Subject: British modern writer James Joyce (1882-1941)
Objectives: help the student to understand the selected short story of James Joyce “Araby” and
and to learn something about James Joyce, the person, his points of views, the artistic features of
his works and his characteristics of the selected works.
Focus: 1) Epiphany .2) Selected reading “Araby”
What is an Epiphany?
In Joycean terms, an epiphany is a moment when the essence of a character is revealed ,
when all the forces that bear on his life converge, and we can, in that instant, understand him.
Araby: Summary of an Epiphany
Each of the fifteen stories in James Joyce's Dubliners presents a flat, rather spatial portrait.
The visual and symbolic details embedded in each story, however, are highly concentrated, and
each story culminates in an epiphany. In Joycean terms, an epiphany is a moment when the
essence of a character is revealed , when all the forces that bear on his life converge, and we can,
in that instant, understand him.
Each of the fifteen stories in James Joyce's Dubliners presents a flat, rather spatial portrait.
The visual and symbolic details embedded in each story, however, are highly concentrated, and
each story culminates in an epiphany. In Joycean terms, an epiphany is a moment when the
essence of a character is revealed , when all the forces that bear on his life converge, and we can,
in that instant, understand him.
I. A brief introduction
James Joyce (1882-1941) was born into a Catholic family in Dublin. When he was young, his
family was quite well-off; but gradually it became impoverished. Joyce got his education at
Catholic schools where he received very strict religious training. During his school days, Joyce
passed through a phase of religious enthusiasm; but he finally rejected the Catholic Church and
started a rebellion against the narrowness and bigotry of the bourgeois philistines in Dublin. When
he studied modern languages at Dublin's University College, he read a lot of books forbidden by
the Catholic Church. Influenced by Ibsen, Joyce finally decided to take the literary mission as his
career. He refused to take any part in the nationalist activities of his fellow students. After his
graduation, Joyce left Ireland for the continent. He lived and worked in France, Italy and
Switzerland for the rest of his life except a few brief trips back to Ireland; for Joyce regarded exile
as the only way to preserve his integrity and to enable him to recreate the life in Dublin truthfully,
completely and objectively in his writings.
Joyce is not a commercial writer. In his lifetime, he wrote altogether three novels, a collection
of short stories, two volumes of poetry, and one play. The novels and short stories are regarded as
his great works, all of which have the same setting: Ireland, especially Dublin, and the same
subject: the Irish people and their life.
Dubliners (1914), a collection of 15 short stories, is the first important work of Joyce's
lifelong preoccupation with Dublin life. The stories have an artistic unity given by Joyce who
intended "to write a chapter of the moral history of my country under four of its aspects: childhood,
adolescence, maturity and public life." The first three stories proceed roughly through childhood
and adolescence in a kind of autobiography; the next seven 'are about people in their maturity; and
the last four deal with public life. The stories progress from simple to complex. Each story
presents an aspect of "dear dirty Dublin," an aspect of the city's paralysis -- moral, political, or
spiritual. Each story is an action, defining a frustration or defeat of the soul. And the whole
sequence of the stories represents the entire course of moral deterioration in Dublin, ending in
the death of the soul. Dubliners begins by presenting death as an inscrutable fact in a small boy's
existence; it ends with a vision in which death is seen. To make the Irish see death and living dead
in their life is perhaps the first step, in Joyce's opinion, to evoke the national spirit of the Irish
people. The stories are also important as examples of Joyce's theory of epiphany in fiction; each is
concerned with a sudden revelation of truth about life inspired by a seemingly trivial incident.
In 1916, Joyce published his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The title of
the novel suggests a character study with strong autobiographical elements. The novel can be read
as a naturalistic account of the hero's bitter experiences and his final artistic and spiritual liberation.
The story develops around the life of a middle-class Irish boy, Stephen Dedalus, from his infancy
to his departure from Ireland some twenty years later. Stephen has an unhappy boyhood. At school,
he is .unfairly treated by his schoolmates and his masters. During his adolescence the sensitive
boy gradually becomes conscious of the oppressive pressures from the moral, political and
spiritual environment. He starts to rebel against the oppressive pressures. But rebellion would
only result in frustrations. Thus, he turns to seek sensual pleasure as an outlet. Consequently he is
tormented with his sense of moral sin and frightened by the terrors of the Last Judgment. To
remove the restless agony from his mind, he devotes himself to religion; but finally he is repelled
by the chilly church life and rejects the call to the priesthood. At a moment of revelation on the
seashore, Stephen suddenly realizes that the artistic vocation is his true mission. To fulfill this
mission, Stephen decides to leave Ireland, to cast off all those that try to tie him down -- "his
family, his religion, his country and his fleshly desire."
Ulysses (1922), Joyce's masterpiece, has become a prime example of modernism in
literature. It is such an uncommon novel that there arises the question whether it can be termed as
a "novel" at all; for it seems to lack almost all the essential qualities of the novel in a traditional
sense: there is virtually no story, no plot, almost no action, and little characterization in the usual
sense. Broadly speaking, Ulysses gives an account of man's life during one day (16 June, 1904) in
Dublin. The three major characters are: Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, his wife, Marion Tweedy
Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The
whole novel is divided into 18 episodes in correspondence with the 18 hours of the day. The first
three episodes are mainly concerned with Stephen Dedalus: he gets up at 8 o'clock on this specific
day; he teaches a history class at a boy's school; and then he walks along the strand to town with
random thoughts in mind. The next 14 episodes are largely about Leopold Bloom, who, after
breakfast, goes about Dublin on his day's routine activities. In the morning, Bloom takes a Turkish
bath, calls in at the National Library, attends the funeral of a friend, and shows up at the
newspaper office where he sells advertising. After lunch, Bloom wanders about in the city,
meeting people in streets, at pubs and in shops, worrying about his wife, his money, his daughter
and his digestion, pursuing persistently his own ruminations over his past, the death of his father
and his baby son, but at the same time cocking an alert ear for what is going on around him. Then
he roams along a beach at twilight, sitting at a place to watch an unknown girl and having a day
dream. In the evening he visits a maternity hospital to inquire about the birth of a friend's baby.
During the course of the day, Stephen also wanders aimlessly in the town, propounding his
theory on Shakespeare's Hamlet at the National Library, drinking at the students' common room
of the hospital, visiting a brothel in the "Nighttown" where he is rescued in a drunken affray by
Bloom. Subsequently Bloom invites Stephen back to his home for a late drink. Stephen leaves in
the early hours of the morning and Bloom goes to bed. The novel ends with the famous
monologue by Molly, who is musing in a half-awake state over her past experiences as a woman.
The events of the day seem to be trivial, insignificant, or even banal. But below the surface of the
events, the natural flow of mental reflections, the shifting moods and impulses in
the characters' inner world are richly presented in an unprecedentedly frank and penetrating way.
In Ulysses, Joyce intends to present a microcosm of the whole human life by providing an
instance of how a single event contains all the events of its kind, and how history is recapitulated
in the happenings of one day. With complete objectivity and minute details of man's everyday
routines and his psychic processes, Joyce illustrates a symbolic picture of all human history, which
is simultaneously tragic and comic, heroic and cowardly, magnificent and dreary. Like Eliot's
masterpiece, The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses presents a realistic picture of the modern
wasteland in which modern men are portrayed as vulgar and trivial creatures with splitting
personalities, disillusioned ideals, sordid minds and broken families, who are searching in vain
for harmonious human relationships and spiritual sustenance in a decaying world.
Joyce spent 17 years working on his last important book, Finnegans Wake (1939). In this
encyclopedic work, Joyce ambitiously attempted to pack the whole history of mankind into one
night's dream. In the dream experience, There is no self-conscious logic, no orderly associations,
no established values, no limits of time or space; all the past, present and future are mingled and
float freely in the mind. Thus, Finnegans Wake is regarded as the most original experiment ever
made in the novel form, and also the most difficult book to read.
James Joyce is one of the most prominent literary figures of the first half of the 20th
century. As a great artistic genius, Joyee has created a body of work worthy of comparison with
the other masterpieces of English literature. In Joyce's opinion, the artist, who wants to
reach the highest stage and to gain the insights necessary for the creation of dramatic art, should
rise to the position of a godlike objectivity; he should have the complete conscious control over
the creative process and depersonalize his own emotion in the artistic creation. He should appear
as an omniscient author and present unspoken materials directly from the psyche of the characters,
or make the characters tell their own inner thoughts in monologues. This literary approach to the
presentation of psychological aspects of characters is usually termed as "stream of consciousness."
And Joyce is regarded as the most prominent stream-of-consciousness novelist, concentrating on
revealing in his novels the psychic being of the characters. Another remarkable feature of Joyce's
writings is his style. His own style is a straightforward one, lucid, logical and leisurely; subtlety,
economy and exactness are his standards. But when he tries to render the so-called stream of
consciousness, the style changes: incomplete, rapid, broken wording and fragmentary sentences
are the typical features, which reflect the shifting, flirting, disorderly flow of thoughts in the major
characters' mind. To create his modern Odyssey -- Ulysses, Joyce adopts a kind of mock-heroic
style. The essence of the mock-heroic lies in the application of apparently inappropriate styles. He
achieves this mainly by elaborating his style into parody, pastiche, symbolic fantasy, and narration
by question and answer from an omniscient narrator. Many critics think that Joyce is a great
master of innovation. His radical experimentation ranges from "stream of consciousness" to his
fantastic engagements with rhetoric, sentimental romance, historical stylistics, counterpoint
and expressionist drama. His mastery of the English language and style is always highly praised.
Selected Reading: "Araby" from Dubliners
"Araby" is the third of the fifteen stories in Dubliners. This tale of the frustrated quest for
beauty in the midst of drabness is both meticulously realistic in its handling of details of Dublin
life and the Dublin scene and highly symbolic in that almost every image and incident suggests
some particular aspect of the theme. Joyce was drawing on his own childhood recollections, and
the uncle in the story is a reminiscence of Joyce's father. But in all the stories in Dubliners dealing
with childhood, the child lives not with his parents but with an uncle and aunt -- a symbol of that
isolation and lack of proper relation between "consubstantial" (" in the flesh ") parents and
children which is a major theme in Joyce's work.
"to write a chapter of the moral history of my country ... under four of its aspects: childhood,
adolescence, maturity and public life." (Dubliners (1914) ) Each story presents an aspect of "dear
dirty Dublin," an aspect of the city's paralysis -- moral, political, or spiritual. Each story in
Dubliner is centered in an epiphany, and each story is concerned with some failure or deception,
which results in realization and disillusionment. " Araby" follows this pattern. The meaning is
revealed in a young boy's psychic journey from first love to despair and disappointment, and the
theme is found in the boy's discovery of the discrepancy between the real and the ideal in life.
Achievement
One of the most prominent literary figures of the first half of the 20th century; a great
artistic genius;a great master of innovation; In Joyce's opinion, the artist, who wants to reach the
highest stage and to gain the insights necessary for the creation of dramatic art, should rise to the
position of a god-like objectivity; he should have the complete conscious control over the creative
process and depersonalize his own emotion in the artistic creation. He should appear as an
omniscient author and present unspoken materials directly from the psyche of the characters, or
make the characters tell their own inner thoughts in monologues. This literary approach to the
presentation of psychological aspects of characters is usually termed as "stream of consciousness."
And Joyce is regarded as the most prominent stream-of-consciousness novelist, concentrating on
revealing in his novels the psychic being of the characters. Another remarkable feature of Joyce's
writings is his style. His own style is a straightforward one, lucid, logical and leisurely; subtlety,
economy and exactness are his standards. But when he tries to render the so-called stream of
consciousness, the style changes: incomplete, rapid, broken wording and fragmentary sentences
are the typical features, which reflect the shifting, flirting, disorderly flow of thoughts in the major
characters' mind. To create his modern Odyssey -- Ulysses, Joyce adopts a kind of mock-heroic
style. His radical experimentation ranges from "stream of consciousness" to his fantastic
engagements with rhetoric, sentimental romance, historical stylistics, counterpoint and
expressionist drama. His mastery of the English language and style is always highly praised.
Major Works
Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man (1916), Ulysses (1922),
Finnegans Wakes (1938),
The artistic features of “Araby”
1. Two Epiphanies Gives the story its structure.
2.Setting is very important in the story.
3. The central symbol of the story is the Church.
4.The quest for beauty is lonely and of an archetype myth.
5. The narrator is ironic.
6. The character grows from innocence to knowledge.