Portals of discovery

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In one part of Hades Bloom seems unaccountably to be responding to something the narrator has said. Here in Scylla and Charybdis the narrator seems to be responding to something Stephen has said, with what seems a whiff of ridicule. (Portals of discovery?? That's a bit grand, isn't it? The only portals I see are made of wood.) These passages, and another one which will come early in Sirens, appear to exceed the unstated limits of free indirect discourse. According to those implicit rules, the style of the narrative may approximate the thoughts or words of a given character, sinking briefly into that person's orbit and helping readers to see the world through his or her eyes. The narrator may not, however, enter the cast of characters by engaging in direct conversation. To do so would be to violate the reader's expectation of receiving a detached, objective report of what is happening. What would become of a novel if its trusted narrative voice should suddenly fragment into a variety of subjective viewpoints?

Readers of Ulysses are about to find out. In Wandering Rocks the single source of reportage dissolves into a fairly bewildering variety of objective viewpoints, jumping all around Dublin, glancing now at this group of characters and now at that one, and even mixing bits of some scenes into the reporting of others. In every subsequent chapter, subjective viewpoints proliferate. Parodic voices alternate with objective narration in Cyclops and Nausicaa, and in Oxen of the Sun and Eumaeus such voices take over entirely. Circe adopts the form of a drama, abandoning third-person narration in favor of letting characters (and countless non-characters) speak for themselves. The abandonment of third-person narration culminates in the novel's final two chapters. Ithaca takes the form of impersonal questions and answers, though the catechism is shot through with subjectivity and whimsical caprice. Penelope offers a pure monologue, neither a narrative nor a drama but simply a woman thinking––or talking, or writing.

"Portals of discovery" also announces the sharpening of another narrative device––repetitions of previously used phrases. This has been happening for a long time: Stephen thinks, says, or hears something in Telemachus or Nestor and that thing recurs in his thoughts, often with verbatim recall, in Nestor or Proteus: "odour of rosewood and wetted ashes," "history is to blame," "He proves by algebra," "omphalos," "saved men from drowning," "oinopa ponton," "Five fathoms," "one great goal," "burying his grandmother." Similar phrases recur in Bloom's thoughts, and Tom Kernan's fondness for the phrase "retrospective arrangement" is noted and recalled by others. But in later chapters such phrases escape the contents of characters' thoughts and begin to figure prominently in the author's narrative art. Sirens plays with them to form quasi-musical variations on thematic motifs, and Circe uses them to construct an industrial-scale recirculating mechanism in which hundreds of previously heard verbal fragments whirl about as if the whole day is being seen through the window of a washing machine. For veteran readers of Ulysses one of this chapter's pleasurable challenges is recalling the source every time such a familiar string of words appears on the page.

When the narrator of Scylla and Charybdis pointedly repeats what Stephen has said, readers are put on notice that the book itself is listening to, remembering, and thinking about what happens in it. As in the akasic records that preserve everything on the astral plane, anything heard, said, or done on June 16 may come back to fill consciousness again and perhaps open portals of discovery.