James Joyce, 1916. Nineteen movements, opened and closed in his own words — with a facing column naming whose idiom the narration is wearing. On the medieval tales of this site that column holds a translation. This book is already in English and still in somebody else's language, which is the harder problem and the more useful gloss.
Not a cast — a set of claims. Grouped by the nets Stephen names, linked to the movements where they appear and to one another.
The claimants as a graph, force-laid. Hover a node to light its ties; click to open its card.
Drag, scroll or pinch to explore. Colour marks which net a figure belongs to; size marks how much of the novel's prose they occupy, which is not the same as how often they appear.
Where the medieval tales get Propp's thirty-one functions, this one gets Gérard Genette's five categories of narrative discourse — the morphology built on a modernist novel, for a book with almost no plot to morphologise.
Drag, scroll or pinch to explore; click a node to jump to its detail below.
Greimas's actantial model, and the term it lacks. The diagram wants an Object that is a thing and an Opponent who is a person; this novel has neither, so René Girard's mediator is set beside it.
No call-numbers, because there is no index to call them from. Twelve lexicons, counted off the text and normalised per 10,000 words — with every word-list printed, so you can disagree with it.
Joyce's own structural unit, in place of the oral type-scene — and Kenner's observation that every chapter's exaltation is deflated by the opening of the next. Both sides of each join are verbatim.
The layer the medieval apparatus cannot have. In a folk tale the style is a constant; in this novel the style is the plot, and it can be measured.
One graph, all the layers. The nineteen movements run as a spine; claimants, leitmotifs, discourse categories, epiphanies, the Object of desire and the five chapter registers hang from the moments they touch — and whatever cross-cuts the novel is pulled toward the centre.
Movements I.1–V.4 run as the gold spine. Hover a node to light its threads; click any node for detail. Toggle the layers above to isolate one kind of connection.
What broke when the folklorists' apparatus met a modernist novel, what replaced it, and what the replacement is worth.