Exodus and Return: Joyce's Ulysses and the Fiction of the Actual

Abstract

Every first-time reader registers the quality which makes Ulysses different from earlier novels (except Portrait) in a way in which no earlier novel is different from another. The felt quality of difference arises from the fundamentally new formal principle upon which Ulysses and its sister novel are constructed. Earlier novels of plotted suspense develop, within an illusion of real life, a dynamic affective pattern which leads the reader out of his own world into another where, moving with an alter ego, he can find a purpose, meaning, and consummation which real life does not have. Joyce's novels, in contrast, seek, in the phrase of Stephen Dedalus, to 'recreate life out of life,' so as to show us this life 'purified in and reprojected from the [artist's] imagination' in a reconstruction which will at once image and transfigure the facts of our real existence.

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