James Joyce - Life and Work

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James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882, in Dublin to a middle

class family, his father John Stanislaus Joyce, his mother Mary Jane Murray. He was the

oldest of his ten siblings, six sisters and three brothers. Around the time his father got a job

as rate collector and they all moved to a fashionable small town, James was attacked by a

dog, episode which gave him cynophobia and keraunophobia because of a very superstitiousaunt that described thunderstorms to him as a sign of Gods wrath. James begun his

education at Clongowes Wood College but got to study there only for four years due to his

fathers inability to pay the tuition any longer, after that he studied at home for a period and

for a short time at Christian Brothers O'Connell School because he was offered a place

Belvedere College. He continued his studies at the recently established University College

Dublin where he studied English, French and Italian, he began to be active in theatrical and

literary circles in Dublin, and he started writing, a review on Henrik Ibsens New Drama

published in Fortnightly Review was welcomed with notes of thanks from Ibsen himself, this

article was James first publication. After graduating he left for Paris to study medicine but

he quit for he found the lectures in French very difficult, he spent some more time there until

he got a telegram from his father to come home because his mother was dying, James and his

father were the only ones who refused to kneel down and pray at the mothers bedside along

with the other members of the family. In 1904 he tried to publish an essay story named A

Portrait of the Artist in the Dana magazine but it was rejected, afterwards he modified it and

named it Stephen Hero but he was never contempt with this result and he abandoned it, and

only after many years when he was in Trieste Joyce completely rewrote it under the name of

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In 1904 he also met Nora Barnacle, a maid at the

time and together moved around, first to Zurich where he was supposed to find a teacher

position but he did not, he acquired one in Pola, afterwards he moved to Trieste, teaching

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English, there Nora gave birth to their first child George, after that, he moved to Rome but

deeply disliked it and returned to Trieste in early 1907 and in that years summer his

daughter Lucia was born. In 1909 along with his son George, Joyce returned in Dublin to

visit his father, among other things he accomplished he opened the first cinema in Ireland,

Volta Cinematograph. He moved back to Zurich where he met one of his most important

friends Frank Budgen, whos opinion he cared for most during the process of writing of

Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, he finished those books in periods of time when he suffered

many eye surgeries and with the financial help of Harriet Shaw Weaver, help without he

couldnt have finished them, later on he and his daughter Lucia, where diagnosed with

schizophrenia by Carl Jung. He died on 11th January 1941 in Zurich after complications

from a surgery for perforated ulcer.

James Joyce wrote poems, published in volumes, Chamber Music (1907), Poems

Penyeach (1927), Collected Poems (1937), he had a short-story collection, Dubliners (1914),

novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake

(1939), a play, Exiles (1918) and a childrens book The Cat and the Devil (1936).

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is written in free indirect speech, a technique

characteristic to James Joyces style, present a young Stephen Dedalus from childhood to

adolescence accepting and then questioning and rebelling against his societys religious

conventions. The style that Joyce uses in this novel will be perfect later in Ulysses and

Finnegans Wake.

Finnegans Wake is a novel composed of four books all them composing seventeen

chapters and in it Joyce took techniques such as stream of consciousness, pastiche to the

extreme trying to recreate the natural flow of the mind in different states, its language is

strange, Joyce used a lot of words from different languages, he even created some of his own

by welding together two different words, classical plot and character constructing

conventions are put aside, this book was written during many years due to Joyces failing

eyesight and his daughters health problems, he had a lot of help from assistants who

searched for the foreign words and put them on cards so James could use them and later on

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when his sight was very bad, the author dictated the rest of the book to them. Among the

assistants was a young Samuel Beckett, a big admirer of Joyce.

Ulysses, the novel that continued the story of Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of an

Artist as a Young Man from a period after his mothers death, is the novel that James Joyce

is best known by. It is created on the structure of one of the most influential works in

universal literature, The Odyssey, by Homer with its plot and theme constructed in such a

way to describe life as a journey, just like Homers odyssey views life as a heroic journey.

There are differences in the two works, major differences for Ulysses is meant to be the

opposite of The Odyssey, if Homer wrote Ulysses journey full of dangerous encounters

tasks and tests to pass in order to get to the truth and salvation, the life journeys of Stephen

Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are full of trivial actions, humdrum and boring moments, the socalled adventure of mister Bloom consists of making breakfast, feeding the cat, attending a

funeral, doing some work for his job, visiting some pubs, and doing a lot of thinking about

Molly, his wife who happened to be unfaithful to him. The chapters from the original works

correspond to the chapters from Joyces book as follows:

First chapter from Joyces book starts with the presentation of the Stephen Dedalus

situation and his friends in a morning; it gives the reader an idea about the events he missed

from the last page from The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man till this books first page.

The action starts at around eight in the morning, with Stephen and his friends, Malachi

(Buck) Mulligan and Haines after the usual morning actions they have breakfast and then

Stephen goes to work, he is a teacher, and other two remain at the golf to have a swim. In

this first chapter, the correspondent of Telemachus chapter in The Odyssey, present Stephen

in opposition with the other two men present, Buck, is the devilish one, managing in time to

be some kind of shadow to Stephen, to tempt him, to minimize his interior reactions and

emotion eventually depressing him. Buck is the symbol of sterile irony and the mockery of

traditions, as a character he is constructed from the image of a friend from Joyces youth, in

time, his ironies towards Stephen evolve to being more and more overt and his role in the

novel grows to be as a factor of defining the isolation of Stephen among his compatriots.

Haines is an English student who temporary lives with Stephen and Buck and he too

represents a menace towards Stephen and his values be simply being an Englishman,

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physically an enemy of Ireland, and starting from the premise Dedalus considers his

independent art in jeopardy only because Haines manifest a superficial and kind of arrogant

interest in it. Stephen feels his dignity is once again undermined by this individual accepted

by Buck even though this acceptance was only for material gain. If considering a parallel

between the two chapters, Homers and Joyces, Stephen may be associated with

Telemachus, Ulysses son who carries the search for a father figure, Stephen also is in the

search of a father figure to replace his own alcohol abusing father. But taking in

consideration that Shakespeares name appears about fifteen times and even more references

to him are present and that Stephen has his own theory about the play Hamlet, one may be

tempted to assume that a parallel between Stephen and Hamlet can be accurate. Stephen has

Buck that accuses him of some kind of insanity, as Hamlet was pleading it too, Stephen feels

a silent and powerful resentment towards Buck as Hamlet felt for Claudius. This latter theory

may be dissolved by the fact that Buck thinks this theory of Stephens will connect the play

to him, Bucks assessment is made by mistake but not without importance and significance.

This first chapter from Joyces novel starts in medias res, in the middle of the action, as

techniques he uses dialogue, interior monologue, a third person narrator, stream of

consciousness and very often he includes in the narration lyrics from songs written in

different font, this pattern of narrative techniques is followed throughout the novel each one

of them being more or less dominant as quantity in each episode.

The second chapter is a pure irony to the chapter Nestor from Homers odyssey

presenting Stephen teaching a lesson of history to a class not so disciplined but proves

patience and calm, and explains the children the mistakes they made and even helps one boy

with his arithmetic, he empathies with him remembering his own clumsiness and the love his

mother carried for him. Then he goes to the headmaster, Garret Deasy as he is called to be

given his wages and he has to take in calmly the superficial pieces of advice of his superior

and his false and misinterpreted words of wisdom and he is even asked for help to mediate

the publishing of the headmasters letter about the foot-to-mouth disease. At the end of the

chapter when Stephen is about to leave the headmaster calls after him urging him to stop,

Stephen hopes it is not another letter but he is told yet another bad joke about an anti-Semite

Ireland. This chapter is ironic because of its exactly opposite sense of action from the

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original chapter where Telemachus goes to Nestor regarding information about his father,

Nestor was an important wise man that helped the Greeks during the Trojan War, but in our

story, Stephen is struck by all the false and ludicrous wisdom of Garret Deasy and the

situation is reversed as he is the one that gives help and proof of wisdom instead of

receiving. As a narrative technique appears Stephens stream of consciousness as he makes

responses voluntary or involuntary in his mind in class and also during the teachings of the

headmaster.

The third chapter, Proteus, refers to the mythical character Proteus that could change his

physical form at will and this concept is represented in Joyces book through the multiple

turns Stephens flow of thought takes. If in the first two chapters it was difficult to recognize

the passage from third person narrator to interior monologue, in this episode it hard to followall the ideas, images, concepts, associations, analogies and all the intelligent allusions made

by Stephen and the rapidity with which he goes through one thought and to another, there are

a lot of foreign words, from French, Latin and others, there a lot of symbols from various

cultures, times, politics, religions, literature. All this is a result of the thinking of a learned

man with a higher power of interpretation and association. The episode has little plot almost

none at all, it consists of Stephen talking a walk on the beach, observing people, considering

if he should visit his aunt, a lot of contemplating and thinking and finally starting his way

away from the beach. From his thoughts presented in this episode we can see that he is no

longer the enclosed in himself and proud Stephen Dedalus he was in A Portrait of the Artist

as a Young Man, refusing to communicate, the share his believes with anyone, he is now

conscious of his mistakes and chained by them, he realizes that he must open up he must

take in the world outside of him and starts to contemplate a lot on his actions and way of

thinking when he was younger, and he sees his mistakes he is more critical and ironic with

himself in a bitter way, showing a tone of deep pain and also the signs of growing up as an

artist and as a human being at the same time. Some may say that the dog that takes a walk on

the beach and that comes and sniffs the carcass of the another dog closer to Stephen and then

going away again is itself a process of change, the cycle of life, physical and psychological,

as Stephen starts to understand that the art is not composed of only the romantic and

beautiful part but art kneels down in front of reality, art must contain all aspects of life, the

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intoxication. In The Odyssey, Ulysses men eat the narcotic flower of the Lotus Eaters and

fell into a deep state of euphoria compelling them to forget the quest they were on, Leopold

leaves home in order to go to the funeral at eleven in the morning but on the way he finds

things to do that take over his mind, metaphorically intoxicating him, his imagining of the

Far East, the image of the tram pulled by horses, the pleasant effect of smoking, he thinks a

lot about the effect of religion on the human psyche and how close people must feel when

they take communion. His watch is constantly drawn by beautiful women and he is almost

completely absent from any other distraction than what his mind needs, he barely hears what

MCoy has to say, he needs to open the letter from his faux mistress and cant wait, he opens

it in his pocket, after reading and finding the flower inside held in place with a pin he makes

an interesting remark finding resemblance between the roses with their thorns and the

women with pins all over their clothes. All this intoxicating escapes from the real situations

he is in is a kind of motif and tactic to draw his attention away from the fact that Molly

might be having an affair with her manager.

The sixth chapter, Hades, Leopold Bloom gets in carriage with Martin Cunningham,

Jack Power and Simon Dedalus in order to attend the funeral of Paddy Dignam, on the way

they talk and share opinions on different aspects of life and events, they even see Stephen

along the way and from the way Simon Dedalus asks Bloom if his son was with Mulligan we

can understand that he doesnt approve of his sons friend, they arrive at the church and

listen to the service, they go to the cemetery, and assist the burial and they leave. In all this

time Leopold thinks a lot about death and hell and especially about the human body and how

it transform after death and how it could be used to a more practical purpose and how the

money from the fancy burials and tombstones could be used in charity work, he thinks it

would so much better that the tombstone could say just how the man buried there was, to

hold words about his life, his personality. This is the episode that coincides with Ulysses

trip to the land of Hades, the land of the dead from Homers book, but it could parallel in a

way episode three for having the focus on fathers, if in that episode we see Stephen think a

lot about his mother and father, now the image is reversed, we learn the not so good

impression Simon has about his son, we see Leopold think a lot about his own father of who

we learn that he committed suicide by poisoning himself. This episode also show the

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exclusion of Leopold from the social group, he is invited last in carriage, he is interrupted

when he tries to tell something and his wife is disrespected, this exclusion of his is not

completely observed by Bloom, he feel compassionate about them, watches the men with

sympathy when thinking of the father and son relations. In this episode we see Bloom rather

vulnerable because he sees his own father and son isolation regarding his father and because

he is not able to take the family name further as his son Rudy died after a short time of his

birth.

The seventh chapter, Aeolus, presents Bloom in his work field, the advertising industry,

and how he tries to secure a new design for a local company, the road and the people he

meets and knows in the newspaper office, Stephen is there too to submit Deasys letter to the

editor who after a glans he agrees to publish, he asks Stephen to write something for thepaper, the chapter ends with the Stephen ending his story about two old virgins and the

image of the trams coming and going in different parts of the town along with other vehicles,

the same image with the trams and carriages and the other machines hurrying around the

city is also the image of the beginning of the episode. This circularity may attempt to show

the busy world of the newspaper and advertising industry, Leopolds working environment,

but another significant aspect is that the whole chapter is constructed in a journalistic style,

partitioned in small fragments with correspondent titles, sometimes intentionally sensational,

just like newspaper articles, even the language is in the same style. This is the first episode in

the book where the reader has no longer the firsthand view on the action and what the

characters are thinking, someone else is present and manipulating the text transforming it,

giving it a certain style. This episode is meant to give the reader a view over the shallow and

mainly stylistic preoccupations of journalists who pretend to cast the Dublin's voice but

manages to have only rhetorical effects. This episode parallels the episode rom The Odyssey

when Ulysses is given Aeolus a bag of the winds that are against him and lets him leave the

island but on the way, his men think he is hiding a treasure and release the winds that bring

him back to Aeolus island and he refuses to help him again. The newspaper headquarters

are the symbol of the island as Bloom tries to renew the publishing of an ad for two months

instead of three in the paper after he reviews is and analyzed it and ran around the office in

the struggle to talk to Crawford to get his approval but he is refused.

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The eighth chapter, Lestrygonians, starts with Bloom walking by a candy store, sees a

sister of Stephens, he feels pity for her when he sees her so thin and imagines that she didnt

eat enough, buys some cakes the feed the seagulls, encounters other people he knows, and

again does a lot of thinking, about the things he sees, about the things he doesnt understand,

like the parallax, he remembers things, events, people, he thinks again about his wife and

wonders if Molly and the manager were touching in one night when they were taking a walk

with Boylan under the moonlight, all together ordinary and unimportant strings of ideas and

concerns. After his walk as he feels his hunger harder and harder he decides to have a light

snack and enters Davy Byrnes and finds some friends of his there, they talk, drink, eat and

after he leaves the restaurant he remembers he has to go to the library to see the ad from

earlier the day. On the way he sees Boylan and starts to panic and hides behind the gates of

the National Museum. The parallax, the concept of seeing one object from different

perspectives, the concept that Leopold has trouble understanding it will reappear in the story

line, as one of the base - concepts that the novel Ulysses is based on. The episode from The

Odyssey presents the Lestrygonians as they eat a big part of Ulysses men, suggesting

cannibalism also present in Joyces novel when Leopold eats his dinner think of how

cannibals would eat Paddy Dignam or any other dead person in general considering all his

compatriots acting disgusting while eating, he sees them when he enters the restaurant eating

as fast and unpleasant. Although he finds others eating as unpleasant he associates food with

sex, as he remembers an intimate moment with Molly, he associates food with creativity by

imagining what the poet A. E. and others eat, and finally food is associated with religious

sacrifice, idea suggested from the beginning of the episode when Leopold mistakenly reads

his name on a religious flyer handed to him, he is cast as a Christ figure starting from the

moment when he buys food for the seagulls, he helps a blind man cross the street.

The ninth chapter, Scylla and Charybdis, refers to the distance that Ulysses must make

between Scylla, a six-headed monster and Charybdis, the whirlpool that would destroy all his

ships, and is symbolized by Stephen Dedalus who take Leopolds role in this chapter as he

hesitates between two possible intellectual attitudes, rationalism and the romantic idealism.

The action takes place at the National Library where Leopold conducts some heavy work

searching his ad, and where Stephen shares his theory about Shakespeare's play Hamlet, a

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theory wrong from the beginning as he himself admits that he does not believe in it. The way

Stephen constructed his theory with heavy notes of misanthropy and misogyny in a dreary

way, in order to express and suggest disillusion, a heavy conscience and mocking and

romantic melancholy, a state that captured the character the whole day. In the library he tries

to shock his listeners, some intellectuals inspired from real life, present with their real names

most of them, with some theories of his, just because he didnt liked them. The episode

contains various styles from play to musical.

The tenth chapter, The Wandering Rocks, is more an interlude chapter to the second half

of nine episodes and it does not corresponds to a whole chapter from The Odyssey but to

only one line that was told to Ulysses when he was explained that he had to choices of

passing, through Scylla and Charybdis and through a portion of water with rocks that shiftedposition on their own. He chose the second option. This chapter of Joyces contains nineteen

other short stories about characters all over Dublin, short stories that are presented one after

another, or in the same time, or intertwined, or parallel, the way in which this episode is

constructed represents the shifting stones, the text is full of traps that confuse the reader

regarding which story he is in.

The eleventh chapter, Sirens, refers to the advice given to Ulysses that in his journey

back to Ithaca he must stay away from the sirens as their spells are able to get him to turn

from his journey. This episode centers on music, there is a lot of it present, most of the action

takes place at the Ormond bar, where Leopold arrives and agrees to have dinner with a friend

only to spy on Boylan, Leopolds eyes slide after the barmaids often. The style of text is

compelling the reader to music by the numerous sound imitating words, and the

conversations mainly having the subject of music or simply references are present, the third

person narrator becomes playful and self-conscious. In this chapter Leopold manages to

evolve and face the possibility of the affair between his wife and Boylan and if at the

beginning of the day he tried to hide from the manager, he evolved to following him and

observing his actions.

The twelfth chapter, Cyclops, again refers to a chapter from The Odyssey as Ulysses

was captive on the island of the Cyclops, the sons of the god of the sea, and tell how the one

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eyed creatures are totally lacking moral sensibility or hospitality and how when Ulysses

leaves one of the Cyclops throws a giant boulder after his ship. Bloom spends the afternoon

in a pub but encounters a citizen that resembles somehow the Cyclops through his anti-

Semitic insults towards the protagonist, his narrow minded judgment, and his power to

moderate his behavior and not lower himself at the level of the citizen and also his general

behavior makes him a target for other men in the pub, he does not drink on one hand and he

easily turns the bar chit-chat to serious conversations only because his superior intellect in

comparison to the other clients of the bar. The whole atmosphere of the place turns anti-

Semitic as Blooms personality traits are generalized towards all the Jewish people. The only

way Bloom can escape the bar is under the screamed anti-Semitic remarks of the citizen. The

narrator in this chapter is anonymous and in first person.

The thirteenth chapter, Nausicca, written in third person narrator full of clichs and

romantic effects, very namby-pamby, represents in the role of Nausicca, the beautiful maiden

that shows Ulysses the way to her fathers court, an ordinary girl on the beach with her

friends, trying to arouse Bloom as he sits on the sand too looking at her, she finds him

mysterious and she would like to get to know him, to find out his story. He finds out that she

has a lame leg when she gets up to leave and feels pity for her and he is relieved that he did

not know that before he masturbated to her. Although the language is romantic, the action

doesnt seem so as a the girl deliberately tried to seduce Bloom as she saw in him a

mysterious man from far away that might be able to sweep her off her feet and give her the

domestic life she dreams of. The episode is the beginning of the second half of the novel and

the beginning of a series of chapters more centered on women and their psychology. The

chapter was also the reason that the novel was forbidden in England and in the United States,

it was violently attacked when the novel first came out.

The fourteenth chapter, Oxen of the Sun, refers to the sin committed by Ulysses men of

eating some of the sacred bovines of the god of sun despite of his advice, just like bloom

with Stephen, Mulligan and several friends of theirs, medical students in a room not too far

from the room where another friend of Leopold is giving birth and has been in labor for three

days. At some point a nun comes to ask them to be quieter. This is the most difficult chapter

from the whole novel but the most impressive one too, Joyce unfolded the entire history of

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the English language by periods of formation starting from the oldest text to modern slang,

going through the Latin style prose, medieval prose, Elizabethan style, seventeenth century

styles, to Daniel Defoes style, and many other important writers till Joyce reaches the

twentieth century with mixed styles and chaotic dialects and slang. All the steps in the

development of the language are paralleled by Mrs. Purefoys episode of giving birth.

The fifteenth chapter, Circe, is similar to the one from The Odyssey where Ulysses with

his men are captive on Circes island where the witch charms them and some she transforms

into pigs as a symbol of giving in to pleasures of flesh. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus

spend a part of their night in a brothel where they suffer heavy hallucinations of obsession of

theirs, events that happened earlier during the day, desires and fears. Among others, Bloom

is feminized and abused, goes to trial, sees almost everyone he knows but under differentforms and appearances, Stephen gets drunk he too has hallucinations some of them about his

mother, he smashes a chandelier and runs of, Bloom manages to settle the score with the

ladies and catches up with him, and after more hallucinations Stephen ends up barely

conscious in the street with Bloom hovering over moments in which he sees his son Rudy

appear.

The sixteenth chapter, Eumaeus, has at the center the journey back home, Ulysses

comes back to Ithaca, he is taken in by Eumaeus his swineherd, he does not recognize

Ulysses but he greets him with hospitality and good will, Leopold and Stephen start their

own journey back home, on the way they stop at the cabmans shelter where Leopold orders

for himself coffee and something to eat for a still drunk Stephen. A sailor intervenes

sustaining he knows Simon Dedalus and starts to tell travelling stories, the conversation

evolves and they talk about lots of things, Stephen maintains a rather arrogant attitude and

Leopold tries to give him a pretext considering his drunkenness, his hard life at home, he

encourages Stephen to go sleep at his fathers tonight as his friends deserted him when in

need. This chapter evolves in a technique more appropriate to the classical novel style.

The seventeenth chapter, Ithaca, written in Roman Catholic catechism style shows

Leopold and Stephen at the Bloom house continuing their conversation, conversation that

consists of three hundred and nine questions and their answers, it symbolizes Ulysses return

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at his home. He and Stephen drink cacao, Stephen admits being hydrophobic thus he refuses

the offer to wash, we find out that the last time he bathed was in October last year, he didnt

trust liquids, they talked, Bloom remembers meeting Stephen twice when he was five and

then ten, he was invited by the young Stephen to have dinner at their house but he politely

refused, Stephen told him an anti-Semitic story in which a Christian boy is beheaded by a

Jewish girls, they both relate to the Jewish girl, Bloom think about his daughter, they both

see the difference between them, Stephen an author, and artist and Leopold the pragmatic

one with more interest in applied science. Stephen gets an offer to stay the night at the

Bloom house but he refuses, so after he leaves Leopold starts getting ready to go to bed,

remembering all the money spent, observing without his intention the signs of Boylans visit

and getting in bed with his wife telling her most of what he did today not counting the

omissions and the lies.

The eighteenth chapter and the last, Penelope, the main character is Molly, her

perspective is the only on in chapter, she remembers events from the day that passed, her

encounter with Boylan, she thinks her husband is more virile than her lover, she obviously

has some grudges against Leopold when remembering his interactions with other women but

she might still love him and he is still on the top of the list when it comes to men in her life,

she remembers things from the far past like the strange ideas that Leopold had over the

years, her fathers image, her friends from her childhood, past lovers, past lovers during her

marriage, their past homes, for a brief moment she remembers Rudy, she thinks about her

daughter and how much they are estranged, she imagines that Leopold sent her away from

home to study photography because he sensed that her and Boylan have an affair and finally

she falls asleep remembering the episode when Leopold proposed to her. This episode stands

out from all the others on one hand because it is presented only by Molly in her own tone of

voice, in her style, as interior monologue after Leopold makes his request to get breakfast in

bed the next day, and on the other hand because it has no punctuation marks, the whole

chapter stretches with only one period at the end of it. From this we can see the lack of

general knowledge in Molly, her being egocentric, but also charitable and sympathetic,

contradictory and with good humor as she imitates the others.

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For critics, Ulysses is a novel of great literary significance and importance in the

modernist fiction from multiple points of view. One of these points of view is the way in

which the content is constructed, documented and what it symbolizes, and spatial form is

very appreciated here because of the way Joyce manages to make a whole out of apparently

unrelated events and aspects, through this aspect Joyce wanted to give the world, through

Ulysses the whole image of Dublin, with all its sounds and lows and highs and people and

way of life and mostly the texture of life in this city. He managed to do this by encapsulating

all aspects of human life and needs in a given environment in just one days course of action

through a multitude of characters and events. One other important aspect that Joyce

introduced in his work is the mythical content that made the novel timeless, the references

towards The Odyssey, although it captured the same structure, the same number of chapters

and mirrored the same course of action with correspond characters, it is made in an original

way referring completely to modern view of the twentieth century literature. The novel is

thought to bring truth deeply embellished in the sea of allusions that needs decoding and

understanding, many of them are ironic in comparison with the situation in which they are

used and the situations they refer to, Joyce is acutely conscious of potential significance; by

flooding the day with an immense amount of experience, and a very large amount of lines of

interpretation, he intends us to feel the comic arbitrariness of the patterns we are able to

construct.(Modernism A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930, Edited by Malcolm

Bradbury and James McFarlane, Penguin Books). We can presume from the way the novel

is constructed and also from the above statement that the major technique Joyce uses is

association (puns, alliterations, rhyming phrases, events) and that the narration builds up in

the same way the mind of the two main characters works throughout the day, building up

information and operating it, we know what the characters know and we are interested in

what the characters are interested in, trivial, ordinary things, like growing up or growing old,

they try to improve themselves and maintain their youth. Each of the important character

finds a way to dust off the feeling of getting old, the feeling of the past, Leopold Bloom

exercises, masturbates, read obituaries, and always travels from east to west to stay ahead of

the sun, Molly finds the cure in sex and in Stephen of who she has a wrong opinion about

being a young clean man. They both have a nostalgic view of the past, the lost paradise,

because everything was better back then, for Molly is the Gibraltar, the place where she

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raised with her parents, the kiss with a faraway lover Mulvey, as for Bloom the past

happiness resides in the smell of lilac from Mat Dillons, the proposal to Molly, the halcyon

days at school. The present, is the unwanted time because it represents the fall, no more of

the happiness that past, for Bloom the fall is represented through one episode when he

masturbated during a field trip in high school and termination of all sexual relation with his

wife after the death of their newborn son Rudy. The future is viewed as an opportunity to

regain the paradise, for Bloom the start of this quest for improvement began at the moment

when he asked his wife for breakfast in bed the next day. The paradise-fall-return

pattern(idibem) reigns over many chapters encouraging the reader to be hopeful for an

improvement in the life of the characters. In the views of many scholars with Mircea Eliade

among them, it is sustained the idea that the theme of the novel is the myth of eternal

repetition, the events are cyclic with a lot of references to the mythic, like Blooms

wanderings are similar to the wanderings of Parnell, Rip Van Winkle and even religious

figures such as Christ and Moses, they are all mentioned in the book in chronological order

of events, repeating events considering Bloom is for example the masturbation that took

place in June to Molly at Mat Dillons and the masturbation to Gerty Macdowell on the

beach still in June.

All the aspects mentioned take even the novel even higher in the modernist literature

considering the form of the novel the way in which the content is presented, the multitude of

styles and languages introduced, more than it can be handled on a single reading of the

novel. Most of the chapters have unique styles. Chapter one is ruled by third person narrator,

interior monologues and dialogues, sometimes is hard to know to which character the

interior monologue belongs to. These monologues are the stream of consciousness that Joyce

perfected in Ulysses. Chapter two holds the same techniques, in chapter three there is very

little dialogue and a lot interior monologue, that of Stephen which is very hard to follow due

to his intellectual superiority, it gives the natural flow of thought of a mind that works better

on association and references. Chapter four uses the same techniques of dialogue, interior

monologue with stream of consciousness and a third person narrator but this time with the

style of Leopold Bloom and the presentation of the action is captured through his personal

way in which his minds operates. Chapter five and six follow the same structure, and chapter

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seven is the first to break the mold by adopting a journalistic style and it consists of short

stories with correspondent title and style of newspaper articles. Some of the titles are

intentionally made to be sensational denoting great things, just like actual newspapers

formulate their stories. The chapter is circular, it begins the same way it ends, with the image

of trams and the whole range of vehicles that are present in the city denoting a busy

population and continuity. James Joyce wanted to capture in this episode the voice of Dublin,

he wanted to show the not deserved importance given to people that put more importance in

aspect of the words and not the meaning, after many time he re-wrote the episode he put a lot

of rhetorical figures that are to be mentioned in the action of the following chapters. Chapter

eight is again using the well-known techniques, chapter nine uses mainly dialogue and

stream of consciousness hidden in the interior monologue but also introduces the dramatic

style and some and insertion of musical notes with one verse of a song in Latin. Chapter ten

introduces again a new style in the novel, the episode is composed of nineteen short stories

that take place simultaneously, consecutive or intertwined. It is hard to recognize to which

story the lines that dont belong in a certain story, belongs to. Chapter eleven is written in a

kind of running technique consisting of mostly short sentences denoting rapidity. Chapter

twelve is again based only on dialogue, interior monologue and third person narrator.

Chapter thirteen adopts the romantic clichd style of the romance novels that circulated at the

time Joyce wrote Ulysses in order to recreate a not so romantic encounter. Chapter fourteen

is the best chapter in the novel because of the numerous styles present and the accurate way

in which they were used, it goes through Latin prose, alliterative Anglo-Saxon, moralizing

medieval prose, medieval romance prose, Elizabethan prose, early seventeenth century prose,

seventeenth century diary style, Daniel Defoes style, Addisons and Steeles essay style,

Lawrence Sterns style, Oliver Goldsmiths eighteenth century style, eighteenth century

political style, Edwards Gibbons style, gothic style, Charles Lambs style, Thomas

DeQuinceys style, Walter Savage Landors style, nineteenth century historical and naturalist

styles, Charles Dickens style, Cardinal Newmans religious prose, Walter Paters

aestheticist style, John Ruskins style, Thomas Carlyles style and after this one the narrative

techniques breaks into the million ways of functioning of the dialect and slang of the

twentieth century language. Chapter fifteen is based on new techniques, that of play script

with directions, descriptions and the name of the character written in capitals before the

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dialogue and that of hallucinations, where illusions are present a lot and where logic is not

that much present and where is hard to realize which line represents reality and which

represents illusion. Chapter sixteen uses again only the dialogue, interior monologue and

third person narrator. Chapter seventeen is in Socratic dialogue style Roman Catholic

catechism, it consists of three hundred and nine question as impersonal as they can be with

answers again, as impersonal as they can be. The last chapter eighteen is seen through

Molly perspective and it composed of eight sentences that are not defined by punctuation

marks, only one period at the end of the chapter. This is meant to show Mollys intellectual

level and has a symbolic view regarding the idea that life is beautiful and meaningful and

everyone and everything has a role or a place in it, beautiful or ugly, smart or slow.

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Documents

James Joyce - Life and Work