“Ulysses” by James Joyce (post 5): Why would it have multiple, confusing narration and a stream-of-consciousness technique that looks like a joke?

I have read only the novel’s first episode, which is only the first twenty-three pages, but I read it twice.

I came to it prepared with a guide book that explains almost every sentence in the novel. And I am quite willing to be helped with literary, religious, and cultural allusions, with which this novel abounds.

But erudition does not justify narrative confusion.

Confused Narration

As best I can make out, there are at least three narrators in this very brief, opening episode: 1. a third-person narrator of the first paragraph, which describes Buck Mulligan before Stephen enters the scene, 2. another third-person narrator who tends to narrate from Stephen’s point of view, and 3. first-person narration and interior monologue by Stephen himself.

Given Joyce’s punctuation and the way he sometimes fails to label who is talking or thinking, I could not always be sure who was talking or thinking. I could have figured it out for myself or used the literary guide mentioned above, but, in the context of this blog, which is about the creative process, I am interested in the narrative confusion itself.

Confused narratives are typical of people who are psychotic or delirious. So what does it mean when the narration of a novel is confusing, but the writer, such as Joyce, is neither psychotic nor delirious?

My hypothesis is narrative multiple personality. The multiple narrators in this novel were among Joyce’s alternate personalities, and since one of them always knew which character was talking and what they were thinking, there was never any sense of confusion.

Stream of Consciousness

There is no extensive stream of consciousness or interior monologue in the short opening episode that I read, but since it is one of the hallmarks of Ulysses, it deserves mention. Its fundamental problem is that it does not represent how people think.

As Wyndham Lewis wrote:

“[Joyce] had to pretend that we were really surprising the private thought of a real and average human creature, Mr. Bloom. But the fact is that Mr. Bloom was abnormally wordy. He thought in words, not images, for our benefit, in a fashion as unreal from the point of view of the strictest naturalist dogma, as a Hamlet soliloquy” (1, p. 6).

Or as C. S. Lewis said:

“The moment you put it into words you falsify it” (1, p. 7).

Joyce, himself, is quoted as saying:

“From my point of view, it hardly matters whether the technique is ‘veracious’ or not; it has served me as a bridge over which to march my eighteen episodes” (1, p. 6).

But it is so obviously not veracious that it seems like a hoax or joke. And for Ulysses to seem like Joyce was joking was one of the worst things that he could imagine. As Joyce said: “There’s only one kind of critic I do resent. The kind that affects to believe that I am writing with my tongue in my cheek” (2, p. 108).

So, in spite of Joyce’s later acknowledging, objectively speaking, the lack in veracity of his all-verbal stream-of-consciousness, it must have seemed realistic and believable to him when he wrote it. But how could that be?

Perhaps his stream-of-consciousness passages were transcriptions of what he heard his characters say. And hearing must have been believing. For if, subjectively speaking, it had felt unrealistic to Joyce, then critics would have been expected to say that he had written with tongue in cheek.

    

1. Erwin R. Steinberg. The Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in Ulysses. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958/1973.

2. Frank Budgen. James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ [1934]. London, Oxford University Press, 1972.