Is it mere contrarianism to read James Joyce's Ulysses as indebted to the Victorian novel, and, more specifically, to the novels of Charles Dickens? After all, Joyce's book has generally been considered to break decisively from the literature of the previous century. T. S. Eliot told Virginia Woolf that Ulysses "would be a landmark, because it destroyed the whole of the nineteenth century" (Woolf 57). Early reviews of Ulysses, favorable and not, likewise center on its newness. Evelyn Scott, who termed Joyce a "contemporary of the future," wrote in 1920 after reading the first few chapters of Ulysses in serial form, "Joyce, to my mind, expresses, more clearly than any other writer of English prose in this time, the conviction of modernity--a new and complex knowledge of self" (Deming 181). When contemporaries did speak of Joyce as writing within a literary tradition, it was generally not that of England or Ireland, but of the continent. Edmund Wilson, for example, asserts in his influential Axel's Castle (1931) that Joyce was "working in the tradition, not of English, but of French fiction" (191). Contemporary scholarship has tended to reinforce the notion that Joyce is rooted outside the tradition of the English novel by reading him in relation to a host of literary forebearers: Homer, Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, Rabelais, and the French Symbolists, to name a few. Yet by positioning Ulysses as the central text in the canon of Modernism, both Joyce's contemporaries and a later generation of scholars have obscured the novel's indebtedness to the Victorian novel--and particularly to the novels of Dickens. One can trace from Dickens to Joyce a line of development in the means by which a narrator represents a character's perceiving consciousness. Joyce in Ulysses transforms Dickensian narration and dialogue by effacing its omniscient narrator, and in the void created by the narrator's absence he turns Dickensian techniques to different effects. The great volubility of some of Dickens's dialogue, for example, seems to provide Joyce with a model on which to construct his interior monologues. Throughout his career, Dickens experiments with characters whose comic loquacity suggests the mind at work. Similarly, the readiness of the Dickensian narrator to include non-naturalistic elements in his narrative or to be temporarily subsumed by the voice or viewpoint of one of his characters points to the mutability of form which is often considered a hallmark of Modernism.
