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Alexandra Anyfanti

M.A. in English Literature

University of Warwick, U.K.

August 20th

, 1992

Time, Space, and Consciousness in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Wyndham Lewis in his book Time and Western Man ventures an attack on the “time-

cult,” the term he uses to refer to those philosophers who sustained a theory of relativity

and flux as the underlying principle of the universe. The main target of his attack appears

to be Henri Bergson and his theory of “duration.” Begson first formulated his theory in

Time and Free Will, in an attempt to distinguish between the organization of the material

world and that of psychic states. He draws a distinction between the permeability and

interpenetration of psychic states as opposed to the concreteness and distinctness of

material objects. Objective or clock-time, the positions of the pendulum and spatial

arrangements are all means of organizing matter, and of cutting artificially the psychic

continuum for practical reasons. “Withdraw the pendulum and its oscillations,” remarks

Bergson, and “there will no longer be anything but the heterogeneous duration of the ego

without moments external to one another, without relation to number”(108). Further on

he adds, “Below the self with well-defined states,” there is a self “in which succeeding

each other means melting into one another and forming an organic whole” (128).

Lewis, attempting as he claims to explore not whether such a philosophy is viable

as a system of abstract truth, but whether its application helps or destroys our “human

arts,” opens his book with a study of novelists such as Steine, Proust, and Joyce, who use

the Bergsonian duration in their works. Dealing with James Joyce in the chapter “An

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Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce,” Lewis discerns in Ulysses an obsession with

Bergsonian duration, which, he claims, renders the book a mechanistic world, full of

“dead matter.” He also sustains that its use is “the glorification of the life-of-the-moment

with no reference beyond itself and no absolute or universal value” (Lewis 27).

In the rigidity and extremity of his arguments, Lewis fails to recognize the

openness and the transformative quality that characterize Ulysses, a quality that

challenges any absolute notion about reality, and the individual that lives and moves in it.

He also fails to capture the duality that pervades the narrative, in which the temporal and

spatial arrangements that characterize the world are both used and dissolved through the

movement of a narrative consciousness that underlies the whole text and animates the

Joycean world.

The novel opens in Dublin, on July 16, 1904. These are the spatial and temporal

frameworks in which the Joycean world unfolds. Everything takes place in Dublin in less

than one day. In that sense, Ulysses adheres strictly to the time and space unities. On the

other hand, if we consider the number of disparate and distant elements that are crammed

into the narrative every instant, the space traversed—Paris, Gibraltar, Andalusia, India—

and the time-span covered—Bloom’s youth, Molly’s girlhood, Stephen’s days in

college—we can still claim that Ulysses rigorously disrupts the unities. Both assumptions

are valid because as Humphrey clarifies, “It all depends on how one considers the

narrative: does it take place in the minds of the characters, or in the thin surface action,

the external odyssey of Bloom?” (85). The former lacks the unities whereas the latter

adheres strictly to them. This dialectic tension between action of the mind and action of

the body lies at the core of Ulysses’ narrative structure. The vacillation and

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interchangeability between external perception and internal processing of experience are

continual, and the two entities overlap. The naturalistic documentation that constitutes the

former, conforming to the external, objective architecture of time and space, functions as

the foundation of the labyrinth of psychological association and symbolism, which

transcends absolutes of either spatial or temporal form.

Joyce retains the temporal and spatial frameworks of his book only to dissolve

them while the development is progressively relocated from external reality to the

internal psychic states that this reality generates. Through this movement, the narrative

consciousness assumes sometimes the costume and postures of Bloom, sometimes those

of Stephen’s, sometimes becomes the citizen, or simply remains a faceless and

impersonal narrative “I,” integrating at the same time all the characters into the narrative

continuum. So, in the same way that the space and time unities are both used and

dissolved, the individual characters are both asserted and disappear into the flow of life of

Ulysses. Through the use of Bergsonian duration, Joyce “destroys” his own construction,

namely an individual world which unfolds in one day and which involves distinct

individual characters, immediately associated with the time and space within which they

move and act. Joyce creates a mythopoeic art, which challenges the oneness of

perspective, and his world, through its “destruction,” expands beyond its boundaries to

unite all times, all places, and all humanity.

As far as the surface action is concerned, Joyce makes sure that we know both the

time of each episode and the position of the characters every instant. In the chronological

chart he gave both elements are specified. For example, at eight o’clock both Stephen and

Bloom get up, in the Martello Tower and Eccles Street respectively. At ten o’clock

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Stephen is giving a history lesson while Bloom is having a bath, and both characters meet

shortly after midnight. The novel is supposed to cover eighteen hours, from eight o’clock

in the morning until two o’clock after midnight when Molly’s monologue fades out.

Through the narrative, the wandering body covers a long distance in the streets of Dublin,

its destination specified through names of streets and through the external perception of

material objects and people around. If we strip the narrative from the internal monologue

(which, however, covers the largest part of the novel), and leave only the bare incidents,

we may see that the temporal and spatial frameworks which sustain them are very well

constructed, and the small details that serve to specify them are carefully chosen to attain

subtle relationships between the events and actions of the day.

For example, the time of Dignam’s funeral appears several times in “Calypso”

and “Lotus-Eaters” in casual conversations, so that when the “Hades” episode opens up

we know that it is eleven o’clock. Considering also that “Proteus” takes place at the same

time (while Bloom is heading for the cemetery, he glimpses Stephen passing by), we

immediately associate the two episodes in terms of their thematic content, such as death,

transformation, renewal, movement. Furthermore, “Wandering Rocks” appears as the

best example of subtle manipulation of the temporal and spatial threads. As specified by

the opening sentence, the episode takes place at three o’clock in the afternoon: “The

superior, the very Reverend John Conmee S.J. reset his smooth watch in his interior

pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. Five to three” (Joyce 180). Through tiny

details and indirect references, Joyce manages to suggest that all eighteen incidents of the

episode take place simultaneously, and even in close proximity the one to the other.

Father Conmee steps into the tram and at that moment Corny Kelleher (in the second

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incident) perceives him while coming out of his office. Blazes Boylan, in the end of the

fifth incident, asks permission to use the telephone at the grocer’s shop, and at the

seventh incident we are transferred to the other end of the wire.

Bell chimes, calendar references and route descriptions, indicate the time and

space coordinates according to which the material world can be arranged, and where

events follow a linear and causal succession. Joyce seems to give some consideration on

these coordinates but the chart he devised, although it cannot be neglected, allowed him

to be free. While the narrative regresses from the external action of the body to the

internal action, these unities are expanded or simply disrupted. Specifications of spatial or

temporal form function ultimately only as reference points, and they are retained only to

be subverted. In terms of the surface action, very little happens; the body wanders in the

streets of Dublin, meets certain acquaintances, has short dull conversations, attends a

funeral, or has lunch at the pub. The dialogue is suspended and the plot is slow or often

static. Under the surface, however, a frenzied movement takes place. As if breaking the

outer crust that withholds the energy beneath, Joyce reveals the multidimensionality that

lurks behind the flatness and singularity of clock time and of physical appearance. The

narrative techniques utilized, without the author’s intervention but with direct

transference to the inner thoughts of the characters, help to relocate the point of interest

from the flat surface action to the plethoric reality of the human psyche, and to render the

book a psychological rather than an action novel.

Joyce clearly indicated his intention about the making of Ulysses: “I try to give

the uspoken, unacted thoughts of people in the way they occur” (quoted in Budgen 94).

And the way they occur, the accent in which they fall is completely different from what

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we perceive in the external reality. An account of the psychic energy and activity cannot

but follow its very rhythm and movement, far removed from regularity, consistency,

linearity or causality. Virginia Woolf considers Joyce a “spiritual” writer because

[H]e is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickering of the innermost

flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to

preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him

adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence or any other of these

signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of

the reader, when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see

(Woolf 107).

A novel trying to represent the psychic world must conform to the incoherence

and irregularity that characterizes the consciousness’ whimsical and unpredictable

“wanderings,” which necessitate different narrative techniques and probe to an

abandonment of the traditional plot arrangements. In Ulysses there is no plot in the

conventional sense of a linear and causal arrangement of events in either time or space.

The episodes do not follow a temporal succession, at least not until “Aeolus” when

finally the time moves forward, and the reader is given a series of everyday occurrences,

which serve as the framework upon which Joyce weaves the psychic fabric. In the

Joycean world, where the externalities are tightly interwoven with the psychic states

resulting in a thick and almost impenetrable narrative texture, there is little experience

sufficient to human needs, except in memory, fantasy, or dream life.

The trinity of sensation, motive, and conduct is broken down, and the action is so

slight and inconsecutive that it hardly counts. Ulysses is a novel of non-events; action is

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speculated, planned, dreamt of, imagined, but fails to take form. While walking along

Sandymound beach, Stephen decides to visit his aunt Sara. He immediately projects in

his mind the scene of the visit, which however never takes place; two pages later, he

changes direction, and it is only a while later that we understand why: “The aunt thinks

that you killed your mother”(Joyce 35). Likewise, Bloom and Gerty’s flirtation remains

rigidly in their personal fantasies and imaginary self-projections, to which the readers

have immediate access. What dominates the landscape is sensation—actual and

imaginary. Also, the much debatable, and frustrating for Bloom meeting between Molly

and Boylan is never actually depicted in the novel; it is, however, always present

activating Bloom’s suspicion and jealousy, and generating in his mind images of

temptation, flirtation, and sexual allure.

The main narrative technique that reinforces the internalization of action is stream

of consciousness. In Ulysses, the intensity and the importance of the external events and

objects is measured in terms of the heterogeneity and the multiplicity of the psychic flow

they generate when perceived by the human consciousness. The unities of time and

space, reduced like all reality to the timeless and space less content of consciousness,

acquire their own qualities, which cannot be measured in the language of the mind. The

odyssey in Ulysses is transferred to an odyssey of the mind, the odyssey of a wandering

consciousness, which can defy the limitations that hinder the body, and thus expand

multi-directionally in both time and space. Such transference explains the paradox of

stillness and flow that characterizes the narrative.

In terms of bodily action and position there may be fixity and stasis, but on a

deeper level lie a continual movement and a rapid interchangeability between here-there,

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you-me, past-present, fantasy-reality. In the beginning of “Lotus-Eaters,” Bloom

encounters McCoy and they begin a dull and short conversation, which Bloom is eager to

end. At the same time, his voyeuristic gaze perceives a female figure opposite, and he

starts speculating about her status, while we are given involuted strips of his ongoing

conversation with Mc Coy as if reported later. The narrative follows a movement from

subject to object of perception, from Bloom to the woman, and then to his thoughts and

words, all these given in a mode suggesting simultaneity and overlapping. On the surface

level, such rapidity of thought remains unperceived. In terms of objective time and

external space, matter succeeds matter in a more or less logical formation, in a priority

style. In the mind, however, such neatness cannot hold. A step made in the outer space

equals great strides in the mind’s ground, where a clock-measured minute becomes so

elastic as to encompass years of past experience and future possibility. In “Oxen of the

Sun,” by asking “What is the age of the soul?” Bloom manages to encompass in only one

paragraph an account of all his life: childhood, adolescence, manhood, and fatherhood

(Joyce 337-338). The phenomenally single and self-sufficient entity bursts into myriad

particles as soon as it enters the psychic world, the same way Stephen perceives in

“Proteus” a plenitude of forms, hues, shapes, and small details. The mind, immaterial and

flexible, no more susceptible to external boundaries and limitations, can travel thousands

of miles in the split of a second, using as a vehicle a momentary and seemingly minute

detail of everyday life. In “Laestrygonians,” the smell of wine is enough to send Bloom’s

stream of consciousness as far as France or China, and to generate innumerable

associations of food, taste, smell, even sex, that have nothing to do with the present

moment but which unite on the other hand all times and all places (143).

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The contours of the stream of consciousness novels such as Ulysses are

summarized in the following way: “they have as time the time of the characters’

memories and fancies in time; . . . and as action whatever remembered, perceived, or

imaginary event the characters happen to focus on” (Humphrey 85). Consciousness in

this context refers to the whole range of awareness and mental-emotive responses of the

individual, from the lowest pre-speech level to the highest fully articulated level of

rational thought. The assumption is that in the mind of the individual at a given moment,

his stream of consciousness is a mixture of all the levels of awareness: an unending flow

of sensations, thoughts, memories, associations, and reflections. The stream of

consciousness technique and the way it is utilized in Ulysses, transcending the unities of

space and time, owe a great deal to the theory of “pure duration.” Bergson defined it as

the form which the succession of our conscious states assume when our

ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from

its former states. For this purpose, it need not be entirely absorbed in the

passing sensation or idea; for then, on the contrary, it would no longer

endure. Nor need it forget its former states: it is enough that, in recalling

these states it does not let them alongside one another, but forms both the

past and the present states into an organic whole, as happens when we

recall the notes of a tune, melting into one another (Bergson 108).

Furthermore, Bergson distinguishes between body movement and mental motion.

Real motion can exist only in duration and in the deeper level of consciousness, through

which all levels of human experience are in continual interaction. “The syntheses carried

out by consciousness,” specifies Bergson, “between the actual position and what our

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memory calls the former positions, causes these images to permeate, complete and so to

speak continue one another” (124).

In addition, Wyndham Lewis, who in Time and Western Man is strongly critical

of the use of Bergsonian dureé, gives a very accurate description of it, a description that

can successfully be applied to the stream of consciousness used in Ulysses:

Duration is what occurs when we completely telescope the past

into the present, and make our life a fiery point ‘eating’ like acetylene

flame into the future. ‘Duration’ is inside us not outside us. Duration is the

succession of our conscious states, but all felt at once and somehow

caught in the act of generating the ‘new’ as ‘free’… Duration is all the

past of an individual crammed into the present; and yet this past is not the

bare present that forgets its past and is unconscious of its future (Lewis

437).

The most plethoric stream of inner life in the novel, and the best application of

Bergsonian duration is Molly’s interior monologue in the “Penelope” chapter. In this

chapter, the fixity and stasis of the body as well as the rhythmical regularity of Molly’s

breath are overcome by a frenzied mental kinesis and a fluxive consciousness, which

synthesizes and relates elements so diverse and distant in both space and time that they

cover a whole lifetime. It seems as if the gates of her mind are set decisively open so that

it can expand multi-directionally, allowing in that way an unprecedented torrent of matter

and memory. The technique, used throughout the novel in a smaller scale, finds a colossal

culmination in Molly’s inner stream. The irregularity of syntax, the lack of punctuation,

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and the constant shifting of the verbal tenses, reinforce and facilitate the breaking up of

the space and time unities, and contribute to the impression of a psychic stream.

The watch Bloom gave to Molly “never seems to go properly,” therefore her

consciousness can disregard objective or clock time and follow its own rhythm. As

Blodgett remarks, “While the fifteen clock-time minutes he allows Molly’s stream of

consciousness suit the quick pace of the mind’s operations, such rapidity does not

necessarily suit other bodily activities” (28). Molly’s reverie is the shortest episode of the

book in terms of temporal indication (for each of the other episodes Joyce allows one

hour), but because as Bloom reflects “Time is the time movement takes,” and since in

Molly’s case the movement is not bodily but mental, the clock-measured time,

chronology and space delineations count but little. When Bloom finally retires to bed

after two o’clock in the morning, Molly remains awake and an odyssey of memory,

sensation and imagination springs up: an odyssey through past, present, and future;

through events, fears, fantasies, impressions, and material objects, all of which become

fused and confused. Her mind streams unhindered, and the present moment becomes the

convergent point where all times meet and where all levels of human awareness become

dynamically interconnected.

Molly gives an account of her experiences both of the recent or remote past,

relives the sensations that the perception of objects generated, relates them to present

states, comments, criticizes, speculates about future possibilities, and expresses a desire.

She describes vividly her sexual experiences, but it is not always clear whether they are

parts of reality or pure imagination. Her girlhood in Gibraltar is fused with her daily

tasks, her life with Bloom, or her flirtations, and her memory of new white shoes and hat

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slides into places and people she had seen when she wore them. All these are

intermingled, the one melting into another without clear-cut distinctions, “like the

crystals of a snow-flake when touched for some time with the finger” (Bergson 138).

Consider the following example:

I first noticed him at dessert when I was cracking the nuts with my teeth I

wished I could have picked every morsel of that chicken out f my fingers

it was so tasty an browned and as tender as anything only for I didn’t want

to eat everything on my plate those forks and fishslicers were hallmarked

silver too I wish I had some I could easily have slipped a sample into my

muff when I was playing with them then always hanging out of them for

money in a restaurant for the bit you put down your throat we have to be

thankful for our mangy cups of tea itself as a great compliment to be

noticed the way the world is divided in any case of its going to go on I

want at least two other good chemises for one thing and but I don’t know

what kind of drawers he likes none at all I think didn’t say yes and half the

girls in Gibraltar never wore them either naked as God made

them…”(617-618)

Her mind follows a wide and expansive circuit of flashback, anticipation, and repetition.

The flow of matter and memory is not, however, smooth and harmonious. There are gaps,

discontinuities and insertions, revealing that the boundaries between one’s past self and

one’s present self-- between the self that experiences and perceives and the self that

remembers-- are so imprecise that they merge into one another.

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Moreover, the interpenetration and intermixture of levels and times, is not simply

a mental travel through infinite time and infinite space; reevaluation and reconsideration

are also parts of this flow, and an ever-shifting quality marks the stream of consciousness.

As Meyenhoff points out, “Wishes and fantasies may not only remembered as facts, but

the facts remembered are constantly modified, reinterpreted, and relived in the light of

present exigencies, past facts and future hopes” (21). Stephen, with the general

disillusionment that pervades his attitude and existence, turns into bitterness towards his

school years and he rejects all that he then held dear (“Proteus” 32-34). According to the

notion of duration, whatever enters its expansive time-space system, will continue

evolving and changing. Evolution in that case does not imply replacement of the old by

the new, but an organic whole that mutates and ever-shifts whenever new elements are

introduced. At the same time, as soon as these new elements enter, they are immediately

influenced by the pre-existing ones. So, in duration Bergson specifies, “the same does not

here remain the same, but is reinforced and swollen by the whole of the past” (153).

The same evolutionary quality pervades not only the psychic world of Ulysses but

the material world as well, a quality resulting from their interaction. Wyndham Lewis,

attacking Joyce’s use of the Bergsonian duration, claims that through its constant use in

Ulysses, which results in “a telling from the inside technique,” the book becomes “a

dense mass of dead stuff,” and thus confines the reader in “a psychological space into

which several encyclopedias have been emptied” (104). Yet, even if we accept that

Ulysses becomes, in Lewis’ words “an Alladin’s cave of incredible bric-a-brac,” still this

“dead stuff” by being invoked, remembered, visualized, and called forth into the

conscious level, is revitalized. Since past merges with the present in order to activate our

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memory and awareness, then objects and events from the past assume new dimensions,

and if they have a place in the present they are not dead any more. As Bergson would

explain, “It seems that these objects, continually perceived by me and constantly

impressing themselves on my mind, have ended by borrowing from me something of my

conscious existence; like myself they have lived and like myself they have grown

old…for if today’s impressions were absolutely identical with that of yesterday, what

difference would there be between perceiving and recognizing? Between learning and

remembering” (138).

A person’s stream of consciousness is always related to some object, either

immediately observable or further distanced in memory or imagination. Molly’s stream

of consciousness, for example, encompasses objects that are not perceptible at the time of

her reverie, but are always visible in her mind, and thus susceptible to its change. In

consequence, the material world of Ulysses is transformed into a world of ideas and

psychic states. Objects or events, either of the past or the present, become activating

mechanisms for the psychic stream to flow, and by entering themselves this very stream

they create new combinations and associations. In “Calypso,” the noise coming from the

bed’s brass quoits is enough to bring about an interrelation of present perception (Molly

turning over) with future potentiality (Bloom fixing the springs), as well as a number of

memories related to it, that the bed had been bought by Molly’s father, etc. Furthermore,

objects in Ulysses, by appearing and reappearing in the narrative in various places, are

detached from their initial space or time position and become emblematic. For example,

the title of the book that Bloom borrowed for Molly, Sweets of Sin, recurs many times

throughout the novel, and Bloom’s suspicions that he is being cuckolded give it a deeply

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personal and, for Bloom, rather poignant undertone, especially when it echoes in the

“Sirens” episode, with its undertones of sexual temptation and flirtation. The same

suspicion of Bloom’s, which haunts his subconscious no matter how much he attempts to

escape it, transforms the bell chimes at the end of “Nausikaa” into a cuckoo song, as if

affirming Molly’s infidelity. Likewise, the same title of the book and the-less-than subtle

name of its author—Paul de Kock—are interwoven with Molly’s sexual preoccupations

in “Penelope,” and become associative with male sexual domination and cocksureness

(629).

The clear-cut delineations of the external world disappear even more rigorously as

the narrative delves into the deeper crevices of the consciousness, in order to depict what

lies beneath rational thought and association, in the level of dream or fantasy. Dreams

and fantasies are particularly suitable for conveying the quality of duration and the

quality of dynamic disorder and association, because these aspects are farther removed

from the data relevant to the construction of an objective theory of time and the practical

pursuits of life. The stream of consciousness technique in Ulysses undertakes to reveal

how repressed agonies and anxieties, or neglected and forgotten memories are always

active in influencing and determining external behavior.

In “Nausikaa,” a very pictorial but at the same time intensely imaginative and

dream-like episode, the readers have access not only to the thoughts of the characters, but

mainly to their most secret imaginings and superstitions, which determine their

perception of each other. Bloom and Gerty construct an image of each other that

corresponds to their secret expectations and fetishisms, and to their conceptions of

femininity or masculinity, but which is probably in discord with their actual identity.

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Gerty’s romantic reveries and the cheap romance stories that feed her intellect make her

see Bloom as the man of her dreams: “the image of the photo she had of Martin Harvey,

the matinee idol.” On the other hand, Gerty feeds Bloom’s voyeuristic tendencies and

activates his sexual fantasies both of the recent or remote past. At the very end of the

episode, in a dream-like sequence, Bloom exclaims,

“O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do

love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed met

him pike hoses frillies for Raoul de perfume your wife black hair heave

under embon senorita young eyes Mulvey plump bubs me breadvan

Winkle red slippers she rusty sleep wander years of dreams return tail end

Agendath swoony lovey showed me next year in drawers return next in

her next her next”(312).

Recent past has led into a more remote past, and Bloom’s consciousness becomes more

compressed and repetitive; here we have jumbled phrases and single words, the result of

mixing past and present, memory and imagination. Through his voyeurism over Gerty,

Bloom intermixes his obsession with drawers and underwear, his fantastical affair with

Martha, and his first meeting with Molly, in a more or less fragmentary, incoherent and

unstable manner.

The most overpowering scene of inner life, as well as a depiction of its

irregularity and absurdity is “Circe.” In that episode, which opens up at Nightown after

midnight, the unities of time and space are violently shattered, and as if the external shell

of the self explodes, readers are positioned in the stage of the human subconscious and on

a level of hallucination. We enter the characters’ minds in a moment when they are both

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very tired and very drunk, and there we observe the animation and activation of their

most deep-hidden agonies, repressed fears, forgotten memories, or neglected realities.

Stephen and Bloom have repressed elements of their past lives that trouble them—most

centrally the death of Stephen’s mother and the death of Bloom’s son. Throughout the

novel, these aspects haunt their minds, but both characters manage assiduously to silence

them. In “Circe,” however, memory and the power of consciousness to delve deeper and

deeper, bring them to the confrontations they have so far avoided, signifying that nothing

that enters the fertile ground of the human psyche is inert or lost. As Joyce remarks in

“Oxen of the Sun,”

There are sins (or let us call them the way the world calls them) evil

memories which are hidden away in the darkest places of the heart but

they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let

them be as though they had not and all but persuade himself that they were

not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call them forth

suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most various

circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp soothe his

senses or amid the cool silver tranquility of the evening or at the feast at

midnight, when he is now filled with wine (344).

In “Circe,” people that they met, thought about, remembered or imagined, either dead or

alive, come on “stage” and disappear with the same rapidity. Bloom’s father and mother,

Stephen’s mother, Paddy Dignam, Gerty, Molly, even the nameless one, or the citizen

from the “Cyclopse” episode. Objects that the characters perceived or carried are here

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animated and assume the significance of psychic states, such as the soap that Bloom

carried throughout, the bell chimes and the “Jigjag. Jigajiga. Jigjag” of Molly’s bed,

which becomes emblematic of Bloom’s cuckolding. Small details and minor characters

that were hardly noticed in the dense narrative of Ulysses seem to have left their trace on

the characters’ subconscious. Thoughts, impressions, sensations and dreams, assume

three-dimensional shape and appear alongside the personalities that encompass them.

Even the “Sins of the Past” assume a voice (or rather a medley of voices) and confront

them. The boundaries of time and space explode, and the whole microcosm of Ulysses

bursts forth. We are confronted with the whole phantasmagoria of the mental world of

Ulysses, in which neither linearity nor causality can be sustained.

“Circe” is the climactic scene of what happens in the novel little by little. By

representing internal states as well as their rapid interchangeability, the transformative

quality of the episode reveals the lack of resolution that characterizes the novel. The

inwardness of the narrative creates openness with no final closure. The final “yes” that

Molly utters before falling asleep links the end of her monologue with its onset, but it

opens rather than closes the narrative; her “yes” anticipates further development and

expansion. As Bergson defined, “states of consciousness are processes and not

things…they are alive and therefore constantly changing”(196).

Ulysses traces the internal processes that do not always find an actualization or

material representation, and because it is a world that does not conform to spatial or

temporal delineations, it is endless and infinite. The metaphor of “stream” and flowing

are integral aspects of the Joycean world. The abolition of time and space unities in both

the narrative structure and in the structure of the characters’ reveries creates the

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impression of a continual becoming, a continual process, very sea like and stream like.

As Bloom perceives it, “It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the

stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream”(Joyce 137).

Consequently, Ulysses becomes a fluid, ever moving and ever shifting world,

since it transcends the limiting visibility of concrete forms and the flat materiality, as well

as space or time arrangements that signify stasis and fixity. Likewise, Stephen in

“Proteus” while walking along Sandymound beach attempts to transcend the “limits of

the diaphane,” to overcome the “ineluctable modality of the visible,” and by exceeding

the limits of his senses to reach the perception of what lies behind appearances, what is

and “ever shall be, world without end”(Joyce 31). Through his senses, but mainly by

transcending and testing their “ineluctable modality” and the so-called safe perception of

concrete forms, perceives a world that is always transforming and changing, a world that

is under a process of formation. He attempts, much like Joyce, to pierce through the veils

of external reality and prove that empirical reality is not secure or finite: it falls in the

fascination of time-space evolution and continuity. The basis of time-space evolution

according to Bergson is abstraction; no absolute truth, no concreteness, but instead

fluidity and flexibility. Even if we accept that the external world is objective and the

same for everybody, yet our very action of perceiving it changes it. Outside us, nothing

lives; reality is not after all only what stands out in discrete concreteness, but whatever

enters the diversity of consciousness and participates in the interplay of its dynamic

structure.

According to that notion, a singular fact in Ulysses does not simply have a

meaning and significance of its own; it becomes the pivotal point of a whole substratum

20

of human experience, of past, present, and future, of all aspects of human life and

psychology, including and being motivated or signified by all the constituent elements of

experience. Paddy Dignam’s funeral serves on one hand as a reminder to Bloom and

Stephen of the deaths of son and mother respectively, but on the other hand it serves as

the framework for the themes of death, the cycle of life, fatality, and mortality. These

elements are recognizable and distinguishable, yet intrinsically interrelated and

reciprocally charged with significance. In each episode, the momentary incident is

magnified as an underlying principle of the life of mankind. The same way that “Hades”

deals with death, “Oxen of the Sun” deals with birth and creation, while “Cyclopse”

touches upon issues of nationalism, national identity, and race.

The very abolition of time and space unities transforms the novel into a

microcosm of reality, and Joyce, as if magnifying a drop of water under the microscope,

manages to capture the heterogeneity hidden behind its diaphanous uniformity, and to

initiate in his art the mythic and the universal. By extension, the characters of the novel

are not mere flat types; they are not “walking chichés” as Lewis claims1(112). They

escape their time and position and become facets of the central narrative consciousness

that wanders throughout, and which is “Assumed by any or known to none,” in other

words is “Everyman or Noman”(Joyce 598). As Bloom smilingly reflects,

[E]ach one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he

is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a

succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone

whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating

in and repeated to infinity (601).

21

Such an argument can be sustained by the rapid interchangeability of voices and the

continual vacillation between object and subject of perception, so that we constantly miss

the source from which the narrated impressions spring forth; also, the fact that the

characters deal with the same issues and problems but from different perspectives and

using different “lenses” or viewpoints render them “possibilities of the possible as

possible” (Joyce 159), signifying that because the external reality is funneled and

acquires importance through our consciousness, then much depends on perspective. For

example, Bloom appears as the scientific mind whereas Stephen is the artistic, the former

deeply materialistic and strongly attached to his bodily functions, whereas the latter

appears as a mind without a body. Yet, “though they didn’t see eye to eye in everything a

certain analogy there somehow was as if both their minds were traveling, so as to speak,

in the same train of thought” (536).

“Colours depend on the light you see”(309), affirms Bloom, and likewise the

book resembles a pack of cards which are shuffled and reshuffled in every episode,

revealing a new perspective, a new view of reality, of life, death, humanity. The

instability of syntax, the plurality of voices and the plethora of discourses that appear

throughout the narrative (philosophy, science, theology, etc.), reveal the movement of the

central consciousness of the novel in an attempt to attain a prismatic view of reality; in

dealing with a multiple and ever-shifting world, a parallactic vision becomes a

prerequisite. Even though Joyce depicts individual characters, like Bloom, Molly,

Stephen, or the plethora of minor characters, which we may recognize through some

mannerism and attitude, yet he finally manages to integrate them into the narrative

continuum that detaches them from their actual position. Ultimately, he attempts to

22

construct a consciousness that is both pluralistic and flexible, despite and beyond labels.

Joyce reveals a sense of selfhood that lies not in singularity but in plurality, as a better

safeguard for sanity. In the protean world he depicts, the self cannot but be protean as

well.

The characters, through the stream of inner life—a constant application and

representation of the Bergsonian duration—are scattered through past experiences and

future possibilities, and they continually change presenting each time a different side of

themselves according to the circumstances they encounter. They often feel poignantly the

change: “Me and me now”; “I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I?”; “I am

different me now.” Considering the constant multiplication of every moment through the

insertion of infinite moments, the permeability of psychic states, and the plethora of

converging elements, the one “me” of yesterday becomes a crowd of “me’s.” The “me”

of yesterday is undoubtedly different from the “me” of today due to the passing of time.

Yet the “me” of today does not place a period mark, a completion to the “me” of

yesterday, but rather a comma, which implies multiplication and enrichment, just like the

slow opening of a fan revealing each time a further facet. Such becomes the case in

“Circe” where Bloom’s new facet is animated and confronts him inquiring, “Is me her

was you dreamed before? Was then she him you us since knew?”(Joyce 439), and

symbolizing somehow the unification of all his different selves. Lewis’ words describe

that condition fittingly: “we are the intersection of a multitude of paths”(360).

Like an actual stream, which runs and encompasses diverse and different elements

without however totally assimilating them into a deceptive homogeneity, selfhood in

Ulysses is presented as an “inexhaustible plethora,” fluxive, dynamic, metamorphic, and

23

conflicting. Bloom is father, son, husband, lover (even if only in fantasy), cynical or

sentimental, physicist, philosopher, physiologist, and even though strongly materialistic,

he indulges in daydreaming. The novel challenges the traditional construction of

characters through their actions and participation in events; man is not only what he does,

he is also what he does not do, what lies beneath, what is speculated, planned or

imagined. The point of interest in Ulysses falls on the characters’ stream of

consciousness, and there as we have seen the change is constant.

The “Circe” episode where all minor and major characters make their appearances

in a phantasmagoric interlude reveals the multiplicity of experience, the plenitude of

selves that wander through the text and the kaleidoscopic quality of the central

consciousness. The themes of “metempsychosis,” “metamorphosis,” and “parallax” that

pervade the text find their best expression in that episode. For Joyce it was meant to be a

“costume episode” (Budgen 234), and the figures that appear can be seen as “self

possibilities, which have gotten out of hand” (Brown 139). In a world that is continually

changing, the self cannot remain static and one sided. As Hume pointed out in an analogy

reminiscent of Shakespeare, “The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions

make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of

postures and situations”(quoted in Meyenhoff 32). In Modernist literature, the self is

rather heterogeneous and relative.

For Wyndham Lewis such understanding of the self is very dangerous. He claims

that our self is our “terra firma” in such a world of locomotive ataxia, and he perceives in

the Bergsonian notion of duration a violation of the sense of self as the stable ground

upon which experience is based. In his own words, “By this proposed transfer from the

24

beautiful objective, material world of common sense, over to the ‘organic’ world of

chronological mentalism, you lose not only the clearness of outline, the static beauty of

the things you commonly apprehended; you lose also the clearness of outline of your own

individuality which apprehends them” (Lewis 174).

It is indeed difficult to accept that in the middle of so much disparity and the

constant bombardment of innumerable atoms, the self can still retain its unity and its

center. It is also uncertain whether Joyce attempts a critique on self-fragmentation due to

the material deluge that modern civilization imposes on the individual. For if we suppose

that in dealing with the modern conglomeration, the individual must be flexible and

plethoric, then self-fragmentation appears as a prerequisite for “Reduplication of

personality” (Joyce 423). For Joyce the dissolving self may not be necessarily a surrender

of sanity but an expansion of possibility. Having as a model Odysseus, an “all-round”

man, able to change and thus to cope efficiently with all unexpected novelties, he

challenges the idea of a strongly monistic self, by depicting a multiple selfhood, which

perceives things from all perspectives and lives in everything. In “Circe,” each side or

posture of Bloom’s sets loose from the others and demands possession of his body and

soul; demands exclusivity; and as Brown successfully remarks, each tries “to destroy the

liberal democracy of his selfhood and set up the dictatorship of a single unitary ego”

(139). Bloom, however, manages to oppose the attempted violation of his selfhood, and

finally gathers again all these loosened postures, and continues his course. He manages to

escape by being Odysseus, a “nobody,” that is in a sense by being everybody, by being

elusive, a wil o’ the wisp, and in this way avoiding one-sidedness.

25

It has also been suggested that if Bloom represents the materialistic, scientific

view of life and Stephen a more abstract, artistic and spiritual one, and since one seeks

the other on a symbolic level (Stephen seeking for a spiritual father and Bloom for a son

through whom he may be reflected), then their final meeting and parallel course

thereafter can be interpreted as the unity of body and mind, of matter and spirit. The

question is why they part again and what this parting might signify. Probably that the self

is not a closed circle and that unity does not necessarily entail closure and finality, but

rather expandability and renewal.

Ultimately, it is this multiplicity and mutability that safeguards the integrity of the

self, that saves from dogmatism and narrow-mindedness. Even Lewis himself asserts that

identity should not mean persistence on one posture, and he accepts the self’s flexibility2

(6-7), but fails to discern that idea in Joyce’s Ulysses. Self-fragmentation can then be

reassessed as self-diversification and self-plenitude. The scattering of the self through

past, present and future, through a continual modification of environment that the

Begsonian theory assumes, does not imply dissolution of the self. In contrast,

expansiveness of our consciousness implies a unifying tendency. As Bloom remarks, the

water constitutes the ninety percent of the human body. Them we may add, the self can

share some of the water’s “universality,” “its democratic quality and constancy to its

nature in seeking its own level,” “its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble

substances,” as well as its “metamorphoses…its variety of forms” (Joyce 549), and thus

be “form of forms.”

As Stephen experiences, “I am another now and yet the same,” and as he later

adds, “In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind Shelley says, is a fading coal,

26

that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in

the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from

that which then I shall be”(Joyce 160). Therefore, I change yet I endure. If through all

this change there is an “I” I can still call “mine”, an “I” that remembers and thinks and

hopes, an “I” that can still encompass all that I was and all that I may become, then I can

still claim possession of myself. Stephen faces the dilemma of whether he still owes

George Russell the pound he borrowed from him five months ago since “Molecules all

change. I am other I now.” If the “I” changes then the “I” that borrowed is different from

the “I” that owes, so in that sense the commitments of the past cannot be valid in the

present. But Stephen can still remember the debt and if we can know ourselves by

memory as he claims, then it is exactly this overlapping of the past into the present that

saves the self from dissolution. Stephen prefers to be indebted rather than selfless.

What Ulysses may very well suggest is that the unity of the self can be attained

through diversity: “We walk through ourselves, meeting ghosts, giants, old men, young

men, wives, widows, brothers in love, but always meeting ourselves”(Joyce175). The self

can still retain its unity through a balance of opposites, if he is like Shakespeare “all in

all,” a “myriad-minded man,” “a prism” flexible and reduplicating, if he “doubles itself in

the middle of his life, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe”(174). The

sense we are given in Ulysses is that the characters escape their individuality and their

singularity, and they join together into a more expansive self; through the abolition of

time and space they become instances of humanity. As Hollingstone points out, “The

novel provides us with one of the most important perspectives on the events of the day,

27

an oceanic feeling in which the vastness of time and space dwarf any human whatsoever”

(438).

Even in a single stream of consciousness we should not concentrate on oneness

and uniqueness, but see it as a heterogeneous flow of human experience. Molly is a

characteristic example of a pluralistic self, represented in a single stream of

consciousness. Her consciousness, spreading through boundless time and space, changes

costume a thousand times and manages to encompass all the aspects and differing facets

of femininity that appear in the novel. She appears both virginal and promiscuous,

hypocritical and deeply sincere; she is mother, wife, and mistress. She combines the

naivety and superstition of Gerty, with the lasciviousness and vulgarity of the females in

the “Sirens” episode. She is both a pious Penelope and a provocative Salome. In a sense

she mutates all the time, her molecules changing with unprecedented rapidity, rejecting

nothing and affirming everything, so that she finally transcends her position as Molly, the

wife of Bloom, and becomes symbolic, a prismatic view of the “woman” in all her glory.

The timeless and space less aspect of these sensations and reflections that constitute her

monologue, liberates them from individual experience and extend them to enduring

aspects of the life of the human kind.

After recording and commenting on her personal experiences, Molly expands

them to a generalization, and she attains universality by expressing issues such as man-

woman relationship, sexuality, and spirituality vs. carnality. It is a self, who partakes of a

larger whole, and its fragmentation through infinite time and infinite space ensures

enrichment and flexibility. As Kennedy points out, “The paradoxical truth attested by the

modern novelist is that each man is—and must be—an island, but to be fully himself he

28

must also discover how to be a piece of the main (to put it in Bloomian language, each

man is a unique drop which must recognize its position as part of the ocean)” (79).

In the end, this depiction of reality and of the self that moves and perceives this

reality, by transcending the boundaries of “now” and “here,” detaches from the secular

moment and positions them on a timeless and space less scale where they partake of the

mythical and the universal. The instability of time and space links the individual and the

momentary with the universal and the eternal. The elimination of plot and of the spatio-

temporal determinations in Ulysses, is complementary to the disintegration of the

traditional character. They are all ways of transcending matter, whether the material

nature which petrifies their qualities, or that of our bodies which limits the infinite

potentialities of human beings for expansion and participation.

In the center of the universe—we may say too, at the beginning and at the end, so

as not to lay more stress on the spatial rather than on the temporal, both moreover being

symbolic and conventional—at its heart and always, there is what we call “I” without

being able to state its nature more precisely. It is the sole and ultimate sum of everything,

and it is itself the whole world reflected in itself.

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NOTES

1. “In Ulysses, if you strip away the technical complexities that envelop it, the

surprises of style and the unconventional attitudes that prevail in it, the figures

underneath are of a remarkable simplicity, and of the most orthodoxly comic

outline. Indeed it is not so much to say that they are, most of them, walking

clichés.” This argument is triumphantly shattered when applied to Ulysses. The

characters appear as deeper and rounder than in any realistic depiction of

character. They are seen from all sides, from their reaction on the surface level,

until the deepest level of dream or fantasy. Joyce depicts what lies behind every

costume and posture. Despite some basic outlines of their form and individuality,

the characters change: they contradict themselves; they fall into discontinuities;

they cannot finally be pinned down because they are more complex than

appearance may reveal. They appear along with the depth and the complexity of

their psychic lives, which presupposes a continual development.

2. Lewis, 6-7. Speaking about self and identity, Lewis recognizes that this notion

implies on the one hand a fixation upon “something fundamental, quite

underneath the flux,” but he also adds that “this will in no way prevent my vitality

from taking at one time one form, at another another, provided, in spite of these

occupations, on the surface, of different units of experience, the range of my

sensibility observe the first law of being, namely to maintain its identity.” And

further on he adds that this “natural matching of opposites within saves a person

so constituted from dogmatism and conceit.”

30

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