Joyce, James - Works: Ulysses and Dubliners

James Joyce

He was born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest surviving child of ten children.
He was largely educated by the Jesuits, before finally enrolling at University College where he gained a Bachelor of Arts degree with a focus on Modern Languages (1902).
He grew up as a rebel among rebels.

Joyce didn’t share the same aim as other political and literary movements. If on the one hand they wanted to free Ireland from the British Empire, gaining independence and returning to Celtic culture, on the other Joyce begin to think of himself as a European rather than an Irishman.
He believed that the only way to increase Ireland’s awareness was by offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European, cosmopolitan viewpoint.

In 1903 he left Ireland to attend a medical school in PARIS. He intended to pursue a writing career.
His mother’s fatal illness brought him back to DUBLIN. The publication of his first short story “The Sisters” dates to this period.
In 1904 he met and fell in love with Nora Barnacle, a twenty-year-old girl who was working as a chambermaid in a hotel.

In 1905 he settled in Trieste, with Nora, whom he eventually married and had two children. In Trieste he made friends with Italo Svevo. The years in Trieste were difficult, filled with disappointment and financial problems. Joyce was in trouble with publishers and printers because of supposedly obscene elements in his prose. “Dubliners”, a collection of short stories all about Dublin and its life was published on the eve of the first World War, in 1914, although it was completed as early as 1905.

In 1915 Joyce moved to ZURICH since his position as a British national in Austrian-occupied Trieste left him no alternative. The following year “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (semi-autobiographical novel) was published, also thanks to the help of the American poet Ezra Pound who praised Joyce for his unconventional style and voice. In 1917 he received the first of several anonymous donations, which enabled him to continue writing the novel Ulysses, which began to appear in serial form in The Little Review in 1918 but was suspended in 1920 on charge of obscenity.

In 1920 he moved to PARIS, where the American-born bookseller Sylvia Beach agreed to publish Ulysses in 1922. This novel drew both praise and sharp criticism.
Although the final decade of Joyce’s life was darkened by his daughter’s illness, his increasing blindness and his father’s death, he continued to write and published “Finnegans Wake” in 1939.

In 1940 the Joyces returned to ZURICH, the city that had first given them refuge during World War I. Joyce never saw the conclusion of World War II. Following an intestinal operation, he died at the age of 59. He is buried in Zurich.

The most important features of Joyce's works

- He set all his works in Ireland and mostly in the city of Dublin.
He wanted to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things.
By portraying these ordinary Dubliners, he succeeded in representing the whole of man’s mental, emotional, and biological reality.
- He rebelled against the Catholic Church, which had taken possession of Irish minds.
- All the facts in his narratives are explored from different points of view simultaneously.
- The artist’s task was to render life objectively and to give importance to the inner world of the characters. These elements, combined with time perceived as subjective, led to the isolation and detachment of the artist from society.

The evolution of Joyce's style

- His style developed from the realism and the disciplined prose of Dubliners, which present different points of view and free-direct speech,
- to the interior monologue with two levels of narration and the extreme interior monologue of Ulysses.
- In “A portrait of the artist as a young man” Joyce used a third-person narrator, a minimal dialogue and free-direct speech.
Language broke down into a succession of words without punctuation or grammatical connections, into infinite puns and reality became the place of psychological projections.

Dubliners

Published in 1914 in the newspaper The Irish Homestead by Joyce with the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus, Dubliners consists of 15 short stories set in Dublin.
The opening stories deal with childhood and then move on to adolescence, maturity and public life of the characters, which are described as afflicted people.
Unlike many Victorian writers, Joyce was hostile to city life. In fact, his Dublin is a place where true feeling and compassion for others do not exist, indeed cruelty and selfishness are present.
DUBLIN is for Joyce the centre of paralysis. Everyone in Dublin seems to be caught up in an endless web of despair. Even when they want to escape, they are unable to because they are spiritually weak (the perfect example is Eveline). The characters are afflicted by the oppressive effects of religious, political, cultural and economic forces.

Narrative technique and themes

The description in each story is realistic, detailed and extremely concise.
The use of realism is mixed with symbolism since external details generally have a deeper meaning. The name of certain objects is carefully chosen and stands out from the naturalistic context in which they are placed.
Each story opens in medias-res and is mostly told from the perspective of a character.
- In the first three short stories Joyce employs a first-person narrator who remained nameless and not identified.
- For the other 12 stories a third-person narrator is employed; he often shares a particular character’s perspective.
- The narrator tends to disappear in the interior monologue, where the character’s thoughts are introduced without any reporting verbs through a free-direct speech.
Joyce used free-direct speech and free-direct thought in order to present directly the character’s thoughts.
The language appears simple, objective, neutral and it is always adapted to the characters according to their age, social class and role.
The style in Dubliners in characterized by two elements:
1) The interior monologue
2) Chiasmus = a patterned repetition of images that creates melodic effects

The epiphany (technique)

It is the special moment in which a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation or an episode lead the character to a sudden self-realisation about himself/herself or about the reality surrounding him/her.
With this peculiar technique, Joyce takes the reader beyond the usual aspects of life.
Understanding the epiphany in each story is the key to the story itself.

The paralisis (theme)

The main theme of Dubliners is paralysis, a static condition which can be physical but also moral.
The physical paralysis is caused by external forces while the moral paralysis is linked to religion, politics, and culture.
The alternative to paralysis is escape, although it always leads to failure.

Ulysses

It’s a novel written by Joyce in 1922.

The plot

The novel takes place on a single day, Thursday, June 16, 1904, when three main characters wake up, have various encounters in Dublin and go to sleep 18 hours later.
The central character Leopold Bloom is a middle-aged advertising canvasser that during his wanderings meets Stephen Dedalus (the protagonist of A portrait of the artist as a young man), who becomes momentarily his adopted son. Finally there is Bloom’s wife, Molly, a singer who is planning an afternoon of adultery with her music director.

Setting

The novel is set in an ordinary Dublin day and Joyce planned each movement of each character on each street. He placed them in real places that he frequented, such as houses, pubs and cobblestones.
He made the very air of Dublin, the atmosphere, the place, the feeling almost indistinguishable from his human characters. In fact, Dublin becomes itself a character in this novel.

The relation to the Odyssey

As the title suggests, Ulysses is related to Homer’s great epic the Odyssey.
Joyce used the Odyssey as a structural framework for his book, that is to give an ordered structure to his complex world. He arranged the characters and events around Homer’s heroic model, with Bloom as Ulysses (although he was not brave), Stephen as his son Telemachus and Molly as the faithful Penelope (strange correspondence because Molly was not faithful).
Each chapter is additionally organised around a different hour, a colour, a sense, a symbol…

Themes

The characters represent two aspects of human nature.
- Stephen is pure intellect and embodies every young man seeking maturity. In the stream of consciousness, he associates things by resemblance.
- Molly stands for flesh since she identifies herself totally with her sensual nature and fecundity. Her train of thoughts is carried by her own memories.
- Mr Bloom is everybody, the whole of mankind. In his stream of consciousness things are linked by cause and effect or by being near in space and time.
The theme of the novel is moral: human life means suffering, falling, and struggling to rise and seek the good.

Style

Ulysses is famous for its revolutionary prose, as Joyce combined several methods to present a variety of matters.
- The interior monologue – employing two levels of narration, one external and one internal.
- The cinematic technique – with the literary equivalents of close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots.
- Question and answer
- Dramatic dialogue
- The juxtaposition of events
Joyce used the “collage technique” to render his characters’ inner life and depict a scene from all perspectives.
The language is rich and complex, with foreign words, literary quotations, catchphrases. Joyce’s Ulysses is a new form of prose based on the ‘mythical method’ resulting from the progress made by psychology, ethnology, and anthropology. This allowed the author to make a parallel with the Odyssey in order to give the characters of a Dublin day another dimension, expressing the universal in the particular.
Joyce’s aim was to write a modern epic in prose.