Text worlds and sub-worlds: stream of consciousness
writing
The second activity suggested in this unit is likely to prove the more difficult. Its
purpose is to try to balance the ideas about text worlds
and narrative comprehen-
sion that were outlined in B10 and to apply them to a short piece of ‘stream of
consciousness’ writing from Joyce’s
Ulysses
. Here first of all is the passage in question
which, when delivered ‘cold’ like this, is alarmingly dense:
(3)
You might pick up a young widow here. Men like that. Love among the
tombstones. Romeo. Spice of pleasure. In the midst of death we are in life.
Both ends meet. Tantalizing for the poor dead. Smell of frilled beefsteaks to
the starving gnawing their vitals. Desire to grig people. Molly wanted to do it
at the window. Eight children he has anyway.
(Joyce 1980 [1922]: 110)
Even though undoubtedly complex as a narrative style, it is still possible to unpack
this text stylistically and also to use cognitive models to explain how we might ‘make
sense’ of it. First of all, let me provide the context to (3). Taken from the ‘Hades’
chapter of the novel, this fragment details Leopold Bloom’s
visit to Glasnevin
Cemetery to attend a funeral. Just prior to this piece of text, Bloom has been in
conversation with the cemetery caretaker, John O’Connell.
From this verbal
encounter, Bloom begins to muse on the implications of O’Connell’s job and on
how, particularly, such employment might affect one’s chances of forming romantic
attachments. This is in effect the main
text world
which Joyce has established for
Bloom.
Bloom’s musings at the level of the text-world
translate into projections, which
as noted in B10, mark out different sub-worlds. Some of these projections are inter-
textual, which is to say that they evoke other texts and especially other literary works.
Others are more of the order of reactions to elements at the text world level, to
aspects of Bloom’s immediate environment. As a first stage in a cognitive unpacking
of the multiple sub-worlds of (3), here is the text again, now in a list format for
easier annotation:
(3
′
) (1)
You might pick up a young widow here.
(2)
Men like that.
(3)
Love among the tombstones.
(4)
Romeo.
(5)
Spice of pleasure.
(6)
In the midst of death we are in life.
(7)
Both ends meet.
(8)
Tantalizing for the poor dead.
(9)
Smell of frilled beefsteaks to the starving gnawing their vitals.
(10) Desire to grig people.
(11) Molly wanted to do it at the window.
(12) Eight children he has anyway.
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E X P L O R A T I O N
Now go through the text and try to identify the elements which mark out the different
sub-worlds which are projected through Bloom’s consciousness. Look out for what
Werth calls
deictic signatures
(1999: 186) because these alert the reader to the partic-
ular narrative world they are currently in. For example,
what sort of anchoring
function is achieved by the deictic marker ‘here’ in the first sentence? The next strand
to the analysis involves tracking the techniques of
binding
and
priming
as it applies
to various characters in the sub-worlds. For example,
to whom does the pronoun
‘he’ refer in the last sentence? Is it to Romeo? If not, what previously ‘bound in’ char-
acter needs to be (re)primed for this reference to make sense?
Bloom’s thoughts are not only fixed on ideas about romantic-sexual attachment.
He also reflects on death (unsurprisingly given his location) and food (it is after all
approaching lunch time – and see reading D4). These preoccupations are ever-present
in Bloom’s mind (as they are no doubt for many of us) but one of the subtleties of
Joyce’s narrative technique is that these three domains of experience are often carried
over in a kind of radial structure from one sub-world to another. You can check the
extent of this by going the down the text again and marking up any words that refer,
either implicitly or explicitly, to either sex, death or food. You may find that the same
word cross-refers to more than one experience. If so, to what extent does Joyce estab-
lish a
web
of connections in Bloom’s consciousness between the three experiential
domains on the one hand and the various sub-worlds on the other?
I do not propose to follow through in detail these guidelines for analysis, only to
offer some short comments by way of conclusion to this unit. One of the most striking
transitions in the passage, to my mind, occurs in the progression from 11 to 12,
where one sub-world shifts to another. Throughout the morning, Bloom’s thoughts
have constantly
returned to his wife, Molly, as the reflection on past experience in
sentence 11 shows. However, these thoughts are reined in rather abruptly when
sentence 12 jolts us into another sub-world space. As well as the change in tense, the
pronoun in this final sentence is a good indicator of how the minutiae of textual
detail can often have significant implications on the development of text worlds and
sub-worlds. The question asked above looked for a referent for the pronoun ‘he’.
Although the most ‘recent’ male subject in the text is ‘Romeo’, we need to look much
further back, and this is where the concepts of binding and priming come to the
fore. Remember, the concept of binding serves to establish a particular character in
a particular place until we receive a signal that that character is to be bound out.
Even though many lines of prose have passed since his last mention, we have so far
had no indication that John O’Connell is to be bound out of the location of Glasnevin
Cemetery. This type of stylistic technique is very much the essence of ‘stream of
consciousness’ as embodied by Joyce’s novel. The process
of binding involves locating
different characters in
different
sub-worlds, such that we need not only to retain and
juggle these various planes of textual representation but we need to be able to recall
each character’s location in each sub-world at a moment’s notice.
Finally, in his commentary on this very passage in Joyce’s novel, the literary critic
Harry Blamires remarks that after the conversation with O’Connell, Bloom’s thoughts
‘run out
centrifugally
from the figure of O’Connell’ (Blamires 1988 [1966]: 37; my
emphasis). This is an intriguing comment, but it is also the sort of critical intuition
11
111
11
111
C O G N I T I V E S T Y L I S T I C S A T W O R K
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