Notes on James Joyce's Ulysses
Michael Groden - Notes on James Joyce's Ulysses
Reading
Joyce Ultsses, A student GuideJoyce's Ulysses
Arnald Houser, Social history of art pp 226 227, The conception of time in Ulysses
JOYCE'S CONCEPT OF TIME
From http://www.triesterivista.it/scuole/percorsi/paola/inglese.htm
The "time school" novelists attempted to recreate that complexity of time consciousness by means of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Its essence was the assumption that the significance of man's existence can be found in the mental processes rather than in the external world. Consequently, the writer's goal was to represent the endless flow of consciousness rather than describe the objective reality. Joyce had extensively employed the stream of consciousness technique in Ulysses. By skillfully entering the minds of his characters he managed to render their mental processes with such verisimilitude that many readers have commented on the novel seeming at times more real than reality. Although the action of Ulysses describes the course of a single day, the coexistence of the consciousness of the characters' past, present and projected future enables the reader to understand fully the characters in the context of the formative events of their lives. As Molly Bloom lies in bed, her past, present and future ceaselessly flow together. She recalls and relives past events, but she also hears "Georges church bells" and plans to check her husband's fidelity the next morning. Her thoughts form a continuum in which there are no temporal divisions: it is an eternal present where differentiated time zones do not exist ("there is a future in every past that is present" [Finnegans Wake 496.35-36]).
Temporality is further explored in Finnegans Wake, although the exploration takes a different form. Joyce's last book does not attempt to re-create everyday reality of in the way Ulysses does. Instead, Joyce creates a reality of his own. His new reality is completely freed from the rational logic which dominates our waking state. Instead it resembles the logic of the dreaming mind, or the working of consciousness, where images are subject to constant movement and transformation. In place of realistic characters, in Finnegans Wake Joyce creates types: "Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies". The spatiotemporal interaction in Finnegans Wake, not only conveys the idea of time without boundaries between the past, present and future, but it also expresses the relativistic fusion of time and space into a timespace continuum.