by V. Tenedini and the students
of Classe V A scientifico-tecnologico
Academic year 2011-2012
‘My own James Joyce’
The central themes in Joyce’s works are:
youth, adolescence, adulthood and maturity,
and how identity is affected by these different stages of life.
All the boooks by Joyce have
an
autobiographical
dimension.
A major experimenter with fictional technique,
Joyce revolutionised the form and structure of the novel
and pushed linguistic experiment
to the extreme limits of communication.
His fame has increased immeasurably since his death,
because of the increasing academic interest in his
work.
(Adapted from “Literature in time” – Loescher ed.)
‘My own James Joyce’
“He would be the poet of his race”
(O’Brien E., James Joyce, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999)
JOYCE’S innovative literary techniques
make him
one of the most influential writers
of the twentieth century,
though its reputation is based
on four books only.
‘My own James Joyce’
DUBLINERS
“He would be the poet of his race”
(1914)
In a collection of short stories Joyce writes about a group of Dublin residents,
each of whom reflects the moral and political paralysis of the city. The story
are characterized by key symbolic moments, which Joyce termed epiphanies*,
which allow each of the protagonists to experience a deep level of selfawareness.
[*Remarkable moments of sudden insight, when a trivial gesture, external
object or banal situation leads a character to a better understanding of
himself and the reality surrounding him. Joyce believed that the writer’s
main task was to record these special moments.
‘Epiphany’ has become the standard literary term to refer to the sudden
revelation or self-realization which frequently occurs in modern poetry or
fiction]
On Dublin – “not merely a backdrop for their veniality but as rich a musical as themselves. No
other writer so effulgently and so ravenously recreated a city.”
“Dublin was his inner landscape”.
On the Irish and their language – “The Irish, doomed to express themselves in a language not
their own, had stamped it with their genius and competed for glory with other civilized countries.
It was called English literature. Samuel Beckett many years later improved on that claiming that
the Catholic church and English domination had buggered [Irish writers] into glory’”.
‘My own James Joyce’
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
“He would be the poet of his race”
(1916)
Established Joyce’s literary reputation.
It is a largely autobiographical work,
recounting the first twenty years of life
of a young artist, Stephen Dedalus
(notice the symbolism in both name
and surname). The novel describes his
intellectual development, his search for
an identity as a writer and his
realization that before he can be a
writer he must free himself from the
suffocating affects of Irish religion,
provincialism and narrow-mindedness.
In this work, Joyce uses a stream of
consciousness technique, a literary
device, called interior monologue*.
[*The interior monologue represents an attempt to transcribe a character’s
thoughts,emotions, sensations and reasoning. In order to represent the rhythm of the
flow of consciousness faithfully, the writer often disregards traditional syntax,
punctuation and logical connections. He does not intervene to guide the reader or to
impose narrative order on the often confused, and confusing, mental processes].
‘My own James Joyce’
ULYSSES
(1922)
“He would be the poet of his race”
first English edition in 1936
This book gave Joyce international fame. The time span of this long and complex novel is that of a
single day, 16th June 1904, the day Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who was to become his lifelong
companion.
It has no traditional plot. One key to its interpretation is given by its main structure: 18 chapters
whose titles are derived from the Odyssey by Homer, as Joyce based Leopold Bloom’s wanderings in
Dublin on the Wanderings of those of the mythical Odysseus.
Leopold is a modern Ulysses, a common Everyman living in Dublin, a city where cultural and artistic
life – in Joyce’s opinion – is paralysed.
His travelling is compressed into a single day in a modern town1. His adventures are the events of
everyday life.
His wife Molly represents Penelope while Stephen represents Telemachus.
[1Modernist literature focused heavily on
experience s of the city space, and the result on
conceptions of human life and communication
of living in urban centres. The implications of
modernist representation of the city is that city
life produces a heightened consciousness of the
relationships between individuals, and of the
diversity and multiplicity of social and cultural
experiences].
‘My own James Joyce’
Joyce represents both
the interior and
exterior worlds of his
characters. The realistic
descriptions
of the external events
are mixed with
historical, literary,
religious, and
geographical allusions,
while interior
monologue is used to
recreate the characters’
most intimate and
random thoughts.
Word, play, puns, and
gross jokes are mixed
with highly
intellectual verbal
exchanges. The
triviality of everyday
life is sometimes
described in minute
detail, while elsewhere
there are intensely
poetic passages and a
variety of styles that
range from the literary
to the journalistic.
“He would be the poet of his race”
On symbolism in Ulysses
On the language of Ulysses
“To each chapter he gave a title, a scene, an organ, an art, a colour,
a symbol and a technique; so that we are in a tower, school, strand,
house, bath, graveyard, newspaper, office, tavern, library, street,
concert room, second tavern, a lying-in hospital, a brothel, a house
and a big bed. The organs include kidneys, genitals, heart brain, ear,
eye, nose, womb, nerves, flesh, and skeleton. The symbols vary from
horse to tide, to nymph, to Eucharist, to siren, to Virgin, to Fenian, to
whore, to heart mother. The technique ranges from narcissistic to
gigantic, from tumescent to hallucinatory, and the styles so variable
that the 18 episodes could really be described as eighteen novels
between the one cover.”
“Language is the hero and
the heroine , language in
constant fusion with a
dazzling virtuosity. All the
given notion about story,
character, plot, and human
polarizings are capsized.”
‘My own James Joyce’
THE MYTHICAL METHOD
“He would be the poet of his race”
T. S. Eliot praised Joyce’s innovative device of using an
ancient myth to interpret contemporary experience;
instead of a narrative method - he said - he used a
mythical method which pointed out the loss of values in
the modern world as compared with antiquity.
Joyce believed in the impersonality of the author. The formal
aspect of fiction was very important for him, as well as the problem of
the point of view. In order to ensure that his works carried no
‘messages’ from himself, he adopted different points of view, different
narrative techniques, different linguistic styles, appropriate or
paradoxical to different characters or situations. In this way he hoped
to solve the problem of how to present the fragmented, multifaceted
nature of reality and how to convey the subjective dimension of
experience.
It was Joyce’s opinion that the artist’s task was neither to teach nor to
convince, but to make people aware of reality through their own
subjective perception. Therefore he sought a form which would make a
literary work as ‘impersonal’ as possible.
The modernist writer no longer pointed out and explained the meaning and
the values of the world he was depicting but he had to provide all the
separate elements of the picture which would enable to readers to reach their
own conclusions.
‘My own James Joyce’
ON THE STYLE THEME AND LANGUAGE OF ULYSSES
(According to Italo Svevo)
“ ‘written symbols of the languid light’
which had flashed across his soul. There
were less things easy for a public
stomach. His technical monstrosities,
his anti-humanist indifference, his
desecration of style and his obsession
with bodily functions which bordered on
the macabre. He would be accused of all
that and more and he countered by
saying that obscenity occurs in the pages
of life as well. More importantly he would
say that ‘the measure of a work of art is
from how deep a life does it spring’. His is
immeasurable”.
“He would be the poet of his race”
“Ulysses took seven years of unbroken labour, twenty
thousand hours of work, havoc to brain and body,
nerves, agitation, fainting fits, numerous eye
complaints – glaucoma, iritis, cataract, crystallized
cataract, nebula in the pupil, conjunctivitis, torn
retina, blood accumulation, abscesses and one tenthnormal vision”.
(According to G. B. Shaw)
“As a young beglamoured barbarian the book seemed to
[Sylvia Beach] to be art but was in fact a slice of Dublin life”.
‘My own James Joyce’
PRAISE OR CRITICISM ON ULYSSES –
“He would be the poet of his race”
[quoted in O’Brien E., James Joyce, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1999]
•
According to Stanislaus Joyce” the
book ‘lacked’ warmth and serenity’
•
According to Virginia Woolf “ underbred
- the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching
his pimples”
•
•
•
“T. S. Eliot while admiring it was also threatened
by its audacity and wished […] he had not read
it. How could anyone surpass that
achievement?[…] In private Eliot said that the
book gave no insight into human nature, was a
dazzlement of style and not a sea of
consciousness.”
“George Moore called it a work form the ‘Dublin
docks’;”
“Yeats recognised its genius and wrote to Joyce
to reassure him of his many admires in Dublin.”
‘My own James Joyce’
FINNEGANS WAKE
“He would be the poet of his race”
(1939)
In his last and most complex work Joyce carries
his linguistic experimentation to the limits of
comprehensibility. The novel recounts a single
night’s events in the life of a Chapelizod publican,
Humphrey Earwicker. The plot is apparently
simple: Humphrey goes to bed, falls asleep, has a
dream, is awakened by the cries of one of his
children and falls back asleep. The next day life
gores on a s usual. There are, however, no fixed
events, characters, times or places and everything
is described in highly manipulated language,
which includes idioms, curses, nursery rhymes,
literary quotations and new words made by
combining parts of words from various languages.
Despite the immense richness of the language,
the book’s complexity and impenetrability
intimidated both the critics and the reading
public.
Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake in a language that he had invented (capable of keeping linguists
busy for the next four hundred years – which was Joyce’s own intentions), a mixture of
linguistic fragments and borrowings from other languages.
“If Ulysses was a book about daytime Finnegans Wake was a book of the night. Dream and
riddle, myth-making, syllepses, syllogism, naturalism, supernaturalism, fabulism, kings and
giants along with Sir Tristam, violer d’amores […] Finnegans wake is a journey into the
unconscious attempting to be conscious”.
‘My own James Joyce’
A LINGUISTIC GENIUS
“He would be the poet of his race”
Perhaps Joyce’s most remarkable talent was his linguistic resourcefulness. He was able to
render in writing the rhythm, tone and pitch of a large variety of speaking voices, to imitate
musical form (which he knew – in words, and to recreated many different prose styles (see Ulysses'
chapter “the oxen of the Sun’)
“Fame, as Rilke has
said, is the quintessence
of all the mistakes which
gather around a name.
Legends begin to spring
up […] Fame had
changed him. What he
would say in his books
he would conceal in life.
[…] Joyce functioned
best in a noisy place. He
needed people around
him. […] He could not
have lived without
outings and
appreciation. Isolation
would have been
unbearable”.
‘My own James Joyce’
“Conflict was at the
root of Joyce’s thrust
and not obfuscation as
he was accused of. […]
Artistic truth was
sacred to him, that was
his religion – the
minutes perfection of
style, diverse metres,
musical notations and
a ravishing lyrical
myth”.
(O’Brien E. James Joyce, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1999)
PRAISE FOR JOYCE’S WORKS
“He would be the poet of his race”
“He was a tragic man with a staggering genius from whom humor was a weapon. Oliver Cogarty
writing about him in the Saturday Evening Post, said that Joyce was a Dante who had lost the key to
his own inferno. Joyce had lost none of the keys and none of the words; in truth he excavated
them”.
“[…] according to 'D.H. Lawrence Had Joyce
a future? The answer was no. As a poet
and novelist Joyce would always fail' ”.
“Ezra
pound
placed
him
above
all
living
writers”
[with his works] “He
compassed body and soul,
high and low, faithful to his
secret conviction that
‘violence and desire are the
breath of literature’’
‘My own James Joyce’
Joyce future was assured. His shade haunts
every great write who has followed him.
“the uninterrupted unrolling of
thought […] the radical
innovativeness of Ulysses
“What he wanted to do was
to wrest the secret form life
and that could only be
done through language
because, as he said, the
history of people is the
history of language”
“He would be the poet of his race”
“What he wanted to do
was to wrest the secret
from life and that could
only be done through
language because, as he
said, the history of people
is the history of language”
‘My own James Joyce’
(All the quotes appear in :
O’Brien E., James Joyce,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1999)