Joyce's Vision of Time in Ulysses

Charito Pizarro shows that the Augustinian frame elucidated by Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative gives the rationale for the inexorability of the dialectical process in James Joyce's Ulysses. Because temporality is demonstrated in the narrative of Ulysses as the incessant dialectic of contraries, the labyrinth as emblem of dialectic becomes the symbol for temporality itself. Contrary to the view of Ezra Pound and others, who thought of the Homeric correspondences as 'mere mechanics', providing no 'major level of meaning in the completed work', Homer's Odyssey has been essential to the making of Joyce's Ulysses as an odyssey from temporality to eternity. Joyce demonstrates, in the interior monologues, St Augustine's discovery that the mind is constantly engaged in the dialectic of the threefold present. In this activity of 'present-making', the homecoming voyagers spin the mental filament constituting the Ariadne thread in the labyrinth. Joyce thereby suggests that 'the homecoming' requires the activity of the consciousness - called attentio by St Augustine - in the pursuit of the eternity of an 'eternally present'.