Student Question
Can you highlight the stylistic and formal originality in the provided passage from Ulysses?
Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.
Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth. Below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion's head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.
Me. And me now.
Stuck, the flies buzzed.
His downcast eyes followed the silent veining of the oaken slab. Beauty: it curves, curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires. Can see them library museum standing in the round hall, naked goddesses. Aids to digestion. They don't care what man looks. All to see. Never speaking, I mean to say to fellows like Flynn. Suppose she did Pygmalion and Galatea what would she say first? Mortal! Put you in your proper place. Quaffing nectar at mess with gods, golden dishes, all ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar, imagine it drinking electricity: gods' food. Lovely forms of woman sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never looked. I'll look today. Keeper won't see. Bend down let something fall see if she.
Dribbling a quiet message from his bladder came to go to do not to do there to do. A man and ready he drained his glass to the lees and walked, to men too they gave themselves, manly conscious, lay with men lovers, a youth enjoyed her, to the yard.
Quick answer:
James Joyce's Ulysses exemplifies Modernism through its use of stream-of-consciousness to explore the protagonist Leopold Bloom's inner thoughts. In the passage, Bloom's memories and sensory experiences intertwine with his mundane surroundings, such as buzzing flies and a pub lunch. Joyce's style reflects Bloom's sensuality and contrasts classical imagery with bodily functions, illustrating the tension between the mythic and the mundane. This technique aligns form and content, revealing Bloom's complex character.
A most complex work that demands multiple readings, Ulysses is the novel that placed James Joyce at the forefront of Modernism, a literary movement that strove to examine the human condition through the exploration of subjective reality. This psychological probing of the consciousness led to the literary technique of interior monologue, or stream-of-consciousness, a technique which paints the inner thoughts and emotional reactions of a character. As a result, passages are non-linear and often layered.
In this novel with the title of the Greek epic, Joyce restructures this classic to speak to the contemporary world. With these Homeric parallels, T. S. Eliot observed that Joyce's work depicts "the immense panorama of futility that is the modern world." With regard to the cited passage from Episode 8, describing Leopold Bloom's inner thoughts while he is in Davy Byrne's pub in Dublin at lunchtime as he eats a ham and mustard sandwich with...
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a glass of Burgundy wine, the sights and sounds of Dublin--"Stuck, the flies buzzed"--frame the almost mythological wanderings of Bloom's mind as he recalls his past love-making on a Dublin beach. Framed by the "flies buzzed," symbolic of the enclosing of Bloom's life in the tawdry,the swirling dream of his experience juxtaposes the classic with earthy images:
Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth.
Part of Joyce's style of writing emanates from his belief that style must be wed to content. The sensual Bloom, who is a sexual deviant at times (he masturbates as he watches girls at a beach), mixes his images of the classical goddesses with the anal workings of the human body, stylistic images that convey the confluence of Bloom's hope for something out of the ordinary that, instead, is reduced to the carnal:
Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires....Lovely forms of woman sculpted Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine.
Thus, in this passage of interior monologue that is combined with Joyce's inimitable eclectic style in which "form is an extension of content," the reader gains insight into the mind and character of Leopold Bloom, a character who is in sharp contrast--a foil--to the idealistic and intellectual Stephan Dedalus.