Repository | Book | Chapter

Joyce's engagement with consciousness presentation, although hailed by critics as the most innovative in the Modernist canon, is strikingly unengaged with shifts across different characters' viewpoints. The different episodes of Ulysses are typically filtered through the consciousness of one character. Joyce himself describes the composition of the episodes pretty much in these terms: "Each adventure is so to say one person although it is composed of persons — as Aquinas relates of the angelic hosts' (Gilbert, 1957: 147). There is, however, a less immediate way in which the consciousnesses of characters are connected and this is through coincidence, or recurrent elements that seem to traverse the boundaries of a character's individual psyche. Udaya Kumar, writing on the different forms of repetition in Ulysses from a post-structuralist perspective, notes that when identical elements, such as the phrase "smell of burn' in Bloom's interior monologues, recur in a character's stream of consciousness, it is feasible to naturalise such examples as a form of recollection (1991: 18). The recurrent element may appear at moments which are far apart in the progression of the narrative or in the movement of "real' time, and one can interpret them as unconscious reminiscence of past experience, triggered by, and embedded in, a new context. But recurrent phrasing, Kumar explains, is harder to naturalise, when "repetition seems to function as a strategy that goes beyond character- subjectivity and its memory' (1991: 19) and when a phrase appears first as part of the consciousness of one character and then of another. Kumar provides the following example:

DOI: 10.1057/9781137307255_4

Full citation: