James Joyce

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Categoria:	Letteratura Inglese
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Data:	05.06.2006
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James Joyce

The period starts before World War I is called Modernism, because of the great changes which affected Europe and America.
First of all, there was a radical brake with the literary tradition af the 19th century, in particular the form gor a foundamental importance, according so to the aesthetic movement.
The writers started representing the variety of the urban life,that was fragmentary and caotic, also recourring to the primitive mith,and some particular narrative devices, such as the epiphany and the stream of consciousness.
Their writing was mainlt influenced by the theories of the austrian doctor Sigmund Freud, who explained that the development of our personality was greatly affected by the unconscious, the hidden part of ourselves.
By studiing the human mind, Frued gave great importance to the interpretation of dremas and to the free associations of thoughts. According to this last theory, each individual associates his ideas freely, guided by the personal experiences. Many writers was fascinated by this and tried to apply it to the analysis of the mind of their character, like Virginia Woolf did.
Modern literature was also influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich mietzche, who showed his contempt for chistrianity and exalted the will to dominate, with the theory of the superman. This, superior to ordinary morality, would replace the christian idela. So according to him, religion lost its indisputable power and men felt deprived of all certainties they had always believed in, with a lack of any reference point. This situation generated a profound sense of anxiety, so that the age was called “the age of Anxiety”.

The Modernism was born abroad with Conrad and Henry James, who used the psychologichal analysis to show the complexity of human mind.Literary Modernism flourished with James Joyce, Thomas Eliot and Virginia Woolf, who deals with the unconsciuos in daily life, by using the “stream of consciuosness technique”.

James Joyce was born in 1882 in Dublin, into a Catholic family. Joice received his early eduacation at the hands of the Jesuits,and then he went to University College, Dublin, where he graduated and specialized in modern languages. He took no part in the Irish literary revival, which accompanied Irish political nationalism because, he felt the Irish patriotism as a provincial movement which paralysed the development of a free spirit in the country.

In 1902 he decided he had learned enough to reject his religion and all his obligations to the family and homeland. Literature became his vocation and his declared bid for the immortality.
He left Ireland into a self-imposed exile, in 1904, taking with him Nora Barnacle, a young chambermaid from Galway,who would become his lifelong loving companion and gave him a son and a daughter.
Joyce first lived in Trieste, where he taught English to support his family an where he met Italo Svevo, whose writing he encorauged. When World War I broke out, Joyce and hi family movd to Zurich, and found asylum again there at the autbreak of the World War II, after escaping from Paris.

His first fiction was “Dubliners”,a collection of fifteen stories, in which Joyce talk about stories of everyday life in Dublin.
The stories are arranged into four groups: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life.
The principal theme of the collection is the paralysis,both physical and moral of Dublin. The characters accept their condition because they aren’t aware of it. All Dubliners are spiritually weak people, they are slaves of their familiar, moral, cultural, religious and political life. The hearth of the whole collection is the revelation of the paralysis to its victims, and the failure to find a way out of it. Linked to the paralysis,there is the theme of the escape, originated by the sense of unclosure that many characters experience, but none of them is destined to succeeded.
The peculiar tecnhique used is the epiphany, that is, the sudden revelation of a strong reality,caused by a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation.According to his task of reproduce the deep and hidden meaning of the life, th epiphany represents the key of the story itself.
Moreover, each story is told from the prospective of a character. The narrated monologue is widely used: it is the presentation of the protagonist’s thoughts that allow to acquire direct knowledge of him. Finally, the linguistic register is varied: the language used suits the age, the social class and the role of the characters.

In 1916 Joyce published “The Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man”, a complex account about the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, in the search for his identity, who represents James Joyce himself, from his birth to his decision to leave Dublin. He took the name of the first Catholic martyr and of the legendary Greek artificer, Dedalus.

The most known Joyce’s work is “Ulysses”. Part of it in progress appears in some review both in England and America, but was banned for obscenity, because reproducing the trivial quotidianity of an ordinary man, and was first published in France.
As weel as all his novels, “Ulysses” is set in Dubli, on 16 June 190, the day in which Joyce and Nora first went out together, and is the account of that single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, an advertising agent.
The day is known as ‘Bloomsday’. Leopold’s wandering strts when he leaves home in the morning, brooding about his unfaithful wife, Molly, who has a lover since their son died, eleven years before. During his wandering, Leopold meets Stephen Dedalus, a young writer who works as a teacher He will represt the son Bloom wishes he had had. The two man spend some time together,and know several things about themselves. In the evening, after having rescueing the young man from a brawl, Leopold takes him home where his wife is already in bed. But stephen refuses Bloom’s invitation to stay and goes away to meet his uncertain future. So, Bloom goes up to bed and falls asleep, while Molly meditaates about her husband and her lover, and decides, in the most known monolouge of the novel, to give Bloom one more chance.

The parallel with Odyssey is developed in all the chapter (18) in which the book is divided.The chapters in fact correspond to each of the episodes of Odyssey.Moreover, the 24 hours covered by the novel represent th 24 chapters in which the Odyssey is structured. All the story have an allegorical sense and every character represent a Odyssey’s character: Leopold Bloom is a modern Ulysses,a common man living in Dublin. His travelling is compressed into a single day in a modern town and his adventures are the events of everyday life. Molly Bloom is Penelope,even if less faithful than the original and Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus, even though he isn’t in the search of a father, but is Leopold who sees in him the soon he had lost.

The poet T.S. Eliot recognized Joyce’s innovative device: instead of using an ancient myth to interpret contemporarry experience, he used an ancient myth, whic pointed out the loss of values in the modern world, as compared with antiquity. “Ulysses” is based on the trivial details of evryday life and the inner life of the characters, with the tecnique of the stream of consiuosness, that is a flux of thoughts, expressed as the come in th mind, without, a logical orde, or punctuation and grammatical rule.

The formal aspect of fiction was very imporatnt for Joyce. He used different narrative technique and different linguistic styles appropriate to different characters and situations. In this way he hoped to solve the problem of how to present the fragmented nature of relity . according to him, the artist’s task wan’t to teach or convince, but to mahe people aware of reality trough they own subjective perception. He hasn’t to point out the meaning and the values of the world he’s depicting, but he has to provide all the separate elements of the picture that allow the readres to reach thei own conclusion.

His last fiction was “Finnegans Wake” which was written in seventeen years.
It deals with a single night and is the story of a dream.In it Joyce introduced classical and foreign words, in ordr to give a unity to the apparent diversoity of the modern languages.It is a circular construction, so that the reader can start reading anywhere, according to Joyce idea that the end is the beginning.