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The chief peculiarities of Joyce's style are to be traced to his out­look. Since he regarded all human experience as a senseless horror, having no objective and coherent meaning, he thought it the author's first duty to abandon all attempt at logical and consistent presentation of facts. He does not, like Huxley, analyse the chaos of life. His one ambition is to render man's sense of painful bewilderment at what he believes to be an insolvable riddle. His undivided attention is given to his characters' sensations and reactions; he endeavours to reproduce the flood of their half-conscious thoughts just as they arise (the so-called "stream-of-consciousness method").

The author's own speech is not only blended with his heroes’ inner speech, but is quite submerged by it. It is always obscure and often unreadable, because Joyce sets down the most distant, indi­vidual and arbitrary associations that come to his heroes' mind in connection with the world of physical things around them.

His style is therefore very concrete and naturalistic in depicting physical feelings, and very abstract when he tries to suggest the lit­erary, philosophical and religious associations to which his heroes are led by their five senses.

The above extract opens with a description of the sea as observed by Stephen, a soul in pain, tortured by remorse for having been cruel to his late mother. The sea is to him an embodiment of infinite life, vast and timeless in its impersonal cruelty. Joyce compares the coming tide with "long lassoes... rising, flowing". The second sentence and the whole of the paragraph is an abrupt transition from the au­thor's own impressions to his hero's. Joyce does not resort either to the usual "he thought" — and then the character's reflections given in quotation marks, — or to the traditional inner speech generally given in the Future-in-the-Past tense. Stephen's thoughts are render­ed in the first person, without quotation marks. He knows the waves will move on and on eternally, leaving him passive and alone.

Joyce's vocabulary is enormous (almost 30 thousand words). He finds a great many synonyms expressing that onward motion of the waves (swirling, passing, flowing, purling, floating etc.). The exact description of the sea's movement is blended with dark and gruesome phantasies: the water seems to be moving ("breathing", in Joyce’s apt metaphor), among "seasnakes, rearing horses", probably standing here for seeweeds and rocks. From these striking and poetical tropes, presumably mythological in origin, Joyce suddenly turns to the “low” comparison of the sea, beating against the rocks as if "bounded in barrels". He introduces a great many sound-imitative words: "flop, slop, slap", expressing Stephen's auditory impressions. These become associated through onomatopoeia (sound-imitation) with other tropes, distant and artificial, such as the comparison of the moving waters with a "flower unfurling" ("It flow s purl ing, widely flow ing, floa ting foam pool, flow er un furl ing").

The picture of the sea that has inspired poets and writers withvisions of grandeur and courage, of depth and beauty, is to Joy (and Stephen) a picture of infinite futility, of hopeless monotony. In the second paragraph the author notices the "writhing weeds lift languidly (an interesting case of personification) and sway reluctant arms." Their long leaves are compared with petticoats swaying in the whispering water, they "sigh", they are "weary" — here the author is again superseded by his hero ("Lord, they are weary"). The notion of weeds, writhing as though in agony, "lifted, flooded, and let fall”by the waves, is to Stephen's lacerated mind a symbol of life's endless and recurring misery; just as the waves themselves are gathered to no end, vainly released — only to go under the influence of the moon.

Again this seemingly objective, almost tangible description is dominated by the author's melancholy, and by highly complex learned and religious associations — with Saint Ambrose who also heard the sighing waves, and with erotic visions of lascivious men and women. The syntax is peculiar and greatly adds to the difficulties of any readers but those well-trained in the mannerisms of modern art: there is for instance, the great space between the first "weary" ("Lord, they are weary") and the second ("Weary too in sight of lovers" etc). It is only with difficulty one can realize that the second "weary" also applies to the weeds. And even that is mere guesswork.

Stephen's broodings about the sea are indissolubly linked with ideas of death. He thinks of a man who was drowned at that spot nine days before. This thought turns up quite casually, being suggested first by the chance recollection of a boatsman's words about the depth of the water ("five fathoms") and next by the line of a famous quotation ("Full fathom five thy father lies"): "At one he said. Found drowned." — That is probably supposed to mean "he said he would come at one but was drowned".

From these reminiscences Stephen switches to the sight before him — of the cruel sea, driving all manner of trash before it — and concealing a corpse "beneath the watery floor". This last quotation is ironical and is meant to display Stephen's light manner of speaking and even thinking of things that hurt him too much to hear serious reflection. With the same end in view Joyce depicts him as imagining a drowned body drawn out to the shore with hooks — and the usual sort of commands uttered by the rescuers of drowning men. At another moment ho calls up gruesome and naturalistic pictures of a decaying body, the prey of greedy fishes, all enumerated with revolting faith­fulness. This naturalism is the starting point for abstruse and mys­tical meditations, with words left out to render the swift thinking process of man. "God becomes man [man] becomes fish [fish] becomes barnacle goose [barnacle goose] becomes featherbed mountain." The idea is ever the same Joycean idea of gradual disintegration, of dissolution into nothingness, or a something that is worse still — into triviality. The living, Joyce states, breathe the breath of the dead, tread on the dust of the dead — and even feed on their remains.

The text is shot through and through with allusions and quota­tions, jolting unpleasantly with ghastly naturalistic details: e.g. "he [the drowned man] breathes upward the stench of his green grave [the sea], his leprous noseholesnoring to the sun". By-and-by Stephen makes up his mind to return to Dublin: a Latin quotation comes to his lips and is followed by distorted quotations from Childe Harold, from Tennyson, the latter unfinished and completing itself by half-chanted nonsense-words of a song. These mark the final turn in Ste­phen's mood from brooding and philosophizing to mockery and self-contempt that are so typical of Joyce's decadent characters.

Poetic images are mixed with naturalistic details; erudite quotations, Latin and English, go alongside colloquialisms in many languages (in the present instance French and Italian); coarse and common words occur in company with rare ones or words of the writer's composition ("foampool", "saltwhite", "seadeath", "wavespeech"); these appear together with newly-coined sound-imitating words "seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss ooos"; elliptical phrases that are more often than not obscure in meaning and unconventional to the degree of being ungrammatical ("A seachange this brown eyes saltblue"). All these peculiarities of Joyce's style are the outcome of his contempt for the moral and artistic conventions of his time. They are meant as defiance hurled at the contemporary world, as a way of expressing the author's dismay and horror at sight of a society far gone in decomposition. But at the same time they are the result of extreme, antisocial individualism, a symptom of a dying culture, of art wilfully giving up its main function — that of universal appeal—and addressing itself to the learned, artistic and literary minority.

Answer the questions:

1. What’s the chief peculiarity of Joyce’s outlook?

2. How does Joyce reproduce the thoughts of his characters? What is the “stream-of-consciousness method”?

3. Characterise the author’s speech.

4. Characterise the imagery in the description of the sea.

5. What can be said about Joyce’s vocabulary?

6. Characterise the syntax of the extract.

7. How is the idea of death rendered in the text?

8. Analyse the intertextual inclusions in the text.

9. Why does Joyce mix poetic images with naturalistic details?

10. Does Joyce use colloquialisms?

11. Summarise the peculiarities of Joyce’s style.

Answer the questions:

12. What’s the chief peculiarity of Joyce’s outlook?

13. How does Joyce reproduce the thoughts of his characters? What is the “stream-of-consciousness method”?

14. Characterise the author’s speech.

15. Characterise the imagery in the description of the sea.

16. What can be said about Joyce’s vocabulary?

17. Characterise the syntax of the extract.

18. How is the idea of death rendered in the text?

19. Analyse the intertextual inclusions in the text.

20. Why does Joyce mix poetic images with naturalistic details?

21. Does Joyce use colloquialisms?

22. Summarise the peculiarities of Joyce’s style.

[1] ashplant — here: walking-stick made of ash

[2] seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss ooos — these words render the speech of the waves ("the wavespeech")

[3] cups of rocks — hollows and cavities in the rocks

[4] foampool — shallow water covered with foam

[5] hising up their petticoats — these are words occurring in a song that Stephen had heard his friend Mulligan sing eurlier the same morning

[6] upturning coy, silver fronds — shyly raising their silvery stems and leaves

[7] Saint Ambrose — a Catholic saint (5th century)

[8] diebus ac noctibus iniursia patiens ingemiscit (Lat.) — he who suffers injuries complains day and night

[9] to no end gathered — brought together without any purpose

[10] loom of the moon — here: the influence of the moon (the ebb and flow are caused by the attraction of the moon)

[11] fathom — about 180 cm, a measure chiefly used to state depth

[12] full fathom five thy father lies — quotation from Ariel's song in Shakespeare's play The Tempest (Act 1, Scene II)

[13] bar – here: bar of sand, also a strip of shallow water

[14] rubble - stones

[15] fanshoals of fishes — a number (a shoal) of fishes resembling in form a large fan

[16] undertow – here: under the water

[17] bobbing – here: swinging

[18] a porpoise — a sea-animal; a pace a pace a porpoise—moving slowly, pace after pace, like a porpoise (note the alliteration)

[19] sunk though he be buneath the watery floor —.a line from Milton's poem Lycidas that had occurred to Stephen earlier that same morning when he first heard about the drowned man

[20] bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine — Stephen means the evil smell of the dead body surrounded by dirty sea-water

[21] a quiver of minnows etc. — his body has become the titbit (choice morsel) for minnows

[22] barnacle goose – arctic goose visiting England in winter

[23] God becomes man etc. — God makes a man, the man is drowned and eaten by the fish, the goose eats the fish and is used to make featherbeds

[24] offal - remains

[25] hauled stark over the gunwale — his naked body is hauled overboard

[26] a seachange this brown eyes saltblue - Stephen means that the sea changes brown eyes into saltblue, giving the eyes of the dead its own colour

[27] Prix de Paris (French) – the first prize received in Paris. Joyce implies that death by drowning being the easiest, it would be sure to be awarded the biggest prize, in preference to all other deaths. The French words and the English phrases following it are the words of common advertisements.

[28] allbright he falls etc. — a free quotation from Milton's Paradise Lost

[29] dico, qui nescit occasum (Lat.) — I say he knows no death

[30] cockle hat — a hat bearing the badge of a pilgrim, a scallop shell; staff — here: pilgrim's stick

[31] my sandal shoon — quotation from Byron's Childe Harold: "not in vain he bore his sandal-shoon and scallop-shell" (shoon — arch. plural of shoe)

[32] of all the glad new year, mother... — the beginning of a hackneyed quo­tation from Tennyson's poem The May Queen: "of all the glad new year, mother, the maddest merriest day". The optimistic ending is sacrificed for the sarcastic "rum tum tiddledy turn" whose rhythm is meant to render the rhythm of Tennyson's poem.

[33] Lawn Tennyson — a play on words: Tennyson — tennis, thence lawn tennis(on)

[34]gia (Ital.) — already; Joyce means that Tennyson, the gentleman poet, belongs to the past

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