In his article “Molly’s Flow,” Attridge argues that “Penelope” epitomizes Joyce’s ability to make readers aware of Ulysses’ textuality because reading the atypical syntax of Molly’s episode forces us to be critically aware of our relationship with the text of Ulysses itself. In my own tracing of the progression of the narration and narrative voice in Ulysses, however, it seems like a common theme all throughout Joyce’s text is this ability to make us as readers aware of the fact that we are reading a physical text as opposed to actually experiencing the events of the novel. While I think Attridge is right to claim that the lack of punctuation in “Penelope” does not cause the narration to “flow” like so many scholars claim it does, I wonder if it is too much of a stretch to claim that “the term [flow] would be more accurately used of earlier parts of Ulysses” (547). My own observations regarding the narrative structure, while certainly defining a “flow” at certain points, seem to point to the fact that Joyce (or the narrator? Or the arranger?) is constantly at work to disrupt any sort of discernable narrative flow in order to make us as readers question the nature of the structural ground of Ulysses.
Beginning with Proteus, Episode Three, we see the narrative “flow” of Stephen’s interior monologue interrupted by third-person narration regarding his physical environment – each time Stephen’s conscience seems to almost entirely consume the narration, we are brought back to reality by a harsh transition to “real time” with a more classic, third person narration such as, “wet sand slapped his boots” (37), “the dog’s bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back” (38), or “he lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks” (41). The sensory details of these third-person passages remind us as readers of the physical realities Stephen is experiencing separately from what he is experiencing in his mind (idea taken from my blog post). While Stephen’s monologues themselves may establish a sort of “flow,” it seems that Joyce intentionally breaks that “flow” in order to keep us as readers from being too consumed by any one form of narration. From the beginning of the novel, Joyce can be seen toying with his readers in an attempt to bridge the divide between what is happening in the novel itself and what our experiences are as readers.
Just like Joyce abruptly transitions between narrative styles in episode three, in episode eight he similarly uses narrative style to craft a “then vs. now” dichotomy between Bloom as he sees himself now and Bloom as he existed during the peak of his relationship with Molly (see blog post). Bloom sits and relives a love scene between himself and Molly in his mind and he explicitly defines “Me. And me now” (144), his “downcast eyes” at present contrasting with his “ravished” “wild” state in his memory. By leading us as readers back and forth between these extreme states of being, each characterized by different narrative styles, it seems to me that the narrator creates flow only to eventually disrupt it and place it under our critical eye as readers. It is breaks and transitions in narration like these that bring us into close contact with the characters of the novel and urge us to think about how and what we really can know about them.
Like Henry Staten says in his discussion of Ulysses’ “decomposing form,” Onomatopoeia seen early on in Ulysses “undermines the illusory transparency of language, extravagantly calling attention to the textuality of its text” (382). The “textuality” of Ulysses is a concept that often comes up in scholarship regarding the novel, and, though it may seem only tangentially related to the role of narration, actually serves as a vehicle for narrative voice to become apparent to us as readers. John Somer terms the mechanism behind this narrative style establishment “the arranger” (65) and explains that “the arranger uses narrative devices that divert readers from their experiences of the narrative to their experience of reading the text … it draws readers into such an intense engagement with the novel’s fictive reality that they ironically experience their own pleasure in reading the passage” (74). The passage from “Hades” that Somer cites as evidence of this theory occurs in Episode Six, well before the final “Penelope,” furthering my notion that a key aspect of the experience of reading Ulysses is that reading it makes us as readers aware of our own reading process.
