In questions concerning literary value, Ulysses is generally considered an incontrovertible example of aesthetic excellence. The prose, style, and design of Ulysses, whenever discussed in evaluative terms, are likewise regularly considered touchstones of literary value. However, it is also the case that bad writing is everywhere in Ulysses. Consider, for example, the letters in the book written by Mr Deasy, Milly Bloom, Martha Clifford, Rumbold, and so on. For the most part, these letters are "perfectly" bad; by that I mean their various verbal, grammatical, and orthographic infelicities deftly enact the mimetic function of disclosing the character, education, and sensibility of each writer. The reader of the novel, like Bloom, is more than happy to accede to Milly's request: "Excuse bad writing am in hurry. Byby" (4.413), since the hastily penned words themselves reveal her personality and situation to us. These letters perform still other literary functions, such as foregrounding themes and motifs and forming significant parallels with other events elsewhere in the novel: Martha's slip of the pen, "I do not like that other world" thus mimics sentiments Stephen expresses as it suggests a distinctively Joycean equivalence of word and world.
There are many other specimens of exquisitely chosen bits of imperfect language, such as the unremarkable stream of Father Conmee's thoughts that reveal his own inanity and hypocrisy as well as serving as a foil to the internal speech of the more interesting soliloquists elsewhere in the book. Nor is this surprising: the novel is the genre that is most inviting of heteroglossia, and necessarily includes ironic or parodic recreations of a number of styles, including (or rather, especially) those deemed false. Furthermore, as I have argued elsewhere, there is also a series of aesthetic evaluations in the novel that guide the reception of the text—it is important to know, as the other characters point out, that Dan Dawson's speech is florid, clichéd, and vacuous. And at a larger level, and there are significant political stakes to the issues of aesthetics throughout the book: the fact that so many more Irish speakers produce and appreciate genuine eloquence than do the English serves to undermine the standard English claim of cultural superiority routinely deployed to legitimize its imperial domination.
There is, however, another kind of bad writing in Ulysses, writing that by anyone's definition is bad, that is intentionally and irretrievably bad. It is especially anomalous in view of the virtual cult of art being promulgated by other modernists like Pound, Eliot, and Woolf.(1) Unlike "great" writing, the description of which rapidly devolves into impressionistic depictions, vague metaphors, and vacuous noun phrases, bad writing is easy to recognize and describe. For our purposes, it will consist of a cluster of adjacent practices: pointless repetition, vagueness and vacuity, use of cliches, unintended solecisms, strained alliteration, pretentious or inappropriate diction, forced comparisons, incoherence, purple prose, and pointless redundancy: in short, all the common faults that teachers of freshman writing are hired to remedy.
In the rest of this paper I will attempt to trace the origin and development of the most "aesthetically challenged" portions of the book, and provide a survey and analysis of the most substantial of the deliberately bad passages, sections, and chapters of Ulysses, noting where they arise, the trajectory they follow, the possible functions they might fulfill, and their final aesthetic and textual significance. The key characteristic of this second kind of bad prose is that its badness does not contribute significantly to the overall aesthetic effect of the passage; rather, its negative features seem to overwhelm any mitigating literary quality it may possess. These sections may collectively be termed "anti-art for its own sake." These resolutely anti-aesthetic elements in fact contradict the aesthetic that governs the rest of the book.
I believe we may identify the first sustained, incontrovertible bits of bad writing (whose badness, that is, goes well beyond what is necessary for characterization or satire); these occur in the headings near the end of the "Aeolus" episode, beginning with "DAMES DONATE DUBLIN'S CITS/ SPEEDPILLS VELOCITOUS AEROLITHS, BELIEF" (7.1021–22). Many other bad headlines might also be adduced, the purpose of which is no doubt to mock the language of headlines and captions with their clipped message, wealth of cliches, forced alliteration, bad puns, and occasional pretentiousness. Even so, satirical play carried on too long soon becomes boring, and this is precisely what the headings tend to do by the end of the chapter (e.g. "SOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE/ ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP" [7.1032–34]).(2)
"Cyclops" also contains much bad writing, in part to debunk the exaggerated claims make by ultra-nationalists as well as to deflate the exaggerations and idealizations inherent in discourse generally and present in particularly egregious form in many oral epics and long poems. Here too, Joyce often goes far beyond the requirements of satire or even the admittedly spacious boundaries of gigantism, as is evinced by the lengthy and rather pointless list of clergymen who are said to attend the revival of traditional Irish sports:
William Delaney, S. J. L.L.D.; the rt rev. Gerald Molloy, D.D.; the rev. P.J. Kavanagh, C.S. Sp.; the rev. T. Waters, C.C.; the rev. John M. Ivers, P.P.; the rev. P. J. Cleary, O.S. F.; the rev. L. J. Hickey, O.P.; the very rev. Fr. Nicholas. O. S. F. C.; the very rev. B. Gorman, O. D. C.; the rev. T. Maher, S.J. [and an additional fourteen names; 12.927–39].
The answer to the question of what function the names perform is perhaps additional unnecessary epic listmongering or additional unnecessary verisimilitude (almost all the names are listed in The Irish Catholic Directory for 1904). Even gargantuanism has its limits, and I suggest they are almost certainly exceeded here. This is not to say that lists cannot possess literary value: think of Nabokov's suggestive list of Lolita's classmates, or the mellifluous lists of place names in Milton, or, for that matter, the riotously funny list of Irish and pseudo-Irish heroes Joyce produces earlier in the chapter.(3) Many other passages from this episode could also be adduced—I suspect we all have our favourites, if that is the term—where the satirical or parodic function of the passage is entirely insufficient to justify the amount of bad writing it embodies. This would not be an issue in an obviously Rabelaisian chapter—Rabelais himself sets a fine example of excess, stylistic and otherwise, and has no patience with the goal of meticulous aesthetic precision. However, the book's larger design is significantly altered here; beginning with "Cyclops," every chapter contains significant amounts of inferior writing that seem to be either unmotivated or inadequately justified, the exceptions to this statement being only the second half of "Nausicaa" and "Penelope." For the first time, there are extensive passages and even pages that one may (and many do) skim with impunity.
It should also be noted that in "Cyclops" there are numerous successful parodic thrusts such language makes possible and, at other times, unexpected sonorities appear more pronounced precisely because of the depletion of the words' sense: "The muchtreasured and intricately embroidered ancient Irish facecloth attributed to Solomon of Droma and Manus Tomaltach og MacDonogh, authors of the Book of Ballymote, was then carefully produced and called forth prolonged admiration." (12.1438–41) Boilerplate description can be expressed with fluent prose rhythms worthy of Sir Thomas Browne. This is arguably an interesting aesthetic achievement in its own right and very possibly foreshadows the trajectory of Joyce's subsequent, more radical manoeuvres.
Aesthetically speaking, the first half of "Nausicaa" is an unusual case. Joyce famously described its " namby-pamby jammy marmelady drawersy (alto lá!) style," thereby enacting the excesses he depicts, a practice that continues relentlessly in the chapter itself. (Letters I, 135). Karen Lawrence (who is still our best guide in these matters) observes that "the parodies of 'Cyclops,' culled from a variety of sources, testify to the limits of style. But no such theoretical basis for parody is found in 'Nausicaa'" (121). We may go further, and state that, in a much more abbreviated form, the parodic recreation of the language of adolescent female magazines and their advertisements would work wonderfully, as does the writing of Martha Clifford, the discourse of Rumbold the barber, or the consciousness of Tom Kernan or Father Conmee. The brevity of these sections is not accidental: it is difficult to imagine them being successful over a stretch of thirty pages or so. That such continuations would not likely work is due to the principle we may call the fallacy of parody: the overly similar, needlessly long, and insufficiently ironic rendition of a style that, in the case of advertising copy for dubious products claiming to produce greater attractiveness for gullible customers, is in most cases its own best parody.
The flaccid discourse goes on for a considerable time ("His eyes misty with unshed tears Master Tommy came at her call for their big sister's word was law with the twins. And in a sad plight he was too after his big misadventure. His little man-o'-war top and unmentionables were full of sand but Cissy was a past mistress in the art of smoothing over life's tiny troubles and very quickly not one speck of sand was to be seen on his smart little suit" [13.54–59]). Though there are many hidden felicities in the section, obscure resonances to other parts of Ulysses, a powerful running critique of sexual repression in organized religion, and numerous other occasional virtues, as a sustained piece of writing this is one that bores new readers of the novel most quickly (though, for the same reasons, it can work quite effectively as an oral performance for an audience that knows little about Joyce). I hasten to clarify that I do not claim that it is uninteresting or devoid of value, especially ideological value, only that as literary prose it is one of the more barren patches in the text. What are we to do, aesthetically speaking, with that very long stretch from the chapter's beginning to the point where it begins to approach its climax?
The best argument along these lines that can be made for the section I believe would build on Craig Smith's analysis of the play of twinning and dualities within and between both parts of the episode, an analysis that John Bishop has considerably extended and redirected. Smith notes that "Tommy and Jacky, as they play with ball and castle, mirror the priests with their thurible and church. Bloom in his adoration is a profane version of the congregation of worshipers, Gerty, of course, becomes a second Madonna, both as the object of adoration and in her unmoving posture. Even such small points as Edy helping Tommy to urinate finds replication in Gerty's more removed assistance in helping Bloom." (631) It is as if Joyce complements the uncharacteristic cloying prose with his typical web of parallels, doublings, and opposite images, as the aesthetic weakness of the prose is put in counterpoint to the aesthetic power of its elaborate and symmetrical architecture. Roughly the first half of Ulysses is governed by the high modernist aesthetic of poetic prose, polysemy, obliquity, internal allusion, symbolic correspondences, indirection, antididacticism, and emphasis on showing rather than telling, theme over event, and thought over action. As the work continues, this "initial aesthetic" is abrogated and at times opposed to itself, as euphony is united with cliché (as in the passage from "Cyclops" cited earlier) or elaborate structural echoes are built around the most pedestrian or even hackneyed prose.
"Oxen of the Sun" also has its share of verbal jetsam. In particular we might focus on the deliberately inert ("unfertilized") Latinate second paragraph which begins, "Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain [...]" (14.7–11; my ellipsis: it is too dreadful to quote in its entirety). It is generally explained that this passage is aesthetically barren because it represents the pre-fertilized ovum. Interestingly, this barrenness recurs in the chapter several times at regular intervals; thus we get "An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most mollificative suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the paranymphs were escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium of connubial communion." (14.352–55) Mulligan's entrance also precipitates a flow of aseptic, Latinate prose: "consideration of the causes of sterility, both the inhibitory and the prohibitory, and whether the inhibition in its turn were due to conjugal vexations or to a parsimony of the balance [...]." (14.668–70) After 50 lines of more conventional pastiche (if that is the term), the dead style briefly resumes, in part no doubt to satirize obfuscative medical terminology: "his incipient ventripotence [...] betokened an ovoblastic gestation in the prostatic utricle" (14.727–28). This style returns at several other points (877–78; 962–75; 1277–92) and its regular recurrences (roughly every 300 lines) become part of the overall pattern of the episode. These passages of inert prose do not seem to be associated with particular historical or individual styles; some appear to point to the ultimate sterility of characters like Mulligan. For the most part, they seem to be regularly punctuating the chronicle of prose styles that surround them, perhaps to point to the constant danger of aesthetic indifference or incompetence that always exists at the borders of all distinctive writing. Finally, we may note an opposite kind of aesthetic collapse at the end of the chapter, as the various dialects, slang, and argots produce a linguistic chaos that is beyond any kind of aesthetic order—even as they constitute a symmetrical anti-aesthetic block to balance the chapter's turgid opening.
"Ithaca" (famously called the "ugly duckling" of the book by Joyce) constitutes an extended satire of pedantic description, scientistic annotation, and the proliferation of information that does not provide knowledge. There is plenty of bad prose here; some of the worst in an early description of the flow of water through Bloom's faucet: "From Roundwood reservoir in county Wiclow of a cubic capacity of 2400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of filter mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial plant cost of £5 per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown, Glen of the Downs and Callowhill to the 26 acre reservoir at Stillorgan, a distance of 22 statute miles [...]" (17.164–69). As the catechism continues, a strange literary quality is added to the turgid, scientistic language as the poetry of hydraulics struggles to emerge and the description of water takes on the baroque diction and melodic cadences of Milton or Browne: "its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density; its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: [...] its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve" (17. 20–08). We see here the way sense and meaning yield to the demands of a varied prose rhythm: artesian wells are not commensurate with waterspouts, there is little violence in eddies, and the mythological waterparting is an odd member of this otherwise naturalistic group. Here, too, it would seem that Joyce is performing one kind of aesthetic virtue (sound) at the direct expense of another (sense), and framing this unusual virtuosity with longer passages of dull prose. If these are flaws, they are relatively minor ones, a predictable consequence of Joyce's shift from the Flaubertian aesthetic of the first several chapters to a more Rabelaisian and protopostmodern one later in the book—though it is unnerving for the reader to move from a poetics where every word deserves to be scrutinized for multiple meanings and convergent aesthetic effects to an opposite practice of composition that often refuses such plenitude. Indeed, if Joyce's representation can embrace the opposed conceptions of both Defoe, the most realistic author, and Blake, the most visionary, why not look for an aesthetic that includes the antithetical programs of a Flaubert and a Rabelais (and a Rushdie)? Except that there is still more to be included.
At this point, we need to step back and confront what appear to be the aesthetic abominations of "Eumaeus." In this section, as Karen Lawrence judiciously points out, "Joyce chooses the 'wrong' word as scrupulously as he chooses the right one in the early chapters." (167) In Joyce criticism before the work of John Henry Raleigh and Hugh Kenner, attempts were made to explain the practice as a kind of stylistic mimesis, as the awkward, cliché ridden prose was said to mirror the exhausted minds of the protagonists. But such a claim cannot begin to justify fifty pages of deliberately bad writing; this would constitute a particularly flagrant case of was has been termed the fallacy of imitative form.(4) More recent critics have sought to uncover unexpected gems within Eumaeus' tissue of verbiage; Lawrence notes the occasionally wry "verbal twists on cliches" (166) as in "gone the way of all buttons," and Andrew Gibson has identified examples of the text's "exhilarating abandonment to artful blunder [and] gleeful revelling in the possibilities of the fatuous." (79) Though there are brief moments of aesthetic value in "Eumaeus," the writing is nonetheless consistently dreadful; this does not mean that it is uninteresting, but rather that its unalloyed badness is part of what makes it so interesting. And its badness is excessive, as the following passage indicates:
it reminded him in a way of a longcherished plan he meant to one day realise some Wednesday or Saturday of travelling to London via long sea not to say that he had ever travelled extensively to any great extent but he was at heart a born adventurer though by a trick of fate he had consistently remained a landlubber except you call going to Holyhead which was his longest. (16.499–504)
One doesn't need a detailed knowledge of classical rhetoric to observe that the flatness of the language and the sentence's flabby paratactic structure are miserably augmented by the piling on of redundancy, cliché, slang, inappropriate diction, and more redundancy. One might nevertheless attempt to argue that Joyce is again making (very minimal) art out of the most unlikely materials, or that he is sacrificing the aesthetics of the sentence to foreground much larger ordering units, so that the basic designs of the book are embodied in hitherto unprecedented language. In the passage above, Bloom is imagining himself as a potential seagoing "adventurer," or at least voyager, in language that includes the tonally inappropriate bardic epithet, "long sea," as local considerations of style are sacrificed the better to foreground the global role of the work's architecture, or what Stephen refers to as "structural rhythm" (15.107). In this way, Joyce is able to include verbal ugliness into the realm of the aesthetic. This I believe is another application of the same general principle that caused Joyce to devote one of the chapter's few aesthetically interesting depictions to the representation of a horse in the act of defecation: "rearing high a proud feathering tail, [let fall] three smoking globes of turds. Slowly three times, one after another, from a full crupper she mired" (16.1876–78). This act can be seen as a kind of consummation of the dialectic between excrement and literary value that pervades the book as bad prose, beginning with "Matcham's Masterstroke," is depicted scatologically. Joyce is thus crowning his own bad writing with the gloriously depicted turds.(5)
Gibson offers an ideological reading of the episode, claiming that it "is a glorious, wicked, delighted perversion of a language (and a concept of 'propriety') that Joyce nonetheless takes to be an unalterable, historical given. It is thus that 'Eumaeus' forms part of his titanic struggle with colonial, Irish history" (219). This claim remains unpersuasive, and only convincingly explains at most a rather small portion of the totality of the chapter. Lawrence for her part provides a compelling general description of the method of "Eumaeus": "literature is destroyed as the book expands. [...] The inclusion of the subliterary is, however, part of a larger enterprise of the book, which is to expand its borders to include what is outside of it." (178) Ironically, in doing so Joyce may have only extended the boundaries of the literary or, differently stated, constructed a way to include bad writing within the realm of the aesthetic, not unlike the way avant-garde sculptors produce compelling forms using unlikely materials, including manure. A number of postmodern authors renounce the artifice of stylistic polish and revel in subliterary discourse; that they can claim a Joycean pedigree testifies to the extent to which Joyce was able to cultivate an original yet suddenly classic style in the first half of Ulysses as well as the negation of this style, perfecting a modernist aesthetic even as he incorporates avant-gardist manoeuvres that prefigure postmodern forms.(6)
We may now begin to suggest some complementary answers to the question of why Joyce chose to write so badly throughout the final chapters. The more negative account might include a desire to deconstruct the aesthetic effects he had already achieved and the development of a new, non-modernist anti-style, as his book grows to incorporate radical avant-garde elements generally avoided by modernism proper. Other practices can be read as extreme instances of Joyce's protean creativity that extend aspects of his book's aesthetic into previously unimagined territories: the creation of radically new aesthetic effects within the most unlikely materials and the denigration of one aesthetic form the better to foreground the achievement of another, especially in the supplanting of recognizably beautiful language with meticulous structural ordering. Finally, we may find evidence of a temptation to force readers to give dubious or downright bad sentences the same scrutiny as great or opaque ones. Consider the sudden poetic description of the night sky in the middle of "Ithaca": "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" (17.1039)? This line seems to me to be of a rather different aesthetic order than earlier markedly poetical passages, such as the celebrated sentences in "Lestrygonians": "Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore" (8.638–39). This kind of passage calls for a particularly careful aesthetic scrutiny, contextualization, and assessment; as such, it is a good way to keep the professors (and other critics) busy.
Looking back over the trajectory of the novel, we find a gradual, intermittent, yet continuous growth and development of anti-aesthetic elements, until they overwhelm "Eumaeus" and continue, in somewhat altered form, into "Ithaca". This expansion of anti-aesthetic discourse, most obviously present in its evacuation of literary style, is finally framed by a return to the verbal felicities of "Penelope". This general pattern strikes me as analogous to the oscillation of order and chaos, sonority and triteness found in the mature prose of Samuel Beckett. It is certainly a serious and fascinating sequence that deserves to be given additional sustained analysis. I'll conclude by affirming that one of the text's most curious features may also be one of Joyce's most impressive achievements: to demonstrate how even the blunders of dreadful writing can be placed within an aestheticized context and thereby transformed, not unlike those unpleasant but eloquently phrased "globes of smoking turds" or even Duchamp's celebrated urinal, as ugliness, pedantry, cliche, repetition, and solecism, all, in short, that is normally opposed to verbal artistry, can nevertheless be comprehended within Joyce's book.
WORKS CITED
Bishop, John. "A Metaphysics of Coitus in 'Nausicaa,'" Ulysses: En-Gendered Perspectives. Eds Kimberly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum, Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 185–209.
Gibson, Andrew. Reading Narrative Discourse. New York: St. Martin's, 1990.
Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
Groden, Michael. Ulysses in Progress. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. The Corrected Text. New York: Random, 1986.
Kenner, Hugh. Ulysses. Revised Edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
Latham, Sean. "A Portrait of the Snob: James Joyce and the Anxieties of Cultural Capital", Modern Fiction Studies 47 (2001) 774–99.
Lawrence, Karen. The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.
McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1992.
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970.
Raleigh, John Henry. "On the Way Home to Ithaca: The Functions of the 'Eumaeus' Section in Ulysses", Irish Renaissance Annual, ed. Zack Bowen. Newark: U of Delaware P (1981) 2: 13–114.
Richardson, Brian. "The Genealogies of Ulysses, the Invention of Postmodernism, and the Narratives of Literary History", ELH 67 (2000) 1035–54.
——. "Ulysses and the Value of Literary Value: Verbal Art and Colonial Resistance", James Joyce Quarterly 41 (2006) forthcoming.
Smith, Craig. "Twilight in Dublin: A Look at Joyce's 'Nausicaa'", James Joyce Quarterly 28 (1991) 631–635
Woolf, Virginia. "Bad Writers", The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol 2: 1912–1918. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: HBJ, 1987, 326–29.
NOTE
A shorter version of this paper was read at the International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin, June 2004. I wish to thank Sean Latham, R. B. Kershner, and Robert Hurd for helpful discussions of these issues.
(c) Brian Richardson, 2006