Sounds and Impostures: James Joyce's Poetic Prose

Known for his depictions of music, James Joyce approximates song at the level of the sentence in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by inflecting the prose with poetic embellishments: rhyme, rhythm, and sonic repetition. The tension between poetry and prose in the free indirect discourse exhibits how the focal characters negotiate between the idealized and the real. In "Araby," "Eveline," "A Little Cloud," and the bird-girl and villanelle episodes, the sound play serves as mere decoration: innocent protagonists romanticizing the ordinary. "The Dead" and the later chapters of A Portrait, however, consolidate the songs of youth with the prosaicism of maturity through a deployment of prose poetry that does not sacrifice verisimilitude, instead evoking the sensory richness and incidental lyricism of everyday experience.