James Joyce, Summary PDF

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JAMES JOYCE Life: 1882: he was born in Dublin, he attended Jesuit schoolds before studying at Universit College, Dublin. 1902: after graduating he went to Paris to study medicine, but soon he dedicated himself to writing poems and proses + developing aesthetic theories. 1904: he met Nora Barnacle and persuaded her to leave Ireland and to go to Europe with him  1905: the couple moves do Trieste, where they lived for several years: Joyce worked as an English teacher and he met the italian novelist Italo Svevo. 1940: Joyce and his family went to Zurich to escape the Nazi invasion. 1941: Joyce dies.

Literary Production: 1907: he published a collection of poetry (Chamber Music), which was followed seven years later by a collection of short stories (Dubliners, 1914). A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), his semi-autobiographical first novel was published in 1916. 1922: his masterpieces, Ulysses, was published in Paris (after having been declared obscene and banned in Britain and America)  in the same year, Joyce began work on his huge experimental novel, Finnegans Wake (published in 1939).

Interior Monologue and Epiphany: Joyce’s works make frequent use of interior monologue (both direct and indirect), through which the writer disappears and the characters themselves reveal their thoughts to the reader  another characteristic of Joyce’s writings is the peak of intensity in the narration that he calls “the epiphany”: a sudden revelation in which “the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant” (= a moment in which a spiritual awakening is experienced and ordinary things/feelings produce a new awareness  Woolf’s idea of “vision”).

“DUBLINERS” (1914) : Joyce’s first short stories collection were published in a collection called Dubliners  they form a realistic and evocative portrait of the lives of ordinary people in Dublin (= protagonist of the novel as the “centre of paralysis”, people here are stucked in their lives by morality, religion and traditions)  4 groups of novel, once for every “phase” of life: “childhood”, “adolescence”, “maturity” and “public life”. Stories written is an apparently traditional way: the descriptive realism which permeates them already contains some of the elements of Joyce’s more experimental future works  absence of a moralising narrative voice, description of inner thoughts of characters (interior monologues) + symbolism: every story is told from the perspective of a particular character, rather than through and omniscient narrator.

“THE DEAD” – The Story: it begins with an after-Christmas dinner party (6th January) at the house of two unmarried sisters, Miss Kate and Miss Julia Morkan, who are the aunts of the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy. He goes to the party with his wife, Gretta, and all the guests are a sort of microcosm of contemporary Ireland and its traditions (different generations = different religious beliefs, Catholics and Protestants, and political tendencies)  Gabriel is not aware of his inadequacy in personal relations, but he feels confident after a speech, and on his way back to the hotel he remembers the best moment as his married life. However, when they reach their hotel room Gabriel realises that Gretta is crying (at the end of the party she had a sad epiphany, a revelation about the past related to her first and perhaps only true love, Michael Furey, and she realises he died for her  listening to and old Irish love-song)  Gabriel, hearing this desparate story, has his own epiphany and when Gretta falls asleep he looks outside the window, where the snow is falling. Gabriel realises the insignificance both of his own life and of those around him (they will die, fade and be forgotten  buried by the snow who’s falling).

Features and Themes: this is the last story in Dubliners and can be considered the “culmination of the feeling of stagnation” which characterises the spiritual life of the city and pervades the atmosphere of the stories  The Dead = realistic because of its detalied descriptions of people and setting, also highly symbolic.

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Gabriel (= the Archangel, who plays the trumpet at the Last Judgement). The party takes place aroung the 6th of January  “Epiphany Day”. Lily the Maid: the “lily” is a flower used as a decoration in the funerals. “The Dead”: characters who are phisically alive but spiritually dead.

Interior Monologues: the reader can notice Gabriel’s apartness from the other guests, considered intellectual and cultural inferior by him (their conversations embarass him)  central event = Gretta’s epiphany, which leads to Gabriel’s epiphany: Gretta, hearing the song, stops for a moment on the stairs (the time has stopped and she returned with his mind at the period of her youth  Gabriel sees her as a “painting”, a woman he never really new: Gretta’s “auditory” epiphany + Gabriel’s “visual” epiphany). Hearing the story of Michael Furey, Gabriel realises the ultimate insignificance of even the most intense moment of existencem, which fade like all the res tinto oblivion.

ULYSSES (1922): it’s considered Joyce’s masterpiece  it’s a novel of 18 “episodies”, all set in Dublin on June 16 th17th: the 3 main characters are Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus (an aspiring writer, the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). The novel tells the story of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom who gets up, walks around Dublin and meets various people in his “voyage”, meets Stephen Dedalus, visits a brothel and gets drunk before finally returning at home to bed with his wife Molly. The various “voyages” of Leopold, Molly and Stephen can be seen also as voyages through their own consciousness, which we are allowed to listen to (we actually are “wearing headphones plugged into someone’s brain”  we have access to their thoughts, their impressions, their questions, memories and fantasies).

Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyseey: Bloom’s wandering reproduces, imitate and parody the travels of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey  Joyce himself claimed that the modern traveller doesn’t need to start a physical voyage to discover new lands, but he must face a “psychological voyage”  Parallelisms: 1. Structure: the 18 episodes of this novel are modelled on the 18 episodes of the Odyssey, but here these are parodied or treated with comic consideration. 2. Heroes/Anti-Heroes: Joyce wants to show how the problems and conflicrs of the classical world can be faced at the same way by the modern man too  the difference is that the modern man is not “perfect”: he’s not an hero and he can’t rely on the kindness of gods to help him in his struggles. 3. Characters: parallelisms between Homer’s and Joyce’s characters. Odysseus is the Hero of the Odyssey, Leopold Bloom is the Anti-Hero of Ulysses: they both have to face a journey in which they meet various people. Telemachus and Stephen Dedalus: they both lack for a “paternal figure”  Telemachus lacks due to Odysseus’ absence, Stephen lacks because he’s very yound and he’s searching for a new house and a “new family” after arriving in Dublin. Penelope and Molly Bloom: they both, during the absence of their own husbands, have to face with the avances of someone who wants to take advantage of Odysseus and Leopold’s absences.

Stylistic Features: Ulysses is full of quotations and references to the history of Western literature (not only Homer, but also Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare)  critics considered this work an attempt to bridge the division between the modern and the classical works rather than a “modern epic novel”. Use of the Interior Monologue: Joyce allows the reader to know his characters and their thoughts through their own words but he also wants to represent the working of the consciousness  he uses the technique of the “stream of consciousness” in which the phrases are connected by free association . Joyce also decides to employ a lot of different styles (which all belong to the history of literature) in writing every single chapter of the novel  under this side it also appears as an encyclopedic novel. When this novel came out it was suddenly considered immoral, obscure and almost impossible to read....