Ferrules of Engagement: The Speech of Unheard Things inUlysses

Abstract

Stephen Dedalus brings to Ulysses certain ideas associated with his early attempts to become a creator: his pledge to “go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (Portrait 275–76), for example, and his youthful definition of artistic epiphany, which Joyce renovates consid erably in Ulysses. Stephen’s attempts to “read the signatures of all things” in Ulysses begin in “Telemachus” and continue in the “Proteus” episode, showing some of the results of his efforts to progress as an artist: primarily, his tendency, when encountering material reality, to forge—create and simultaneously falsify—a text with which to encapsulate what he sees before him (37). He habitually cobbles together his own cursory observations and fragments of others’ words and ideologies. This proclivity, coupled with his view of objects as pretexts for creating epiphanies out of the mundane, demonstrates the solipsistic strain in Stephen that Joyce will counter in the novel by using the very materials with which his young protagonist imprisons his consciousness: objects and words. The underexamined story in Ulysses is that of the minutiae that sometimes seem beneath the notice even of those who set out to examine trivia. We might call this category of details the “throwaways,” to borrow Joyce’s name in Ulysses for an amalgamation of horse, paper scrap, and prophet, except that to do so suggests that they share the same prominent status as “Elijah Throwaway,” an entity who receives a fair amount of overt attention from both the narrative voices and Bloom. To find the deeper foundations of the phenomenal world in Joyce, it is necessary to move beyond examinations of items that Joyce presents as talismans, symbols, or objects that characters respond to with focused, conscious attention, such as the kind Stephen employs when he seeks out an epiphany. Presences so unobtrusive and incidental that they appear thoroughly dispensable at first glance provide the bedrock for Joyce’s creation, a crucial layer of linguistic and material reality in which a blade of grass occupies the same