Violare i limiti imposti dal genere: Ulysses di James Joyce

Abstract

When James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was published in 1922, it breached irrevocably the traditional barriers of narration that had previously contained the novel. It shattered the parameters of traditional mimesis of both the late Nineteenth Century Victorian novel, as well as the Naturalistic one. Joyce’s writing disarticulated and collided directly with the pretention that a novel could provide an objective representation of personal or collective narratives of reality. Joyce thus revisited the unified collocation of narrative space and time in traditional mimesis, and he simultaneously demonstrated their intrinsic instabilities. To exemplify these tendencies in Joyce’s writing, I shall be looking at two eloquent episodes of Ulysses that highlight this paradigm shift in narration: the transitioning from the objective spaces of narration to the mental ones of Joyce’s characters. I am particularly interested in the four possibilities of narration in the mental activity of Leopold Bloom in Calypso (Ch.4 of Ulysses), and in the mental space of Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness in Penelope (Ch.18 of Ulysses).