Joyce, James - techniques, Ulysses, Eveline and The Dead

-James Joyce -> Virginia Woolf

James Joyce's early life

He was born in Dublin in 1882. He graduated in modern languages and he was interested in European culture. In fact, he considered himself a European rather than an Irishman, the freeing of Ireland from English dominance didn’t attract him and he travelled a lot. He wrote two main books, but he had little success in life. He died in the neutral Switzerland in 1941.
For Joyce, the artist’s task was to render life objectively in order to give back to the reader a true image of it. There’s no didactic aim: even the main theme is the failure to find a solution out of ‘paralysis’, without hope.

- By Freud = continuous flow of thoughts that characterizes human mind

- Phenomenon of the flow of thoughts that our mind constantly produces

- In our mind there’s a continuous use of flashbacks and illogic links.

1) -1914

- Collection of short stories written in almost traditional way: psychological realism and disciplined prose.

- Every story reproduces Joyce’s love/hate for Dublin

- All of his stories are set in Dublin

- Ireland sleeps as a prison: mentally and physically

- Main theme: the impossibility to left Dublin

- Mental closure of Irish people: sort of paralysis that will be developed in “Ulysses”, “Finnegans Woke”

p. 465 one of the short stories - Protagonist: Eveline

Eveline's story

-She’s a girl who falls in love with a boy. Her fiancé wants to emigrate in South America, and at the beginning she wants to go with him, but then she’s not able to leave, because when her mother died she promised to her to not leave her father alone. It’s a symbol of paralysis, because she renounces to her happiness and freedom.

• The story can be divided into two sections.

1. Section 1: lines 1-113: Eveline's considerations of her life.

2. Section 2: lines 114-140: Her moral failure, her impossibility to go away.

• The world outside her window makes her think about her childhood, but now everything has changed so much: the mother was dead, she had to take care of her little brothers and of the father, often drunk. She fears her father, because he is a violent and uncontrolled man and she resents his parsimony. However, at the beginning, he was not so bad.

• Eveline's father quarrelled with her boyfriend Frank since he distrusted sailors. Because of that fight Eveline accepted to leave home and to go to Buenos Aires with Frank. Now they had to meet secretly.

• The sound of a street organ reminds her of the night that her mother died, and how her father had paid a street organ player to move off to not disturb =• She is caught between a future far from her family with Frank and the passivity of her home city. Frank is her rescue.

• When she is on the quayside, she is paralysed and is not able to get on board the ship. Her relationship with Frank turns out to be a superficial one since she dare not take risks

• The girl understands that her affections for her family and place are the most important ones even if that place is a home with dusty curtains and that family contains a frequently drunken and abusive father.

• The character of the girl is not introduced in a traditional way since we are not given information about her physical appearance, family and school. The reader is obliged to infer the pieces of information from the development of her thoughts.

• Eveline is a modernist short story since there is no introduction; the main character is presented through her thoughts, which provide information about her past and future life. The technique of free direct speech is also employed.

Epiphany in Joyce's work

Most important short story: - Revolution in the technique of writing

- Introduction of what Joyce defines epiphany: sudden revelation about the character or the reality surrounding him/her caused by a gesture, an external object or a sound. (Proust)

- Protagonists: Gabriel and Greta, married; they are at a party, when suddenly Greta starts crying hearing a song which reminds her of a young man who died for her love when she was seventeen = first epiphany. Then at home she falls asleep, while he watches her realizing that he is deader than that boy in Gretta’s mind = second epiphany.

2) - Most famous book written by Joyce

- Built on a comparison: the Greek Odyssey and his book ; the protagonist is the same, but it’s more modern

- Protagonist: Ulysses

- Setting: Mediterranean Sea, close sea from where you cannot escape. Nobody cannot pass the Hercules Colons, because it has been said that they are the extreme limit of the world, there’s nothing else beyond.

- Setting: Dublin, idea of close world from where nobody can escape

- Actions take place in 24 hours, walks in different places of Dublin, limits of classic theatre.

- 3 main characters: Leopolde Bloom (Ulysses), Molly Bloom (Penelope, Ulysses’ wife)

Ulysse’ son, Telemaco, they didn’t have any children but Leopolde meets Stephan Dedalus. Stephan is a young men homeless that Leopolde takes home as an adoption. Dedalus was Icarus son (sfidare gli dei), it refers to the fact that Dublin is similar to a Dedalus (intrico di strade che percorrono). Stephan comes from the Christian time,he’s the protomartyr, first of the Christian martyrs. Ireland was Christian.

- Techniques:

Direct interior monologue, thoughts with no logic: stream of consciousness, thoughts are mixed to reproduce it; it’s used interior monologue. No interlocutor. Written in first person. No points of conclusion/ punctuation because our flow of thoughts hasn’t any punctuation.

The most important monologue: “Monologue of Molly”. At the end, she is in the middle between awake and asleep, she has a flow of thoughts which begins/finish with “yes” >> refers to the Greek’s concept of time: it’s circular, not linear, so beginning and end are the same

- Evolution of Ulysses, because the action takes place in a bar in Dublin and the actions only last a night.