1

The labyrinth of understanding: textual space in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Véry Dalma

The text unfurls its space

James Joyce’s Ulysses is a labyrinth of understanding. Its textual space creates an area

of understanding the diverse cross-connecting routes of which the reader has to explore so

that the correlations of meaning and hence, the possibilities of making sense of these

correlations may unfold. Differently put, Ulysses, as a textual construction, insists that its

intersections, echoes and associations be comprehended throughout the spatial exploration of

the text so that in this way it may reveal itself as a dynamic, ever-changing field of meaning,

open to interpretation. The present paper wishes to elaborate briefly how this textually created

field of meaning – that is the textual space of Ulysses – reveals itself throughout the process

of understanding. Such an elaboration requires that the particular mode of textual space

Ulysses creates – and thereby exposes – be elucidated beforehand.

In order to elucidate the mode of textual space Ulysses testifies of, the paper will begin

with the brief explication of an important Greek term, ‘energeia.’ As Hans-Georg Gadamer

elaborates,1 the term was created by Aristotle as a fundamental concept of his theory of

physics, elaborated by way of an analogy to ‘Dynamis’ or dynamism, which analogy

demonstrates that ‘energeia’ involves both actuality, reality and action. Therefore, the concept

of ‘energeia,’ thematizing the being of motion in the sense of actuality as action, sheds light

on the mode of being manifested by the work of art,2 since, as Gadamer underlines, the

unfolding of the work of art is also a process of dynamic actuality. The work presents itself as

it is actually in the specific way it unfolds throughout the process of understanding, and in this

sense, it uncovers itself as ‘energeia.’ In other words, the work of art exhibits itself inasmuch

as the movement of understanding allows it to unfurl in its ever-changing completeness. With

regard to the dynamic movement of understanding a work of literature necessitates, this

means that – as Gadamer formulates it elsewhere – “the actualization of writing always

already requires interpretation in the sense of explicative understanding, just as the

actualization of the word addressed to somebody does.”3 Therefore,

1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Wort und Bild – ‘so wahr, so seiend,’ ” Gadamer Lesebuch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,

1997), p. 185. 2 Gadamer 185.

3 “Die Aktualisierung von Schrift verlangt jedenfalls immer schon Interpretation im Sinne des deutenden

Verstehens, wie die des Wortes, das einem gesagt wird.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Frühromantik, Hermeneutik,

Dekonstruktivismus.” Gesammelte Werke 10: Hermeneutik im Rückblick (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), p.

129.

2

it is not the variety of the possible meanings of a written form or of a set of signs that is actualized when

one is reading, but the thereby signified. Writing cannot be read without being ‘understood,’ that is,

without being articulated and thus, without performing an unparalleled intonation and modulation, since

these anticipate the sense of the whole. 4

In other words, the norm that a work of literature presents may only be met if one follows the

speech of the text as it unfolds, if one conforms to its command and thereby enters the ever-

changing correlations of meaning. Only this way does the literary work become ‘energeia,’ or

the dynamic actuality that is itself. The work of art, hence, is the actual norm of understanding

to which one has to be attentive in order to allow for its unfurling, in which process it bares

itself as a dynamically meaningful creation. “The concept of the ‘text’ is a fundamental

hermeneutical concept. It constitutes the authoritative base [Gegebenheit], to which

understanding and interpretation has to measure itself – it is the hermeneutical point of

identity which keeps every variable within bounds.”5

Therefore, with regard to works of literature one may say that it is the text itself which

in its mode of articulation – exposed in its dynamic unfolding – unveils something seemingly

known in a light which makes one recognize it differently, if one becomes aware of the way

the work addresses one. To put it in another way, the mode of articulation a work of literature

as a mode of lingual organization exhibits, opens up in and as the edifice of the text which one

has to explore throughout the process of reading, and which process provides the possibility

of making sense of the continually altering meaningful correlations. Hence, the autonomous

work of verbal art as ‘energeia’ uncovers itself as a dynamic order, as a free-standing artistic

construction which, as such, occupies its own verbal-textual space. It is this space one has to

explore, attempting to understand its unfolding textual correlations, in order to be able to

reach possible insights the work, in its dynamic unfurling – which takes place throughout the

process of understanding – may impart. Umberto Eco formulated this insight in The Open

Work the following way: “[b]lank space surrounding a word, typographical adjustments, and

4 “Es ist also nicht die Vieldeutigkeit eines Schriftbildes oder Zeichenbestandes, sondern die des damit

Bezeichneten, die, wenn einer liest, aktualisiert wird. Man kann Schrift nicht lesen, ohne zu ›verstehen‹, d. h.

ohne zu artikulieren und damit eine einmalige Intonation und Modulation vorzunehmen, die den Sinn des

Ganzen antizipiert.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Frühromantik, Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktivismus,” p. 129. 5 “Er formuliert die autoritative Gegebenheit, an sich Verstehen und Auslegen zu messen hat – gleichsam als der

hermeneutische Identitätspunkt, der alles Variable begrenzt.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Der eminente Text und

seine Wahrheit.” Gesammelte Werke. Band 8: Ästhetik und Poetik I: Kunst als Aussage (Tübingen: Mohr

Siebeck, 1993.), p. 289. [my translation – V. D.] This does not mean that the text is restricted to an originary

interpretation. The text unfolds itself in a novel way every time it is encountered by the reader, but it provides

insight only if it is read as an artistically autonomous construction, in terms of its own measure.

3

spatial composition in the page setting of the poetic text – all contribute to the creation of a

halo of indefiniteness and to making the text pregnant with infinite suggestive possibilities.”6

Modes of textual space

Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue entitled Phaedrus, makes it explicit that rhetorical

speeches, − which are, like works of literature, lingual constructions − should exhibit

themselves as organic arrangements. “[E]very discourse ought to be a living creature, having

a body of its own and a head and feet; there should be a middle, beginning and end, adapted to

one another and to the whole [.]”7 Therefore, the insight that verbal constructions, as the

organic creations of language, have bodies of their own and thus, occupy their own verbal

space in which understanding has to orient itself was already present in antiquity. However,

the recognition that works of literature, though still confined to works of poetry, create and

occupy their own autonomous verbal-textual space was first made manifest in its consequence

by the art and aesthetics of Romanticism. According to the Romantic conception of organic

form the poem, the work of art, is a spatially organic entity. As Coleridge writes, “[t]he

organic form […] shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its

development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.”8 The sequence of

words, organized into an organic whole by the poet’s imaginative design, creates the very

space in which the aesthetic revelation takes place. Therefore, the organic form, as

Coleridge’s concept of the image highlights, “is an appeal to poetically empowered words to

turn substantive and to hold within themselves the moving world of words and references that

are recreated into the text.”9 On the basis of this line of thought it proves justifiable to claim

that according to the Romantic conception of organic form, the poem occupies its own

autonomous, self-sufficient textual space and does not allow for any kind of external rule or

influence to interfere with its organic structure.

In this respect, the consideration of the mode textual space presented by the Romantic

fragment is also necessary. Despite being an essentially different mode of construction from

that exposed by the organic form, the fragment, another fundamental mode of Romantic

thought, also exhibits itself in and as its own textual space. The fragment is complete in its

6 Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work.” The Open Work. Translated by Anna Cancogni (Cambridge,

M. A.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 8. [I slightly modified the translation – V. D.] 7 Plato, Phaedrus. [264 C] Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Retrieved from The Internet Classics Archive

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html., on 2 June 2011. 8 The quoted excerpt from Coleridge’s essay entitled “Shakespeare’s Judgement Equal to His Genius” is cited by

Murray Krieger in his work entitled Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1992) on page 199. 9 Krieger 214.

4

incompletion, it is organic unto itself: as Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy formulate it,

“[t]otality is the fragment in itself in its completed individuality.”10

What this implies may be

well highlighted by the following thought of Maurice Blanchot: “[t]wo fragmentary texts may

be opposed, but only inasmuch as they are posed after each other, one without relation to the

other, or related by an indeterminate blank that neither separates nor unites them […].”11

Hence, although the fragment’s “very completion remains incomplete,”12

this incompletion is

part of its autonomous textual space. In other words, the fragment exposes – by way of its

completed incompletion – that the process of (re)reading is compelled to be a constant state of

becoming, which becoming is the becoming, the unfurling of the text that accounts for itself

in its very construction and thus, for its incompletion also. Therefore, the fragment, by way of

its very mode of construction, makes on realize that though the movement of understanding

can never reach a predetermined goal, that – in this sense – a work of art “should forever be

becoming and never be perfected,”13

it nevertheless demarcates an autonomous area of

understanding which unfolds in and as a self-contained verbal-textual space whose relation to

other texts (and textual spaces) may be illuminated by its own textual correlations only.

Romanticism, in many respects the antecedent of Modernism, left the legacy of the

concept of organic form and that of fragmentariness, both conceived as autonomous verbal-

textual modes of space, to Modernist thinkers and artists.14

Moreover, Modernists opened up

still new ways of creating constructions of textual space, due to the considerable influence

unique ways of representation in visual arts had on verbal arts. Differently put, poetry and the

verbal arts gained inspiration from the visual arts in terms of creating their own verbal space

in the form of unique and self-sufficient poetic structures. Among the various aesthetic

movements in the early twentieth century, Cubism was one of the most influential. As Glen

Macleod claims, “[t]he cubist techniques of fragmentation, multiple perspectives, and

juxtaposition are part of the standard modernist repertoire from Eliot’s The Waste Land to

Stevens’s ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar.’ ”15

That is, due to the influence of the modes of

10

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press,

1988), p. 44. 11

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation. Translation and foreword by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: The

University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 154. [I modified the first half of the English translation on the basis of

the Hungarian translation – V. D.] 12

The Literary Absolute 46. 13

The Literary Absolute 43. The quotation is a part of the 116th

Athenaeum fragment by Friedrich Schlegel. 14

Frank Kermode in his work entitled Romantic Image (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957) explores this

artistic legacy in great detail. 15

Glen Macleod, “The visual arts.” The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. by Michael Levenson

(Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 202.

5

visual representation on verbal arts, in the creation of poems as constructions of verbal-textual

space the “act or quality of looking”16

itself became the focal point. Still, this did not mean

that poetry or any of the verbal arts was supposed to aim at creating the verbal illusion of

visuality. On the contrary. As Reed Way Dasenbrock underlines, Ezra Pound, the originator

of the Modernist concept of the poetic image, “repeatedly warned against […] the

misapprehension that by an image he meant a visual image.”17

That is, a new mode of poetic

construction emerged which Joseph Frank, the author of “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”

describes as an “[a]esthetic form in modern poetry […] based on a space-logic that demands a

complete reorientation in the reader’s attitude towards language.”18

For example, in T. S.

Eliot’s work entitled The Waste Land, as Joseph Frank points it out, “syntactical sequence is

given up for a structure depending on the perception of relationships between disconcerted

word-groups.”19

Therefore, the Modernist work of verbal art, as a complex lingual utterance,

is built up of disconnected textual particles which make up a pattern of relationships that the

reader has to decipher herself/himself; and in order to be able to decipher this pattern in a way

that it may become meaningful to him/her, the reader has to navigate the space of the text

which is the actual area of understanding. Besides Eliot numerous other authors reverted to

the realization of this mode of verbal-textual space or ‘spatial form’ in literature. Among

many others, the above mentioned Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf

and William Faulkner all made attempts at effectuating this construction. Joyce’s Ulysses,

published in the same year, in 1922, as Eliot’s The Waste Land testifies of a similarly devised

textual space, the elucidation of which will ensue, now that the required ground of its

understanding is set.

16

Macleod 206. 17

Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pond and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 93. 18

Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 15. 19

Frank continues the above cited passage in the following way: “To be properly understood, these word-groups

must be juxtaposed with one another and perceived simultaneously. Only when this is done can they be

adequately grasped; for, while they follow one another in time, their meaning does not depend on this temporal

relationship.” Frank 14. The stance held by Joseph Frank with regard to this point differs from that of the present

paper. I cannot agree with the notion that word groups can be “perceived” simultaneously, since the sequential

character of writing and reading cannot be suspended even in case of a text which is devised in terms of what

Frank calls ‘spatial form.’ However, the sequential character of reading is only one aspect of the complex

process of understanding a literary text. The oscillatory game of making sense of diverse textual particles in their

respective relations to one another cannot be avoided either, since it is a fundamental requirement in associating

“disconcerted word-groups” and is hence unavoidable in the understanding of the text itself.

6

The textual space of Ulysses

As Joseph Frank explicates, the reader of Ulysses is compelled to read the text

“exactly in the same manner as he reads modern poetry, that is, by continually fitting

fragments together and keeping allusions in mind until, by reflexive reference, he can link

them to their complements.”20

Richard Ellmann’s statement concerning Joyce’s mode of

composition sheds light on the way such a spatial construction of the text came into being:

“[h]is method was to write a series of phrases down, then, as each episode took form, to cross

off each one in a different coloured pencil to indicate where it might go.”21

As a result,

complementary textual fragments referring to the same events or themes, establishing

associations or constituting verbal echoes surface throughout, at diverse points of the work,

which fragments, as Stuart Gilbert points out, “have to be assimilated in the reader’s mind for

him to arrive at a complete understanding.”22

Therefore, instead of making one follow a

sequence of actions and events, “Joyce gives us details and actions in solution and obliges us

to sort out the givens,”23

as David Hayman underlines. Accordingly, Joyce himself declared

as regards the possibilities of textual composition that “[a] man might eat kidneys in one

chapter, suffer from kidney disease in another, and one of his friends could be kicked in the

kidney in another chapter,”24

which events in the course of the reading process may manifest

themselves as diverse associated locations embedded into the textual space of Ulysses.

However, the reading process does not simply become a task of assembling a puzzle:

it gradually grows into an exploration of an area of understanding, as pointed out above, in

which the reader has to follow diverse textual paths form one location of a corresponding

fragment to the other and throughout this textual wandering do possibilities of meaning

develop. In other words, the distance and the difference between the diverse related textual

locations modulate the possibilities of meaningful correlations between these, therefore, such

distances and differences are constitutive in making sense of the textual fabric of the work, as

it unfolds throughout the process of understanding. The corresponding textual fragments

unveil different aspects of the same point of reference which point of reference may concern,

among others, a specific relation between characters, a particular theme or a mode of verbal

formulation in the novel which are often also interrelated. And as one makes his/her way

through the text from one textual location to the other, the significance and meaning of each

20

Frank 20. 21

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 416. 22

Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), p. 25. 23

David Hayman, Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning (London and Madison: The University of Wisconsin

Press, 1982), p. 22. 24

Joyce quoted by Ellmann on p. 436.

7

site appears differently in the light of previous or impending readerly insights reached at

diverse other meaningful locations surfacing in various other contexts. Hence, the whole work

is constantly remodulated throughout the process of reading which process is therefore the

spatial orientation of the reader in and by the text.25

Moreover, the area of understanding the reader explores – as he/she tries to uncover

the textual correlations and thus, to make sense of the text of Ulysses – does not only entail

the diverse routes from one corresponding textual fragment to the other. It also involves the

paratactic arrangement or, in other words, the direct juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated

segments. Given that the paratactically ordered textual units do not constitute a coherent

verbal surface, one has to work out the relations between these oneself as one moves to and

fro between them. The juxtaposed textual elements may be discrete textual chunks articulated

by diverse textual voices, such as the voice of style and the voice of a narrator, but they may

also be disparate fragments of thought or textual vignettes lacking explicit connection though

formulated by the same voice. Whichever mode of juxtaposition it may be, parataxis – as a

result of the collision of the incongruent textual segments – always brings about the disruption

of a unified narrative surface by way of inducing textual fissures which imply the lack of

causal relations and the lack of conceptual thinking. The juxtaposed textual units are joined by

the very fissures which separate them, since these hiatuses give rise to counter-orders within

the text and the tension of difference between these counter-orders, anchored in the textual

gaps, create the actual need of giving sense to the paratactic arrangements. Therefore, as

Wolfgang Iser claims, “each trace marks both difference and interaction between segments”26

which, in turn, means that “[d]ifference […] operates both as a divider and as a stimulus for

the linking of what has been divided.”27

Though Iser explicates the significance of the gaps

between the textual segments of a literary text from a different aspect than the one prevailing

in the present discussion, his claims prove to be of considerable importance also with regard

to understanding how textual space unfurls. By way of creating meaningful fissures, parataxis

builds a facet of the verbal-textual space of Ulysses: the juxtaposition of diverse textual

segments calls upon the reader to orient herself/himself in the space of textual counter-orders,

25

Although the scope of the present paper is not wide enough to undertake the task of elaborating the relation

between time and textual space, it must be noted that making renewed attempts at understanding the literary text

always entails giving time to it. That is, following the diverse textual paths – and thereby orienting oneself in the

area of understanding – always involves correlations between evocation, retention and anticipation, and these

correlations are established by the ‘timing’ of the text. Therefore, one may say that it is time which allows for the

comprehension of the text’s spatially relational order. 26

Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. (Baltimore and London: The

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 228. 27

Iser 229.

8

so that in this way (s)he may attempt to uncover their possible correlations and thereby, to

answer the need of giving sense to the juxtaposed chunks of the text within its entire area of

understanding. The forthcoming passages will make an attempt to elucidate briefly how the

various modes of parataxis manifest themselves in the text.

Paratactic arrangements

As one of the above mentioned modes of paratactic arrangement in Ulysses, the

juxtaposition of discrete textual chunks articulated by diverse textual voices appears several

times throughout the novel, conspicuously in the chapters entitled ‘Aeolus’ and ‘The

Cyclops.’ In the former, the imitations of newspaper headlines interrupt the narrative, in the

latter, the narration of the cyclopic narrator is interrupted by passages of stylistic mockery.

The meaningful contrast between the style – together with the tone – of the textual planes

presented by the colliding segments, and the implicit associations lingering in the intruding

fragments to the narrative passages which they interrupt unfold only if the text is read as a

spatial construction. That is, the two textual planes – presented by the narrative passages and

the intrusions – have to be understood in the light of each other so that the sense of the

juxtaposition may surface. Let an example illustrate this point from the chapter entitled

‘Aeolus:’

− What is it? Mr Bloom asked.

− A recently discovered fragment of Cicero, professor MacHugh answered with pomp of tone. Our lovely land.

SHORT BUT TO THE POINT

− Whose land? Mr Bloom said simply.

− Most pertinent question, the professor said between his chews. With an accent on the whose. (102-103) 28

The caption SHORT BUT TO THE POINT halts the narrative temporarily in order to anticipate and

also to comment ironically on Bloom’s directly following remark. Therefore, the intruding

headline gains significance in the light of the dialogue which it interrupts, and the dialogue

itself becomes intelligible if the interrupted passages are associated by the reader

retrospectively, with a ‘detour’ through the intruding caption.

The juxtapositional structuring of the text is also observable in the tenth chapter of the

novel entitled ‘The Wandering Rocks’ which, to apply David Hayman’s phrase, is constructed

as “a series of interlocking prose vignettes.”29

To put it differently, the chapter is constructed

28

All parenthesised references are to the page numbers of the following edition of Ulysses: James Joyce,

Ulysses, ed. by Hans-Walter Gabler (London: Penguin Books, 1986). 29

Hayman 97.

9

of juxtaposed “chunks of irregularly shaped prose,”30

into which chunks, interpolations are

inserted to indicate the fictional simultaneity of various situations. Here is an example:

The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.

−Them are two good ones, he said.

Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth. He bent to make a bundle of the

other books, hugged them against his unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.

On O'Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J

Maginni, professor of dancing.

Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles. Fair Tyrants by James Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it?

Yes. (193-194)

The section itself from which the example is taken – the tenth section or “prose vignette”

within the tenth chapter of the novel – presents Leopold Bloom as he is scanning books at a

bookstall. The passage presenting the description of the shopman is followed by another,

thematically unrelated passage which concerns Mr Maginni, dancing master. Hence, the

narrative is, again, halted by way of an interpolation which results an ironic contrast between

the appearance, the circumstances and the bearing of the shopman and of the dancing master.

This kind of parataxis is also a mode of the spatial orientation of the reader in and by the text,

since the relations between the diverse juxtaposed textual segments acquire meaning only if

the segments are understood as such parts of the text that throw light upon each other as the

reader herself/himself attempts to the uncover the possible correlations between them,

oscillating to and fro. On the basis of the exemplified modes of textual composition, one may

posit that parataxis proves to be one of the fundamental and hence, unavoidable orders of

organization in the textual space of Ulysses.

Moreover, the textual construction of series of silent thoughts also demands that these

be understood in and as a spatially meaningful arrangement. The juxtaposed fragments of

thought expose two or more – though not necessarily unrelated – thematic planes which are to

be made out by way of following the text as it uncovers itself in its own meaningful space.

That is, the difference of one plane of thought from the other and their ensuing counter-orders

are to be interpreted in terms of their meaning-relations surfacing in the textual space; and the

meaning-relations of these planes cannot be understood in any way other than by way of

opening up possible correlations between the diverse corresponding fragments of thought

given in solution. To put it in another way, the reader, trying to comprehend how the thoughts

are related, oscillates from one fragment of thought to the other and in the area of

understanding explored by way of this oscillatory game, the possibilities of meaning unfold.

The following excerpt, also from ‘The Wandering Rocks’ chapter, illustrates this well:

30

Hayman 82.

10

Mr Kernan halted and preened himself before the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser. Stylish

coat, beyond a doubt. Scott of Dawson street. Well worth the half sovereign I gave Neary for it. Never built

under three guineas. Fits me down to the ground. Some Kildare street club toff had it probably. (197)

The following interpretation of this passage, as one of the several possible interpretations,

seeks to demonstrate that the thematically corresponding fragments of the cited silent

monologue reveal their relatedness if one associates them throughout the process of

understanding which takes place as an orientation within the realm of the text’s spatially

meaningful area. Hence, one may reach the following interpretation of the first, the third, the

fifth and the sixth sentences by way of understanding them in association: Mr Kernan ponders

on his coat and rejoices at the thought of the low price it cost. The second and fourth

sentences of the series of silent thoughts intrude into the thematic scope delineated by the

first, the third, the fifth and the sixth sentences, engaged by the formerly stipulated

association. However, if the second and fourth sentences are also uncovered in their possible

correlation, they become meaningful as the constituents of another plane of thought. “Scott of

Dawson street,” on the basis of the association between the second and fourth sentences, may

turn out to be somebody who “Never built under three guineas.” Therefore, in the light of the

meaningful relations set up between the thoughts of the first plane, the reference to Scott and

to the price of his services (uncovered as the second plane) may be understood as a means of

contrast by which Mr Kernan seeks to highlight the advantageous purchase he made with

buying a second-hand coat from Neary. If the linear process of reading is not complemented

by the spatially oriented understanding of the relations between the diverse fragments of

thought, the passage may pose considerable difficulties to the reader.

Last thoughts on the textual space of Ulysses

Last but not least, one may speak of spatiality as regards Ulysses in yet another aspect.

Though this consideration concerns the mode of textual construction only implicitly, one may

say that the arrays of the various stylistic attributes associated with the chapters also amount to

a spatially apprehended whole. Most of the episodes were assigned by Joyce an appropriate

symbol, an art, a colour and an organ of the body, which all shape the particular mode of

textual composition applied in the diverse chapters. These stylistic attributes, however, do not

mould the artistic design of the individual chapters only, but also, “being interrelated and

interconnected in the somatic scheme of the whole,”31

as Joyce put it, add another aspect to the

spatial apprehension of the novel: Ulysses becomes the space occupied by the human body and

31

Joyce quoted by Jeri Johnson, “Introduction,” James Joyce, Ulysses: The 1922 Text (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1998), p. xxxi.

11

by the microcosm of arts, by the ring of symbols and by the spectrum of colours. Thus, as one

reconstructs correspondences and traces echoes in terms of the Joycean stylistic attributes,

another facet of the meaningful space of Ulysses takes shape.

The diverse facets of spatiality elaborated upon above overlap, intersect with each

other and thus comprise a labyrinth of understanding which unfolds throughout the process of

reading as the meaningful area of textual correlations: an area that is, which, constructed as

the verbal-textual space of Ulysses, compels the reader to delve into the intricate order of the

text, so that (s)he may make sense of what is revealed to her/him in its verbal relations.

Therefore, the autonomous, textual space constituted by Ulysses testifies to a fundamental

insight articulated by Manfred Frank with regard to the process of understanding a literary

text, which insight was formulated the following way:

Those who follow only the continuous flow of succession in the text, miss its junctions of meaning, the

recurrence of its themes, the concentration of its symbols, the harmony of its scales at diverse locations

[…], briefly: all those hermeneutical intersections and cross-connections which allow a unidirectionally

rendered text to be polyfunctional […].32

32

“Wer nur dem kontinuierlichen Fluß der Nacheinander folgt, verfehlt in einem Text die Knotepunkte des

Sinns, die Rekurrenz seiner Themen, die Verdichtung seiner Symbole, die harmonie seiner Tonfolgen an

Verschiedenen Orten […], kurz: all jene hermeneutischen Kreuz- und Querverbindungen, die einen

unidirektional wiedergegebenen Text polyfunktional werden […] lassen.” Manfred Frank, Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare: Studien zur deutsch-französischen Hermeneutik und Texttheorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,

1990), p. 155. [my translation – V. D.]