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Alexander, William Joseph

English

2006

MA

William Butler Yeats described early 20th century Ireland as a place where "the old world that sang and listened is, it may be for the last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and writes, and their antagonism is always present under some name or other in Irish imagination and intellect" (Samhain 6). My thesis examines the work of two authors who explore the tension between oral and literate narrative forms, and proves that both ultimately express this tension as an interfusional dialectic rather than the binary antagonism Yeats describes. My first chapter explores the interfusional qualities of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien deeply admired the Beowulf poet and the ancient historical moment in which that poem originates; a moment in which the singing and listening of traditional Anglo-Saxon scops came face to face with the reading and writing of Christian scribes. Tolkien created a similar fusion of traditional material and newer techniques, one that resonates simultaneously with the fusion of oral and literate modes evident in Beowulf and with the crisis of modernity in which 20th century nationalism and technological progress coalesce into two world wars. My second chapter deals primarily with James Joyce and his pseudo-autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as its abandoned first draft Stephen Hero; I also follow the implications of my analysis into select chapters of Ulysses. Assuming that Yeats is correct about the antagonism between orality and literacy in "Irish imagination and intellect" (in the early 20th century, at least), I set out to examine this conflict in Joyce's work. By focusing on phonocentrism (the assumption that speech is closer than writing to both interior consciousness and the reality language attempts to describe) in Joyce's stream-of consciousness technique and his treatment of the character Stephen Dedalus, I demonstrate how Joyce is attempting to break through hyper-literate, abstract and self-referential conventions and cognition into a more "natural" language, increasingly using mythic and folkloric material to do so (even as he mercilessly mocks the romantic idealization of such material). In both chapters I make use of Walter Ong's descriptions of the psychodynamics of orality and Jacques Derrida's deconstructive techniques. In closing I rely on Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutical theory of reading to prove that interfusional literature, by approximating the aura of the aural in written literature, creates a reality-check to our assumptions and master narratives. Oral texts foster crucial consciousness.