Language is the hero and heroine, language in constant fluxion and with a dazzling virtuosity. All the given notion about story, character, plot, and human polarizings are capsized. By comparison, most other works of fiction are pusillanimous. Faulkner thought himself Joyce’s spiritual heir and while the breathlessness of language in Faulkner is sometimes comparable, Joyce’s characters are more graspingly human and Dublin not merely backdrop for their veniality but as rich and musical as themselves. No other writer so effulgently and so ravenously recrated a city.
To each chapter he gave a title, a scene, an hour, an organ, an art, a color, a symbol and a technique; so that we are in tower, school, strand, house, bath, graveyard, newspaper office, tavern, library, street, concert room, second tavern, a strand again, a lying-in hospital, a brothel, a house and a big bed. The organs include kidney, genitals, heart, brain, ear, eye, nose, womb, nerves, flesh, and skeleton. The symbols vary from horse to tide, to nymph, to Eucharist, to virgin, to Fenian, to whore, to earth. The technic ranges from narcissism to gigantism, from tumescence to hallucination, and the styles so variable that the eighteen episodes could really be described as eighteen novels between one cover.
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