Joyce's Ulysses as poem: rhythm, rhyme, and color.

Abstract

James Joyce may be one of the most important writers in the English language since Shakespeare. His novel Ulysses shows why. It reflects the change in man's view of time and space, brought about by Einstein. It marks a departure from the idea that time--narrative and sequence--must serve as the organizing principle of the novel. Instead, space--as it filters through the consciousness of various characters--determines the movement of Ulysses. This change, or spatialization, resembles what has occurred in poetry during the twentieth century. Ulysses shares with modern poetry other attributes, too. It is fragmented. It must be reread at least once if a person is to make some sense of it. Most important, it should be read with an ear listening to the sound of the words. Joyce makes extensive use of three poetic techniques: rhythm, rhyme, and color. He employs these devices for various purposes--to make a character's salient feature memorable, to imitate an action being depicted, to mimic a quality of an object being described, to create an aural context suitable to the idea being conveyed--but invariably to reinforce meaning. That Joyce has built this novel with meticulous attention to the sounds of the words supports what Joyce scholars have long maintained: that Joyce relies on form to carry part of the load of meaning. This tight relationship between meaning and form constitutes another major characteristic of poetry. Form and content, fragmentation, rereading, sound--all point to one conclusion: Ulysses should be read, like Shakespeare's plays are read, as a poem. This contention points to what Ulysses accomplishes: it obliterates boundaries between genres; it reduces differences between literature and two other art forms--music and visual arts; and it alters the function of the artist.