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Joyce's Visions
Hudson Review, The, Summer 2004 by Phillips, Brian
Consider his description of the "young juicy crinkled and plump red tomatoes" examined by Blazes Boylan in the "Wandering Rocks" chapter of Ulysses. Where Shakespeare's abstract description of autumn takes on concrete vividness through the magnetic pull of the words, Joyce's adjectives seem separated by a great amount of space. Each is terminal; each corresponds to only one aspect of the thing described. 'Young juicy crinkled and plump red": age, saturation, texture, weight, and color. Each word performs its solitary duty unassisted by the others, with the result that Boylan's tomatoes, rather than being shown, are only subtly anatomized. (Compare D. H. Lawrence's extraordinary description of the kangaroo with its "drooping Victorian shoulders," or Melville's of the shark moving under the waves with its "white gliding ghostliness of repose," for a fine illustration of the effect of deft redundancies.)
Joyce himself was certainly aware of his dissecting inclination. He apotheosized it in the "Ithaca" chapter of Ulysses, where, when Mr. Bloom knocks his head painfully against a sideboard, his author positively revels in the disconnect between language and sense: "The right temporal lobe of the hollow sphere of his cranium came into contact with a solid timber angle where, an infinitesimal but sensible fraction of a second later, a painful sensation was located in consequence of antecedent sensations transmitted and registered." No sentence has ever been less viscerally suited to its subject, which is why it makes us laugh; but surely some part of the comedy comes from its aspect as selfparody, from our sense that it is only the extreme expression of a habit of mind we have felt throughout the book. When, elsewhere in "Ithaca," Joyce portrays Bloom unlocking a door by noting that he "raised the latch of the area door by the exertion of force at its freely moving flange and by leverage of the first kind applied at its fulcrum," one catches the sly exhilaration of a writer who, under a disciplined stylistic stratagem, has cast off all restraints.
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