City Circuits: “Aeolus” and “wandering rocks”

This chapter addresses the formal experimentation in Ulysses that picks up momentum, complexity, and difficulty – along with virtuosity and wonder – in the “Aeolus” and “Wandering Rocks” episodes. If previous episodes of the novel utilized first a fairly standard version of third-person omniscient narration, and then the intense subjectivity of the stream-of-consciousness technique, I will argue here that one of the new formal techniques introduced in “Aeolus” and “Wandering Rocks” models narrative voice on some of the modern technological structures that redefined everyday life both in turn-of-the-century Dublin and in the European metropolis generally. The two technologies central to Joyce’s formal experiments in these two episodes are the newspaper in “Aeolus” and Dublin’s sewer system in “Wandering Rocks.” The formal experiments of Ulysses attempt to give ontological and epistemological teeth to the idea that the city itself can be a character in fiction. Thus the city of Dublin becomes something much more than mere setting. In “Aeolus” and “Wandering Rocks” in particular, Ulysses ventriloquizes urban infrastructures for use as plausible points of view from which the action of each episode is perceived and, at a stretch, narrated to us as readers. With this argument, I intend at once to offer an interpretation of the episodes and also to demystify some of their stylistic challenges: to show, that is, that their difficulty is not in the service of a modernist difficulty-for-its-own-sake but rather in the service of an intensified mimeticism that seeks to outdo – not, crucially, undo – narrative realism. Ulysses might be an anti-realist novel, but that is true only insofar as it attempts to be more realistic than realism. Joyce’s modernism in Ulysses, however, is as distinct from nineteenth-century realist fiction as it is from other non- or anti-mimetic texts in the modernist canon. And the distinction from both traditions emerges out of the way that Ulysses imagines and then deploys a narrative point of view grounded in Dublin’s urban infrastructures.