Joyce Fise

8/13/2019 Joyce Fise

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Derek Attridge - Reading Joyce

Social, economic & political transformations led to a newly-formed system of representing the world

through language, using so called Joycean technique, such as: parody, pastiche, self-referentiality,

fragmentation of word and image, open-ended narrative and multiple p.o.v.

Inexhaustibility of his workmultiple starting and ending point for interpretation

The 4th story in Dubliners

1st published under the pseudonym Stephen Daedalus Stylisticallythe writing is pretty unremarkable, the language is not your usual literary

registerBUT it is completely transparent, a truth-telling story whose sole aim is to convey

as convincinglt as possible the actuality of a specific, though presumably imagined, personal

experience -> rather, the content which we are accustomed to thinking of as the raison

detreof fiction) serves as a vehicle for the manner of telling, the slow release of information,

the hints and the presuppositions that we are invited to elaborate on, the rhythm of mental

deliberation that propels the narrative forward, andour present concernthe controlled

language that through its very sparseness possesses a hair-trigger suggestiveness -> he

shows how unstable the relationship between content and form is

The inconclusiveness of the writing in inescapable frombecause it is built into the storywe can never know if evelines hopes for a better life are valid or baseless

The readers enjoyment lies in identifying this language as language normally excluded fromliterature, but functioning here just as efficiently as the most elaborate of styles to suggest

with immense precision a mind, a social milieu, a series of emotions. The pleasure is in the

precision, rather that what it is precise about. Sometimes, the inner monologue is vague in terms of whose voice is itEveline talks basic

English language, no fancy words, but there are times when such comments are made

might this be Joyces voice or the effect that the social context and desires of Eveline has on

her subconscious and thus, her language?

The Bohemian Girlmaterial reference, smtg Eveline might want to be, but certainly is notas proof comes the visit to the theatre with Frank that is a rehearsal of the life she hopes to

have with frank

Joycedouble task (like or realistic/naturalist writers): Creating the impression of realityconveyed through renderind the exact thoughts

of the characters

Making the reader an active part by asking of him to piece together the pieces of thepuzzle in order to understand

The demands of naturalisma degree of incoherence, a completely non-literary

style a minimum of infosince the character doesn t have to state things she/he

already knows (also happening in Ulysseswhen we gradually find out about the

dead son, the father that hanged himself, though references are made beforehand

it s like he is trying to enduce into readers the same epiphanies/revelations that

his characters have)

Connections between stories in Dubliners and episodes in Ulysses:


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Maria in `Clay` might provide a clues as to what awaits Eveline when trying to leaveDublinMaria also sings a song from The Bohemian Girl

The Nausicaa episode in Ulysses is an elaboration of Eveline, building fantasiesaround some stranger whom she interprets in the terms of the romantic stories she

had read

CHRISTOPHER BUTLER - Joyce the modernist

Joyce was a NietzscheanN. Helped sustain his opposition to those totalizing religious and

philosophical frameworks characteristic of the 19th century burgeoisie`My mind rejects the whole

present social and Christianity` - says Joyce in his letters to Nora

S. Daedalus - `fond of saying that the absolute is dead`

Symptoms in Joyces work - pragmatism, pluralism and most typical for modernist

sceptical ironyThe `scrupulous meanness ` in Dubliners = seeing things as they really are:

In realism you get down to facts on which the world is based; that sudden reality which

smashes romanticism into a pulp(...) if we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would

be better off. That is what we were made for. Nature is quite unromantic. It is we who put romance

into her, which is a false attitude, an egotism, absurd like all egotism. In Ulysses i tried to keep close

to fact. J.J.

Joyces attitude to the modernist climate comes from his esentially solitary (and egotistical)

expertientialism, and from our senses of the ideological risks it ran.

Ulysseshe had set himself the task of writing a book from 18 diff. p.o.v. and in as many

stylesunknows to his fellow tradesmen leading to an esentially relativist attitude towards the

truthful depiction of reality

He uses modernist techniques to adopt a series of rhetorical masks which make us doubt the

authority of any particular style. The various methods used in Ulysses are, thus, different but not

definitive ways of filtering and ordering experience.

Although Joyce obeys the underlying casual necessities of narratives & is as concerned with

accuracy as Proust, he also makes us see his history of a day within a number of stylistic frameworks,

which are all relative to one another, and which often disrupt the conventions of word formation and

syntaxthis is the beginning of Joyces revolution of the word, completed in Fs Wake.

Matthew Arnold`modern times find themselves with an immense system of institutions,

established facts, acredited dogmas, customes, rules, which have come to them from past times

they feel like this system is not of their own creation, that it does not correspond to their wants, that

it is customary, not rational. The awakening of this sense is the awakening of the modern spirit.`

Modernist are revolutionary in the sense that they take what has already been stated and

created in matter of art and recreate it, expand it, perfect it, inventing radically new languages for art

the complete recreative and parodic mastery of previous traditionsfor instance, before Ulysses,

Joyce writes Dubliners in a very Chekhovian manner, and The Deadis very Symbolist and, also,

Ibsenic.

Important in joycean writings: A distinctive reinvention of Symbolist experience through his epiphanies *


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* a sudden spiritual transformation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture

or in a memorable phase of the mind itself

Reviving and immeasurably extended the presentation of the `stream ofconsciousness`, previously found in Edouard Dujardin

There are all sorts of reflected influences in Ulyssescubism, futurism, simultaneism,

dadaism etc. -> Joyce was attached to none of these various schools

Ulysses & Freud

Nausicaa - `the unveiling of the subconscious in the Freudian manner`

èvery action and reaction of Blooms psychology is laid bare with Freudian nastiness &

`much of the action in Ulysses is subconscious`

Ulysses = à volume of dream interpretatins by Freud`

Joyce himself claimedgoing back to the Catholicism he had previously rejectedthat he

preferred the confessional as a mode of self-revelation

GARRY LEONARD - Dubliners

It could be read like ìf someone had made a two-hour film by putting the camera on a tripod

and letting it run, and then brought the result directly to the screen with no editing

1. The SistersMaybe Father Flynn sinned when he taught the boy the Catholic Mass

Maybe the sisters could have saved him (otherwise why the name?)

Maybe there was smtg wrong with the narrator who becomes so self-conscious that he

doesnt want to eat crackers at Father Flynns wake for fear of embarassement

The 3 words that he hates: gnonom(some kind of a riddle or, how he encounters ita

geometric form of a parallelogram with a missing corner*), simony (the selling of smtg

with spiritual value for moral gain), paralysis how much of what he doesnt know is

nonetheless affecting him?

* is the narrator the missing corner, feeling alone and apart from his family? His uncle was

always telling him to `box his corner and, indeed, he is sitting in a corner when he refuses to

take the crackers from Eliza

The thing with the story ta daaaamus, readers, dont seem to get whats going on because

the boy doesnt either. the boy tries to connect the dots, to form a narrative out of

apparently unrelated details.

Joyce refuses to be an omniscient narrator because the 20th century is anything but anAge of Faith, it is an age of deep incertitude with an accompanying deep suspicion of all

meta-narratives

Father Flynn gets into a crisisthe loss of faith, the discovery of the empty chalice

maybe he passed the crisis onto the boy

Joyce praises Ibsens characters for being portrayed in a way that does not preach about the

meaning of life, but invites the reader to observe closely and speculate in order to piece the parts

and to see wherever the writing is fainter or less legible


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In the beginningthe boys assumption that he would know if F.F. was dead because there

would be 2 lighted candles at the head of his corpse; he goes past the window night by night

Aftera long dread about the fascination F.F. exercited upon himhe was fearful by the idea of F.F.

being dead but yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work - here is the invitation

and the warning of Dubliners: come closer, look for where it fades, where it is illegible, but know that

what remains unsaid is often what we fear to say, or even think, and yet, at the same time, might

want to hear shouted aloudthe longing and the fear that accompanies genuine insight

unadulterated by self-delusion or wishful thinking: deadly work, indeed, but perhaps an antidote to

the moral paralysisidentified as one of the subjects of Js work.

One of the dynamics of Js work: adding, altering, amending what he initially wrote, seeking a greater

and greater degree of subtlety and finesse.

2. ArabyThe conclusionthe boy realizez that he doesnt have enough money to buy a present for Manganssistera convergence of the political (the shop girl is English, implying that the good themselves are

another way for England to profit from the chronically dissatisfied citizens of colonial Ireland), the

personal (seeing the shop girl flirting with her 2 admirers he realises he hasnt done anything similar

regarding Mangans sister, hence the girl thinks nothing about him), the familial(he is late because

his uncle was late, he constantly tries to escape the tangled web of animosity and alcohol), the

textual (even if hes unaware of it, his journey follows the pattern of the search for the Holy Grail)

and the religious (The Bazaar = a profit-driven, indifferent Church)

The Joycean epiphany does not so much confirm a truth as disrupt what one has growncomfortable accepting as true

3. A Little Cloudthe epiphanyLittle Chandler returns home after his conversation with Gallaher to find he hates his

furniture, his wife, his marriage, his infant son for robbing him of the chance to be an acknowledged

poet.

But is this true? Maybe he didnt write any poetry because this allows him to continue fantasizing

that he one day will

He is trying to make himself feel more important that he actually isthats why he wants to meet

Little Chandler . But why does Little Chandler meet him while trying to be in a state of denial, fooling

himself that their friendship is valuable? Because, like the narrator inArabyand Maria in Clay, he

uses almost constant fantasy to insulate himself from the reality of his life as he is living it.

Joyces intention in Dubliners - `to write a chapter of the moral history of my country

4. Eveline- A simple anti-emigration propagandist fiction but, in fact, interogates the terms and

functions of the nationalist propaganda it supposedly embodies

In the end, Eveline cannot leave Irelandshe returns to an alcoholic father that beats her

and a thankless exhausting job where her salary is not even her own.Reason for not leavingthe promise that she had made to her mother not to leave this place


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Frank = the stock seducere in the anti-emigration tales

The meaning of the tale: people do not stay in London because they discover the wonder of

doing so, but because theyre trapped (one of the ways theyre trapped is the ideology of a pure

and lovely Ireland

Joyces epiphanies the rearrangement of a fantasized reality into an actual onemay be

intended as an antidote to moments where all the diffcult realities in Ireland are ignored and

replaced by a pleasant image of an Irish lass waving from her cottage window at her man happily

tilling the ground with his hoe, only pausing to acknowledge her adoring gaze

5. Clay- A game is recounted where three saucers are placed on a table and the blindfolded player

lowers her hand

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Joyce Fise