Narrative desire and narrative reluctance in James Joyce's Ulysses : examples from "Sirens" and "Ithaca"
Date
1987
Authors
Hunter, Catherine
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Abstract
In Ulysses, Joyce creates a narrative technique which liberates the text from the potential for reification inherent in conventional narrative form. In this thesis, I explore his techniques in "Sirens" and "Ithaca," analyzing the opposing impulses in the narrative, including especially the apparent tension arirising from a desire to both create, and to resist creating a story-line. In Ulysses, conventional narrative form is revealed as suspect. With its power to convince, and its tendency towards closure, it is portrayed as the means by which the characters delude themselves with, and are ultimately paralyzed by, simple explanations for the problems in their society. At the same time, these potentially paralyzing aspects of narrative form are counteracted by Joyce's narrative technique.
In Chapter One I examine the narrative technique of "Sirens." In this chapter, the struggle between narrative desire and narrative reluctance manifests itself in a tension between content and form. This tension results in a self-conscious narrative which draws a lot of attention to the individual signifiers by which its constituted. Within the story, the characters are easily convinced by the various cultural frictions which surround them, consuming them with little thought to their nature as linguistic constructs. These fictions tend to have a reifying effect on the characters, paralyzing them and alienating them from each other. Yet through Joyce's narrative technique, any attempt to convince the reader is subverted by the narrative's tendency to dismantle and examine the individual linguistic elements of which fictions are constructed.
In Chapter Two I point out that Joyce's narrative technique draws attention to the way in which dominant cultural fictions are easily disseminated. Narrative reluctance gives rise to long chains of paradigmatic word associations. As well, the narrative tends to pick up and imitate phrases and styles from the surrounding context. These two techniques mirror the involuntary nature of language choices. Since cultural fictions are coded into reified bits of language, they are easily recirculated. Within the story-line, many such fictions are shown to perpetuate paralysis, yet within the narrative, they are disempowered through parodic repetition.
In Chapter Three I examine the narrative technique of "Ithaca." "Ithaca": seems like a final desperate attempt to fulfill narrative desire, and yet in this chapter, narrative desire and narrative reluctance become almost indistinguishable in places. The conflict manifests itself in three main areas: in diction, in the use of metonymical movement, and in the treatment of the hermeneutic codes of the story.
In conclusion, Ulysses investigates the various ways in which fictions are coded into reified language, assimilated, circulated, and recirculated. The narrative technique of the novel disempowers reified fictions through attention to the signifier, and through parodic repetition. But Ulysses does not syimply displace these past texts in order to replace them with the master text of itself. As a novel, Ulysses resists reification by presenting itself as a process rather than a product. In this way, it raises some interesting questions about the status of the writer in society. By portraying writing as an ongoing process, which involves interaction with others, the novel works to dereify the role of the writer, and makes possible a reintegration of his or her role within the community.
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