When David Hayman coined the term “arranger” in 1970 (Somer 65), he inspired a new area of scholarship—and questions—with respect to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Many scholars attempt to trace the presence of the arranger throughout Ulysses, which contributes to their understanding of the novel as a whole. In the wake of Hayman’s introduction of the arranger, two essays that stand out in their examination of “Aeolus” and the six chapters that precede it are Karen Lawrence’s “‘Aeolus’: Interruption and Inventory” and John Somer’s “The Self-Reflexive Arranger in the Initial Style of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’” and together, they informed the parameters of our project.

 

In her essay, Lawrence explores the formal arrival of the arranger in “Aeolus.” The headings throughout the chapter convey this arrival and “puncture the myth of [the novel’s] absolute authority” (Lawrence 392). Lawrence questions Hayman’s word choice in coining the term arranger; in concert with the theme of journalism in “Aeolus,” the actions of the arranger, particularly the headings, remove the text from a particular “consciousness” (393). Like in the press, moreover, the work of the arranger can be devoid of authorship entirely.

 

Aside from the headings, the various cases of inventory testify to the arranger’s presence in “Aeolus.” These lists of sorts, Lawrence paradoxically argues, convey that the “richness” of the details of life necessarily exceeds the “richness” of the details of a list in a text (402). Like the section headings, inventory stands in opposition to typical novelistic form. And Lawrence asserts that the “intrusion” (394) of other texts—such as the parodies found throughout the novel—move the text further away from a particular “consciousness” (393) and towards the “text of received ideas” (395-396). Lawrence’s continuation of the study of the arranger, applying Hayman’s term with greater depth and breadth to Ulysses, was vital to our careful dismantling of the various voices at play in “Aeolus.”

 

In his essay, moreover, Somer examines the arranger’s presence in Ulysses before “Aeolus.” Somer describes the “initial style,” which is how Joyce refers to the narration in the first ten chapters of the novel (Somer 67). Within the first six chapters of the “initial style,” Somer describes, omniscient narration slowly gives way to interior monologue and free indirect discourse (67). Somer also designates a clear difference between the “mimetic written-oral tradition” and the “self-reflexive written tradition”: the “mimetic written-oral tradition” solicits the reader’s belief in the narrative’s realism, while the “self-reflexive written tradition” directs the reader’s attention towards the narrative’s constructed nature (68). In Ulysses specifically, certain constructed narrative features, such as parodies and classical references, or the “text of received ideas,” as Lawrence would describe them, permeate the text (Lawrence 395-396). 

 

Somer argues that the arranger is Joyce’s primary tool in establishing an “effaced narrator” (Somer 71), or a “narrative without a narrator” (72). He asserts that free indirect discourse is the “trapdoor through which the arranger springs onto the dramatic set” (73). Before “Aeolus,” the arranger’s presence is much more subtle—and therefore more difficult to identify. As Somer notes, though, one narrative feature that testifies to the presence of the arranger before “Aeolus” is the transitioning between objective action, free indirect discourse, and interior monologue. Somer writes:

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the initial style shifts often and unexpectedly from one narrative mode to another.  In order for these shifts to occur economically, the narrator shrinks within the text and, consequently, gives readers the opportunity to encounter the narrative without a narrator…the feeling that they are in contact with a reality that is rendered directly to them and not one mediated through a prejudiced sensibility. (72-73)

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The evolving dynamic between the three narrative modes—from the “initial style” to “Aeolus” and beyond—and the role that the arranger plays in this evolution are central to our study of the arranger, which is why we rely upon Somer’s designation of these three narrative modes to divide “Aeolus” according to its component voices (67). We also rely heavily on notes in the Gifford when doing so, as indicated in many of our annotations.