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.