JAMES JOYCE
James Joyce was
born in Dublin,
on February 2, 1882, as the son of John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished
gentleman, who had failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of
professions, including politics and tax collecting. Joyce's mother, Mary Jane
Murray, was ten years younger than her husband. She was an accomplished
pianist, whose life was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. In spite of
their poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class facade.
From the age of six Joyce, was educated by Jesuits at Clongowes
Wood College,
at Clane, and then at Belvedere College in Dublin
(1893-97). In 1898 he entered the University
College, Dublin. Joyce's first publication was an
essay on Ibsen's play When We Dead Awaken. It appeared in the Fortnightly
Review in 1900. At this time he also began writing lyric poems.
After graduation in 1902 the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist,
teacher and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. He spent
a year in France,
returning when a telegram arrived saying his mother was dying. Not long after
her death, Joyce was traveling again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a
chambermaid who he married in 1931.
Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man in 1916, a play Exilesin 1918 and Ulysses in 1922.
In 1907 Joyce had published a collection of poems, Chamber Music.
At the outset of the First World War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich. In
Zürich Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, which was first
published in France because
of censorship troubles in the Great Britain
and the United States,
where the book became legally available only in 1933. In March 1923 Joyce
started in Paris
his second major work, Finnegans Wake, suffering at the same time
chronic eye troubles caused by glaucoma. The first segment of the novel
appeared in Ford Madox Ford's transatlantic review in April 1924, as part of
what Joyce called Work in Progress. The final version was published in
1939.
Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it
incomprehensible. After the fall of France in WWII, Joyce returned to
Zürich, where he died on January 13, 1941, still disappointed with the reception
of Finnegans Wake.
"Ulysses"
1922 was a key year
in the history of English-language literary modernism, with the appearance of
both Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land. In Ulysses,
Joyce employs the interior monologue and the free direct speech that are words
uttered by a speaker without quotation marks, parody, jokes, epiphany that is a
momet in which characters can understand the truth, interior monologue with two
levels of narration, a device used to give a realistic framework to the
characters' formless thoughts, up to extreme interior monologue.Thus language
breaks down into a succession of words without punctuation or grammar
connections, into infinite puns, and reality becomes the place of our
psychological projections, our symbolical archetypes and cultural knowledge.
Joyce breaks with the tradition and uses innovative tecniques: interior
monologue, mythic method, there isn't a plot, ma the attention is focused on
the point of view of the characters, so he doesn't show his opinion. These
techniques reproduce the situation of modern man. Infact this work was written
during the period of the experimentation.The action of the novel, which takes
place in a single day, June 16, 1904, sets the characters and incidents of the Odyssey
of Homer in modern Dublin and represents Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope and Telemachus
in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus,
parodically contrasted with their lofty models. Mr Bloom is a common man, he
represents the anti-hero, the inept, he is tragic and comic at the same time
(he brings a potato in the poket). He wonders through the streets (idea of the
labyrinth) of Dublin like Ulysses in the Mediterranean sea. Dublin is the setting in
place of his works. It is the second largest town after London
in the British Empire. He is a Jew and an
Irish person this means to be isolated, alienated, saparated. The author wants
to say that the condition of the modern man is very difficult. This man is
alone. The relationship are not based on love.
Everything is overturned to underline th situation of
the contemporary man. Leopold Bloom is like a crowd (The waste land). Mr Bloom
meets Dedalus that was looking for his father, and he adopts him. Dedalus
represents the pure intellect, he is a projectin of
the author in the young age. He was escaping from a difficult situation. The
complete name is Stephen Dedalus. Stephen is the first cristian martyr, he was
stoned to death because he wanted to introduce the new cult in the jew community so he represents the artist that try to introduce
a new way of life. Dedalus is a mytological character, he is a craftsman. In
the myth he was able to make a pair of wax wines (that represents arts) to
escape from the labyrinth. The labyrinth represents the imprisonment, the
impossibility to find a way to escape. Like Dedalus creates the wings, the
author is able to go away, inventing characters, stories, etc. Mrs Bloom is the
anti-Penelope , she cuckolds Mr. Bloom with another man. Molly seems to be
the most positive character in the story, because in the end she shows har
feelings.
The book explores various areas of Dublin life, dwelling on
its squalor and monotony. Joyce gives a portrait of ordinary life of ordinary
people. This idea of ordinariness is very important for the concept of
anti-hero. Nevertheless, the book is also an affectionately detailed study of
the city, and Joyce claimed that if Dublin
were to be destroyed in some catastrophe it could be rebuilt, brick by brick,
using his work as a model. The "story" takes place in a one day, the 16th
of June, in which (in his life) Joyce met the woman of his life nora barnacle;
this day is important, because represents a turning point from the life of
dissolution that he lead, following the example of his father, before this
important date.The book consists of 18 chapters, each covering roughly one hour
of the day, beginning around about 8 a.m. and ending sometime after 2 a.m. the
following morning. Each of the 18 chapters of the novel employs its own
literary style. Each chapter also refers to a specific episode in Homer's
Odyssey and has a specific colour, art or science and bodily organ associated
with it. This combination of kaleidoscopic writing with an extreme formal,
schematic structure represents one of the book's major contributions to the
development of 20th century modernist literature. This schematic structure
reflects his rigid education. Joyce refers to the myth to underline the
differences between the mythic past and the present time, in order to
understand better the reality of modern times. The situation is totally
different. The mythic past is something that is not in time. Ulysses is one of
the most important characters of the myth, he is sharp, intelligent and he is
able to be creative. He is totally different from Mr Bloom. The most important
themes of this work are two: the impossibility to escape and the contemporary
paralysis. People have the sensation to be oppressed (from the church) and they
need to escape away from
home. But the characters fail to find a way to go away from Ireland. There
is the impossibility to change the situation (exiles at home). The causes of
the paralysis in Ireland are
differents: the church, the politics that is not able to give a selfgovernment,
the culture that it isn't open to Europe
and the lack of courage to rebel. According to Joyce the church in Ireland had
taken tha place of aristocracy and it was against this form of oppression. But
tha conflict was also a conflict between old and young
generation, between a son and his parents, infact ha didn't want to follow the
way of life of his father. In the work we find a subjective perception of time,
it isn't chronological, and the novel opens in medias res with the analyses of
a particular moment. The reality is described from the point of view of the
mind that analys the situation. We can find the same themes also in "Dubliners"
and the same style in "The portrait of an artist as a young man" and "Finneganns
Wake" becouse both belong to the period of experimentation.
