Ferrules of Engagement: The Speech of Unheard Things in Ulysses

Stephen Dedalus brings to Ulysses certain ideas associated with his early attempts to become a creator: his pledge to “go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (Portrait 275–76), for example, and his youthful definition of artistic epiphany, which Joyce renovates considerably in Ulysses. Stephen’s attempts to “read the signatures of all things” in Ulysses begin in “Telemachus” and continue in the “Proteus” episode, showing some of the results of his efforts to progress as an artist: primarily, his tendency, when encountering material reality, to forge—create and simultaneously falsify—a text with which to encapsulate what he sees before him (37). He habitually cobbles together his own cursory observations and fragments of others’ words and ideologies. This proclivity, coupled with his view of objects as pretexts for creating epiphanies out of the mundane, demonstrates the solipsistic strain in Stephen that Joyce will counter in the novel by using the very materials with which his young protagonist imprisons his consciousness: objects and words.

The underexamined story in Ulysses is that of the minutiae that sometimes seem beneath the notice even of those who set out to examine trivia. We might call this category of details the “throwaways,” to borrow Joyce’s name in Ulysses for an amalgamation of horse, paper scrap, and prophet, except that to do so suggests that they share the same prominent status as “Elijah Throwaway,” an entity who receives a fair amount of overt attention from both the narrative voices and Bloom. To find the deeper foundations of the phenomenal world in Joyce, it is necessary to move beyond examinations of items that Joyce presents as talismans, symbols, or objects that characters respond to with focused, conscious attention, such as the kind Stephen employs when he seeks out an epiphany. Presences so unobtrusive and incidental that they appear thoroughly dispensable at first glance provide the bedrock for Joyce’s creation, a crucial layer of linguistic and material reality in which a blade of grass occupies the same moral, etymological, and physical universe as the giant, the budding genius, or the Everyman. Ordinary things, such as plants, furnishings, or pieces of jewelry, “speak” in unexpected ways in Ulysses, allowing the author to challenge traditional hierarchies of importance that have long dominated discussions of humanity’s place in the physical realm; these items encourage a reconsideration of both the way in which we envision our own significance among the props we habitually undervalue, disregard, or misunderstand, and the power of language to create and reorder that understanding.

Before Ulysses begins, Stephen is no stranger to the concept of trivia as vital to the formulation of aesthetic theory. As he tells Cranly in Stephen Hero, Stephen’s concept of epiphany depends upon singling out details and focusing upon them until they yield a vision that moves both object and viewer beyond ordinary comprehension: “This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself’ … He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany” (211). Stephen’s early formulation of this process when he applies it to objects, however, depends largely on an action that takes place in the observer’s mind: “Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty” (211). Stephen’s use of passive voice to describe what happens to the object emphasizes its helplessness as the subject’s eye not only regards, but “gropes” for it; his syntax demonstrates his belief in the primacy of the perceiving subject, going so far as to make “focusing,” rather than actually seeing, the supreme act of...