James Joyce and the art of mediation

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In James Joyce and the Art of Mediation, David Weir uses the concept of mediation as a way of understanding both aesthetic theory and narrative practice: Joyce's ability to interweave contrary modes of thought and presentation makes the artist a mediator from the outset to the end of his long narrative career. Beginning with an examination of Joyce's early critical writings and aesthetic speculations, Weir shows that the principles of mediation provides a common base for several well-known Joycean devices. The epiphany, for example, makes ordinary experience the medium for feeling and meaning, providing Joyce with a method of making high drama from everyday life. This early form of mediation serves as the model for later narrative developments, as Joyce begins to experiment with a number of devices that allow him to integrate logical, objective structures with psychological, subjective structures effects. These narrative paradigms, or mediating structures, include the gnomon, a geometrical figure whose potential to mediate contrary elements is exploited in Dubliners; chiasmus, a rhetorical figure that allows for integration of character and narrative in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and various organic figurations based mainly on human sexuality that lead to a poetics of the body in Ulysses. These same geometric rhetorical, and organic structures are also used to illuminate the method and meaning of Finnegans Wake.