The New Narrative Form

James Joyce (1882-1941)

- experimenter interested in human relationships > man in relation to himself and society (= V.
Woolf); archetypal rebellious Modernist artist;
- similar to Yeats & Eliot in terms of meanness of modern society and its evils (Dublin = prototype
of all cities; a city of stasis and paralysis); combination of realism and symbolism, finally reaching
a mythopoetic method;
- urban socialist, rejecting the idealisation of a Celtic past; the Catholic Church perceived as
disabling (The Faith of the Fathers had neither a patriotic nor a strategic regard for Joyce) >> the
use of METAPHOR for the spiritual condition of Ireland + a mixture of sentimentality and cold
irony; ‘a style of scrupulous meanness’.

MODERNIST FICTIONAL INNOVATIONS

- > Friedrich Nietzsche - the modern spirit was characterised by an Apollonian and a Dionysian drive
of the self [Apollonian = principle of individuation which implies rationality; Dionysian = the
creative process >> art is born of this opposition; ‘rational self is a fiction’; truth is ultimately
impossible to find]
- the ‘aggregation method’ (Eliot): images following one after the other, no logical narrative
sequence << Nietzsche: ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’ >> Modernist discourse
characterised by a logic of the form of metaphor or symbol (symbolic form);
- TIME – represented as SPATIAL PLOTS in the flow of consciousness: the discovery of
unexpected transitions and suppositions, images rather than statements (see Ezra Pound’s
imagistic poems); the characters discover the plots of their own lives, shape their own experience
by means of associations, fantasies or present perceptions  Joycean EPIPHANIES or Woolf’s
LIVING MOMENTS resulting in automatic writing, in voluntary responses dictated by
consciousness;
- CONSCIOUSNESS – represented in two ways:
o Stream-of-consciousness: thoughts reported in the third person singular, the use of past
tense simple > impression of intimate access, but without surrendering authorial
participation
o The interior monologue: an eye narrative, the grammatical subject; the characters verbalise
their thoughts, reflections, questions, memories, fantasies, impressions triggered by
physical sensations and associations of ideas [in A Potrait we notice the artistic
development and growing command of language in the main hero Stephen Daedalus; the
action consists in a series of epiphanies, that is, spiritual experiences in the Character’s
life; his progressive grow pupil  student  artist in a world of national discontent,
political and religious tension which he tries to sort out]

Brief analysis of Joyce’s works

1) Dubliners (1914) – a collection of 50 stories depicting an atmosphere of ennui and moral and
intellectual paralysis as well as spiritual collapse. The technique of the significant detail <
Chekhov; the brilliant use of the technique of epiphany = Christian term > illumination of
meaning [Joyce was brought up in a Jesuite college, then became a fervent atheist]
2) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) – a Joycean autobiography portraying the
author’s discontent with traditional Irish culture;
3) Ulysses (1922) – ‘a little story of the day’, an encyclopaedia (‘my intention was to transfer the
myth’ and to embody the chaotic forces of Western civilisation at the beginning of our century);
Joyce recommends the method of ordering, controlling and giving shape to the immense
panorama of hostility of the present history > MYTHICAL METHOD; Stephen = artist relying
on a pure intellect; the artist = ISOLATED – he wants to be free and reject the institutions that
put pressure on him; the use of PASTICHE – recreation of style (Latinate, Anglo-Saxon,
various cultural references) >> Finnegan’s Wake – language becomes an experience; Joyce’s
 unrivalled project of taking revenge on the English language via a mixture of all languages he
knew.
4) Finnegan’s Wake (1939) – highly experimental novel combining ‘dream language’ (pastiche
language) with the stream-of-consciousness; comic mode made up of the association of
opposites and puns.

Notes on A Portrait
- his first writing to use the stream-of-consciousness technique associated with selective
omniscience; it is the second version of the manuscript called Stephen Hero (the reader = 1st
person singular vs. 3rd person singular > creator of irony = opposition of each ending of a chapter
with the beginning of the next; the ending of chapters marked by enthusiasm dampened because of
the oppressive institutions of the family, church, homeland.
- Undermining the concept of Bildungsroman – conflicting views > crisis/transformation, sudden
insights/ ‘epiphanies’
- Development of his art towards SYMBOLISM (green = colour of Irish nationalism; red = socialist
ideology that gained ground among the nationalists)
- TITLE: development of SD; chooses art as his new homeland; the artist = the supreme hero; he
rejects his physical father, choosing a spiritual one (the mythical figure of Daedalus, a craftsman);
surrounded by a labyrinth (close to Daedalus’s son Icarus) >> symbolic view of himself, defying
everything in his flight; an ironical allusion to the fall of Icarus); creating ambition (huge
ambitions ‘in the smithy of his soul’); his name symbolic of choosing art, not faith.
- Introverted and intellectualised Stephen: the novel culminates in an aesthetic system based on
Thomas Acquinas’s definition of beauty completed by phases of artistic apprehension:
INTEGRITAS, CONSONANTIA/HARMONY AND CLARITAS.
- EPIPHANY = found in the most commonplace experience of sudden revelation; artist seen as a
sort of priesthood >> the alienated artist speaking in a sophisticated language;
- Disciple of Wilde’s ‘art for art’s sake’
- Being an artist = awareness of form, language, images tied to colours, sound, forms
(correspondences)