoccupied with the encoding and decoding of messages: sometimes in the name of hermeneutics, sometimes in the name of semiology, sometimes in the name of radical scepticism. Although the problem of inference—of what readers do with the output of decoding—confronts it at every turn, it lacks an inferential model of communication, and has therefore been reduced, more often than not, to piety or sociology. During the 1970s, a surge of interest in literary language led critics to Chomsky and Saussure, but not to Grice (Grice 1975). To this day, literary theory has barely acknowledged the existence of pragmatics (though see the suggestive critique of Saussure in Fabb 1988). If Grice got it right, the theorists are in for a rude awakening.

Literary theorists have hardly paid any attention at all to Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986). This seems to me a mistake. Relevance Theory is not only the most elegant version of pragmatics currently available, but the most uncompromising in its view that inference cannot be assimilated to a code model of communication. It asks questions which literary criticism has never been able to ask, let alone answer. Literature, in turn, presents an intriguing special case of the Relevance Theory axiom that communication is most effective when the costs of processing an utterance are minimized and its contextual effects maximized. Writers frequently raise the costs of processing their ‘utterances’, and promise in exchange a yet richer contextual effect. They do not so much abandon as complicate the principle of relevance. They offer different kinds of relevance. They prompt us to wonder what relevance is.

If the linguistic structure of an utterance ‘grossly underdetermines its interpretation’ (Wilson and Sperber 1988: 141), then literature might be defined as a form of communication more grossly underdetermined than most by linguistic structure: the grosser the better. Literature tests to the limit not our powers of encoding and decoding, but our powers of inference. To examine the relation between linguistic form and pragmatic interpretation in a literary text is to ask what makes literature special—and to test a theory which claims to explain that relation.

2. MODERNISM

I have chosen to discuss two early twentieth-century writers, Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce, because, like their ‘Modernist’ contemporaries, they deliberately raised the stakes. At a time when writers were encouraged to make things easy for the reader, they made things difficult. They could do so because changes in the publishing and marketing of fiction had established a greater diversity of readerships. ‘While the new, unusual or experimental writer could not expect to establish himself any more easily under the new system than under the old’, Peter Keating concludes, ‘he would at least be able to make direct contact with the portion of the reading-public sympathetic to his work’ (1989: 405).

Some writers could even be said to have recruited a readership by the severity of the demands they made on it. George Meredith's novels might be too difficult for the ‘popular reader’, Arabella Shore wrote in 1879, but ‘the indirect expressions embody so much wit, or sense or fancy, that we love the work the more for the trouble it has given us’ (quoted in Keating 1989: 384). The literary agent J. B. Pinker managed to persuade Henry James that there were firms which would pay for the privilege of publishing a writer of the ‘better’—that is, the more difficult—sort. ‘If the pressure to achieve best-seller status was made more acute by the evolution of a truly mass audience’, Michael Anesko observes, ‘the same conditions eventually fostered the recognition that smaller, more discriminating publics existed in tandem with it and might be capable of supporting writers of distinction. Even if James's books didn't sell, his name added an indisputable aura of quality to a publisher's list’ (1985: 143).

What kind of trouble did such writers put their readers to? In processing an utterance, we first decode its linguistic structure (identify syntactic functions, etc.) and then combine the output of that decoding with an appropriate context in such a way as to produce an effect which could not have been produced by either operation alone. The context may include information which can be picked up from the physical environment, information stored in the hearer's short-term memory-store, and information stored in the mental encyclopaedia. ‘The idea is that there is a small immediately accessible context consisting of the most recently processed propositions, which forms the basis for the interpretation process, and this minimal context is then expanded by reference to earlier discourse, to encyclopaedic knowledge, or to sense perception. Each of these extensions of the context will, by hypothesis, be motivated by the desire to optimize the relevance of what has been said’ (Smith 1989: 75).

Writers have ways of making things more difficult. For example, a periodic sentence structure, which withholds the main constituent and requires that subordinate or dependent constituents be held in the mind until its belated appearance, places a considerable burden on the reader's short-term syntactic memory, and thus ‘achieves its effects at great cost’ (Leech and Short 1981: 225-228). Periodic sentence structure has always been a mainstay of the British prose tradition. One need look no further than the complexity of James's syntax for proof that Modernist writers did not hesitate to test their readers in this way.

Information picked up from the physical environment does not usually come into play in the interpretation of literature. Other contexts do, and the writer can to some extent determine their accessibility. A reader's interpretation of a passage in a novel will depend on his or her memory of what has been happening in the previous ten pages, or the previous hundred. Most writers exploit the former, a few insist on the latter. Joyce made extraordinary demands in this respect. In Ulysses, when Bloom takes leave of Molly at the beginning of the day, we do not witness what they say to each other. The details of this crucial conversation emerge bit by bit during the course of the novel, some being withheld until Molly's nocturnal monologue in ‘Penelope’, the concluding episode. It is up to us to cross-reference these bulletins, which no reader could possibly keep in mind, using the book as an information retrieval system.

Joyce's appeals to encyclopaedic memory are no less exacting. When Bloom begins to think about the phenomenon of parallax, in ‘Lestrygonians’, we must access, as Bloom himself does, the information stored in encyclopaedic memory at the conceptual address for ‘parallax’. We may well draw a blank; in which case, as faithful readers, we should consult a dictionary or an encyclopaedia, or a critical study in which the issue is explored (Kenner 1980: 73-75). Ulysses is of course a more punishing novel than most. But the interpretation of Modernist fiction (and poetry) quite often requires the retrieval of information from some pretty inaccessible contexts.

Modernist writers disturb or neutralise linguistic form in such a way that we are forced to access these relatively inaccessible contexts. Normally, the syntactic and phonological organization of an utterance affects the way it is processed and understood. Its ‘focus’—the surface constituent which receives the main stress—helps us to assess what it is about (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 202-217; Blakemore 1987: 97-104). Such information status is determined, not by the structure of the discourse, but by the speaker. Even so, there are, if not rules, then at least regularities. It is a courtesy to the listener to introduce old (given) information before the new information which represents the ‘focus’—the point—of the utterance (Greenbaum and Quirk 1990: 397-398). In Relevance Theory terms, ‘an optimally relevant utterance will have its effort-saving background implications made available by initial constituents, and its effect-carrying foreground implications made available by its final constituents’ (Sperber and Wilson 1987: 706). This allows the listener to construct a context as he or she processes the utterance, interpreting the new information in the context provided by the old. Modernist writers sometimes disguise or displace the focus of a sentence, thus forcibly extending the range of inferences necessary to understand what they are talking about.

3. ‘A CUP OF TEA’

The heroine of Katherine Mansfield's ‘A Cup of Tea’, Rosemary Fell, a thoroughly ‘modern’ young woman, visits an antique shop in Curzon Street, Mayfair. She likes the shop, and the shopman, because they repay her patronage with an unobtrusive but comforting deference. On this occasion, she is shown a little enamel box with a glaze so fine ‘it looked as though it had been baked in cream’. Hearing that it costs twenty-eight guineas, she decides not to purchase it at once, but asks the shopman to keep it for her.

But the shopman had already bowed as though keeping it for her was all any human being could ask. He would be willing, of course, to keep it for her for ever.

The discreet door shut with a click. She was outside on the step, gazing at the winter afternoon.

Leech and Short (1981: 126-131) quote this passage and then offer a stylistic analysis of what seems to them its most striking sentence: ‘The discreet door shut with a click’. They consider the sentences Mansfield might have written (e.g. ‘The door discreetly shut with a click’), and conclude that the sentence she chose creates its effect above all by transferring the shopman's chief attribute to the door he may or may not shut with a click. ‘The author makes it seem as if in this euphemistic world, tradesmen, dealers—men of the flesh—have refined themselves out of existence, and have imparted their qualities to the shop itself, its furniture and fittings, in a general ambience of discretion’ (p. 129).

The sentence is striking, of course, and for the reason Leech and Short suggest. But why exactly does it compel attention? I shall argue that it ‘leaps out’ of the surrounding passage because it constitutes a threshold, a disturbance of the stylistic norm established by the story's opening. Up until this moment, the story had developed a gossipy conversational style which clearly mimics the idiom and intonation of Rosemary's ‘set’, and moves fluently into and out of her consciousness. The remark about the door disturbs that style. It places Rosemary and her world with an accuracy, and a quiet irony, of which she herself would not have been capable. Its teasing metaphor (in what sense are doors discreet?) creates a complication. For the first time, we are asked to understand something about the heroine which she herself does not understand: for which she does not have the words. Is it possible to identify anything in the semantic or syntactic structure of the sentence which might have produced this change of emphasis?

‘The discreet door shut with a click’ (1) is a near-miss for ‘The door shut with a discreet click’ (2). (2) conveys very roughly the same meaning as (1), but it has a significantly different effect. It seems more natural. We can more readily associate discretion with clicks than with doors. (2), in short, could not be mistaken for a threshold. To grasp why (2) seems natural is to grasp why (1) compels extra attention. Let us imagine what happens as the reader processes the temporal sequencing of (2). On reaching ‘The door’, we access a range of possible referents. The range is immediately and unambiguously restricted by the definite article, which tells us that the identity of the door in question has already been established. We know that Rosemary Fell spends much of her time entering and leaving shops, and assume that she is in the habit of doing so by the door rather than the window. We know that she has just concluded a transaction, and can deduce that she will now leave the shop she is in. We have no trouble in identifying the door in question, since it is a part of our knowledge of the fictional world Mansfield has created. Indeed, it is so much a part of our knowledge that it can be of no interest in itself. It is not relevant in its own right. It contributes to the relevance of the sentence by allowing us access to a context (the behaviour of doors) which may turn out to be relevant. It raises a question in the reader's mind—‘What did the door do?’—the answer to which might well prove relevant. For example, if it turned out that the door had fallen off its hinges, we might begin to worry about the heroine's safety. ‘The door’ carries what Sperber and Wilson call a background implication, because its function is to reduce processing costs and to access a context which may carry effects.

As it happens, the door doesn't fall off its hinges. ‘The door shut …’. This, too, is a background implication. Our knowledge of doors tells us that they customarily open and shut, and it comes as no surprise to find this particular example in the process of doing so. Again, though, the background implication raises a relevant question: ‘In what manner did the door shut?’ There are several ways in which a door can shut, and the way it does so can tell us quite a lot about it, or about the state of mind of people passing through it. This door shuts ‘with a discreet click’. We have arrived at the focus of the sentence: a foreground implication which is relevant in its own right, and which maximizes the contextual effect. Our impression that the shop in Curzon Street is a discreet place frequented by discreet people has been significantly reinforced.

So much for what Mansfield might have written. What she did write produces a comparable, but considerably more powerful, effect. ‘The discreet door shut with a click’. The focus of the sentence is still its final constituent: the new information it has to give us concerns the manner in which the door shut. But it is harder to process. The initial constituent—‘The discreet door’—must be classed as a background implication. It raises a relevant question, provides access to a context. When we get to the end of the sentence, we already know that this is the kind of door which is likely to shut with a click rather than a bang. And yet that context is relatively large, relatively inaccessible. We have to rummage around in our encyclopaedic entry for ‘door’ until we discover ways in which a door might be considered discreet. The solution assumed by Leech and Short is that this door is discreet because it is operated by discreet people. But we should surely also consider the possibility that the door is discreet with reference to the street it opens onto: it is unobtrusive, perhaps, recessed, painted an unassuming colour. This interpretation doesn't contradict the one proposed by Leech and Short. But the multiplying of possible interpretations does increase, fractionally, the cost of processing the initial constituent. If the sentence was optimally relevant, we should be able to make up our minds immediately as to the door's discretion, before passing on to the verb phrase ‘shut with a click’. To the extent that we have to work at it, the implication does not fulfil its normal function.

There is another factor which needs to be taken into account. As we watch Rosemary hesitate over her little enamel box, we may possibly be reminded, in a vague sort of way, of the scene in The Golden Bowl (1904) where the Prince and Charlotte Stant visit a Bloomsbury antique shop (James 1966: 98-110). There, too, hovers an obliging shopman who is prepared to keep things for the right people, and who lovingly fingers the ‘discreet cluster’ of objects spread out on the counter. In that scene, discretion is, of course, of the essence. The Prince's fiancée, Maggie Verver, must not find out what they have been up to. It is possible, then, that the puzzling discretion of the door in Mansfield's story may encourage us to access the context provided by another scene, another fictional shop. That context, however, an ambitious, baroque novel about adultery, is a large and relatively inaccessible one. Unless we happen to know The Golden Bowl very well indeed, we will probably struggle to connect wimpish Rosemary Fell with James's high-toned lovers. Even so, the possibility of a connection may well strike us as relevant: as likely to enrich the story we are reading. For anyone prepared to recall the details of The Golden Bowl, the door's discretion becomes a context not only for the click which confirms it, but for the rest of the heroine's day. One might say that ‘The discreet door’ carries a foreground implication with regard to the sentence which contains it, since it is as relevant as the ‘click’, but a background implication with regard to the story as a whole. Or we could say that the focus of the sentence is the sentence as a whole, rather than any particular constituent: it's all equally new, equally relevant.

Either way, the sentence draws attention to itself. Its semantic ordering flouts the conventions of normal discourse, conventions which the story has hitherto adhered to. In Relevance Theory terms, it guarantees an increase in contextual effect, but only at the cost of an increase in the effort required to process it. In my terms, it constitutes a threshold. By withholding the kind of relevance we might have expected—a straightforward cumulative ‘filling in’ of a not unfamiliar fictional world—it invites us to exercise our powers of inference: to access more remote contexts in search of other kinds of relevance.

The proof of its status lies in the paragraph it initiates. Rosemary Fell finds herself in the street outside the shop. She has crossed a symbolic threshold, exchanging the security of the shop for the insecurity of the street. Dark thoughts assail her, followed shortly by a beggar, a young girl. Rosemary commits the first indiscretion of the day, perhaps of her life. She invites the girl home with her. Thereafter we are in a different story, a different world: a world where nothing can be taken for granted; a world which an allusion to The Golden Bowl may possibly have enabled us to recognize.

4. THE SCALE OF EXPRESSIVENESS

Ulysses is defined, to some extent, by its difficulty. Its puzzles and enigmas have set it apart from other works of fiction, and so guaranteed its uniqueness. I don't want to suggest that the conditions of its publication—the need to appeal to an elite readership—determined the way it was written. But I do think that those conditions encouraged Joyce to refine and complicate his style. Some evidence for this argument is provided by the way he raised the stakes between one book and the next. The title of A Portrait familiarises us in advance with its content: it is a Bildungsroman, a Kunstlerroman. The title of Ulysses is less accommodating. It tells us that we will have to read Homer in order to read Joyce. Joyce advised his aunt, Mrs Josephine Murray, to get hold of a translation of the Odyssey, or Lamb's simplified Adventures of Ulysses, and then read a critical essay which his publisher would send her, before she attempted his novel (1957: 193). He never hesitated to spell out the demands it would make on the reader.

Joyce's Homer, furthermore, was a Homer filtered through contemporary commentaries such as Victor Bérard's Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée (1902-03). According to Bérard, the Odyssey was based on the Mediterranean voyages of Phoenician sailors. Its geography incorporates three distinct areas or theatres: the home island of Ithaca, off the Western coast of Greece; a southeast axis down through the Peloponnese to the Levant; and a northwest axis up through the Mediterranean to the Straits of Gibraltar. At the beginning of the poem, Telemachus moves along the southeastern axis, while Odysseus finds himself at the extreme limit of the northwestern axis, in Gibraltar. The action returns father and son to Ithaca from opposite directions.

Joyce used Stuart Gilbert to put into circulation this particular reading of Homer.

“Have you read Victor Bérard's Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée?” Joyce asked me when I mentioned my reading of the Odyssey. (This interrogative method of suggestion was characteristic, as I soon came to learn.) I at once procured a copy of that bulky work, and found it fascinating reading.

(Gilbert 1952: 11)

The interrogative method of suggestion was a characteristically sly way to create readers. We might also note Gilbert's emphasis on the bulk of the context proposed. To read Ulysses is to pledge time and effort. If we do pledge the time and effort, we are rewarded by a new understanding of the movements of the main characters around Dublin. Traced on a map of the city (Hart and Knuth 1975), those movements can be seen to mirror the wanderings of Odysseus and Telemachus (Seidel 1976). The title of Joyce's book is itself a threshold. It makes manifest the author's intention to raise the stakes.

‘My work’, Joyce told Adolf Hoffmeister in 1930, ‘is a whole and cannot be divided by book titles … from Dubliners on it goes in a straight line of development. It is almost indivisible, only the scale of expressiveness and writing technique rises somewhat steeply’ (quoted in Coggrave 1991: 11). The thresholds which steepen that scale so dramatically are stylistic as well as titular. At each point on the curve, at each threshold, the cost increases. So it is also within each work. The expressiveness of Dubliners rises from the ‘scrupulous meanness’ of ‘The sisters’ to the lyricism of the ‘The dead’. In A Portrait, the style develops as Stephen develops. The curve on which the episodes of Ulysses are plotted rises even more steeply. My aim here is to examine a particular point on the curve, a particular threshold.

5. THE INITIAL STYLE

The words ‘End of the First Part of Ulysses’ appear on the last page of the Rosenbach fair copy of the ninth episode, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, along with the date: New Year's Eve, 1918. If we add ‘Wandering Rocks’, as a kind of coda, we have, Hugh Kenner points out, ‘a ten-episode block, homogenous in its style and reasonably self-contained in its themes and actions’ (1980: 61). It would be as though two stories of the kind found in Dubliners, one about a stoical cuckold-to-be, the other about a young artist turned drifter, had been woven together for purposes of ironic counterpoint. I want to locate this ten-episode block on the rising curve of expressiveness and writing technique. On one hand, the threshold constituted by its title separates it from Joyce's earlier work, and from the standard contemporary novel. On the other, it is mild stuff by comparison with what follows.

Joyce himself referred to the style in which the first ten episodes are written as the ‘initial style’ (1957: 129). It combines dialogue, first-person present-tense interior monologue, and third-person past-tense narrative. Critics have treated it, productively, as a norm which the later episodes depart from and return to (e.g. Kelly 1988). It does seem deliberately, almost parodically, normative. The third-person narrative sentences conscientiously follow the subject-verb-object pattern of written English. As Buck Mulligan prepares to bathe, in ‘Telemachus’, an elderly man emerges from the sea.

He scrambled up^ by the stones^, water glistening on his pate^ and on its garland of grey hair^, water rilling over his chest^ and paunch^ and spilling jets out of his black sagging loincloth^.

(1984, I, p. 41)

This is an elegant example of loose sentence structure, in which the order of words follows the accumulation of ideas: the mark ^ indicates points of potential completion, at which the whole of what precedes could be recognised as a sentence. This kind of sentence makes things easy for the reader by reducing the amount of syntactic information that has to be stored in decoding. We decode each constituent as we come to it, keeping in mind only the immediately preceding grammatical context. The effect is of relaxation, informality, directness (Leech and Short 1981: 228-230).

In some respects, Ulysses is easy going, at first. Joyce seems to want to accommodate the reader. He keeps us fully informed, while at the same time lowering as far as he can the cost of processing that information. The elderly man disappears from the novel, but he leaves behind him a vivid impression. This is a world we can know intimately, it seems, with little effort. And yet Joyce does more than offer this informativeness as a professional courtesy. He exploits it. He tests it to the limit, provoking us to ask what might be the point of so much detail. When Bloom mourns, in ‘Hades’, loosely-structured sentences spell out the self-consciousness of a non-Catholic at a Catholic ceremony.

The mourners knelt^ here and there^ in prayingdesks.^ Mr Bloom stood behind^ near the font^ and, when all had knelt, dropped carefully his unfolded newspaper^ from his pocket^ and knelt his right knee upon it.^ He fitted his black hat gently on his left knee^ and, holding its brim, bent over piously.^

(I, p. 211)

Kenner captures the edginess of this passage when he speaks of ‘a seriatim accuracy of observation that hovers just this side of being malicious’ (p. 67). With the unimportant exception of two subordinate clauses (‘when all had knelt’, ‘holding its brim’), we decode each syntactic constituent of these sentences as we come to it. Because we absorb the details of the scene seriatim, we are not taxed in any way. Indeed, it's all too easy. Some presence or figure—Kenner, following David Hayman, calls it the Arranger—has gone out of its way not only to describe a man exhaustively, but to ensure that we assimilate as economically as possible every single detail of the description. It is hard not to attribute a motive—malice, say—to such accuracy. Sentences written in the initial style convey a vast amount of information with great efficiency. They are so scrupulous, and so efficient, that we can't help asking what it's all for. How much of the information is relevant? And relevant to what?

One thing an Arranger does is to tilt these gangling sentences towards periodic structure, and thus increase, marginally, the cost of interpretation. In a periodic sentence, dependent constituents—those, like adverbials, which cannot be interpreted in isolation—are often anticipatory: they must be held in the memory until the major constituent of which they are a part has been interpreted (Leech and Short 1981: 226). Adverbials play an increasingly important, and mischievous, role in the initial style. In ‘Calypso’, Bloom sets off to buy a kidney for his breakfast.

He approached Larry O'Rourke's. From the cellar grating floated up the flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar squirted out whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush.

(I, p. 113)

The adverbials of location (‘From the cellar grating’, ‘Through the open doorway’) have to be held in the memory until we discover exactly what will be done with them. Of course, it's only the tiniest of impositions. We may well know or guess that O'Rourke's is a pub, and not be surprised to hear that it is equipped with a cellar grating and a doorway. We might also adduce a rhetorical function for the periodic structure of the sentences. The suspense while we wait to interpret the adverbials might be thought to dramatise Bloom's apprehension, the sharpness of early morning smells. The deviation from a loose sentence structure is barely noticeable. However, it might prompt us to ask what exactly the narrator wishes us to notice about the scene. What is the focus of these sentences?

It might be that the adverbials, far from dramatising Bloom's apprehension, signify in their own right. As the initial constituent in their respective sentences, they provide a direct link between what has gone before and what is asserted in the main clause. They function as what some linguists would call the ‘theme’ of the sentence. They tell us what the sentence is ‘about’. It is possible to argue that thematisation varies according to genre: detective stories tend to thematise time adverbials, while travel brochures thematise adverbs of location (Brown and Yule 1983: 131-133). The initial style consistently thematises adverbials of location, especially in episodes like ‘Wandering Rocks’ which have Dublin, rather than individual characters, as their subject. Joyce did after all claim that if the city were to disappear, it could be reconstructed from his description of it (Budgen 1934: 69). One might argue that this deviation from loose sentence structure can be explained by a grammatical ‘rule’ (of thematisation).

Such a rule could not, however, cope with the opening sentence of ‘Lotoseaters’.

By lorries along sir John Rogerson's Quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill lane, Leask's the linseed crusher's, the postal telegraph office.

(I, p. 141)

Nobody, I think, has ever claimed that this sentence, or the episode it introduces, or the novel as a whole, is ‘about’ lorries. By thematising these ostentatiously insignificant lorries, Joyce craftily varies the pattern. He surrounds the sedate verb phrase ‘Mr Bloom walked’ with such a thicket of adverbials that we can't really tell what he means us to notice. Rather, there is no grammatical rule which arranges the adverbials into an order of significance.

John Porter Houston, discussing the vital role played by adverbials in the initial style, concludes that they ‘serve, more than anything else, to vary word order and sentence shape’ (1989: 33). He admits that this variation cannot be explained by any grammatical rule. But his characterisation of its function in rhetorical rather than grammatical terms—‘solemnity, a striking rhythmic effect, or remoteness from any concern over easy communication’ (p. 22)—is too vague to be much of an improvement. He is quite right to speak of a pragmatic function (‘concern over easy communication’), but doesn't develop the insight. All grammatical descriptions of the language of Ulysses (e.g. Gottgried 1980) suffer from a similar vagueness. They admit that grammar won't explain everything, but have no terms for what it won't explain. We have reached the limits of the code model of communication.

If we are to understand the function of adverbials in the initial style, we must look not to their grammatical, rhetorical or semiotic coding, but to the inferences they support, and the principle which guides those inferences. Let us return to the opening sentence of ‘Lotoseaters’.

By lorries along sir John Rogerson's Quay Mr Bloom Walked soberly, past Windmill lane, Leask's the linseed crusher's, the postal telegraph office.

Most readers will probably have little difficulty with this sentence, despite the proliferation of adverbials. The concluding words of the preceding episode—‘Poor Dignam!’ (I, p. 139)—have reminded us that Bloom is due to attend a funeral. With that context in mind, we will, at a first reading, select the adverbial of manner (‘soberly’) as the focus of the sentence. Bloom's sobriety is relevant because it combines with what we already know to produce a contextual effect: to reinforce our assumptions about his state of mind. The place adverbials may distract us momentarily, but are quickly subordinated by the principle of relevance.

It should be noted, however, that a second, complementary criterion of relevance operates on the initial style: relevance to the character described, what matters to him or her at a particular moment. What matters to Bloom, at this moment, is not so much his sobriety as the telegraph office. ‘Could have given that address too’ (I, p. 141). He is on his way to collect a letter addressed to him at the Post Office in Westland Row: a letter which might just as well have been addressed to him at the telegraph office on the Quay. Bloom's preoccupation supervenes on, or mixes with, the preoccupation signalled by the conclusion of the previous episode. The initial style often works by such a layering of relevance.

At subsequent readings of the sentence, yet other preoccupations may supervene. If we have looked at a map of Dublin in the interim, we may want to know what Bloom is doing on Sir John Rogerson's Quay. He's headed for the Post Office in Westland Row. But the Quay is by no means in a straight line between Eccles Street, his point of departure, and Westland Row. He's taken a considerable detour to the east. Why?

‘Lotoseaters’ begins on the Quay, further to the east than Bloom needs to be, because in the equivalent Homeric episode Odysseus sails south through the Aegean from the coast of Thrace, and then southwest through the Mediterranean until he lands at Djerba, on the African coast, the land of the lotoseaters: according to Victor Bérard, that is (Seidel 1976: pp. 154-155, 177). Bloom's route takes him in a southwesterly direction from the Quay to Westland Row, and then to the baths in Leinster Street. With Odysseus's path through the Mediterranean in mind, rather than Bloom's sobriety, we may decide that the focus of the opening sentence of ‘Lotoseaters’ is in fact one of the adverbials of place: ‘by sir John Rogerson's quay’. That is the piece of information which now seems most relevant: which combines with a context created outside the book to produce a new understanding of Bloom.

The initial style stretches and complicates syntax—but never to the point where the code breaks down. None of its sentences are impossible to decode. The aim is not to deconstruct syntax, but to make more than one inference possible. The opening sentence of ‘Lotoseaters’ is crammed to bursting-point with adverbials: with different contexts in mind, we will select different adverbials as the focus of the sentence. The threshold constituted by the book's title, which brings into play the Homeric context, intervenes in the interpretation not only of incidents, but of particular sentences.

6. WANDERING INFERENCES

In ‘Wandering Rocks’, the ‘coda’ to Kenner's ten-episode Ulysses, Joyce subverted the premises of the initial style. For the first time, he described events and mannerisms of which the characters are not aware. For the first time, characters other than Stephen and Bloom are accorded interior monologues. A distinction emerges between what it is possible to infer about one type of character and what it is possible to infer about another.

Some characters, the ones who belong in a traditional novel, remain ‘characters’: figures about whose intentions there is only ever one inference to be made.

By the provost's wall came jauntily Blazes Boylan, stepping in tan shoes and socks with skyblue clocks to the refrain of My girl's a Yorkshire girl.

(I p. 545)

In this section of ‘Wandering Rocks’, various people greet the viceregal cavalcade, their exact location often thematised by the sentences which describe their various gestures. There can be no doubt, however, that the focus of the sentence which describes Boylan is ‘jauntily’. Boylan is all jauntiness, and forever jauntiness. He is one of the very few characters in the book whose motive and intention can be inferred from everything he says and does. The provost's wall is a mere backdrop to his jauntiness. ‘His hands in his jacket pockets forgot to salute but he offered to the three ladies the bold admiration of his eyes and the red flower between his lips’ (I, p. 545).

But what about Thomas Kernan, first presented by the same kind of sentence as presented Bloom in ‘Lotoseaters’?

From the sundial towards James's Gate walked Mr Kernan pleased with the order he had booked for Pulbrook Robertson boldly along James's street, past Shackleton's offices.

(I, p. 513)

His boldness seems at this moment the most important thing about him; the subsequent interior monologue mulls over his recent triumph. No Odyssean protocol is likely to attribute significance to his route. But by the time the cavalcade comes into view the boldness has subsided.

The viceroy was most cordially greeted on his way through the metropolis. At Bloody bridge Mr Thomas Kernan beyond the river greeted him vainly from afar.

(I, p. 541)

The sentence which describes Kernan's greeting stretches to include three adverbials of location, and one of manner. In Boylan's case, location is eclipsed by manner; here, manner (‘vainly’) becomes a feeble reflection, a mere consequence, of location (‘from afar’). Each constituent is easy enough to decode, and the effort required to store ‘At Bloody bridge’ and ‘beyond the river’ temporarily will trouble few readers. Yet it is hard to know what to make of it. About Boylan, only one inference is possible: that he means to cruise the viceroy's female companions. It is easy to know what to make of him. With Kernan, motive and intention slip from view. He means to greet the viceroy; but his location at a distance, so roundly insisted upon, means that he cannot have expected to succeed.

The progress of the cavalcade reveals just how hard it is, except in Boylan's case, to infer an intention from an act or a gesture. It also reveals how hard it is not to try to infer an intention. Even the Poddle River, hanging out ‘in fealty’ a ‘tongue’ of liquid sewage, finds itself included among the supplicants (I, p. 543). The viceroy, programmed to infer fealty, is still at it in the episode's wonderfully sly concluding sentence.

On Northumberland and Landsdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849, and the salute of Almidano Artifoni's sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.

(I, p. 547)

This sentence seems to deliver relevant information as efficiently as one could wish, up to and including an adverbial of manner (‘punctually’) which we are happy to identify as a likely focus, since it confirms our assumption that the viceroy takes his duties seriously. But with the business of reassurance safely out of the way, the sentence gains a second, and more mischievous, wind. The identification of the house outside which the schoolboys stand might conceivably be said to have some slight bearing on the viceroy's punctual response to salutes. But clearly the joke is on us, as we labour to make connections. A gap has opened between decoding and inference: between the ponderous but maddeningly feasible, maddeningly automatic decipherment of gossip about Queen Victoria, and the highly questionable relevance of the knowledge so laboriously produced.

In the later episodes of Ulysses, which are beyond the scope of this paper, we decode furiously, unremittingly, as though on a treadmill, but infer lamely: until ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Penelope’ redress the balance by providing, right at the death, a flood of information whose relevance cannot be doubted. Here, at the conclusion of ‘Wandering Rocks’, the conclusion of the initial style, the gap between decoding and inference, so characteristic of Ulysses, is confirmed by the viceroy's acknowledgement of an act which was not even intended as a gesture: Artifoni's sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.

Works Cited

Blakemore, Diane, 1987. Semantic constraints on relevance. Oxford: Blackwell.

Brown, Gillian and George Yule, 1983. Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Budgen, Frank, 1934. James Joyce and the making of ‘Ulysses’. London: Grayson and Grayson.

Coggrave, John, 1991. Behind the squirtscreen. Times Literary Supplement, 5 April 1991, pp. 11-12.

Fabb, Nigel, 1988. Saussure and literary theory: From the perspective of linguistics. Critical Quarterly 30, 58-72.

Gilbert, Stuart, 1953. James Joyce's Ulysses (revised edition). London: Faber and Faber.

Gottfried, Roy K., 1980. The art of Joyce's syntax. London: Macmillan.

Greenbaum, Sidney and Randolph Quirk, 1990. A student's grammar of the English language. London: Longman.

Grice, H. P., 1975. Logic and conversation. In: P. Cole, J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics, Vol. 3: Speech acts, 41-58. New York: Academic Press.

Hart, Clive and Leo Knuth, 1975. A topographical guide to James Joyce's ‘Ulysses’. Colchester: A Wake Newslitter Press.

Houston, John Porter, 1989. Joyce and prose. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.

James, Henry, 1966. The golden bowl. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Joyce, James, 1957. Letters, ed. Stuart Gilbert. London: Faber and Faber.

Joyce, James, 1984. Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, 3 volumes. New York: Garland Publishing.

Keating, Peter, 1989. The haunted study. A social history of the English novel, 1875-1914. London: Secker and Warburg.

Kelly, Dermot, 1988. Narrative strategies in Joyce's Ulysses. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.

Kenner, Hugh, 1980. Ulysses. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Leech, Geoffrey and Michael Short, 1981. Style in fiction. London: Longman.

Mansfield, Katherine, 1983. Short stories. New York: Ecco Press.

Seidel, Michael, 1976. Epic Geography. James Joyce's Ulysses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Smith, Neil, 1989. The twitter machine. Reflections on language. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson, 1986. Relevance. Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson, 1987. Precis of Relevance. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10, 697-754.

Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber, 1988, Representation and relevance. In: Ruth Kempson (ed.), Mental representations, 133-153. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.