Lyrical Awkwardness
Lyrical Awkwardness

Poetic dislocutions in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Summary/Abstract: The stylistic quirkiness of Ulysses is not only inconceivable but also unfathomable. The meanderings of speech from the opacity of narrative through chunks of silent thought to adopted discursive conventions do not leave the reader with the impression that they are facing a transparent narrative. On the contrary, the prose epic of Ulysses subverts expectations concerning “mood”, voice and discursive conventions, yielding threads of lyrically opaque speech. As these threads intertwine and cut across one another, a poetic fabric develops that diverts attention to itself and reveals how prose can foster lyrical foregrounding. The “Eumaeus” episode presents textual constructions that employ marked conventions of speech and eminent syntactic arrangements besides the indeterminacy of “mood” and voice to defamiliarize correlations of perception, thought and emotion. Accordingly, the work demonstrates that the thickly woven opacity of a multifarious fabric is indeed capable of leaving a lyrically subtle imprint on the attentive reader.

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