this question is to begin where Joyce and his best recent critics begin: with the exuberant, revolutionary nature of his narrative language. For many years it was thought that Joyce's primary innovation was the development of stream of consciousness, a technique by which narrative penetrates the interior thoughts of characters and introduces experiences to fiction that had steadfastly been kept out: the mind's uncensored, disjunctive musings on taboo motives and bodily impulses, on associational reflexes, on errors, slips, inadvertencies. For Joyce, language is the artist's way into the deeper consciousness of the individual and the race. -765-
But stream of consciousness is older than Joyce's first readers realized. As far back as Victor Hugo in the mid-nineteenth century, novelists had a notion of interior narration. Hugo writes in Les Misérables:
It is certain that we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking person who has not done so. It may indeed be said that the word is never a more splendid mystery than when it travels in a man's mind from thought to conscience and back again to thought… We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult wherein everything speaks except our mouth. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.
Of course, Joyce himself recognized that he was not the first writer to release the energies of interior narration in fiction. Rather, he located his true powers as a writer in the original and evocative units of language that composed the concentrated narrative phrases, sentences, and paragraphs-stream of consciousness or otherwise-in his books. No writer before him placed such priority on the structure, texture, sound, and shape of words on the page, whether to transport fiction to realms where it had never coursed before or to represent the full voicing of the era's many ideolects: sexual, musical, political.
Joyce thrived on the means available to the artist for sounding out language, for turning and twisting words into a pattern that connects or brings disparate phenomena together, from discrete sounds to the way words form in the mind, from the idioms of Victoriana to the excrescences of gutter slang, from the lyric phrase to the cloacal fart in the Sirens episode of Ulysses that serves as a commentary on local Irish politics: 'Kraaaaaa… Pprrpffrrppffff.' It is not enough for Leopold Bloom to point out the folds in a Dubliner's fat neck in the Aelous episode; the text of Ulysses has to offer fat folds: 'Fat folds of neck, fat, neck, fat, neck.' The plasticity of language is, of course, part of the fiction's great comic strength. Late in the day of Ulysses, Bloom finds himself embarrassedly making an excuse to an acquaintance about being in Dublin's red light district: 'I was just making my way home… ' The excuse is so phony a horse pulling a nearby carriage reacts appropriately with a hearty laugh while whinnying into the very heart of Joyce's homing epic: 'Hohohohohohoh! Hohohohome!'
As often occurs in Joyce's fiction, the working of a character's mind serves as a commentary on the nature of language as a creative property in and of itself. Here is Leopold Bloom in the Lestrygonian episode musing on his wife's wit. The process described is not altogether differ-766- ent from the process employed throughout Ulysses and for most all of Finnegans Wake.
She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and you'd think he was singing into a barrel. Now, isn't that wit. They used to call him big Ben. Not half as witty as calling him base barreltone. Appetite like an albatross. Get outside of a baron of beef. Powerful man he was at stowing away number one Bass. Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.
The goal of narrative language for Joyce is to make all the observations of life work out as part of the fabric of the modernist text. He identifies one of his techniques for doing so in Finnegans Wake at the same time he creates a word for it: 'langwedge.' Narrative language not only conveys meaning but mimics it. Leopold Bloom in the Lotuseaters episode of Ulysses notices that the last letter is worn off the legend in the crown of his hat. The text reveals what Bloom sees: 'Plasto's high grade ha.' The intrepid reader can take it a step further; the sentence, like the whole of the mock epic Ulysses, provides a high-grade laugh.
The breaking up and reformation of the very syllables that produce Joyce's words exemplify a tendency that had been there all along in his fiction from the very carefully selected keywords-paralysis, gnomon, simony-of his first story in Dubliners, to the young artist's fascination with the sound of the word «suck» in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to the description of a widow's unkempt hair in the Sirens episode of Ulysses- wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevyhair un comb:'d.' Joyce commodifies language, turns it into a value package where meaning derives from many sources-the accumulation of sounds, puns, metamorphic words, the arrangement of sentences and phrases. Early in Finnegans Wake we are simply told that 'every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings.'
The means by which words participate in the formation of action and ideas has absorbed the attention of Joyce's finest critics in recent years. Of most interest is the way Joyce includes a variety of styles and voices in his fiction, making language reveal all the sounds a civilization makes, beginning with the nuances of character idioms and dialects. To experience Joyce's fiction is to see Ireland verbally or, better yet, to hear it visually. In the Hades episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom hears the sound before the word, and the Joycean text gives us the image of the brogue: 'Oot: a dullgarbed old man from the curbstone tendered his wares, his mouth opening: oot.--Four bootlaces for a penny.' In the -767- Aeolus episode, Bloom casually articulates a principle that forms the basis of what Joyce accomplishes in narrative. In reference to the whir of the printing press in the newspaper offices for which he works as an advertising canvasser, Bloom says, 'Almost human… doing its level best to speak.' Everything in Joyce's life- remembered or projected-can be made manifest if he can construct the means to make it speak.
Hugh Kenner describes a variation on interior narration that he calls the 'Uncle Charles Principle' (derived from a character in Portrait of the Artist), whereby Joyce melds his own style into the psyche of all those voices- individual and cultural-represented in his fiction, 'an interference phenomenon between 'his' language and language not his, sometimes other characters', sometimes the author's.' In the following example from the first chapter of Ulysses, the narrator's voice imitates the inner voice of Stephen Dedalus until Dedalus's inner voice actually takes over itself at the phrase 'White breast.' Joyce's narration works by a careful mimesis, a mimicry almost, marking distinctions that are not altogether easy to note:
Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.
The subtle transference in the passage from a narrator's language to interior character monologue is characteristic of Joyce's fiction and bears comparison with the recently revived and scrutinized theories of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, whose analysis of the novel as a form-'another's speech in another's language'- generally describes a politics of fiction in which narrative offers a speaking platform to those who are rarely heard at all. What Bakhtin calls the heteroglossia of fiction is as well represented by the infinitely variable and various narrative styles of James Joyce as by any writer who ever set pen to paper.
Discovering, executing, and refining an array of narrative languages for all his characters and all his Irish settings is for Joyce akin to the formulation of artistic consciousness. He used the words he so carefully crafted in Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake as a mirror of the substantiating intellect, as an emblem for the sustained and satisfied artist hero-the key idea behind his adaptation of Homer's -768- Odyssey in
In his notes for his play, Exiles, Joyce comments, 'A nation exacts a penance from those who dared to leave her payable on their return.' Joyce pays the exile's greatest debt without ever returning-he re-creates the place from which he departs by the ingenuity of his word-driven imagination-what he called, in a wonderful pairing of artistic exile and artistic consciousness early in Finnegans Wake, his Irish 'landescape.' To be away from one's native land, and yet longing for its feel, its texture, its local life, leads, as another exile, Vladimir Nabokov, puts it, to the creation of 'unreal estate.' Joyce's language makes Ireland all over again. A telling instance occurs early in his Portrait of the Artist when the young narrator recalls the time he confused the 'wild rose blossoms' from the popular Irish song with his own toddler version, 'the green wothe botheth.' The narrator wonders under what conditions somewhere in the world a person might create his own Irish symbol, a 'green rose.' The words on the page that frame the question provide the answer: the text produces the 'green rose' as the young artist imagines it and the reader reads it.
Joyce's first efforts were short stories about those Dubliners he observed and listened to all his life. He had an early agenda derived partly from the personal animus he harbored against the inhibiting and stifling nature of
