Joyce, James - Life, themes, technique, Dubliners

Infanzia e istruzione

- 1882, large family, Dublin.

- Jesuit schools, then University College in Dublin where he studied French, Italian and German languages and literatures (and English literature).

- 1902: graduated in modern languages.
- He didn’t want Ireland to be free from English dominance; he wanted a broader European culture; he thought himself as a European rather than an Irishman.

- He wanted to give a realistic portrait (from a European, cosmopolitan viewpoint) of Ireland to increase Europe’s awareness about it.

- Travelled through Europe; spent time in Paris.

- 1903: back to Dublin because of his mother illness.

Incontri e vita familiare

- 1904: met and fell in love with Nora Barnacle.

- October 1904: they moved to Italy; he started teaching English, became friends with Italo Svevo.

- Two kids with Nora, 1931 they got married.
- Financial problems, his books were not successful.

- 1914, Dubliners: a collection of short stories all about Dublin and life in Dublin.

- 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: semi-autobiographical novel.

- 1914, Exiles: drama, naturalistic.

He moved to Zurich.

- 1917: he started receiving anonymous donations; he was able to start writing Ulysses (Paris, 1922).

- He had to flee from Paris to neutral Switzerland, where he died in 1941.

Dublin

Esilio volontario e ambientazione delle opere

- Joyce went into voluntary exile, but still set all his works in Ireland and mostly Dublin.

- He wanted to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people.

- Represented man’s mental, emotional and biological reality.

Style and technique
- He wanted to render life objectively.

- He used different points of view and narrative techniques appropriate to the several characters portrayed.

- Language broke down into a succession of words without punctuation or grammatical connections.

It was the oppressive effects of religious, political, cultural and economic forces on the lives of lower-middle-class Dubliners that led Joyce to write “Dubliners” and portray the characters as psychologically afflicted people.

Dubliners: struttura e temi

This collection consists of fifteen short stories, arranged into four groups, that represent four aspects of people’s lives: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. What holds all these stories together is a particular structure and the presence of the same themes, symbols and narrative techniques. The last story, “The Dead”, can be considered Joyce’s first masterpiece. It stands out from the other fourteen stories because, however similar in theme, it is denser, more elaborate and more remarkable; it is at once the summary and climax of Dubliners.

The description in each story is realistic and extremely concise, with an abundance of external details, even the most unpleasant and depressing ones. In fact, Joyce thought his function was to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life and he employed a peculiar technique to reach his purpose, the epiphany, that is the sudden spiritual manifestation caused by a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation, which is used to lead the character to a sudden self-realization about himself/herself or about the reality surrounding him/her. Indeed, this motif is central to the collection, as it is the revelation, not the plot, that drives the stories. Dubliners can be seen as a sequence of multiple epiphanies that offer a revelation of the city in its intellectual, moral and spiritual paralysis.

Paralisi e rivelazione morale

The paralysis of Dublin which Joyce wanted to portray is both physical, resulting from external forces, and moral, linked to religion, politics and culture. Joyce’s Dubliners either accept their condition because they are not aware of it or because they lack the courage to break the chains that bind them. All of them are spiritually weak and scared people, they are slaves of their familiar, moral, cultural, religious and political lives. However, the moral centre of Dubliners is not paralysis alone but its revelation to its victims. Coming to awareness or self-realization marks the climax of these stories, since knowing oneself is the basis of morality. The main theme is also the failure to find a way out of paralysis. The opposite of paralysis is escape and its consequent failure. It originates from an impulsive caused by a sense of enclosure that many characters experience, but none of them succeeds in overcoming; they live as exiles at home, unable to cut the bonds that tie them to their own world.

Narratore e punto di vista

The omniscient narrator and the single point of view are rejected: each story is told from the perspective of a character. Joyce uses narrated monologue in the form of free direct speech and often of free direct thought; it consists of the direct presentation of the protagonist’s thoughts, through limited mediation on the part of the narrator, and allows the reader to acquire direct knowledge of the character. The linguistic register is varied, since the language used in all the stories suits the age, the social class and the role of the characters.