Iconic Realism through Cognitive Dissonance in James Joyce's Ulysses

A view of Dublin from the top floor of the Guinness Factory

An excerpt from a paper I presented at an American Conference for Irish Studies:

Throughout his novel, Ulysses, James Joyce illustrates iconic realism through cognitive dissonance by means of language that contains semantic components directly correlating with his characters and their settings. In turn, the readers interpret those linguistic features according to knowledge of the language and manner in which the semantic elements align with their personal experience. 

As Joyce pens this novel, the world around him deals with the repercussions of World War I, and the general reaction is one of stalwart patriotism to culture. Joyce acknowledges this through his resonating dissonance between characters devoted to traditional elements within the Irish community and those attached to more dissonant coexistences, eventually leading to Bloom realizing the isolation in his own life. 

An example is through examination of linguistic and structural patterns employed by Joyce, through a distinctive, realistic element, the human act of breathing. Considering that Ulysses was once banned by libraries in the United States, and as recently as just a few years ago, clear breathing in public places has been banned due to mask mandates during the covid pandemic, a conscientious reader just might find release from the stifling, cognitive dissonance while reading through Joyce’s realistic representation of the aromatic Dublin travels of Leopold Bloom. One needs only to read the gaseous lines from this novel to imagine the dissonance of Joyce’s mind and Bloom’s physicality. 

However, Leopold Bloom also experiences personal and religious revelations through each inhaling and expelling of air. One such vivid example is in the chapter, entitled, Aeolus. Here, Joyce uses the heaving air of a pompous society’s fickle response to Bloom’s Jewish culture. In this chapter, we are introduced to various comparisons between Jesus Christ, Stephen Daedalus, and Bloom: their dissonant placements in their individual societies and how each has dealt with these discrepancies. Joyce describes the editor as having a ‘scarlet beaked face,’ a ‘comb of feathery hair’ and a harsh voice, similar to that of a cock crowing, once again referring to the Biblical reference of Peter rejecting Christ on the morning of his crucifixion (Blamires 49). Such reflections illustrate the iconic realism that Joyce incorporates in this novel, as he uses these iconic images within Bloom’s mind, occasionally audibly articulated by Bloom, but mostly present only in his mind, to bring the audience in alignment with the dissonance present in Bloom’s, and Joyce’s, Dublin. 

Iconic realism in Music

Click the image above to hear ambient music with nature sounds

From my book, p. 77: 

A community will associate specific meaning with a sound, connecting interpretation with cultural significance. Continued and consistent associations with sound sources create iconic structures within the musical compositions of the community. These structures originate from musical instruments including the human voice, sounds of the environment, or synthesized sound sources, each source signifying a specific aspect of a community’s culture. 

A composer incorporates the semiotic theory of iconic realism through placement of the established iconic structure in a new, realistic setting, not traditional for such an iconic structure. The created dissonance alerts the listening audience to a new association, bringing awareness to a cultural dilemma represented by this innovative musical construct.  

Since music is an aural art form, the structure which music contains depends on two parameters: time and space. Sound waves travel through space within a specific time frame. Musical composition consists of metrical patterns, rhythm, arrangement of pitch variations conveyed through instrumentation and notation of musical dynamics changing the speed and intensity of those pitches. A composer determines the amount of time and space needed to express her/his art within these parameters. The semiotic component of music is most present in the genre of opera, in which music aligns with narration aurally and kinesthetically. 

The listener is an active participant in the musical flow, assimilating the sensory stimuli received from the sound source with the tonal information of the musical composition as well as the visual stimulation of the stage presentation. In this sense, the composers, the musicians and the audience collaborate albeit in an autonomous manner, forming an interpretation. 

Iconic realism in music involves the sounds of nature, outer space or any object not associated with a musical instrument, that has been synthesized with traditional musical instruments of an orchestra, jazz group, or contemporary musical group. The juxtaposition of the natural or tech sounds with the orchestral music illustrates an aspect of cultural reform, as established by the composer of the musical piece. 

We hear this kind of musical juxtaposition in many of the spa-like pieces that incorporate the sounds of wolves, birds, frogs with ambient, meditation music. Click the image above to hear an example from YouTube. 

Robert Frost's "The Oven Bird" and Iconic Realism (Click onto this title to hear and see an ovenbird.)

(Oven Bird photo from Google Images)

The Ovenbird

by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,


Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,


Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.


He says that leaves are old and that for flowers


Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.


He says the early petal-fall is past


When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers


On sunny days a moment overcast;


And comes that other fall we name the fall.


He says the highway dust is over all.


The bird would cease and be as other birds


But that he knows in singing not to sing.


The question that he frames in all but words


Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Robert Frost's poetry portrays the enigma of humanity through his observations of nature. His poem, "The Ovenbird," is no exception. The high-pitched song of this bird reminds the busy human of the lessons learned through the simplicity of nature.

The iconic structure here is the oven bird, a woodland icon, representing the natural progression of life. In the tenth line, Frost points out, "He says the highway dust is over all." This line is unusual in that it follows vivid, natural imagery that awakens the reader to the conflict between humanity's impact versus the seemingly insignificant bird. A bird whose voice sounds like a song to us, but to the bird, it's simply communicating to other birds in a natural way, "not to sing.”

In this poem, Frost also illustrates through the passage, "Mid-summer is to Spring as one is to ten," the necessity of a natural sequence and the devastation that can exist when humanity interrupts or neglects this natural progression. 

This could also pertain to each of us. We must follow a natural sequence in our individual lives, for if we do not, we could take a path that causes pain and dissonance, which is why we must align our hearts with the One who guides us throughout our lives...in God's time. 

To hear me read this, please click HERE.

Brian Friel's "Molly Sweeney" and Iconic Realism

In his play, Molly Sweeney, Brian Friel utilizes theatrical dialogue between his three main characters, situated in connection with Molly’s blindness. Her blindness enables her to ‘see’ the world in a way that the sighted cannot. She transports the other characters and thus, the audience, from ignorance to awareness of cultural expectations. 

Friel’s Molly Sweeney is a literary representation of the iconic figure of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, and he creates the icon as a realistic woman with real perceptions in order to bring the audience to an awareness of the cultural dilemma of the dichotomy within the Irish historical perception of self. Friel connects Molly’s new sight with an overall feeling of anxiety that could be the personal reactions of one individual’s yearning for courage... or a nation’s.

Sydney Owenson's "The Missionary" and Iconic Realism

In her novel, The Missionary, Sydney Owenson presents two religious communities, the Hindu community of 17th century India and the European Roman Catholic community during the Spanish Inquisition. Set in the year, 1620, after the establishment of the British East India Company in the lush jungles and arid desert of Western and Northern India, this tale illustrates a political genesis of European imperialism represented by the two central characters, Hilarion, a 25-year-old Portuguese Franciscan Nuncio and Luxima, a young, widowed Brahmin priestess.  

To some readers of this narrative, Owenson may appear to be telling an adventurous romance in an exotic setting to entertain her aristocratic readers, and this may be partially true. However, her romantic novel illustrates much more, for iconic properties of parochial dynamism reside at the core of each character’s restrictive community. These properties include the intense need for the Missionary to convert non-Christians to Catholicism and the deep conviction of a Hindu’s integration of natural and spiritual beliefs. Furthermore, Owenson creates an unrestrictive, fertile setting, where the Catholic missionary represents dogmatic and imperious Britain and the Hindu priestess, faithful to her own belief and community, represents the fervent hope for freedom of faith found in Owenson’s Catholic Ireland. 

Therefore, in her novel, The Missionary, Sydney Owenson illustrates the semiotic theory of iconic realism by representing two disparate icons, each placed within a realistic community, only to reveal a cultural reality that, only through a truly spiritual connection, can one be led from cultural cynicism to Divine Truth.