James Joyce Quarterly

The significance of Joyce's language experiments and the influence that this experimentation has had on the meaning of his work is already widely recognized. In Nurit Levy's Textplicating Iconophones: Articulatory Iconic Action in "Ulysses," however, the author uses a new approach to reading Ulysses in an attempt to illustrate the ways that the semantic message is transmitted by articulatory and acoustic representations. Levy calls this process "articulatory iconic action" and [End Page 189] discusses the question raised in the text's opening sentence—"Is or is not language iconic acoustically?" (3)—while Ulysses is mainly used as a case study to demonstrate how the linguistic idea is applied (306). Therefore, the author's greatest concern is to show how "articulatory actions and their acoustic phenomena support messages without recourse to text-external information, that is, from the distribution of phonemes alone" (67). Levy studies the phonemes and phonotactics in Ulysses and attempts to define the relationship between the articulatory elements and the semantic aspects there. This intention is captured by the word "iconophones" used in the title of her book. She avoids using language that might show a direct relation between iconic meaning and articulated sounds, even though she does think that the acoustic effect of words can be decisive and can illuminate the semantic message held therein. Such precise language, specialist terminology, and the necessary care that Levy adopts can make her writing difficult for the reader.

The "meaning" Levy gives to the phonemes "ŋ," "d," "ts," and "s" depends mostly on their phonological distinctions, such as the aperture and continuity in their articulation. Therefore, she describes "meaning" as neither informational nor conceptual but instead as "a linguistic norm abstracted from linguistic practice" (xv). For example, meanings might include prolongation, alienability, distance, closeness, transition, delimitation, boundaries, continuity, integration, or control. This raises a question: if this kind of "universal" meaning is supposed to coincide with every phoneme, since the content is decided through articulatory characters rather than the context, would the semantic message that Levy finds in Ulysses by studying the arrangement of these phonemes be too limited and too farfetched for a special text such as Ulysses?

It is a question that has been raised often regarding the work of the Columbia School of Linguistics, which is the basis of Levy's linguistic perspective. The Columbia School is still considered, in the words of Alan Huffman, "the most radical on today's linguistic scene."¹ In its difference from the popular linguistics influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, the Columbia School finds that "both substance and structure have their place in linguistics, in both phonology and grammar."² Traditionally linguistic meaning is believed to be arbitrary, and grammar is considered to correspond to what Aristotelian scholars call logical and regular patterns of thought. Ulysses is especially comparable to the Columbia School of Linguistics methodology, as it exploits the linguistic capacity to express subtleties of sense and feeling. Joyce's writing contains many neologisms and illogical sentences that deviate from the traditional grammar in order to imitate the subtlety of senses and feelings. According to Levy, the best way to explore the articulatory iconic contribution to the semantic content occurs when the [End Page 190] author leaves the lexical and syntactic tradition to find new ways to imitate nonlinguistic sounds. The neologisms imitating the mewing of the cat in the third episode in Ulysses are one of her examples (69). Levy believes that Joyce is clearly aware of the articulatory iconicity he employs here and throughout Ulysses.

In other examples, the two Ulysses sentences Levy studies are taken from the third and thirteenth episodes respectively.³ Although the episodes are separated by some distance, Levy believes that the resemblance in the sounds and graphemes between the "ts" in "[t]hat is why mystic monks" and in "[t]hat's how that wise man what's his name with the burning glass" (U 3.38, 13.1138-39) is "perhaps not by chance...