8 - The styles of Ulysses

Summary

Ulysses has been well described by Arnold Goldman as an ‘encyclopaedia of styles’. Joyce deliberately set out to devise ‘a new style per chapter’, and – through Gilbert and others – offered a series of justifications for these styles, usually relying on the Homeric parallels. Thus the ‘Aeolus’ episode uses newspaper headlines and overblown rhetoric because journalism and oratory are the modern equivalents of Ulysses's bag of winds. The parodic history of English prose styles in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’, on the other hand, was justified by its setting in a maternity hospital; the development of English prose was the literary equivalent of the growth of an embryo. These explanations have their place in commentaries on Joyce but we need not perhaps take them very seriously. They belong, rather, to the time-honoured category of Irish bulls.

Some, though not all, of the later chapters of Ulysses are stylistic encyclopaedias in themselves. ‘Aeolus’ runs through a vast repertoire of rhetorical figures, ‘Sirens’ reproduces hundreds of musical forms, and the ‘linguistic gigantism’ of ‘Cyclops’ parodies a series of texts ranging from the Bible and Celtic epic to a child's reading-book. Yet the concept of an encyclopaedia will not in itself explain the styles of Ulysses. It is only very recently that critics have felt able to state their rationale.