JOYCE'S LINGUISTIC POETICS/POLITICS

Joyce's attempts to harness the effects of language and, increasingly with time, languages, may arguably be selected as the feature of his writing which mostly conditioned its technical transformations. Indeed, it is hard for a newcomer to the ever-expanding world of Joyce studies to miss the several time-worn pronouncements made by Joyce himself or, vicariously, by friends and fictional alter egos about his felt need to transcend the barriers of expressiveness set by the systems of existing languages. Though such neat polemical slogans have too often been taken as programmatic, to the detriment of the elements of chance and fluidity that Joyce was increasingly willing to admit into the mechanics of literary composition, there is no denying that Joyce's oeuvre is best seen as constantly trying to inform an evolutive linguistic poetics – one which, I wish to contend, conditions, and therefore should remain central to, whatever interpretive avenue we choose to explore.

(R)evolutions

Although Joyce seemed to embark with each new work on a radically different experiment in literary language, it is more helpful to see the whole Joycean output as a discrete continuum in which apparently new departures in fact redeployed earlier narrative-linguistic habits in a different guise.