ABSTRACT
James Joyce's long-sustained preoccupation with the task of giving new life to the old language finds a convenient focus in the fourteenth episode of Ulysses, The Oxen of the Sun, largely composed of parody, and urgently inviting reflections on the relationships that might be cultivated between living authors and dead ones. In the Odyssey the voyagers bring disaster on themselves by failing to heed a warning not to touch the sacred cattle of the sun-god Helios. Joyce introduces new chaos as well as new order into literary tradition, and because he was a highly self-conscious linguist and historian, he compels to undertake a retrospective inquisition into larger inheritances of language and civilisation. Joyce assimilated into the four-part structure of Finnegans Wake the theory of history which traced a cycle of theocratic, aristocratic and democratic stages to a ricorso returning the process to its beginning. Much of Finnegans Wake polarises between the phallic drives and the engulfing hospitalities of the womb.
