MwA ] la ] The Age of Modernism (1702-29) James Joyce (1882-1941) ordin of int aa) Life... E + James Joyce was born in Dubli + He was the oldest of ten cl schools before going on to University Coll + In 1902, after graduating, he went to Paris to st n but he soon dedicated himself to writing poems and prose sketches and developing his distinctive aesthetic theories, + He met Nora Barnacle in 1904 and persuaded her to leave Ireland and go to Europe with him + The couple moved to Trieste in 1905, where they lived for the following ten years. Joyce worked as an English teacher at the Berlitz School of Languages. in in 1882. hildren. He attended Jesuit lege, Dublin tudy medicine James Joyce (1938), deal g by Jacques-Emile Blanche + At the outbreak of World War I Joyce and his family fled to Glotisal Pate ook aa Zurich in neutral Switzerland, where he died in 1941 ... and works : + In 1907 Joyce published a collection of poetry, Chamber Music, which was followed seven years later by the short stories Dubliners (1914). + His semiautobiographical first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was published in 1916 and the play Exiles in 1918. + His masterpiece, Ulyses afer being declared obscene and banned in Britain and America, was published in Paris in 1922. + In the same year Joyce began work on his huge experimental novel Fimmegans Wake. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man janishing The writings of Joyce - especially his later novels - make frequent use of interior monologue, 8 both direct and indirect. Through this technique, the writer almost disappears and the readers find themselves directly inside a character's mind. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel which is stil relatively traditional in form but which f Pa foreshadows many of the themes and verbal complexities of Ulysses, Joyce inserts a m: wi : of ¢ 5, anifesto of whi ; ae at he sees as the role of the narration itself pean tsonality of the artist passes into the and the action like a vital sea [...). The invisible, refined out of existence, hind or beyond or above his handiworkgue, ders m8 AmANM ry thought ordit and feelings come together to produce a new sudden awareness. This instant of intensity can be compared to Woolt’s idea of ‘vision’ In his first draft of A Portrait of the Artist ‘asa Young Man, Joyce explains through his character Stephen what he means by epiphany WORD MATTERS A language to dream in Joyoe's Finnegans Woke, published in 1939, can be described as a dream-sequence representing the stream of the character's Lnconscious mind during one night. However, the real protagonist is longuage itself, a nocturnal dreamlike language that is without Precedent. Anthony Burgess once wrote that Joyce ‘puts himself to sleep with o language appropriate 40 dreaming. Identities merge, time Is liquidated, opposites are Feconciled. A plastic language is By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. [...] ‘I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse ! of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany. [...] Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings? of a spiritual eye which seeks® to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the 1 glimpse : quick look 2 groping : lo 3 seeks: tr a bom, one in which two objects or persons can subsist in one and the same word’. The unique style of Finnegans Wake is like a voracious machine which devours and at the same time spils out a huge number of different languages all mixed together, from Lain to Greek, from French fo German to lfalian. To say that a characler had not arrived ye, the narrator says that he ‘had possencore rearrived’ (from the French pas encore, meaning ‘not yet). The book is full of wordgames, multilingual puns, expressions which Lewis Carroll optty baptised ‘portmanteau words’ ~ words in focus is reached, the object is epiphanised.” which are packed the sense of at least two terms or ideas just ike in a frayelling-bag. To say something like ‘my corpse wil feriise the earth ‘and help the crops to grow, Joyce simply compresses it in one word: cropse’. Life is presented as a ‘crossmess parzle’ which is a combination of Christmas parcel and crossword puzzle, but also ‘contains a mixture of religious ond profane resonances: the word mess evokes both the English sense of ‘chaos and the talian essa. The meanings of Joyce's words in Finnegans Wake are never final, never exhausted.ete ed The Age of Modernism (1901-45) ME ZONE. Giurg iain a collection called Dubliner although y & Dubliners are published in 1914 | they form a realistic and eyo Joyce's frst short stories we a msl eine the wap bin. As J ore written before stories in the book were nt rs eilhood (The Sie te four ple in ary peop ‘ortrat of the lives of ordinary P hildhoo’ i napete A.city Emanged in four groups that correspond {2 “afer the Race’, “TWO Gallant an through iis Encounter’ and ‘Araby’, adolescence | interparts, Clay’ and ‘A Painfll Case) People sedi House), maturity (8 Litle Clow Mother, Grace’ and “The Dead), oe oe »e Room’ os » public life (Ivy Day in the Committe fe a tng of paralysis that many of the chara A significant theme in all the store and limited cultural and social traditions, Ty experience as a reut of bing ied to antiqued 3 inhibited by repressive mg he centre of paralysis; The last story, “The De also reflected in their relationships in which codes. Joyce himself once defined Dublin as os chemcaiien ial gnation wi can be considered the culmination of the feeling of stagnatio € pervades the atmosphere of all fifteen stories life of the city and pervades the atmosp lino written in an apparently traditional way. Howe, the descriptive realism which permeates then already contains many of the elements of Joyce more experimental later work, such @s the absence cultural infer of a moralising narrative voice, description of receive ana characters’ inner thoughts and use of symbolism ‘The central ' Each story is told from the perspective ofa ie end. particular character rather than through an Bething. Gre omniscient narrator Boning it tetumned to | her from the Evening on Karl Johann Strasse, poets on Kart Johann 1 by Edvard Munch, “AR Spiphany o Rasmus Meyer Coleco, Bagon, Tita epiph Munch's pointing captures the mosphere of elausrophobit the lst sce, and paralysis present in Joyce's Dubliners. tendencies. Gabriel feels self-contid z ot Loic: iti and on his way tothe hotel he reme,.ge ily ater fan Protestants ~ and polio mers the best es speech he makes at the pat): desire for his wife, Gretta "ments of his married life and he feeHowever, when they reach their hotel room he realises that she is crying: at the end of the party, she suddenly had a sad ‘epiphany’, a revelation related to her past. Listening to an old Irish song sung by one of the guests, she suddenly remembered her first and perhaps only true love, Michael Furey, a young man who she thinks died for her. On hearing this desperate and passionate account Gabriel has his own ‘epiphany. When Gretta falls asleep he looks outside the window where the snow is falling. He realises the insignificance both of his own life, and of those around him, all of whom will fade and die and be forgotten, buried by the snow that continues to fall the sense of well-being generated by the party is seen under a harsh new light Features and themes ‘Although “The Dead’ can still be considered realistic from the way it gives detailed descriptions of people and settings, at the same time it is also highly symbolic. The names of the characters carry a symbolic meaning: Gabriel, for example, is the name of the protagonist but significantly is also the name of the archangel who sounds the trumpet at the Last Judgement. Another aspect which foreshadows Joyce's more experimental writings is the way the writer gives us a picture of the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters. Gabriel's final thoughts at the end of The Dead’ are in fact one of Joyce's first uses of indirect interior monologue, a technique further developed in his later work. During the story, through our access to his thoughts, we are constantly made to feel Gabriel's apartness from the other dinner guests, who he considers his intellectual and cultural inferiors and whose level of conversation embarrasses him. However Gabriel too is going to receive an awakening which will make him reflect on his own complacency. The central ‘event’ of the story is Gretta’s epiphany, which will lead to Gabriel’s own epiphany at the end. The scene in question is more complex than it appears. On the surface it is almost nothing. Gretta stops for a moment on the stairs when she hears a song from her past, but in stopping it is as though time itself has stopped, or that she has stepped outside of time and returned to her lost youth. This epiphany is reflected through Gabriel's own gaze as he watches her from the bottom of the stairs. In this sense it is an epiphany for him too, in which he sees, as though she were a figure in a painting, his wife as a woman he never really knew. The auditory epiphany of Gretta coincides with Gabriel's visual epiphany. But Joyce goes even further. In the last scene of the story, after Gretta tells the story of Michael Furey, Gabriel, looking out the window at the all-covering snow, reflects on the ultimate insignificance of even the most intense Moments of existence, which fade like all the rest into oblivion. Chant tAmour (1 868-73) by Edward Burne-Jones. i: ‘The Metopolilon Museum of rt, New York Bume-Jones's work the unheard music being played is ‘voked bythe emotions ofthe listeners whom we might lmagine lost in their own memories of love, Bleak insights Out of the pastEPMA Comparative Literature John Cage the wake of Joyce by many critics as James Joyce's final novel, the gargantuan Fi ke, Is regarded BY my ae ombious experiment teary Be Ba opis infer, Joye® Wrote FOTOUSy, yee ‘ ep literary critics occupied for the next four rs‘! \ The novel was orginally known simply sion pend the text selfs perhaps best appr Not in terms of its overall structure (relatively few people have actually read It from a 10 8 Gs an experimental ‘reading in progress’, an open work which announces on ‘arenwart seer words’ op Of he meanings of Wake’ in which the reader has te freedom ro decide what fo do with In this sense Finnegans Wake, with its openness, [— — Polylinguistic word games and fragmented syntax, is Close in spirit to the musical theories of American composer John Cage who regarded music first and swroth with twone nathandJoe foremost os a ‘sonic process’. Indeed, Cage employed A @lements of Joyce's fext in a number of his compositions, a | Moreover, he generated several written texts from the ha | Novel which he called Whiting for the 1st, 2nd... Time Through Finnegans Wake. To do this he used a technique ree | called ‘mesosties’, a method which comes from the oO peasy Greek mesdstichon (composed by mesos, ‘middle’ and ee ed aed siichos, \verse’) in which one choses a word (in Cage’s role Sn eae case the name JAMES JOYCE) and then identifies words in each line in the middle of the page which sequentially poe Contain the letiers of the words chosen. As Cage writes, ‘A nae mesostic is a road down the middle,” hEaven. Visit the Ubuweb site and look for the entry on John Cage where you'll find an audio extract of Whiting for the 2nd Time Through Finnegans Wake. Listen to Cage's explanation of his method and then to the two readings. What is curious about his relationship with Joyce's text? What qualities of the text are most evident in his ‘Writing through’? HORIZONS Focus on the text: Ulysses Published in 1922, Uses represents ahi happens in terms of actual events, salesman Leopold Bloom, who gets way, including the y before finally going home 2 igh point of Modernism. In Joyce's masterpiece not much 1 basically tells the story of a day in the life of advertising 4p, walks around Dublin and meets vari The m ‘The bo the no becom probler moder rely 0 ordina posses The | Odyss “blown and € home Telen moth tums Penel of he secre Ulys Leo his v whic Step the in se into Mol love com An Alt war thea PRCT e Sern ‘The modern anti-hero ‘The book’s parallelism with The Odyssey extends to its structure. The 18 episodes which comprise the novel are modelled on equivalent episodes in Homer's text, but in Ufsses these usually become parodic or at least are treated with comic circumspection. Joyce shows how the problems, conflicts, triumphs and tragedies of the classical world are the same problems faced by modern man, The difference is that modern man is imperfect. He is not a hero, and he cannot rely on the kindness of the gods to help him through his struggles. However, this very ordinariness of Joyce's characters contains within it a depth and vitality which no classical hero possesses. The Odyssey Odysseus/Ulysses: the Greek soldier and hero whose ship, returning from the Trojan wars, is Lylown off course. He finds himself delayed by a series of bizarre and sometimes perilous events and encounters, which he survives by using all his wits, and manages, finally, to return to his home of Ithaca ‘Telemachus: the son of Ulysses awaiting his father’s return is forced to share his home with his mother’s suitors, who treat him badly and deny him his rights. Seeking news of his father he tums to the wise King Nestor, who gives him good advice. Penelope: the wife of Ulysses, who faithfully awaits her husband's return, avoiding the advances ofher suitors by busying herself with weaving a work which she never finishes, since at night she secretly unweaves what she has woven during the day. Ulysses Leopold Bloom: a middle-aged Jewish advertising éanvasser who goes out one morning, leaving his wife asleep in bed, and wanders around Dublin on a series of inconclusive errands during which he meets the young writer Stephen Dedalus. ‘ Stephen Dedalus: an indigent and pretentious young writer whose companions eviet im from the temporary home they have made in a coastal tower. Forced to wander the streets of Dublin in search of a new home, and a substitute father, Stephen meets Bloom, who offers to take him into his home. Molly Bloom: the wife of Leopold, Molly isa semi-professional singer who has had several lovers. While Bloom is out on his wanderings her latest lover, the theatrical agent Blazes Boylan, ‘comes to visit her. An odyssey in consciousness Although the ‘plot’ of Ulysses is very much like a map on which we follow Leopold Bloom's wanderings, the various odysseys of Bloom, Stephen and Molly are equally voyages through the “internal sea of their own consciousness, which we are invited to listen to. The experience is, as the writer and critie David Lodge says: rather like wearing earphones plugged ' into someone’s brain, and monitoring an endless tape-recording of the subject's impressions. reflections, questions, memories and fantasies as they are triggered? either by physical sensations or the association of ideas. Mi 1 plugged: cone 2 tig function.V1 onsciou The Fi sof sudden chan} ness ve consciousness in Several Ways » workings of the ; e workit e verrupted sym slips of the tongue, present and anticipated future “ve idea is dominant and ney ‘This interior monologue a4 ws incompl ssociation. No 0 Jaborated. « which are being ¢l rs which at Joyce does not select material se of realism. a elp to produ nds. Yet at the sam¢ AI ofthese devices a Pre al he rubbish that asses though ot ind sthetie rounds He Preere cording toa very precise symv0NS aa events. Thoughts are vith thought information constantly with thoug! ‘ce an increased sens on time, ‘ Jopaedic novel ‘or him it took a ‘maj Anta H t consider Ussses so much @ novel as a modern epic. For him it took a ‘major DS Ee a eae bie for art, He regarded as extraordinary the way it step toward making the modern world posst “ it eae bridge the divide between the modern and the classical et iolee fe is ful of quotations from and references to, not only Homer, but also Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Vico, Aquinas, in fact practically the whole history of Western literature, Apart from interior monologue, it employs practically every single ‘hetorical technique and style in English, from Latin liturgy and Anglo- Saxon poetry to the language of advertising slogans and popular magazines. In this sense itis also an encyclopaedic novel in the tradition of Sterne and Rabelais. When it came out, the book was considered by its first readers immoral, incoherent, chaotic, obscure, impossible to read. Some conservative critics even compared it to a ‘telephone directory’ - which became one of Joyce’s favourite nicknames for it. All this means that the book can be read in many ways, not just from beginning to end. Rather than understand and interpret in a traditional way, the reader is invited to ‘play’ parts of the text like a game (or like a piece of music) and the number of ways it can be played is infinite. The Son of Man (1926) by René Magri Private collection. oe ae Anonymous and interchangeable on the surface, Maghite' flues provide a pertet representation ofthe modere ihe mood Ulysses (1922) I was thinking of so many things ‘This extract is from Molly Bloom's the final lines of the book. is who has just returned eae na ie oy famous monologue which ends Ulyses: this extract is, in fit ed. Beside her is her husband Lome Bloom 10he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could Jeading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so ‘many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old ‘windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes ‘my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. The Threshold (1992) by Bill Viola. Contemplating Viola's video installation we are drawn across 2 border between two states of perception, an exterior ‘environment signalled by ambient video machine noise and the interior world of three silent, sleeping faces on the screens. The passage from one state fo another is equally o passage into the perception of our own inner sol 2 Modern literature disse che ero un fior di montagna si siamo tutti fiori allora un corpo di donna si stata una delle poche cose giuste che ha detto in vita sua cil sole splende per te oggi si percid mi piacque si perché vidi che capiva 0 almeno sentiva cos’ una donna e io sapevo che me lo sarei rigirato come volevo e gli detti quanto pit piacere potevo per portarlo a quel punto finché hon mi chiese di dir di si io dapprincipio non volevo rispondere guardavo solo in giro il cielo e il mare pensavo a tante cose che Tui non sapeva di Mulvey € Mr Stanhope ¢ Hester e papa e il vecchio capitano Groves e i marinai che giocavano al piattello e alla cavallina come dicevan loro sul molo ¢ Ia sentinella avanti alla casa del governatore con quella cosa attorno all’elmetto bianco povero diavolo mezzo arrostito ¢ le ragazze spagnole che ridevano nei loro scialli e quei pettni alti e le aste la mattina i grec ali ebreie gli arabi e il diavolo chi sa altro da tutte le parti d’Europa e Duke street e il mercato del pollame tun gran pigolio davanti a Larby Sharon e i poveri ciuchini che ineiampavano mezzi addormentati ¢ gli ‘uomini avvolti nei loro mantelti addormentati all’ombra sugli scalinie le grandi ruote dei carti dei toric il veechio castello vecchio di mill’anni si e quei bei Mori tutti in bianco ¢ turbanti come re che ti chiedevano di mettert a sedere in quei loro buchi di botteghe e Ronda con le vecchie finestre delle posadas fulgidi occhi celava l’inferriata perché il suo amante baciasse le sbarre e le gargotte mezzo aperte lanotte ee nacchere e la notte che perdemmo il battello ad Algesiras il sereno che faceva il suo giro con Ia Sua lampada e Oh quel pauroso torrente laggit. in fondo Oh e il mare il mare qualche volta cremist come il fuoeo e gli splendidi tamonti i fichi nei ‘giardini dell’ Alameda sie tutte quelle stradine ccuriose e le case rosa e azzurre e gialle e i roseti ei ‘gelsomini e i gerani ci cactus e Gibilterra da ragazza dov'ero un Fior di montagna si quando mi misi la rosa nei capelli come facevano le ragazze andaluse 0 ne porterd una rossa si.e come mi bacid sotto il muro ‘moresco e io pensavo be” Iui ne vale un altro e poi gli chiesi con gli occhi di chiedere ancora si allora mi Chiese se io volevo si dire di si mio fior di montagna e ‘per prima cosa gli misi le braccia intorno sie me lo tirai addosso in modo che mi potesse sentire il petto tutto profumato sie il suo cuore batteva come impazzitoe si disi si voglio Si. Translated by Giulio de Angelis.ME ZONE 6lpuraetcouas Modernism (1901-45) Molly's mind. Rea Overview thoughts, recollections and mental associations which cross Molly ahh, Here is alist of some of the thous! ‘ the order they appear in the ext oe [J the night she was iate for a boat at Algeciras * a, b [| hergirhood in Gibraltar m ¢ [| the sea at sundown Fe 4 [-] her first sexual encounter under the Moorish wall e @ [| the fowi market in Duke street Es tan encounter with Bloom on a coastal hilside, where he compared her fo a mountain flower and they hog Ee their frst sexual experience together a 9 (5 aNoorish caste in Spain and Arabian shopkeepers with white clothes and turbans ot ‘ h_ [J Spanish inns and a girl who meets her lover in secret Hes 1 her memories of people she knew and a previous time of her life in Spain when she met people from all ov But ie ‘Steph J (7) the gardens and streets in a Spanish town ey Textures, forms and styles hs 1 What do you call this type of interior monologue? 5 ; 2. Underline examples of unconventional use of grammar (subjects or verbs missing, fragments of sentences and sot) fe What is the effect ofthis? 3 What do you notice about punctuation? What is the effect of this? 4 What is the most frequently used word in the passage? What effect does it have? You 5. Describe the tone ofthe passage. You can choose from the following list or add your own adjectives it you wn a t 'yrical rational prosaic sensual ironic precise evocative ng Confused ecstatic affimmative vague torrential Anc Discussion ft 1 Read the passage aloud. Mark where you want to Pause. Compare your script to that of other students’. Ai 2 Now that you have founda suitable mhythm forthe passage, record He He An Formal: Greek Mythology . Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’, Vol. 2, 12 5 5 He aera ea * "Show, Pygmalion, Vol. 2, 12.5 se bal i 1 Auden, “Musée des Beaux As, Vol, 3, 12.6 : aot noe cole p.171 R b eae Disintegration and chaos si teal Wat br Ga Vol. 1, Depa 1 The disintegration of character, . 3,127, Departures eae "= ARTLINK Bacon, Vol. 3, 127, p. 332 1 Bache Me a ee a BARTIINK De. Orie CFS