Abstract

At some moment in his life, James Joyce stopped writing Ulysses. If there had been at least one more thing he meant to fuss with or to fix, one more thing he meant to do to the book, he never did it. Ulysses was at that moment complete.The book reads to me as if it’s “harking back in a retrospective sort of arrangement” from that very moment, as if Joyce anticipated coming to it all along.1 Because he knew it would be a moment in which the book he was writing would become the book he had written, that moment backed up into the writing itself, it dictated to him that the narrator’s sentences must be in the past tense. For Joyce, each phrase of Ulysses was over and done with as soon as he found that he could let it stand as it was. I think it’s for this reason that his characters’ actions and words are narrated as if they too were in the past. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned …” . The writing which empowers Buck Mulligan to speak and act had at some moment stopped being a present participle for Joyce and begun to be a noun, a piece of writing, that now-realized thing which had been written. It’s therefore in the past tense that the narrative proceeds.Not that along the way there isn’t interior monologue that offers what a given character thinks, each thought sounding very much as if it’s in the present. “Mr Bloom stood far back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads. Twelve. I’m thirteen” . The illusion is that right here, right now, autonomously, Bloom is thinking about how many mourners there are at Dignam’s funeral and is trying to establish their number for himself. And yet while the sentence fragments “Twelve” and “I’m thirteen” interrupt the already completed past-tense narrative, the past-tense sentence which introduces the fragments implies an intelligence that has managed to narrate Bloom’s thoughts before Bloom himself has thought them. To narrate that Bloom is “counting the bared heads” in advance of that counting is paradoxically to review what hasn’t yet happened. It implies a knowledge that looks back on each present moment from a point outside of time. And it’s from precisely this point that the narrating intelligence closes off Bloom’s present-tense thoughts with past-tense news: “The coffin dived out of sight, eased down by the men straddled on the gravetrestles” . James McMichael, professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, is completing a manuscript called Reading “Ulysses.” His most recent book of poems is Four Good Things