Joyce, James - Life and Works (6)

James Joyce

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 into a typical, catholic, nationalistic family He contrasted his contemporaries, such as Yeats, who were leading the Irish Renaissance and were trying to rediscover the Irish Celtic identity referring back to the past in order to create a national conscience. Joyce, instead, believed that the only way to increase Ireland’s awareness was by offering a realistic portrait of its life from a cosmopolitan viewpoint. He couldn’t life in the paralysis that affected Ireland so since he was very young (in 1904) he left Dublin. He spent some time in Paris, then he moved to Italy in Trieste where he became Italo Svevo’s English teacher. He was defined an artist in movement because he wandered around Europe but also because he changed his view of the world, passing from a provincial viewpoint to a cosmopolitan one. His literary production can be divided into two periods:
• The first period was characterized by a conventional style and by the use of a common language Works like Dubliners (1914) and A portrait of the Artist as an Young man (1916) belong to the first period.
• The second period was characterized by a modernist style, he rejected logical sequences and conventional syntax. During this period he produced works like “Ulysess” (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939) and Stephen Hero (1944).
Joyce and Dublin
Although he went into voluntary exile at the age of twenty-two he loved his country, in fact he set all his works in Ireland. He wanted to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people in order to show the decay of his country that lived in a condition of stagnation and paralysis.
Dubliners
Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories that was published in 1914 in Italy. The stories are divided into 5 sections:
• Childhood
• Adolescence
• Maturity
• Public life
• Epilogue
The stories are not linked but they present same common elements like: Dublin, Dubliners, some recurrent symbols (snow, sea, chalice), paralysis, epiphany. The last story The Dead can be considered Joyce’s first masterpiece, it is the summary and climax of Dubliners.
The use of epiphany
The description in each story is very realistic, the use of realism is mixed with symbolism. Joyce used the “epiphany” that is “the sudden spiritual manifestation” caused by an external object or by a banal situation. This epiphany lead the character to a realization about himself or about the external reality.
Narrated monologue
In consist of the direct presentation of the protagonist’s thought in the form of free direct speech. The narrator assumes the identity of his characters allowing the reader to acquire direct knowledge of each character.
Ulysses
Ulysses is considered Joyce’s masterpiece, it was published in Paris in 1922. According to Eliot Ulysses was a revolutionary work in its use of the mythical method which had the importance of a scientific discovery. The novel takes place on a single day (June 16, 1904), in this novel is described the day of an ordinary man, Leopold Bloom. During his wanderings Leopold meets Stephen Dedalus (Joyce’s alter ego) who become his adopted son. Joyce’s Ulysses is based on the mythical method that allowed the author to make a parallel with Homer’s great epic poem Odyssey. Leopold’s wanderings around Dublin are compared to the wanderings of Ulysses around the Mediterranean sea, Stephen Dedalus represents Telemachus and Molly Bloom is described as an unfaithful Penelope. Thanks to use of the mythical method Joyce could mark the squalor of the present and the glory of the past, but although Ulysses and Leopold live in different times they are moved by the same spirit of knowledge. Joyce wanted to make a sense of an historical period (the age of anxiety) that seemed to be without any meaning.