Joyce’s vision of the dynamic tension between static and kinetic impulses that informs Ulysses is faithfully embodied in its aesthetic aspects. On the one hand, the novel, built upon structuring frames of varied levels and patterns, is polished to the utmost by the author’s supreme artistic sense. On the other hand, it is filled with formal excrescences and coarse materials. This conflicting, but interrelated, mode might be discussed in the antithetical terms of licence and control, focusing on two concepts of verbal play and sentimentality. Ulysses never loses control entirely even when indulging in transgressions of normal syntax. For one thing, the dislocation of words is carried out within the limit of the minimal syntactic order needed to convey the meaning of the sentences. That is, the licence of local disordering is under the control of the general order, which, though transgressed superficially or partially, remains intact on the fundamental and potential level. For another, basic sense is never lost in breaking normal linguistic patterns. The changing of ordinary word order, far from a gratuitous caprice, often contributes to effectively convey the relevant thematic meaning or the narrative context. In this way, the kinetic aspects on the formal level suit the main action and theme, which play the role of static factor in the complicated and digressive text. Ulysses contains a lot of sentimental subjects, but it presents them in an unsentimentalised manner. Joyce rarely gives a direct presentation of Bloom’s distracted and sentimental state of mind resulting from Molly’s presumed adultery. By making the scene of adultery take place utterly offstage and just suggesting the effect the adultery has on Bloom’s mind he avoids sentimentality. By the similar token, unlike Bloom who is immersed in the sentimental mood incurred by his dead son’s appearance at the end of Circe, the author distances himself from the scene and provides himself with a broader vision, thereby catching and embedding varied levels of significance. Furthermore, the presentation of the scene is complicated by inversions which imbue it with ironical overtones, a restraining counterpart to the released sentimentality in the situation.