About the Project: An Overview
Our Mission
James Joyce’s Ulysses opens with a presentation of the narrator’s unique prose: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” the novel opens, introducing Buck Mulligan’s brashness and some of the adjectives typically associated with him (Joyce 3).
Notably, Joyce’s narrator is not the only figure whose voice is featured in Ulysses, and relatedly, the novel as a whole is not exclusively written in third-person prose. The twelfth chapter of the novel, for example, is written in first-person prose, and the narrative frequently enters into short passages of first-person interior thoughts that interrupt third-person prose.
The frequent transitions between narrative styles and between figures who are narrating the text demonstrates the uniqueness of voice that defines Ulysses. More pointedly, a uniqueness of voices defines the novel, as it is not possible to identify just one voice that is responsible for the novel’s prose. The presence of these layered voices throughout the text—and their elusiveness, in particular—originally intrigued us, the (Un)Arrangers, to design a project that examines voice in Ulysses.
Given the multitude of voices present in Ulysses, however, even attempting to examine voice throughout the novel was an objective we needed to define more narrowly. And so, when we encountered the products of the work of the arranger in the seventh chapter of Ulysses, “Aeolus” (Lawrence 394), our project, Aeolus(Un)Arranged, was born.
The chapter, which takes place in a newspaper office and discusses the process of editing and compiling a newspaper throughout, is fittingly arranged in the style of a newspaper, in contrast to the uninterrupted flow of prose of the previous chapters. The section headings throughout the chapter testify to a form of arrangement, so to speak, and are one manifestation of the voice of the arranger, “a persona … somewhere between the narrator and implied author” (Somer 65). There are many other manifestations of the arranger’s voice, and it is our purpose in this project to identify that voice more specifically by identifying its manifestations in “Aeolus” and by separating it from other voices in the chapter. As our annotated text demonstrates, there are many passages throughout the chapter that are difficult to delineate so particularly according to their component voices. These passages, however, often provide some of the most poignant presentations of the complexity of the layered voices in Ulysses and provide fruitful focal points for discussions of this complexity.
Perhaps John Somer put it best when reflecting on Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
While Stephen and his friend, Lynch, stroll through the streets of Dublin, Stephen discusses three issues: the purpose of art, the nature of beauty, and the forms of art. At this stage of his career, Stephen’s aesthetic reaches its crescendo in his final point. Art, he says, has three forms, the lyrical (the most subjective), the epical, and the dramatic (the most objective). If art is to represent life truly, the artist must provide his audience no more help with his narrative than God provides them with life. The artist should remain ‘within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’ (P 215). According to Stephen, if art is to be authoritative, it must be objective, that is, dramatic in form. (Somer 70)
Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, presents the idea that the artist must abstract himself from his art. The arranger, in a way, does just that. Because the arranger does not narrate, he is perhaps even more imperceptible than Joyce’s narrator. And yet, he has a profound impact on the novel, and on “Aeolus” in particular, as evidenced by the arrangement of the chapter into subsections and by other formal features. These formal features raise the question of who arranged the sections and supplied the section titles. While the narrator supplies the prose of the novel, who arranges the prose as it is arranged? While we are not in a position to determine the precise identity of the arranger, we are in a position to identify his voice more precisely, and we hope this examination will inspire further discussions of voice in Ulysses. Be sure to visit our annotated text to embark on this discussion of voice!
Procedure
This project was comprised of four phases:
Close reading and a critical review
Delineating voice in “Aeolus” (our annotated text relies on the Project Gutenberg transcription of "Aeolus")
Discussing and debating those delineations via digital comments
Informally reflecting on our findings in an online blog
We began this project with a literature review of existing scholarship on the presence of the arranger in Ulysses in order to begin to identify the various voices present in “Aeolus.” Based on this research (see our blog for a comprehensive literature review) and on our own close reading, and relying on the electronic tools available within the digital humanities arena, we decided to annotate the text of “Aeolus” in a way that separates the various types of narration and voices present in the chapter. We relied on insights from Gifford and other scholars to guide our close reading and divisions of the text. Research on the rhetorical devices at work in the chapter (such as the helpful list Gifford includes in his appendix) was particularly useful throughout our process—especially because Lawrence emphasizes that these devices can often point to the presence of the arranger. Because designations of types of narration and voice are somewhat subjective, though, we separate the chapter into sections: we delineated the types of narration and voices in one section together to identify our baseline standards for doing so, and then we each delineated the types of narration and voices present in one of the remaining three sections independently in order to model different approaches to engaging with voice in Ulysses. We hope that our differing approaches serve as a fruitful basis for discussions of voice in the novel. We ultimately use the text as a forum for annotations and discussion about points of contention or confusion through digital comments. We encourage you to visit our annotated text for a more detailed description of our methodology for approaching our designations of text and annotations.
Voice in “Aeolus,” and in Ulysses more broadly, is undeniably elusive, and we intend this project as the beginning, rather than the end, of a discussion. Especially because of its electronic format, we view this project as an educational tool, and we invite future students of Ulysses to engage with our examinations and to add their own comments and annotations to the annotated file. Understanding voice in Joyce is necessarily a work-in-progress, and we hope that this project is, as well.
Outcome
If our mission is to examine voice in Ulysses, our outcomes fittingly include finding our own voices. And we hope other readers of Ulysses will contribute their voices to the conversation by adding digital comments and by perpetuating the discussions we have started. As our annotations demonstrate, all three of the Aeolus(Un)Arrangers have different understandings of how to identify the presence of interior monologue and free indirect discourse specifically, and identifying where objective action ended and either interior monologue or free indirect discourse began especially posed a challenge. In fact, each time we read the chapter again, we changed our minds about our prior attributions of voice, which conveys the elusiveness of the text.
While we designed this project in order to examine voice, and to understand the role of the arranger more closely, we emerge from this project not with concrete answers, but rather, with more pointed questions and observations about the role of the arranger and what he contributes to the text. The presence of the arranger is evident in the formal arrangement of the chapter into subsections, as well as in many of the rhetorical features that we note in our annotations. Sometimes the arranger is seemingly present even when a character is speaking. But questions about his presence remain: why indicate the presence of an arranger in the first place? Why arrange the chapter into subsections? Does the seeming presence of an individual who arranges the prose of the chapter impact the content of the chapter, and if so, how?
Our lack of concrete answers to these questions—perhaps paradoxically—is very telling. This lack reinforces the layered, elusive nature of the voices in Ulysses. We emerge from this project, in other words, with a more thorough understanding of that complexity. And though we cannot answer our framing questions definitively, we each individually engaged in explorations of subtopics related to the presence of the arranger that perhaps contribute to answers to these broader questions. Julie was especially interested in the parallelism between Stephen’s thoughts and the work of the arranger throughout the course of this project, and she explores that interplay on our blog. Graham was especially interested in identifying the impact of individual voices in the chapter throughout the course of this project, and he takes a creative approach to examining the chapter with and without certain voices present on our blog. Rebecca was especially interested in the fact that the chapter is set in a newspaper office and directly discusses editing and arranging, and she assesses the parallelism between form and content in “Aeolus” on our blog. Just as this project enabled us to contribute our voices to the discussion of voice in Ulysses, we encourage our readers to contribute their voices, as well!