Fiction at its best has been the representation of life in
all its richness and totality since its origin. The presentation of ‘thought’
has a distinctive role in fiction, for it is the thought only through which the
‘imitation of reality’ materialises in speech. In order to make the speech or
utterance meaningful, the arrangement of the sequence of words in a sentence
should have logic. In syntactic analysis, we generally concentrate on the phenomenon
of the arrangement of words into meaningful grammatical structures. The magic
of an author depends largely upon the syntactic structures produced by him. The
quality of structures used, determine the overall utility and aesthetic value
of the piece of writing. Much of the writers’ perspective of life comes alive
not only through his selection of words but also their arrangement in
appropriate syntactic structures. Syntax in Joyce’s hands has received a novel
treatment which has evidently left critics wondering over his ingenuity. The
genre which he propagated was unique and revolutionary in many ways and his
readers would agree that in order to depict the pre speech levels of thought he
could not have done justice with conventional syntactic structures.
The following discussion is an attempt to highlight some
sentence lengths which he brought in, in order to project his characters’
thought processes.
The outcomes of Joyce’s innovative linguistic engineering
are prevalent throughout his three novels. Each one of them confronts readers
with different striking and unconventional sentence structures.
The Stream of Consciousness in James
Joyce’s Novels: A Study in Sentence Lengths
While studying Joyce’s sentence lengths, we find that he
cares little for the traditional syntactic patterns. For him, even stray,
incomplete structures are capable of producing the desired effects, since his
prose is far from adhering to the traditional norms of plot, character and
setting trio.
In Joyce’s novels, non-normal syntactic order confirms the
faithful representation of the random production of the different associated or
non-associated ideas produced by the mind of characters. Many sentences in
these novels provide testimony to this fact as they display Joyce’s propensity
for altering the conventional syntactic pattern and length.
Quirk and Greenbaum in their book A University Grammar of
English, give us seven basic clause types. The following table exhibits these
clause patterns1. As we observe them, we can understand to what
extent Joyce deviates from these well-established norms:
(1) SVA
Mary is in the house.
(2) SVC
Mary is kind /a nurse.
(3) SVO
Somebody caught the ball.
(4) SVOA
I put the plate on the table.
(5) SVOC
We have proved him wrong /a fool.
(6) SVOO
She gives me expensive presents.
(7) SV
The child laughed
Joyce’s manipulations of traditional syntactic lengths
stand justified as we pore over Joyce’s attempt at expression in the textual
form the most inexpressible aspect of human personality, i.e., ‘thoughts’.
In order to catch the uncontrolled and inconsequential
quality of characters’ thoughts, Joyce goes beyond the conventional structure
of an English sentence. The cohesive internal organization of the main and
subordinate clauses does no longer seem relevant. He trims his sentences
abruptly short. They are either just words / phrases with full stops or
fragments with one or other clausal element missing. Conversely there are
prolonged sentences which take the form of large paragraphs and sometimes we
turn a page a two searching a full stop. The analysis of these sentences in
terms of main and subordinate clauses or with any conventional tool does not
serve the purpose. The nature and purpose of Joyce’s prose requires such
experimentation. The key is to observe them in the context and appreciate their
significance therein.
1. One word
sentences
Often single words and phrases with full stops serve as
sentences in between the passages. Such sentences are integral to their
contexts. These are often stray ideas scattered in the form of single words or
phrases amidst the character’s stream of thought. A few examples include the
following:
1. Our. Little. Beggar. Baby. Meant nothing. (U, p. 120)
2. Golden ship. (ibid,
p. 349)
3. Cool hands. (ibid, p. 349)
4. I. He . Old. Young. (ibid, p. 349)
5. A thrush. A throstle. (ibid, p. 351)
6. Order. (ibid, p. 351)
7. Echo. (ibid,
p. 351)
8. I. Want. You. To. (ibid, p. 369)
Most of such sentences occur during the ‘Sirens’ episode
in Ulysses. Bloom, sitting at the Ormond bar, writes a letter to Martha. The
noises, people and the overall scenario inside the bar often find expression in
the form of stray lexical items or phrases in Bloom’s thoughts. When he sees an
object, person or hears some noise, his thoughts give an immediate verbalized
expression to the observed phenomenon or reflect upon it in such patterns
interrupting the on-going thought.
2. Short sentences
In line with one word sentences, Joyce’s brief statements
punctuate the stream of the character’s thoughts and feelings. Such sentences
often record the character’s immediate reflections upon his present
surroundings and are not a part of a prolonged thought process. They sometimes
occur amidst the character’s ponderings over something, pausing the character’s
spontaneous thought process to take account of the surroundings. The best
illustrations of short sentences can be found in A Portrait, where Joyce
employs such sentences (mainly SVA, SVC, SVO patterns) to depict the thoughts
of Stephen, which present him as a small and sensitive child. Being a child, he
does not indulge in prolonged ponderings. His reflections over his observations
in his surroundings are very elementary in terms of vocabulary and syntactic patterns:
1. When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.
His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell (AP, p. 7)
2. His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played
on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance. (ibid, p.7)
3. The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different
father and mother. They were Eileen’s father and mother (ibid, p. 7)
4. Rody Kickham was a decent fellow but Nasty Roche was a
stink. Rody Kickham had greaves in his number and a hamper in the refectory.
Nasty Roche had big hands. He called the Friday pudding dog- in- blanket.
(ibid, p. 8)
5. The face and voice went away. Sorry because he was
afraid. Afraid that it was some disease. Canker was a disease of plants and
cancer one of animals: or another different. That was a long time ago when out
on the grounds in the evening light, creeping from point to point on the fringe
of his line, a heavy bird flying low through the grey light. Leicester Abbey
lit up. Wolsey died there. The abbots buried him themselves (ibid, p.22)
These short sentences are here expressing that how the
sensory objects affect the child’s mind. The objects and people, among whom he
resides, are the only occupiers of his mind. Apart from this child’s limited
linguistic complexity is also reflected. As his thoughts are simple, so words
and sentences are simple too. There is no subordination or co- ordination
involved in the sentences; however the sentences are grammatically complete.
3. Sentence
fragments used as sentences
Abundant sentence fragments in the interior monologues of
his characters are expressive of the character’s random associations and have
been attempts at giving a sentential structure, but there are large semantic
gaps prevalent in them. These are syntactically incomplete, for example, noun
phrases have no verbs, verbs have no subjects, objects lack subject and verb
both etc. Hence, the structural and semantic connections between these
sentences cannot be established by supplying simple conjuncts or by any other
means. These fragments are actually juxtapositions of stray ideas. Some
examples are quoted here:
1. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat
for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk. I
read in that Voyages in China
that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. Cremation better.
Priests dead against it. Devilling for the other firm. Wholesale burners and
Dutch over dealers. Time of plague. Quicklime fever pits to eat them. Lethal
chamber. Ashes to ashes. Or bury at sea. (U, p. 145)
2. The Malaga
raisins. Thinking of Spain.
Before Rudy was born. The phosphorescence, that bluey greeny. Very good for
brain. (ibid, p. 190)
3. Hello, placard. Mirus bazaar. His excellency the lord
lieutenant. Sixteenth today it is. In aid of fund for Mercer’s hospital. The
Messiah was first given for that. Yes Handel. What about going out there.
Ballsbidge. Drop in on keys. (ibid, p. 233)
However, a kind of thematic unity between the sentence
fragments within a single paragraph is also sometimes evident, but most of the
time these fragmentary structures depict the divergent thoughts of the
characters. There are sudden leaps from one idea, observation or thought to
another and they lead to no substantial conclusion about the character’s
ponderings. The first set of sentence fragments quoted here, presents Bloom’s
thoughts when he attends Paddy Dignam’s funeral and then pays a short visit to
Parnell’s grave. Although in the sentence fragments, there is a lack of a
systematic development of ideas but, the theme of funeral underlies the
fragments, as the words, “corpse”, “cremation”, “priests”, “burners”, “ashes”
bind the flowing thoughts. There are many instances in Ulysses where any
unified theme is difficult to decipher through the fragments, since they are
often mere babblings of the soliloquiser which generally has not been given a
formal pattern.
4. Long but
unshaped sentences
Joyce has his own ways of stretching or prolonging his
sentences. He would add phrases or clauses one after another and join them by a
weak and vague conjunction ‘and’. Joyce would also put several phrases together
having parallel structures. He forms sentences that sometimes extend up to not
only large paragraphs but also exceed pages.
Joyce’s long but unshaped sentences are roughly of the following types:
1. Strings joined with ‘and’
2. Use of the series of parallel structures
3. Paragraph long sentences
4. Page long sentences
5. Dissociated sentence parts in longer sentences
6. Long series of adjectives qualifying single nouns
4.1. Strings joined
with ‘and’
Joyce joins many sentence strings with ‘and’. These
sentence strings are grammatically complete and represent various ideas
occurring inside the character’s brain. The ideas which are compiled in such
single long sentences could have been written separately in several distinct
sentences having a formal pattern of the traditional narrated prose, but Joyce
employs such sentences to depict the spontaneous flow of thoughts. A few
examples are the following (bolds mine):
1. He told Stephen that his name was Athy and that his
father kept a lot of race horses that were stiffing jumpers and that his father
would give a good tip to Brother Michael anytime he wanted it because Brother
Michael was very decent and always told him the news out of the paper they got
everyday up in the castle. (AP, p. 25)
2. He thought of his own father of how he sang songs while
his mother played and of how he always gave him a shilling when he asked for
sixpence and he felt sorry for him that he was not a magistrate like the other
boy’s father. (ibid, p.26)
3. And he saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees
up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it
went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after
it, high, high almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an
entrancing blush for straining back and he could see her other things too,
nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other
pettiwidth, the green four and eleven, on account of being white and she let
him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a
moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back he had a
full view high up above her knee no-one ever not even on the swing or wading
and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like
that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half
offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentleman looking
and he kept on looking, looking. (U, p. 477)
The first two sentences are the part of child Stephen’s
stream of consciousness. In the first sentence we find that he is reporting
what a boy called Athy told him while introducing himself to him. Being sick,
he has been admitted to the infirmary. He there gets acquainted with Athy and
then Athy tells him about his own father. Thus, whatever Athy told him takes
the shape of a long syntax where different ideas about Athy’s father have been
tied one with each other. Similarly in the next sentence, child Stephen thinks
about his parents and the thoughts flow one after another joined with ‘and’.
The third sentence has been taken from the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter of Ulysses. After
the tensions of the entire day, Bloom is now in a relaxed mood. He observes the
movements of the lady called, Gerty Mc Dowell. He is provided with an
unexpected relief by that sight and dozes off. The style of this sentence in
his interior monologue represents the constant tendency to sink from the
fantasy levels of consciousness towards the mundane and vulgar. Bloom admires
the lady at a discreet distance. There is a firework display on the horizon,
during which his gaze if fixed on Gerty. Thus, the sentence carries Bloom’s
unconscious or dreamy descriptions of Gerty’s movements and many short strings
have been joined with ‘and’ as the thoughts about Gerty and his own desires
have been woven together.
4.2. Use of the
series of parallel phrase structures
Joyce lays many phrases together which have parallel or
similar structures, separating them either by commas or by the conjuncts like
and, that etc. or sometimes none of them in-between. Such long sentences can be
seen as the depiction of the act of recalling. During the process of recalling,
mind often tends to list and then put the objects, persons or ideas in a
particular order and in a uniform pattern. Thus, the human mind places a
particular phenomenon in line with the other things with which that has been attempted
to be recalled in the similar pattern and the sentence is dragged till the
process of recalling ends.
We often find the reduplication of the lexical items in
such parallel structures, as Joyce has a strong liking for mocking names, for
example, “Sindabad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailor and
Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the
Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and
Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the
Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer” (U, p.871).
John Porter Houston writes about this particular sentence
that, “This provides the sense of irrational drift while adhering to the
principle of repeating the same device, modified at the appropriate point, that
informs much of ‘Ithaka’; looseness of sense joins with formal coherence.”2
Following are a few examples of the co-occurrence of a
number of parallel phrases within a single sentence:
1. He saw not Bronze. He saw not gold. Nor Ben nor Bob nor
Tom nor Si nor George nor Tanks nor Richie nor Pat. Hee hee hee. He did not
see. (U, p. 375)
2. And there sat with him the high sinhedrim of the twelve
tribes of Iar, for every tribe one man, of the tribe of Patrick and of the
tribe of Hugh and of the tribe of Owen and of the tribe of Conn and of the
tribe of Oscar and of the tribe of Finn and of the tribe of Dermont and of the
tribe of Conmac and of the tribe of Kevin and of the tribe of Caolte and of the
tribe of Ossian, there being in hall twelve good men and true. (ibid, p. 419)
3. Martin Cunningham (in bed), Jack power (in bed), Simon
Dedalus (in bed), Tom Kernan (in bed), Ned Lambert (in bed), Joe Hynes (in
bed), John Henry Menton (in bed), Bernard Corrigan (in bed), Pasty Dignam (in
bed), Paddy Dignam (in the grave).
(ibid, p. 827)
4. In the ignorance that implies impression that knits
knowledge that finds the namform that whets that convey contacts that sweeten
sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that
bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality. (FW, p.18)
4.3. Paragraph long
sentences
Study of the length of sentences in Joyce’s novels brings
many surprises. There are instances in these novels where a sentence is so long
that it forms a complete paragraph. There is no full stop in between. The
spontaneous thoughts are joined by commas or other marks of punctuation.
Examples are the following:
1. For nonperishable goods brought of Moses Herzgog, of 13
Saint Kevin’s parade, Wood quay ward, merchant, hereinafter called the vendor,
and sold and delivered to Michael E. Geraghty, Esquire, of 29 Arbour Hill in
the city of Dublin, Arran quay ward gentleman, hereinafter called purchaser,
Vedelicet, five pounds avoirdupois of first choice tea at three shillings per
pound avoirdupois and three stone avoirdupois of sugar, crushed crystal, at
three pence per pound avoirdupois, the said purchaser debtor to the said vendor
of one pound five shillings and six pence sterling for value received which
amount shall be paid by said purchaser to said vendor in weekly installments
every seven calendar days of three shillings and no pence sterling: and the
said nonperishable goods shall not be pawned or pledged or sold or otherwise
alienated by the said purchaser but shall be and remain and be held to be the
sole and exclusive property of the said vendor to be disposed of at his good
will and pleasure until the said amount shall have been duly paid by the said
purchaser to the said vendor in the manner herein set forth as this day nearby
agreed between the said vendor and his heirs, successors, trustees and assigns
of the one part and the said purchaser, his heir successors, trustees and
assigns of the other part. (U, p. 377)
2. And by that way went the herds innumerable of bellwethers
and flushed ewes and shearling rams and lambs and stubble geese and medium
steers and roaring mares and polled calves and longwools and storesheep and
cuffe’s prime springers and culls and sowpigs and baconhogs and various
different varieties of highly distinguished swine and Angus heifers and polly
bullocks of immaculate pedigree together with prime premiated milch cows and
beeves: and there is ever heard a trampling cackling, roaring, lowing,
bleating, bellowing, rumbling, grunting, champing, chewing, of sheep and pigs
and heavy hooved kine from pasturelands of Lush and Rush and Carrickmines and
from the streamy vales of Thomond, from M ‘Gillicuddy’s reeks the inaccessible
and lordly Shannon the unfathomable, and from the gentle declivities of the
place of the race of Kiar, their udders distended with superabundance of milk
and butts of butter and rennets of cheese and farmer’s firkins and targets of
lamb and crannocks of corn and oblong eggs in great hundreds, various in size,
the agate with the dun. (ibid, p. 380)
In such kind of sentences, Joyce captures the thought in
its fullness, i.e. providing every single detail of that thought altogether in
a spontaneous manner. He portrays all the fleeting impressions of which that
particular thought is composed of. Both these sentences have been taken from
the ‘Cyclops’ chapter of Ulysses. He takes great care in the composition of
these sentences, so that they might appear to be formless but actually have an
intricate pattern. He thus depicts the random association of ideas through such
sentences.
These long sentences have been constructed with long
series of nouns or verbs which have been joined with commas. There is also a
repeated use of the conjunction ‘and’. Apart from this, he does not hesitate to
repeat a chosen structure a number of times to stretch the sentence.
There is an extensive use of same syntactic structures in
the first sentence, for example, “hereinafter called the vendor”, “Arran quay
ward, gentleman, hereinafter called the purchaser”, “three pence per pound ,
said purchaser”, “said vendor”, “said nonperishable goods” etc. Such
repetitions lengthen the sentences. The flow of thoughts about purchasing of
goods, vendors, prices of goods and their weights echo in the mind of Bloom. In
the second sentence a long series of the names animals has been presented, “…
flushed ewes and shearling rams and lambs and stubble geese and medium steers
and roaring mars and polled calves and longwools and storesheep…” All the noun
phrases have been joined by ‘and’ here and also we have a repeated pattern of
phrases. Joyce continues the statement to encompass the different activities if
these animals (tramping, clacking, roaring, lowing, bleating, bellowing,
rumbling, grunting, champing, chewing) and also the food prducts procured from
them, “superabundance of milk and butts
of butter and rennets of cheese…” and much more whatever comes into Bloom’s
mind while thinking of these animals within this single long sentence. Hence,
in such long sentences many associated or unassociated ideas or elements have
been combined and put together.
4.4. Page long
sentences
Many sentences in Finnegans Wake fall in the page long
category. These sentences are so long that they are just not confined to a
single paragraph; rather they cover two or three pages till they reach to an
end. Such sentences rarely occur in speech.
Fritz Senn3 have done a comprehensive study of the Wake
sentences. He categorizes sentences on the basis of their grammaticality,
understandability and acceptability. He says that a large part of Wake
sentences are ungrammatical due to unusual lengths and many other deviant
grammatical usages, difficult to understand due to morphemic distortions, and
therefore unacceptable too. About such page long sentences he says that they
demand too much from memory, i.e. so many ideas are piled together that the
reader tends to forget the previous idea as he proceeds further in the
sentence. These sentences however can be understood by working out their parts
on paper or in mental repose. Senn talks of the following sentences from the
text:
Following sentence travels from an uncertain start on page
287 to a kind of finish on page 292:
… when as the swiftshut scareyss of our pupilteachertaut
duplex will hark back to lark to you symibellically that, though a day be as
dense as a decade, no mouth has the might to set a mearbound to the march of a
landmaul, in half a sylb, helf a solb, holf a salb onward the beast of boredom,
common sense, lurking gyrographically down inside his loose eating S.S. collar
is gogoing of whisth to you sternly how- Plutonic love liaks twinnt Platonic
yearlings- you must, how, in undivided reawlity draw the line somewhere)
The second sentence is one of the twelve questions in
Shaun the post, which runs from page 126 to page 139 is another example:
What secontone myther rector and maximost bridges maker
was the first to rise taller through his beanstale then the bluegum
buaboababbaum or the giganteous wellingtonia Squoia;
Wake sentences thus, can be described in many ways as the
deviations from the rules syntax to a large extent. Joyce puts words in an
aberrant order or pattern and alters syntax and lexis largely to depict the
speech of dreams. Such page long sentences also compose Molly Bloom’s famous
eighty pages long soliloquy in Ulysses. There are eight sentences in this
interior monologue but there is no punctuation mark in them so there is some
kind of uncertainty about the beginning and ending of these sentences.
Further, in this context we can observe ‘Attributive
Sentence’ too. A critic of Joyce called, Liisa Dahl in her article “The
Linguistic Presentation of the Interior Monologue in James Joyce’s Ulysses”,
introduces the concept of ‘Attributive Sentence’ in the following manner:
An attributive sentence grows through loose modifiers
which join in without a fixed plan. Additions can be made to it in the order in
which associations arise in the mind, because there is no definite pattern to
which a new word should conform. The connection between the parts of a sentence
is “half open”. There is usually a grouping round the subject which is the
starting point but there is no fixed termination4.
Liisa quotes the following passage from Ulysses in support
of the argument:
Yes because he never did a thing like that before as asked
to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel
when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his
highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs. Riordan that he
thought he had a great leg of and she never let us a farthing all for masses
for herself and her soul greatest miserever was actually afraid to lay out 4 d
for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments…(p. 871)
Attributive structure is another mean through which Joyce
depicts the random associations of ideas and such random associations extend
the sentences. As stated by Liisa, there is a central object around which the
thoughts revolve. The connections between the parts of the sentences cannot be
established since they are so varying, but the central object often remains
intact. In the passage quoted above, Molly associates many facts about Bloom
randomly as she ponders upon their relationship as husband and wife. She keeps on
adding her ideas about him one after another without any pauses and the
sentence is lengthened.
4.5. Dissociated
sentence parts in longer sentences
One more remarkable characteristic found in the sentences
of the interior monologues of Joyce’s characters is that sentence parts in such
sentences are put in a most casual and haphazard manner. These sentence parts
are distantly associated with each other, i.e. there is a lack of the principle
of cause and effect relationship in them so they lead to no substantial
conclusion about the message they want to convey. In other words, while reading
them we get the impression that these haphazardly put sentence parts belong to
several other different sentences and they have been piled up together. As a
result, the sentences are long and intricate. Ideas in them are sometimes
intricately fused together and hence, such sentences yield a confused reading.
Following are a few examples:
1. Windy night that was I want to fetch her there was that
lodge meeting on about those lottery tickets after Goodwin’s concert in the
supper room or Oakroom of the mansion house. (U, p. 197)
2. After all there’s a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour
of things from the earth garlic, of course, it stinks Italian organgrinders
crisp of onions, mushroom truffles. (ibid, p. 217)
3. Besides there was absolution so long as you didn’t do the
other thing before being married and there ought to be woman priest that would
understand without your telling out and Cissy Caffrey too sometimes had that dreamy
kind of dreamy look in her eyes so that
she too, my dear, and Winny Rippingham so mad about actors’ photographs and
besides it was on account of that other thing coming on the way it did. (ibid, p. 476)
In these sentences we find that various ideas have been
compressed together and they depict the immediacy in the character’s mind for
the verbalization of a particular set of thoughts occurring together. The first
and second sentences here can be rearranged in the following manner:
1. That was a windy night. I went there to fetch her. A
lodge meeting about the lottery tickets after Goodwin concert was on, in the
supper room or Oakroom of the mansion house.
2. After all there is a lot fine flavour in vegetarian
things, in crisp of onions and mushroom truffles. Garlic of course stinks like
Italian organgrinders.
In the first sentence we find that how more than one
thought about Molly intervene Bloom’s thought process and in the second
sentence Joyce attempts to create an image of a hungry man’s consciousness. He
detests the sight of restaurants where customers are guzzling coarse food and
the sight of the killing of poor, trembling calves, their raw meat and bloody
bones. Hence ultimately he finds the vegetarian food to be much better. These
ideas are jumbled up in his verbalized thought.
The third sentence is also a piling up of many ideas.
These sentences however can be understood in their respective contexts as they
are the muddled impressions of what a character observes or thinks in or about
his surroundings.
4.6. Long series of
adjectives modifying a single noun
Joyce introduces a long series of modifiers, both normal
and deviant to qualify a single noun. All these modifiers present a pen
portrayal of the object or phenomenon which is being qualified. Following are a
few examples (italics mine):
1. -O, the night in the Camden hall when the daughters of
Erin had to left their skirts to step over you as you lay in your
mulberrycoloured, multicoloured, multitudinous vomit! (ibid, p. 279)
2. The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a
round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed
redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded
deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. (U, p.382)
3. York and savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of earth, and
punnets of mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and red green
yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples. (ibid, p.379-80)
4. Elijah is coming washed in the blood of the Lamb. Come
on, you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you
doggone, bullocknecked, beetelebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed
fourflushers, falsealarms and exessbaggage!
(ibid, 561)
In these examples we find both types of adjectives: simple
as well as compound. In the first and second examples, Joyce has omitted commas
in between the modifiers order to project the immediacy of articulation of the
soliloquizer’s impressions about a particular spectacle. The first sentence
consists of a series of sixteen compound modifiers. Most of them are new
coinages. The statement belongs to the ‘Cyclops’ chapter of Ulysses. The scene
is set in the Barney Kiernan’s bar. This series of modifiers are qualifying a
‘hero’ who is present in the bar at that moment. All these modifiers are the
products of Bloom’s observation of that fellow. These give us a kind of pen
portrait of that hero whose description in Bloom’s interior monologue however
does not end even here, rather takes two complete paragraphs further.
Such series of modifiers delay the noun which is modified.
These unconscious releases from the mind indicate a prolonged thought process
or pondering. Sometimes we also find the repetition of the same adjective a
number of times. This kind of repetition expresses the emphasis which the mind
gives to the object while articulating:
(He rushes against the mauve shade of flapping noisily)
Pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats. (ibid, 634)
To conclude this discussion the length of the sentences
here, we can say that by employing different methods to convey the immediate
verbalization of the content of the mind, Joyce seems to suggest that language
is the raw material, it is a kind of tool in our hands with which we can
express the psychic content, which is quite inexpressible effectively by any
other mean. We need to learn however, to ‘use’ language in various ways so that
it conveys aptly what we want. Joyce has mastered this use that is why his
presentation of the psychic content is so effective and convincing. Apart from
all these linguistic features discussed above, in order to portray the
continuity of the thought process, i.e. the ‘flow’, he employs the following
more such striking syntactic innovations. These sentences are actually long
chain of associations tied to each other by different grammatical means:
(a) Lengthening of sentence by a series of genitive
phrases:
Examples:
1. What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, where
Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and Bloom’s thoughts
about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen? (U, 797)
2. ’ Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry,
in affect, as singing so salaman susuing to swittvitles while as unbluffingly
blurtubruskblunt as an Esra, the cat, the cat’s meeter, the meeter’s cat’s
wife, the meeter’s cat’s wife’s half better, the meeter’s cat’s wife’s half
better’s meter, and so back to our horses…(FW, 116)
(b) Lengthening of sentence by prepositions:
Example:
1. Till tree from tree, tree among
trees, tree over tree become stone to stone, stone between stones, stone under
stone for ever. (FW, 259)
(c) Lengthening of sentence by repetition:
Example:
1. He thought that he thought that
he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not. (U, 797)
To conclude, Joyce expands the sphere of English language
by incorporating various deviant as well as innovative syntactic structures in
his novels. He sought to recreate an impression of the mental processes with a
new approach and an original style, which evidently has found no match.
References:
1. Radolf Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, A University
Grammar of English (Delhi:
Pearson Education Pvt. Ltd., 2003) 167.
2.
John Porter Houston, Joyce and Prose: An
Exploration of the language of Ulysses (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,
1989) 159.
3. Fritz Senn (ed.) New Light on Joyce: From the Dublin Symposium
(Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1972) 66-72.
4. Liisa Dahl, “The Linguistic Presentation of the
Interior Monologue in James Joyce’s Ulysses”, James Joyce quarterly 7.2(1970)
115.
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Dr.
Sukanya Saha, Ph D, was a lecturer with Amrita School of Engineering,
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Bengaluru and other institutions. She
occasionally contributes writing on various literary topics .
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