In my brief time on this rather blue, rather green, and rather monkey populated planet, there is perhaps no work of literature that has had a more profound impact on my life than Joyce's Ulysses. As I've often mentioned in our class before, it has opened my eyes to the possibilities of meaning-making that only literature can theoretically provide as a body of work. Considering that, my final essay for this class has been inspired by a lecture that Derrida gave on Joyce known as "Ulysses Gramophone" which has been paraphrased by Levina (2018) in an essay called "On the Corporeal Origins of Language: Derrida says Yes to Joyce." In this essay, Levina explains Derrida's thought process during the aforementioned symposium: highlighting how the theorist believes that Joyce used language as a form of meaning-making, but also as a living extension of the body. Thus imparting a lived experience to the arbitrary closed loop system of the sign and signifier. Once we introduce historical, lived context to foundational semiotics, it can start taking a new dimensionality inherently on its own that further frustrates the play of sign and signifier. While one could write a whole thesis on this topic proving Derrida entirely correct, I aim to write this essay with reference to the works of Levina, Derrida, and Cixous that we read in class. By exploring Joyce's language, we can understand how Derrida views it as performative, subjective, and entirely founded in destabilizing conventional aspects of writing.
Before analyzing Ulysses with Derrida as a framework, it would be a mistake for me not to mention the Uncle Charles Principle as a methodology for how Joyce wrote his work. To write characters how they would be written was definitely an avant-garde practice for the time period especially considering his complex technic that extends this to each chapter in the book. As Levina states, "..itself is not quite such a structure but a living embodied consciousness.." (59) in reference to Derrida's thesis statement about the novel. Thus, any analyses of the consciousness of characters in the book must also acknowledge how the book conveys a living, breathing, and almost alive sensibility with its language. As perspectives and hours change, a greater section of Joyce's humanity gets buried within the structure of the book.
Circling back to Derrida's thesis at the symposium, he introduces the idea that Joyce uses language to convey "gramophony" or the combination of body and meaning-making. In Differance, Derrida himself writes, "It is never offered to the present. Or to anyone. Reserving itself, not exposing itself… in the occult of a nonknowledge or in a hole with indeterminable borders (for example, in a topology of castration)." This means that language does not reserve a rigid meaning but rather defers meaning to the subjective state in relation to others. Even when words have a constant a priori and posteriori meaning, meaning can change in relation to itself. In the nexus of language, Derrida presents a theoretical discourse that is entirely dependent on context to give the work an inherent meaning. As the philosopher mentions in the symposium, Joyce's primary method for achieving this goal is iterability. Through repetition, Joyce is almost able to deconstruct the meaning of the word such that it takes repetition as its primary form instead of its own meaning. The most prominent example of this comes at the end of the novel in Molly Bloom's epic stream of consciousness monologue. Penelope famously ends with "I put my arms around him yes…yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." (644, 1610) Each time Molly utters "yes," it seems to take a different meaning. While some may see it as an extension of her own rhythmic flow through the chapter, any close reading could only bolster a myriad of theories. Yes can take a sexual connotation as she masturbates and fingers herself finally orgasming at the end of the book, mirroring Leopold's earlier scene is Nausicaa where he also masturbates using the word "Yes" while glaring at Gerty Mcdowell at the beach. Simultaneously, it could be argued that each use of yes is a different nostalgic reflection from her marriage with her husband. Every time she says the word, she feels that much closer to her partner again and comes back to the final capitalized "Yes" as an acknowledgement of their marriage and love. Even when reading these lines in reference to Cixous' "Laugh of the Medusa," it becomes obvious that Joyce's feminine stream of consciousness writing style has allowed him to break conventions of writing through a break in the conventions of patriarchy. Her "yes" is not just a lived bodily experience but one that reclaims her place in society through a desire that she is shamed for and celebrates her presence in the story of the Blooms in the novel. Levina's own essay also interprets the final lines of the book, viewing it through the combination of breath and sound. This argument toys with the idea that a reading of the book must not only be grasped intellectually but felt sensually. It is both a sound and a gesture that is bodied in her own intentionally lived reality. Lastly, I believe that the final "Yes." also functions as a gesture of deferral to the actual final words of Joyce: "Trieste-Zurich-Paris / 1914-1921." It reaffirms the author's own identity as an Irishman that has been living far away from home for a long time and behaves like a promise to depict his motherland faithfully.
Further considering how gramophony is utilized in Ulysses, Derrida mentions his theory of interplay of language and signs. He emphasizes that while we believe in language having an objective truth, it is actually the interplay of signs that gives it any real meaning since there is no real truth, just a deferred one. Much like how this aforementioned linguistic structure is constantly disrupted through external sources, Joyce also disrupts the narrative in Ulysses in a variety of ways, the most prominent being onomatopoeia. By introducing sounds that mimic the sensory world—such as "Thnthnthn", "Sllt", "Tap. Tap. Tap.", or "Pprrpf rrpf "—Joyce dismantles the conventional hierarchy of written language, forcing the reader to engage with the text through sound and sensation rather than logical meaning. These onomatopoeic expressions defer meaning by pointing to something outside the text that can never be fully "present" within language. For example, in Sirens, words like "thnthnthn" imitate musical vibration, capturing the auditory essence of music without reducing it to a fixed referent. Each recurrence of the sound alters its effect, embodying iterability: a repeated signifier that shifts meaning based on its context and rhythm. The farts and grotesque bodily sounds in Circe ("Pprrpf rrpf ") further extend this idea: language collapses into the materiality of the body and highlights the tension between the "high" literary form and its visceral roots. By blurring the boundaries between signifier and body, Joyce allows language to break free of traditional meaning, becoming performative and alive. One of the clearest examples of this appears in Aeolus (Episode 7), where Joyce mimics the mechanical rhythm of the printing press with the sharp, fragmented sound "Sllt." In an episode dedicated to the power of oratory and print media, this noise disrupts any sense of permanence that printed words attempt to establish. The sound of the press reminds us of the material process of meaning-making: language is not an abstract concept but a physical production, tied to machinery, labor, and repetition. Each "Sllt" echoes slightly differently, pulling readers into an awareness of language's iterability. Joyce takes what could be authoritative and mechanical and turns it into something unstable. As Levina notes, this makes language feel real and alive. By destabilizing narrative structure through a combination of onomatopoeia, conjoined words such as "moocow," and personifying elements such as breath and sound, Joyce makes us question the intention of convention in the first place.
In Circe, Joyce transforms the body into a site of linguistic and ritualistic performance, where identity is split, remade, and marked by language. Bloom's hallucinations are filled with exaggerated transformations, grotesque rituals, and theatrical violence that expose the ways in which language can inscribe itself on the body. Reflecting Derrida's differance, one of the most compelling moments of ritualistic bodily transformation in Circe occurs when Bloom hallucinates his feminization and transformation into a submissive woman. Bloom proclaims, "Not man… Woman." (436, 2960) This transformation is mediated by language, and the descriptions evoke a sense of the body being reconstituted, marked, and disrupted. For Derrida, this is an example of language as a trace as Bloom's body is no longer fixed as "male"; instead, it becomes plural, fragmentary, and deferred through language. This scene also reflects Cixous' écriture féminine through her assertion that writing should "return to the body." Both the aforementioned theorists would argue that Bloom's body exists as both subject and object of language—a space where words mark identity through ritual while also revealing its inherent instability. Joyce continues this theme of bodily transformation as ritual with Bloom's absurd hallucination of being crowned as the king and messiah figure. The grotesque spectacle of the ritual ending in the creation and then destruction of the proverbial "Bloomusalem" parodies the authority of language and ritualistic power through its ending where Bloom is termed as "bisexually abnormal" and "Lady Bloom." In this moment, Bloom's body is rewritten as a site of sacred ritual coronating this supposed power but the language Joyce uses mocks the seriousness of traditional religious ceremony. For Derrida, not only does this mock ritual expose how meaning is generated through external structures of power and language but also reveals the instability of those systems. Thus, his body becomes a trace of all possibilities and never settles into one fixed meaning.
In Ulysses, Joyce transforms language into a living, breathing force, rooted in the body and endlessly shifting in meaning. Derrida's theories of différance, iterability, and gramophony help illuminate how Joyce breaks free of language as a rigid system by turning them into a sensory and performative experience. Whether through Molly Bloom's rhythmic "yes" in Penelope, the grotesque bodily transformations in Circe, or the fractured onomatopoeic sounds like "Thnthnthn" and "Pprrpf rrpf ", Joyce refuses the closure of meaning. Levina's insight that Joyce's work conveys "a living embodied consciousness" captures its essence: words become traces of lived experience, demanding to be felt rather than just understood. Through a return to the body, Joyce aligns with Cixous' vision of écriture féminine, rejecting structure to celebrate rhythm, desire, and multiplicity. Ultimately, Ulysses is not a book to simply be read or re-read. It must be experienced. Joyce invites us into the infinite play of language through the arbitrariness of sign and signifier—a world where meaning is fluid, deferred, and as alive as the bodies that create it.