James Joyce's 'Ulysses' and Iconic Realism through Cognitive Dissonance

This is an excerpt from a paper presented at the American Conference for Irish Studies, 2022:

The semiotic theory of iconic realism is the placement of a realistic iconic element within a realistic setting in which that element is not usually associated, to bring about the recognition of change that needs to occur in society. 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. 

The spirit of Joyce must navigate between what is expected of Leopold Bloom as a Jew and what his Dublin neighbors expect of him as an Irishman. This spirit first reveals itself in the chapter, entitled, "Telémachus" through Stephen Daedalus, as he experiences an internal conflict of his mother’s death, with visions of her appearing to him as did the ghost in Hamlet. This type of cognitive dissonance continues through the Homeric episodes. 

Moreover, Leopold Bloom also experiences personal and religious revelations through each inhaling and expelling of air. One such vivid example is in the chapter, entitled, Aéolus. 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. Through Bloom’s cognitive experience, the reader understands the ‘cross’ that he must bear. 

Another example of this use of the inhaling and expelling of air exists in the Scylla and Charybdis  chapter with the obnoxious expelling of high verbiage between Stephen Daedalus and the other scholars. Here, once again, Joyce employs the use of linguistic empowerment of those who have against those who have not…or very little. Joyce, through Stephen, refers to those who do not understand the human spirit as the ‘vegetable world.’ He decides to stay firmly planted in the present, “through which all future plunges to the past” (Blamires 77). Here, Joyce unknowingly reveals an interesting foreshadowing of worldly events with which only the current reader can relate, for within 25 years of this writing, the world will revisit Joyce’s own recent past of WWI through the lens of WWII. 

Blamires, Harry, The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through Ulysses, Routledge, New York: 1997.