Joyce's Ulysses: A Database Narrative

In "Ulysses" in Progress, Michael Groden states that James Joyce's "earliest work on 'Cyclops' in mid-June 1919 may thus represent the precise chronological point at which he stopped writing one kind of book, basically concerned with Stephen and Bloom, and began to write another, in which a succession of parody styles, and eventually a group of schematic correspondences, began to take over."¹ One side of the divide Groden describes is defined by a character-driven narrative appearing in the initial stream of consciousness style. On the other side, after June 1919, Groden argues the text is dominated by a series of stylistic experiments and the categories of information Joyce listed in the schemas he distributed to friends. More recent genetic studies and manuscript discoveries reveal that the changes Groden refers to should be understood more as quantitative than qualitative: Joyce did not start writing a different book, but amplified features of the text that had been at work since his earliest ideas—in 1906—for a story paralleling the life of an ordinary Jewish Dubliner with the Homeric account of Odysseus's travels.²

Groden's point remains important, however, because the "Cyclops" episode, as it appears on the pages of Ulysses, features sections of text that are unmistakably different than the initial stream of consciousness style that defines Ulysses up to that point.³ The episode takes place in Barney Kiernan's pub and features many familiar characteristics from the preceding episodes, Homeric parallels, real and fictional Irish citizens, and Joyce's painstaking reproduction of the Dublin idiom. However, the "Cyclops" episode is told largely from a new perspective, a truculent and unnamed narrator, and while this departs from the text's general focus on Stephen and Bloom, Ulysses has assumed the perspective of other characters before, most notably in "Wandering Rocks." What truly signals the difference between "Cyclops" and nearly everything the reader has encountered so far are these familiar modes appearing alongside extended swaths of information, from another narrative voice, that by turns interrupt, distort, and generally overload the narrative events as they take place in the pub. These non-narrative interruptions take the form of comically long lists, stylistic shifts, and other departures from the scene that clearly relate to the text on the pages, but are not part of narrative frame. Groden says,

In these elaborate lists (which have been seen as part of the Homeric parallel), Joyce worked toward encyclopedism by taking a specific incident and cataloguing its observers or participants. In most cases his techniques of revision caused him to extend the lists to such comical lengths that they eventually assumed a logic of their own beyond any logic in the events that originally inspired them.

(Groden 195–96)

The presence of these comically long lists in "Cyclops" signals the point where the text of Ulysses begins to exhibit an unmistakable overload of information. Though the episode includes protracted sections that interrupt the scene in the pub, these sections are related to the narrative events and Homeric correspondences in ways that reveal, as Groden indicates, the expansion of a new brand of logic at work in Joyce's creation of Ulysses.

Among the most famous of these passages is what Joyce called the "Forester's Marriage" (LIII 55). The passage begins with John Wyse Nolan lamenting the loss of trees in Ireland: "As treeless as Portugal we'll be soon, says John Wyse, of Heligoland with its one tree if something is not done to reafforest the land. Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I was reading a report of lord Castletown's …" (U 12.1258–61). After a characteristically fulsome agreement from the Citizen, the text transitions to a description of an imaginary wedding that relates to material in Wyse's comments but bears no relevance to (and is not heard by) those conversing in the pub:

The fashionable international world attended en masse this afternoon at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine...