“It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant”: Ideology and Style in James Joyce’s Ulysses. (Extract) (original) (raw)

In this essay, I posit an approach to eliciting the relationship between style and ideology in Ulysses that reads the stylistic strategies of the text in relation to Joyce's Irish experience of the English language. This essay will assert that Joyce's linguistic and stylistic experimentation can be read as an expression of the colonial experience of Imperial language. The sequence of stylistic variation that constitutes the structural pattern of the whole in Ulysses undermines the notion that art mirrors 'reality' and questions the notion that language can even represent experience. My thesis will aim to demonstrate how this deconstruction of representation is not transhistorical, but rather specifically conditioned by the cultural politics of colonial experience. If we can read the sequence of heterogeneous styles as functioning to undermine the veracity of an 'extant' reality that art mirrors through representation, this textual strategy necessitates an unstable narrative discourse throughout the entire text. Therefore I propose an approach to the broadly synonymous style of the first six episodes of Ulysses that focalises a linguistic instability more commonly associated with the later sections of the text. Both of these components of the texts stylistic structure, the deceptive instability of the ‘initial style’ and the later succession of stylistic variation, are determined by the political and discursive conditions of Joyce’s colonial experience.