Textual Topography

This chapter examines how the branching narrative framework of “Wandering Rocks” reflects the structure of the manneristic maze and emulates the nonlinear visual structures which are traced by the characters of Ulysses as they wander through Dublin’s streets. In light of Henri Poincaré’s definition of geometry as “the summary of the laws by which images succeed each other,” it explores how James Joyce presents time presented as the fourth dimension of space in his construction of a textual “picture of Dublin” which follows the movement of wandering bodies. This chapter provides a schema of the narrative network in “Wandering Rocks,” illustrating how Joyce’s textual remapping of Dublin involves the structural emulation of fundamental geometric constructs and related topographical concepts which involve the coincident meeting of lines (as in triangulation, parallax, and the Cartesian coordinate system). In light of the parallactic perspectives which are facilitated by the episode’s branching structure, this chapter demonstrates how the labyrinthine “Wandering Rocks” narrative epitomizes Joyce’s Brunonian perversion of unidirectional rectilinearity on a structural level, disrupting “wider manifestations […] of ‘conceptual and behavioral rectilinearity’” in its nonlinear form.