Point Virgule

Any great writer refines their use of punctuation as their technique matures. Early works may be covered with so many colons, parentheses, and hashes that it looks like a programmer wrote it in C++.

One very interesting example of this change in punctuation technique is apparent in the works of James Joyce.  His first major work, Dubliners, contains 163 semicolons.   A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also uses a good healthy number: 191.  His next work, Ulysses, is by far more word heavy than his first two works combined, so we would then expect the semicolon usage to follow its current upward trend.  But, Ulysses uses only 34 semicolons.  To show how striking this is, here is a rough word count for each book, followed by its number of semicolons:

Dubliners: 62,689 words, 163 semicolons
Portrait: 78,231 words, 191 semicolons
Ulysses: 244,687 words, 34 semicolons.
(Not even going to touch Finnegans Wake at this point: what constitutes a 'word'?)

Why such an change? Sure, a writer can change their punctuation preferences and may forgo using the semicolon in their later works.  But if you are going to let it go, why use it at all? For clarity, we should look at the breakdown of the usage by episode. Here is a list of the number of semicolons in each chapter of the 1923 edition of Ulysses:

Telemachus: 0 
Nestor: 0
Proteus: 7 (one is removed in 1984, error?)
Calypso: 0
Lotus Eaters: 0
Hades: 0
Aeolus: 0
Lestrygonians: 0
Scylla & Charybdis: 0
Wandering Rocks: 0
Sirens: 1 (error?)
Cyclops: 24 (of which 23 function as serial commas)
Nausicaa: 0
Oxen of the Sun: 0
Circe: 1 (error?)
Eumeus: 0
Ithaca: 1 (error?)
Penelope: 0

And we begin to see that even within the work, semicolons are scant and carefully placed.  Could it be a mere coincidence that even in the longest and densest chapters of the book, there is never any more than one semicolon (if we ignore errors), and that the eleven page Proteus contains 20% of the semicolons of the 644 page book? 

As the breakdown shows, Cyclops is by far the most semicolon heavy chapter of the book.  But the semicolon usage in Cyclopes is not as heavy as it first appears.  Of the 24 semicolons that appear in the episode, 23 of them are used to separate persons in a list.  Each person listed is given their abbreviated formal title--like "the rev. P. J. Kavanagh, C. S. Sp.;" (U12.928-29) A semicolon must be used to clarify the punctuation in each of these items. When we discard these , we are left with only one for the episode.  

We must also count the corrections made for the 1984 edition, which removes the semicolons used in Sirens, Ithaca, and Circe: all of them likely typist errors. This leaves us with Cyclops and Proteus. 

Proteus and Cyclops have few links between them. Not one character is seen in both, they are separated in space and time, and there are few leitmotivs from Proteus that are repeated in Cyclops. So what characteristics do they share that requires semicolons to convey the intended meaning?

One answer concerns metaphysics.  
Separation of different substances--be they ideal or material--is one of the symbols important for Proteus and Cyclops.  Proteus deals with the demarcation of the world around us and whether it is truly separated from our consciousness.  Semicolons are here to show separation of physical objects: "Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts." (U3.154-56)  All these objects are of different substance, but all are sufficiently net-like to be grouped with a semicolon.  This is not so unlike the dispute over the consubstantiality of J.C.: should he be separated from the Father by a period, or a comma? Or are they so similar that they require no punctuation at all?

Cyclops is concerned with the separation of people specifically. People are separated by nation, race, creed, disputes, physical space, etc. The semicolon expresses this explicitly when separating the list of clergy present for the parody of the Gaelic games. As for the one remaining semicolon in Cyclopes, it looks as if it was intended for clarity in a list of addresses.

The other (and more interesting) answer concerns eyes/vision.  
Joyce had a taste for using sigla to symbolize his characters and ideas, like the upside down 'T' representing Issy in Finnegans Wake. And as nearly everyone of the Internet age would know, the semicolon has a common usage in the winking emoticon, ;).  It is not reaching to think that Joyce may have been adding meaning to these episodes by using the actual appearance of the text, in this case a 'one eyed colon'. Similarly, John Gordon has written a great explanation as to why the Ithaca chapter has so many more "c's" than any other chapter (the 'c' represents 'curves', which is a symbol for Ithaca) , and my theory for the semicolon lies along the same lines.  It is used to visually convey one eye shut. 

In the very beginning of Proteus, Stephen closes his eyes to see if the world would then stop existing.  The world doesn't cease to exist, but the world of Proteus continues to be dominated by Stephens single minded (read 'one-eyed') consciousness. We only get an account of the world as Stephen sees it, and he can only see it very poorly.

The Cyclops episode uses this same principle: that of the single viewpoint. With one eye closed there is no parallax, no depth perception, and no ability to see from an opposing vantage. Both physically and symbolically, the citizen of Cyclops has only one eye open.

Finally, the French term for the semicolon is Point Virgule (French: 'point and small line'). Virgule is etymologically derived from the Latin, virga, and related to virgin.  Virga originally meant 'a young sprout', but was also related to an English term used for the male phallus.  Joyce would have been familiar with the word--he knew both French and Latin and had experience working with French publishers.  The semicolon fits the schemata of Cyclops: indeed, a punctuation mark (whose use is discriminating text) that consists of a single dot for an eye and a sprout-phallus makes sense for the episode.