What does a "normal" novel have that Ulysses doesn't have? Well, I am glad you asked. This post will deal with all the way Ulysses goes off the beaten path in terms of standard writing procedure.
1. Punctuation: A pretty fundamental part of most writing, by the end of Joyce's novel he opts to disregard any and all forms of punctuation. And I mean all! He just stops out of nowhere. Why? It seems to be part of his fascination with the stream of consciousness and him try to articulate thought and emotion. He also does not use quotation marks at all. This seems like a mere formality to me, but maybe there is something more to it.
2. Words: Joyce uses a lot of words that are not in the standard dictionary. Maybe this is not technically an omission, but it definitely stands out as being different. Sometimes he will combine words to convey a certain meaning (like scrotumtightening, that made me double take) and sometimes he will just plain make it up because it creates a feeling though its sound.
3. Grammar: Subjects and predicates? Not always there. Some great sentences include: Morning mouth bad images. Or: Cruelty behind it all. Even: Yes, yes. Most of these come when Joyce is writing from within a character's mind. He portrays thoughts as images sometimes flowing calmly and at other times torrentially.
4. Structure: Each episode has a different rhythm and flow, each character has a different way of thinking, and sometimes Joyce goes off on tangents seemingly for days on end. At first it appears very disorganized unlike more mainstream novels which have an easily recognizable order to the storyline. Once I tried reading it like poetry, focusing on the metaphors and imagery rather than what the story was about it began to make sense.
I could go on and on about what makes this novel different than any other, but for my purposes this is sufficient for now.
Heavens, I don't think I could read a novel sans punctuation. Your argument that it's poetry is looking more and more attractive.
ReplyDeleteThat's kinda cool all the differences from normal novels and such. The last point you made (#4) about the disorganization of Ulysses had me thinking of a book I read for a class last semester. Its a Spanish novel called Pedro Páramo and one reviewer said it was as if the writer wrote the book and threw the chapters in the air and collected them randomly because it isn't "in order." And you're right, once you get past that and look at it differently it starts to make some sense.
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