James Joyce

‘My own James Joyce’

by V. Tenedini and the students

of Classe V A scientifico-tecnologico

Academic year 2011-2012


His fame has increased immeasurably since his death,

because of the increasing academic interest in his

work.

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

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.

(Adapted from “Literature in time” – Loescher ed.)

autobiographical dimension.


“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.


“He would be the poet of his race”

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 self-

awareness.

DUBLINERS

(1914)

[*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‟”.



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*.

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

(1916)

[*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].



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.

ULYSSES

(1922) first English edition in 1936

[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].



On the language of Ulysses

“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.”

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.

On symbolism in 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.”


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.

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.

THE MYTHICAL METHOD

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.

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.


(According to G. B. Shaw)

“ „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”.

ON THE STYLE THEME AND LANGUAGE OF ULYSSES

(According to Italo Svevo)

“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 tenth-

normal vision”.

“As a young beglamoured barbarian the book seemed to

[Sylvia Beach] to be art but was in fact a slice of Dublin life”.



• “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.”

PRAISE OR CRITICISM ON ULYSSES –

[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”

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.

FINNEGANS WAKE

(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.

“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”.

“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”.

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‟)

“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)

“[…] according to 'D.H. Lawrence Had Joyce

a future? The answer was no. As a poet

and novelist Joyce would always fail' ”.

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”.

Joyce future was assured. His shade haunts

every great write who has followed him.

“Ezra

pound

placed

him

above

all

living

writers”

“the uninterrupted unrolling of

thought […] the radical

innovativeness of Ulysses

[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‟‟

“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”

(All the quotes appear in :

O‟Brien E., James Joyce,

Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1999)



“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”

James Joyce

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