Writing in 1984, the influential critic and theorist Ralph Rader observed that “Ulysses stands unchallenged as the greatest literary work in English of the twentieth century” (340). Today, too, there are probably no other serious contenders for this distinction. Of course, many people would dispute the value of such a ranking. There are too many criteria by which one could evaluate works of literature. By some criteria, Ulysses may not succeed very well. Even so, the status of Ulysses is hardly arbitrary. It is connected with the wide range of criteria by which this novel exhibits unusual excellence. For example, critics have recently come to stress the place of Ulysses in post-colonial studies. Indeed, analyzing the novel in the context of anticolonial struggles has become almost commonplace. As I write, the current edition of the James Joyce Literary Supplement includes recent books treating “Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Joyce,” “Decolonizing Modernism” (including Joyce), “Empire” and Joyce, as well as the relation of “Irish Modernism” to “the Postcolonial” (see Majumdar, Venegas, Szczeszak-Brewer, and Rubenstein, respectively). In keeping with this, Joyce’s relation to colonialism, anticolonialism, and nationalism will be a recurring concern in the following pages.
Treatments of Ulysses that emphasize its postcolonial credentials fall into the broader class of evaluative criticism that addresses the relation of the novel to our understanding of the real world. Though most critics would probably not phrase the idea in this way, the suggestion of such work is that we come to understand the real world (e.g., the world of colonialism) more fully through literary works. Commonly, that understanding has one of three foci. The first is social relations, particularly political relations. Thus not only colonialism and nationalism, but also racism, cultural identity, gender, and patriarchy, become central topics for both interpretation and literary scholarship.
The second common focus for “worldly” treatments of a literary work (as Edward Said might have put it) is ethical. Since at least the time of Plato, literary works have been examined for their moral (or immoral) implications. The mention of morality might bring to mind simplistic treatments of the “life lessons” that are “taught” to us by a literary work or the corrupting and degrading influences a work might have on our moral natures. However, the examination of a work’s ethical implications is often complex and nuanced, particularly as practiced by moral philosophers. In the study of Ulysses, there is hardly a more perceptive critic than Martha Nussbaum. In her Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Nussbaum presents Ulysses as the apex of a moral ascent that involves not only ethical judgment and feeling, but a sense of real humanity, with all the messiness that involves. One may or may not agree with the details of Nussbaum’s analysis. However, her integration of ethics and emotion, a sense of right and a feeling of human acceptance that goes beyond a condescending tolerance of other people’s supposed faults, is valuable both as a theoretical formulation and as a way of understanding the finely drawn moral thought and feeling implicit in Ulysses. Indeed, as my appreciative comments suggest, Nussbaum’s chapter on Joyce is one of the most important inspirations for the present study.
It is worth pausing for a moment over the precise ethical and political purposes of Ulysses. I suspect Joyce did not set out primarily to convey a political or ethical message. However, it is clear he had political and ethical views that are necessarily woven into the fabric of the narrative— necessarily, because they are manifestations of his own attitudes and interests. It should be obvious to even casual readers that the book criticizes (and analyzes) anti-Semitism. As already suggested, it is also clearly anticolonialist. However, it is at the same time antinationalist. The anticolonialism and antinationalism may appear contradictory. However, they are perfectly consistent. There is a larger pattern here. Joyce was, as we will see, opposed to reducing individual complexity and value to any identity category. Thus he was necessarily opposed to both colonialism, with its assertion of the group identity of the colonizer, and nationalism, with its assertion of the group identity of the colonized. Anti-Semitism fits here as well, for it too is a doctrine that reduces individuals to identity categories.
In keeping with this, Joyce also distrusted constraints on individual freedom—freedom of thought, freedom of expression (including literary creation), and freedom of non-harmful, consensual action. The final point is particularly important in Ulysses. As Nussbaum recognized, Joyce set out to depict human ordinariness, and that ordinariness is often highly indecorous. It involves thoughts, desires, and actions that we all deny due to an excess of public shame. This is particularly true of sexual thoughts, desires, and actions. As we will see, Joyce provides many suggestions that his obvious self-representative in the novel, Stephen Dedalus, has homosexual feelings and may have engaged in homosexual acts. Leopold Bloom has androgynous fantasies and engages in masturbation, as do several of the women in the novel. Masturbation, though widespread, was routinely vilified at the time and was undoubtedly a source of deep shame for many people then and later. Joyce engages in a political project of very broad consequence when he seeks to destigmatize masturbation, as well as homosexuality, transvestism, and other vilified practices. Indeed, Joyce goes so far as to give Bloom coprophilic tendencies. It would seem that the purpose of this is in part to present the most extreme case possible. If even coprophilia is not a proper source of shame, then surely other forms of sexual desire are not.
This sexual liberation aspect of Joyce’s novel may seem banal now, after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. But there is a sense in which it is no less relevant now than at any time since it was published. As Pinkerton and colleagues note, masturbation “remains one of the most stigmatized sexual behaviors” (107), “hidden in secrecy and shame” (106) despite its prevalence.1 More generally, JoAnn Wypijewski points out that “mechanisms of surveillance and restraint … are not relics of a benighted past.” The “times are not auspicious,” she argues, “when judges dispute whether Americans have any right to sex” (9). Alexander Cockburn goes still farther, noting that “US sex offender registries doom three-quarters of a million people—many of them convicted on trumpery charges—to pale simulacra of real life. Others endure castration and open-ended incarceration” (9).
If one wishes to label Joyce’s politics, then “anarchism” seems as good a label as any, as Manganiello has discussed at length. This is particularly true if one thinks of Emma Goldman as representative of anarchism. Her commitments were not only anticolonialist and antinationalist. They also involved a deep concern with sexual liberation.
Returning to the general topic of interpretation and evaluation, we may think of the first area of worldly critical analysis and evaluation (politics) as bearing on systemic interrelations among people, whereas the second (ethics) concerns an individual’s actions in the world. The third of the three areas in which we tend to evaluate fiction in relation to the real world is psychology, moving us from the individual’s (ethical or unethical) behavior to his or her mind. Thus another common way of evaluating and analyzing a literary work is in terms of what it tells us about human mental operations. This too has been a prominent form of analysis in Joyce criticism. As one would expect, a great deal of this criticism has been psychoanalytic. Indeed, Jacques Lacan, perhaps the most important psychoanalytic writer after Freud, treated Joyce extensively.2 In keeping with this, Lacanian approaches have been important in Joyce study, as have other approaches derived from Freud and post-Freudians.3
Somewhat surprisingly, however, there has been relatively little work on Joyce’s great psychological novel in terms of recent cognitive, affective, and neuroscientific approaches.4 Our understanding of human mental processes has advanced enormously in the past two or three decades. Much of this research converges strikingly with the insights of Joyce’s novel. Yet Joyce critics have tended to ignore the technical literature in these new areas, and critics familiar with the new research have tended to bypass Joyce’s work. In his widely read Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer popularized the idea that neuroscience and literature—prominently including high modernist literature—can be mutually illuminating. One of the main contentions of the following pages is that Ulysses can contribute powerfully to this mutual illumination. As with ethical analysis, this should not be considered too narrowly. Joyce does not “teach” us a simple “lesson” regarding cognition or emotion—nor does cognitive science simply convey some sentence-length insight into a novel. Rather, the integration of the two should add depth and nuance to our previous understanding on a range of topics. For example, in treating simulation, the cognitive research should bring to our attention subtle features of Joyce’s narration and characterization in Ulysses. At the same time, the interwoven, detailed particulars of the novel should extend our understanding of the varieties and operations of simulation.
The mention of “Joyce’s narration” here recalls that not all critical analytic evaluations of Ulysses or any other work are worldly. Many such treatments are more properly aesthetic or literary. One common criterion for the critical analysis and evaluation of a work concerns the technical innovations developed in the work. Indeed, for several decades, assessments and interpretations of Ulysses focused on narrational and stylistic features, particularly interior monologue and stream of consciousness. The work of early critics on these topics was path breaking and deeply insightful. However, this is an area of formal literary study that is highly psychological. In consequence, it converges with worldly psychological concerns. As such, it too should benefit from recent advances in cognitive, affective, and neuroscientific research. Unfortunately, however, there has been little redevelopment of narratological and stylistic treatments of Ulysses in light of this research—despite the broader interest of narratologists and stylisticians in the development of cognitive poetics.
As these points suggest, Joyce’s narratological and stylistic innovations were closely related to his psychological interests. Moreover, his psychological orientation dovetailed with his political and ethical commitments to individual human freedom and to the reduction of human shame over (putatively deviant) sexual desire and sexual behavior. All these areas— literary form, character psychology, ethics, and politics—are therefore particularly likely to be illuminated by recent psychological approaches. In addition, the complex, nuanced nature of Joyce’s representations is itself likely to contribute to our understanding of related topics—such as identity—explored in a necessarily simplified form in experimental studies. The following chapters therefore draw on a range of research and theorization, from current understandings of imagination, memory, and emotion, to the serial and parallel operation of the mind, to empirically based accounts of social identity formation. They integrate this research with the detailed analysis of passages from Ulysses. The primary goal of this integration is to further our comprehension of Joyce’s text. At the same time, however, such integration should advance our understanding of the theoretical topics involved.
A project of this sort might proceed in one of two ways. A cognitive scientist might begin with cognitive categories, perhaps those of cognitive poetics. Those categories may themselves be organized in different ways. One alternative would be to take up a simple narratological schema along the following lines:
author → discourse (narration and plot) → story (character and event) → verbalization
Cognitive poetics might lead us to consider, for example, simulation in connection with the author, because simulation is fundamental to authorial creation. Thus the opening chapter might treat simulation. It seems fairly clear that the simulation of Bloom in “Calypso” has some characteristics that differ from the simulation of Bloom in “Circe.” To cover these differences, this chapter would treat bits of the novel from different episodes.5 This organizational structure might lead next to discourse, thus an examination of the ways in which cognitive and affective narratology may enhance our understanding of interior monologue and stream of consciousness. This too would range across episodes of the novel. Further chapters would turn to character psychology, verbal style, and other topics, also spanning large sections of the work.
This approach has a sort of conceptual clarity in its favor. However, it is likely to be ineffective in examining the novel itself. Joyce has written a very intricate work in which there are many cognitive and affective concerns. These concerns are not uniformly present throughout the novel. Rather, one issue may be explored with particular intensity in “Nestor” whereas another is more significant in “Circe.” Organizing the analysis by reference to cognitive concepts would be likely to result in a fragmented understanding of the novel. No less significantly, whereas Joyce does highlight particular concerns in particular episodes, he also integrates various concerns. For example, inferential components of mental processing are never dissociated from emotional components in Joyce’s depictions. Moreover, both are embedded in social and political contexts. One of the great benefits of literary study— in contrast with empirical psychology—is the relative ecological validity provided by such integration.6 To treat simulation alone in one chapter, narration in a second, and so on would therefore fragment the novel in a second way. In addition to fragmenting the linear development of the work, it would fragment the mental and social integrations that make the work a compelling representation of human cognitive and affective processes as they operate in the world (as opposed to the artificial and selective conditions of the laboratory). In short, a concept-based organization risks losing (or at least obscuring) much of what is valuable in the cognitive study of a literary work—both with respect to the work and with respect to cognitive and affective principles.
For this reason, the following chapters have a different structure. They are guided primarily by Joyce’s organization of the novel, proceeding episode by episode. They explore the key components of cognition and poetics: simulation, narration, processes of character thought (both inferential and affective), and idiolectal and emotional elements of style. Moreover, they tend to stress one or two central concepts in a chapter. But the interrelation of these components and the emphasis in any given chapter are guided first of all by the novel, by what is occurring in a particular episode. This does have the drawback that not all the material on a particular conceptual topic (e.g., cognitive principles of narration) appears in a single chapter. But it has a number of advantages. First, it allows the reader to follow the analysis in relation to the novel itself—ideally rereading Joyce’s episodes in connection with the relevant chapters (a process that would be impossible with the conceptual organization). Second, it permits the analysis to address the complex integration of different cognitive and affective elements and processes, thus preserving one of the most ecologically valuable features of literature—its treatment of the multiple properties and interrelated operations of human thought and feeling. Third, it facilitates the exploration of Joyce’s own developing complication of narration and style, as these change in interaction with one another. Finally, it enables our examination of the thematic purposes served by cognitive and affective features of the novel. Thematic concerns (regarding gender, nationalism, and so on) arise in different ways and with varying emphases in the novel’s episodes. Moreover, the relation of these concerns to simulation, narration, style, and so on is not uniform. Organizing the work by reference to the episodes makes it much easier to treat these thematic purposes as they develop in the course of the novel.
An important implication of the preceding points is that Joyce’s psychology and politics have continued significance—potentially contributing to cognitive and affective theories—in part due to their accuracy, thus due to their realism. Put simply, there would be no point in relating Joyce’s work to current research if the work did not reflect something about the human mind that may be further understood through cognitive and affective research. Similarly, there would be no force to Joyce’s thematic concerns if they had no relation to the world we live in today. For example, Joyce suggests that men like Bloom and young women like Gerty and her friends do masturbate, that men like Bloom have androgynous fantasies, and so on. If this is simply untrue, then the political force of the representations would appear to be lost. Thus one main concern of the following pages is the degree to which Joyce’s novel may be understood as an instance of realism. An important contention of the following analyses is that Joyce consistently adhered to what we may refer to as “critical psychological realism.” Simply put, “realism,” in this usage, is the representation of the story world in such a way as to enhance the reader’s understanding of the real world. “Psychological realism” is a form of realism that seeks to enhance the reader’s understanding of human mental processes. “Critical realism” is a form of realism that sets out to displace false beliefs that have been fostered by earlier works (e.g., by earlier novels). Critical psychological realism is crucial to Joyce’s literary techniques (such as interior monologue), his psychological representations, and his ethical/political themes bearing on such topics as group definition, sexuality, and shame. It is also bound up with his novel’s relation to recent cognitive and affective science.
Readers familiar with criticism on Joyce’s novel may be perfectly happy to accept that Joyce is some sort of realist in the first half of the novel. However, they are likely to balk at the idea that “Oxen of the Sun” or “Circe” is realist in any way. One contention of the following analyses, however, is that these are no less critical psychological realist than any other episodes in the book. All that has happened in these episodes is that Joyce has come to realize that realism does not require a particular sort of style. In short, these episodes do show a change. But the change is not a matter of shifting from realism. It is a matter of re-understanding just what constitutes realism. The point is particularly important for the relation of these episodes to our understanding of human psychological processes.
More exactly, my first chapter begins with thematic and basic psychological concerns because these figure prominently in the opening episodes of Joyce’s work and because they provide a more reader-friendly introduction to this complex novel. The chapter particularly examines the topic of shame, first insofar as this is a function of group identity—thus in relation to colonialism—and second as it bears on sexuality. From here, the chapter turns to the thematic operation of style. Specifically, the chapter addresses the ways in which group shame is bound up with language, thus how verbal style may have a political function. This analysis in turn suggests the interconnectedness of the main concerns of the following chapters, as the discussion of identity, shame, and verbal style interweaves thematic issues, character psychology, and (cognitive) aesthetics. In connection with these various concerns, the chapter examines passages from the first and second episodes, “Telemachus” and “Nestor.”
The second chapter takes up the issue of identity more systematically. It begins with the psychology of group identity, distinguishing types of group identity along with their various emotional and cognitive sources and consequences. The second part of the chapter turns from group identity to individual identity. Both parts present broad, theoretical accounts, tailored in part to Joyce, but also making more general claims. Here, as in the first chapter, there are two reasons for this particular focus. First, it is in general easier for readers to deal with themes and character psychology than formal issues (we all have much more practice in the first and second than the third). Therefore, themes and character psychology allow an easier entrance into the novel. Second, as to the issues of identity in particular, the chapter focuses on the third episode of Ulysses—“Proteus.” Named for the self-transforming Greek deity, the episode is systematically concerned with identity.
The third chapter continues the focus on character psychology but turns to a more narrowly literary topic—current research on imagination or, as it is commonly called, “simulation.” Simulation is the ordinary process of tracing out hypothetical or counterfactual trajectories of actions or events (as when I imagine what it would be like to accept speaking engagements two weeks in a row). Much recent work on literature stresses its continuity with processes of everyday simulation. Simulation bears on Ulysses in at least two ways. First, it enters into character thoughts, including thoughts that are intertwined with issues of identity and such emotions as shame. Second, it is the encompassing psychological process that generates the literary artifact of Ulysses itself. This chapter starts with simulation by characters. It goes on to treat the components of authorial simulation, beginning with story world, genre, and story. This chapter, then, serves as a transition between the political and character psychological concerns of the opening chapters and the more literary orientation of the following chapters. Here, too, I follow the general principle of beginning with what is more familiar or more reader friendly—thus the elements relating to the story (characters, scenes, events and action), rather than the elements relating to the narration and style. In considering these varieties of simulation, the chapter takes up parts of the fourth and fifth episodes of Ulysses, “Calypso” and “Lotus Eaters.” Through its discussion of Shakespeare, the ninth episode of the novel, “Scylla and Charybdis,” directly addresses issues bearing on literary simulation and the related question of the degree to which biography should enter into literary interpretation. For this reason, I violate my usual principle of discussing the episodes in sequence, skipping ahead for a brief treatment of the relevant sections of this later episode.
Following on the treatment of story in chapter three, the fourth chapter takes up “discourse,” which is to say, the components of emplotment (roughly, the selection and organization of story elements in the actual telling of the narrative), narration (the simulation of narrative voice), and style. The chapter begins with an overview of emplotment. It goes on to explore narration in greater detail. Narration is particularly important because it will form a sort of interface between the character psychology of the work—including the politically consequential character psychology—and the literary or aesthetic and “artifactual” aspects of the work. One concern of the chapter is that, in the course of the opening episodes, Joyce establishes a default narrational form. That default form—with, for example, its combination of external narration and interior monologue—serves as a basis from which the reader responds to the later discursive experiments, such as the fantasy-related dramatic form of “Circe.” The chapter then explores default narrational form through close analyses of passages from the sixth and eighth episodes, “Hades” and “Lestrygonians.” In the seventh episode, “Aeolus,” Joyce introduces a stylistic deviation from this default form—the use of section headings, in part related to newspaper titles or subtitles (see Lawrence 55). This is the first salient instance of such a deviation in the novel. The chapter concludes with an examination of just what Joyce is doing with this deviation, considered in terms of cognitive processing.
The chapters to this point have eased the reader into the analysis of the novel through political themes, character psychology, and author psychology, as well as the definition of a default narrational format. The remaining chapters consider Joyce’s subsequent development of unexpected and difficult narrational and stylistic techniques in relation to the psychological concerns of the novel as well as its political and ethical themes. The fifth chapter takes up the issue of parallelism in the novel. First, in relation to “Wandering Rocks” (episode ten), it examines the way Joyce represents spatial parallelism and simultaneity. The novel (any novel) is a serial medium. It presents us with words in a certain order, and we read those words one after another. Even if we skip around in the novel, we are still reading in some linear sequence. The fact seems obvious to the point of banality. However, it is precisely that banality that makes Joyce’s development of simultaneity in “Wandering Rocks” noteworthy. Far more significantly, the development of spatial simultaneity in this episode appears to have enabled Joyce to engage in a more radical and more consequential simulation in the eleventh episode, “Sirens.” There Joyce actually works out a means of presenting parallel thought processes in his serial medium. This innovation shows not only great technical novelty and creativity, but also great insight into the operation of the human mind—insight only partially recognized in cognitive science even today. In connection with these points, this chapter considers parallel versus serial accounts in social and individual cognition, elaborating these in relation to passages from these two episodes. It also develops the psychological principles that distinguish between the largely serial processes of verbal thought (presented in “interior monologue”) and the more parallel processes of nonverbal thought (presented in “stream of consciousness”).
The mention of Joyce’s insight into the human mind brings us to the issue of psychological realism. At this point in the book, we are entering into the episodes that most critics see as violating the realism of the earlier episodes. For example, Brian Richardson—in my view, one of the most astute critics of modern literature—actually goes so far as to suggest that there is a new implied author in the later episodes of the novel (120; see also 79–85). In the terms of the present study, this would be a change in the fundamental simulative operation of the work. In treating “Cyclops” and “Nausicaa” (episodes twelve and thirteen), chapter six takes up the issue of critical psychological realism more systematically. This chapter considers these two episodes, not as the start of a deviation from realism, but as the culmination of a specifically critical realism. In connection with this, the chapter returns us to the key political and ethical themes. Critical realism does not seek to debunk indifferent factual misrepresentations. The target of critical realism is ideologically functional distortions, misleading representations of politically or ethically consequential conditions. In consequence, this chapter examines critical realism in relation to the important themes of group identity (colonialist or nationalist) in “Cyclops” and sexuality and shame in “Nausicaa.” In order to explore these topics, Joyce extends the spatial (and social) parallelism of “Wandering Rocks” and the psychological parallelism of “Sirens” to narrational parallelism in these two episodes. After treating the varieties of realism in some theoretical detail as well as the difference between embedded and parallel narrators, the chapter analyzes exemplary passages from these two episodes.
The development of narrational parallelism is part of Joyce’s growing recognition of the complex nature of discourse and its components. In episode fourteen, “Oxen of the Sun,” Joyce goes so far as to make verbal style autonomous not only relative to story but even to narration. Chapter seven, then, considers what constitutes style cognitively, why style might be considered autonomous, and why this autonomy means that no particular style is “realist.” Specifically, this chapter takes up the distinction between interior monologue and stream of consciousness as an initial basis for the autonomy of verbal style. However, it then explores how and why the scope of this autonomy may be extended. The chapter considers just what emotional purposes are served by the great innovations in style undertaken in this episode. However, the analysis of “Oxen of the Sun” is not confined to emotion. It also returns us to the political use of style treated in the opening chapter, as well as the topic of nonnormative sexuality.
If anything, the technical innovations—the violations of default narrational form—are even greater in “Circe” (episode fifteen) than in “Oxen of the Sun.” But the nature of the innovations is different. Chapter eight considers “figurative narration”—the use of figures of speech, prominently metaphors, in narration—as a mode of psychological realism with particular relevance to the depiction of fantasy. Specifically, the episode takes up parallel narration again. In this case, Joyce brings us even further into the intricate parallelism of nonverbal thought, seeking to represent ongoing fantasies and associations with their complex emotional configurations. The difficulty of this undertaking leads Joyce to develop narrational techniques beyond those of earlier episodes. In addition to the general technique of figurative narration, there are a number of, so to speak, subsidiary techniques, such as “semanticizing” non-speech sounds (turning them into words or fragments of words). Processes such as this serve to convey the cognitive simultaneity of association, feeling, and perception in ways that could otherwise be described, but not conveyed with such direct impact. Given that the episode focuses particularly on fantasy, it returns us to issues of sexual freedom and shame. Indeed, it is the key episode for understanding this central part of the novel’s politics. In connection with this, the chapter considers recent research on masochism in particular and its relation to Bloom’s thoughts, feelings, and associations.
The final chapter takes up the concluding episodes of the book, “Eumaeus,” “Ithaca,” and “Penelope.” One of the most striking features of “Eumaeus” is that it changes the diction that has marked much of the novel. In consequence, the style of the episode is commonly seen as “tired,” as involving (intentionally) awkward phrasing and mischaracterization. For example, in her landmark study of style in Ulysses, Karen Lawrence maintains that “in ‘Eumaeus,’ Joyce chooses the ‘wrong’ word as scrupulously as he chooses the right one in the early” episodes (167). However, to my mind, the language of “Eumaeus” is no less aesthetically polished than that of any other episode. It is simply different. This chapter begins by arguing that “Eumaeus” continues the politicization of style by democratizing verbal beauty, extending it from the highly learned styles of, say, “Oxen of the Sun,” to the sort of idiom we would expect from Leopold Bloom.
The chapter, however, focuses more fully on narration. One concern I have always had about interior monologue is that it seems to me to get something terribly wrong, to be cognitively mistaken. Most of my interior “monologue” is what might be called “audience directed.” I spend a lot of time imagining talking to other people. I imagine explaining the project of this book to my editor, or talking about long-term health care with my wife. I rarely just speak my interior thoughts to a personless void. It seems as if Bloom and Stephen are often doing just that. Of course, I could be unusual, or my introspective assessment of my interior monologue may be mistaken. But, whether I am unusual or not, I cannot be so wholly unique as to be the only one with audience-directed internality. In “Eumaeus,” we find that Joyce begins to incorporate audience direction into interior monologue. The partially dual quality of narration in audience-directed interior monologue is further extended by the question-and-answer format of the following episode, “Ithaca.” Indeed, that episode takes up “cooperative narration,” a form related to, but also sharply differentiated from, the parallel narration of some earlier episodes. This chapter goes on to examine the cognitive and thematic implications of such narration.
The discussion of cooperative narration leads us to consider an emotion we have not addressed at length in earlier chapters—attachment, the ties of affection that bind parents and small children, friends, or lovers. “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca” develop “relational” (rather than “isolated”) narration, perhaps in part due to their development of attachment concerns. We see these concerns in the growing warmth Bloom feels for Stephen, as well as his affection for his daughter, wife, and home, all of which come up in the course of “Ithaca.”
This development of relational narration and attachment provides a context for the “Penelope” episode, in which the former is starkly absent. It is somewhat unfortunate that the “Penelope” episode has become in effect paradigmatic of interior monologue. One result of its familiarity is that the striking contrast between this and other episodes—particularly “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca”—is partially obscured. When one shakes off that habituation, however, the terrible isolation and loneliness of the monologue become particularly noticeable. The point holds for both the content (what Molly thinks about) and the very nonrelational narrational form. This sense of isolation and loneliness to some degree fosters sympathy with Molly, who is driven at least as much by longing for genuine communication and affection as by sexual desire. Moreover, the point is not without feminist resonance—as we are reminded by the work of feminists to create solidarity and interaction among isolated middle-class women in the activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the obvious problems, Molly’s sense of isolation has some salutary consequences as well. Most strikingly, Molly evidences almost no shame. She does evidence a rational concern for what other people think, and a longing for reciprocal attachment. But she gives no indication of a sense of herself as an object of other people’s disgust, the fundamental source of shame. On the other hand, Molly’s monologue does reveal a sense of guilt, a sense that she has perhaps betrayed her own attachment bonds, most obviously with her husband. This feeling of guilt only serves to make her more isolated and lonely. The point has consequences for our construal of the novel’s famous ending. Though often seen as a great comic affirmation, in this context Molly’s final “Yes” takes on an almost mournful tone, hearkening back to an irrecoverable past, a past that makes her current loneliness and guilt all the more oppressive.
The nine chapters of this book have both interpretive and theoretical goals. Again, they first of all seek to illuminate Joyce’s novel. At the same time, they endeavor to expand our understanding of human cognition and emotion. Because the organization is guided by the novel, however, the theoretical points may sometimes be obscured by the textual analyses. For this reason, the book ends with an afterword that briefly outlines the main theoretical points of the preceding chapters.