Chapter 6 The Oral and the Written in Ulysses
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Ulysses both opposes the oral and the visual and cojoins them, interlinking oral and written composition to the extent that they even turn into one another. Joyce also brings out the visual side of the novel by playing with the work’s typography and page layout, paradigmatically in “Scylla and Charybdis”, where Stephen and Mulligan appear to be competing for control over the look of the page. The theme appears again in the novel’s interest in writing, the visual form of speech, for Aristotle the sign of a sign, and for Plato the key to forgetting. In exploring, in addition, the physicality of the written word, Joyce links the oral and visual to the fluid and the fixed, the one as changing and alive, the other as stable and even permanent. As it turns out, the conjunction is also particularly appropriate to Ulysses itself, as both material object and continually changing text.