Style and Narrative in the "Ithaca" Chapter of Joyce's Ulysses

In Ulysses Joyce introduced narrative modes which subvert our traditional idea of literature and the literary. In the seventh chapter of the book, Aeolus, he initiates this process by parodying the sub-literary headings of a newspaper and in Eumaeus he employs cliches from various non-literary sources: journalism, bureaucracy, and everyday speech, for example. But it is Ithaca, the penultimate chapter, which represents the book's most radical attack on the idea of literary style. In Ithaca the narrative dons the anti-literary mask of science; its technical, denotative language, like the prose advocated by Thomas Sprat's Royal Society, represents science's answer to metaphor and fine writing. In the impersonal of Ithaca Joyce worked hard to dispense with most of the beauties of literary style. He called the chapter the 'ugly of Ulysses,' but in a book which he called his damned monster-novel,2 the ugly duckling is likely to be the favorite child. In reading Ithaca one senses that a page has been turned in literary history. From now on, it would seem, the most interesting creative project for the modern writer is to create ugly ducklings rather than swans. The chapter which deliberately dispenses with the beauties of style dispenses with other niceties of novel-writing as well. In it Joyce plays with our conceptions of narrative and plot as well as style. Ithaca is an anatomy of a chapter; it offers us an outline of events. Instead of the suspense of a linear plot, it offers direct questions and answers; instead of the human voice of a narrative persona, it offers a catalogue of cold, hard facts. In the 309 questions and answers in the chapter, the book seems to interrogate itself, implicitly promising to disclose all the facts of the plot. Joyce wrote to Frank Budgen that in the mathematical catechism of Ithaca, all events would be resolved into their cosmic, physical, psychical etc. equivalents .. so that the reader would everything and know it in the baldest and coldest way . . ..3 The type of narrative imagination represented in Ithaca is what

Art · Literature · Narrative · Style (visual arts · History · Modernist Literature and Criticism

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