Valérie Bénéjam has been working at the Université de Nantes (France) as a Maître de Conférences in English Literature since 1997. A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she wrote her PhD under the supervision of Jean-Michel Rabaté at the University of BurgundyDijon. She has written many articles about Joyce and is currently writing a book about UlyssesAll About Molly) and co-editing with John Bishop a collection of articles on the issue of Joyce's representations, across his work, of spatiality and space (Spatial Joyce).
ABSTRACT
“Don’t be talking!”: Gravity, Eccentricity and the Expanding Margin of Discourse in “Sirens” and “Cyclops”
In Ulysses, next to his celebrated achievements with interior monologue, Joyce experimented with various narrative and stylistic techniques aiming at rendering the multi-vocal, polyphonic quality of what Hélène Cixous later identified as the “municipal character” in the novel. These experiments with group speech are probably most visible in “Sirens” and “Cyclops.” With different techniques and effects, these two episodes pivot upon similar polar oppositions between harmony and cacophony, consensus and dissent, centre and margin, centripetal gravity and centrifugal eccentricity. In this paper, I will examine the musical blending of speech in “Sirens” and the mock-epic linguistic battles in “Cyclops” to show how they constitute two different solutions to the same literary challenge, bringing different but complementary lights to the dialectical relation between centre and margin in Joyce’s work.
“Don’t be talking!”: Gravity, Eccentricity and the Expanding Margin of Discourse in “Sirens” and “Cyclops”
In Ulysses, next to his celebrated achievements with interior monologue, Joyce experimented with various narrative and stylistic techniques aiming at rendering the multi-vocal, polyphonic quality of what Hélène Cixous later identified as the “municipal character” in the novel. These experiments with group speech are probably most visible in “Sirens” and “Cyclops.” With different techniques and effects, these two episodes pivot upon similar polar oppositions between harmony and cacophony, consensus and dissent, centre and margin, centripetal gravity and centrifugal eccentricity. In this paper, I will examine the musical blending of speech in “Sirens” and the mock-epic linguistic battles in “Cyclops” to show how they constitute two different solutions to the same literary challenge, bringing different but complementary lights to the dialectical relation between centre and margin in Joyce’s work.
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