James Joyce
Thanks to the literary experiences he had had with his friend Joyce the Italian writer Italo Svevo wrote in 1908 a
particular portrait about James Joyce entitled "Mr James Joyce described by his faithful pupil Ettore
Schmitz". This book is the best example which show
the personalities of both writers. In this way Svevo remembered him like that: "When I see him walking in the streets,
I always think that he is having a great pleasure. Nobody waits for him, and he
doesn't want to reach any place and meet anybody. His way of walking really belongs to him and it can't be quicker
or faster. When his body rests, it is that of a sportsman but if it moves it's
that of a baby weakened by his parents'
love. Life, has not been a real friend for him. But, it'd have been worse and
but in spite of it , James Joyce should have preserved, the appearance of a man
who considers things as points that interrupt light to enjoy it". Then, the
first written document about the relationship between Svevo and Joyce was only
a kind of portrait that the ripe and faithful pupil Ettore Schmitz showed his young English teacher. It's not a critic
picture, of course, but only a loving portrait. But many people have read in
these unconventional es something between admiration and a benevolent envy
for a man like Joyce who was able to cross lonely ways, and demonstrate a
paternal trepidation for the proud young man that maybe, hides under the
excesses of certainty a possible fragility of soul. Probably the same that
induced Joyce , incited by the cultural poverty of his city, the bad condition
of his family and by his mother's death to leave Dublin and to moving on
the continent,. Joyce wrote his friend Curras that with his stories he wanted
"to show that horrible place that many people consider a city". Dublin then
represents the spiritual paralysis present in the whole Ireland. On the isle
stagnates the particular smell of corruption. Reality and corruption in Dublin
are the same. In the tissues of "Dubliners" the characters are prisoners.
"Dubliners" is a collection of "epiphanies". This narrative technique is based
on the concept that life goes on with the same rhythm as the real one but the
psychological mechanism aren't forced by the desire to create a drama. The
writer is only interested in concentrating on some particulars, and to point
out the essence of things and the awakening of conscience. Many people say that this awareness, is present in all the
works written by Joyce, into the quenched lights of the "Portrait of the
Artist", in the alcoholic visions of "Ulysses" in the long nightmare of
"Finnegan's Wake". His portrait about Dublin wants to be only a great epiphany,
a kind of a religious "revelation". Its aim, was to show his inhabitants that
they were into a spiritual paralysis , corrupted, oppressed by useless and
cruel rules. He wrote the publisher Richards, who the enter Ireland had critiqued his works: "I think that you
decreases the process of civilisation in Ireland preventing people to examine
themselves
carefully in to "my well-polished mirror".
Like Svevo, also Joyce 's work, was autobiographical and when he tries to
re-recreate life artificially through
his words, which force his hand and lead him, from his solitude towards the
nucleus of his experience, using only the memories of his youthness
in Dublin. It is the proof that though explained in a symbolic-key, the work
derives completely from his autobiographical history. Also ambition tied him up
to Svevo, wishing that his art was considered European, and he dreamt to shape
it in the "Irish conscience". His
genius, was fully expressed in "Ulysses". The detailed analysis on Stephen in "Dedalus" better-known as "A
portrait of a young artist as a young man", it's the first anticipation of what
will be the turning point in Ulysses. In this novel, the Irish writer
makes a revolution in the narrative
description of reality represented only through the reproduction of the
interior process of the protagonists that crossed it. As it happened in Stephen
Dedalus ( in which whose are, symbolically remembered the first Christian
martyr, Stephen, and a hero of the an period, Dedalus); the narrator
suggests a careful psychological analysis of the young protagonist(in fact
after having had a strong religious passion he feels his sexual pulsation in
which he sees his freedom). In Ulysses, conceived as a modern-key
re-elaboration of the Odyssey, Joyce's narration has at the beginning, a
sublime style then it turns into a comic one, it has a modern language then finally he use an old
one breaking with tradition. To express this situation there is a wide use of
the "interior monologue technique", or "stream of consciousness" a phrase
coined by the psychologist and philosopher William James brother of the
novelist Henry James in order to describe the mind's flux of thoughts. This
innovation was influenced by Freud's work and the new psychological theory of
the concept of time which was no longer seen as a series of points in an
objective chronological sequence, but as a flux of subjective consciousness, in
which present, past and future co-exist. Ulysses is set in Dublin, on 16 June
1904 (the day of Joyce's first walk with his future wife, Nora Barnacle) and covers
only the events of that single day following the physical and mental wanderings
of three main characters: Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and the artist Stephen
Dedalus. The novel is based both on the trivial details of everyday life. His
eighteen chapters, in fact correspond to the episodes in the "Odyssey ".
Leopold Bloom is the modern "Ulysses" while the young Irish man, is Telemachus.
Every hour of the day, from dawn to night, has got its episodes and it
corresponds to a canto of Odyssey; every episode, has got its center of
sensation in a part of body , brain, ears, nose, stomach, intestine and so on
down it. There are two common men whose life is described in a particular day :
the novel, represents the modern man's Odyssey. For this reason, the narrator
can pause on the thoughts of the three protagonists. Very meaningful, is Mrs
Bloom 's long interior monologue. Joyce reproduces , the complex and dark
psychology of the woman where her ideas are tied all together with her emotions and instinct. Probably the novel had
a tremendous impact not only for of its alleged abscenity
but mostly because of its revolutionary form as we can see in the monologue .
The language becomes the instrument used by the narrator to describe the
quality of the woman's interior life. Molly Bloom, is a happy and restless
solitary woman and her little particulars realistically reflect some details
about her life such as her nostalgia and her regret or reproof. The main
quality that we attribute to Joyce is to analyse, to and describe the daily
world through his characters' eyes, giving the reader every aspects: from the
sublime to the sordid, spiritual and material one.
