James Joyce

In Europe James Joyce was considered one of the prophets of Modernism.

He grew up a rebel among rebels. The political and literary movements which had the aim to free Ireland from the
British presence and dominance attracted him very little; his interest was in a broader European culture and this led
him to begin to think of himself as a European rather than an Irishman.
According to Joyce, and in contrast with his contemporaries, the only way to give Ireland a strong and national
conscience and awareness was by offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European, cosmopolitan viewpoint.
Joyce had a complex relationship with his Ireland: on the surface he seems to reject everything dealing with Irish
culture and traditions, as a matter of fact Joyce’s works are deeply centered on Ireland and more specifically on
Dublin.
He imposed a self-exile at the age of 22 by establishing himself on the continent. Why this choice? For two important
reasons:
1) to allow him a better and wider artistic climate far from the mental and cultural static condition of Ireland;
2) to give him the objectivity necessary to write about his country with the right emotional and intellectual
detachment, giving a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people, doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives.
His hostility towards the Church was the revolt against the official doctrine and the struggle against the provincial
Church which, according to him, had taken possession of Irish minds.

DUBLINERS
It consists of 15 short stories: they all lack obvious actions, but they disclose human situations, moments of intensity
and lead to a moral, social, or spiritual revelation: epiphany (revelation of truth, giving the character a new
awareness).
The stories are arranged into 4 groups which represent 4 phases of human life:
Childhood - Adolescence – Mature Life – Public Life.
The last story “The Dead” can be considered Joyce’s masterpiece: it is at once the summary and the climax of
Dubliners. What hold all these stories together is a particular structure and the presence of the same themes,
symbols, places and narrative technique.
Joyce depicted events, places, characters, objects in a very realistic way but he was extremely concise. Realism
(places, pubs, streets, people, idioms of contemporary Dublin) is mixed with symbolism and external details
generally have a deeper meaning.
Joyce thought his function was to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life and he used a peculiar technique
to achieve his purpose: the epiphany that is “the sudden spiritual manifestation” caused by a trivial gesture, a banal
situation, an ordinary object used to lead the character to a sudden self-realization about himself/herself or about
the reality around him/her. Understanding the epiphany is often the key to the story itself.

A PERVASIVE THEME: PARALYSIS

The paralysis of Dublin, which Joyce wanted to portray, is both physical and moral, linked to religion, politics and
culture. Joyce’s Dubliners either accept their condition because they are not aware of it or because they lack the
courage to react and break the chains that bind them. The Dubliners are spiritually weak and scared people, they
are to some extent slaves of their familiar, moral, cultural religious and political life.
The moral theme in Dubliners is not paralysis but its revelation to its victims. This self-realisation and awareness is
the Climax.
Joyce is far from being didactic. The main theme is the failure to find a way out of “paralysis”. Its opposite is
“escape” and its consequent failure. His characters seem to live as exiles at home, unable to cut the bonds that tie
them to their own world.
When Joyce talks about paralysis he means paralysis of will, of courage, of self-knowledge, which leads ordinary
men to accept limitations imposed by the social context.
EVELINE, Dubliners
Eveline Hill, a 19-year-old woman who works in a Dublin shop, sits inside her family's house recalling childhood,
including some happy memories as well as her father's drunken brutality to her and her siblings.
Eveline thinks about people she has known who have either left Ireland (a priest who has travelled to Melbourne, for
example) or died (her mother and her brother Ernest), and of her own plans to leave the country with a man
named Frank.
She recalls meeting Frank, an Irish sailor now living in Argentina, and dating him while he visited Dublin on vacation.
Eveline also thinks about her father's disapproval of Frank, and of her promise "to keep the home together as long as
she could" before her mother grew deranged and died.
Later, gripped by fear of the unknown and probably guilt as well, Eveline finds herself unable to board the ferry to
England, where she and Frank are scheduled to meet a ship bound for South America. He leaves without her.

THE NAME
The name Eveline means "little, or small, Eve" which is Hebrew for "life." Of course, the connotations associated with
the name Eve are those of the first woman who tempted her mate Adam with the apple from the serpent, an act
which expelled them from the Garden of Eden.
On the other hand, the meaning of "life" and the diminutive suffix of -lyn, or -line suggest that Eveline lives a small
life.

THEMES, MOTIFS AND SYMBOLS

Dust is associated with decay and lifelessness. Eveline lives a dismal (gloomy, melancholic, sad) and hopeless life,
and it is the idea of spiritual lifelessness and paralysis which drives the narrative of Joyce's story "Eveline".
As the narrative opens, Eveline sits at the window and regards the evening as it "invades the neighborhood". She is
tired and her nostrils inhale the "odor of dusty cretonne" in the darkening room. Eveline looks around the room,
wondering at the yellowing picture of the priest, whose name she has never learned. Clearly, there is an aura of
spiritual corruption about the priest friend of her father, who would only say "He is in Melbourne now", a location
where many Irish prisoners were sent. Then, Eveline thinks of the store where she works and the lifeless position she
holds there with Miss Gavan, who often scolds her, "Look lively, Miss Hill, please".
Similarly, at home Eveline lives a stagnant life. She works every day and turns over her salary to her father. After her
mother's death, Eveline has had to do all the housework and cooking. And, yet, with all her drudgery and discontent
and even physical abuse by her father, Eveline is still uncertain about departing from her home with her sailor named
Frank. For, it is the Catholic duties of obedience to her father and caring for her brother that paralyze Eveline,
leaving her in the dusty house and the stagnant environment. Eveline, a victim of her self-delusion, surrenders to
the dust and hopeless paralysis of this self-deception.

Themes
1) THE PRISON OF ROUTINE
Restrictive routines and the repetitive, mundane details of everyday life mark the lives of Joyce’s Dubliners and
trap them in circles of frustration, restraint, and violence. Routine affects characters who face difficult
predicaments, but it also affects characters who have little open conflict in their lives.
The most consistent consequences of following mundane routines are loneliness and unrequited (not returned)
love. In “Araby,” a young boy wants to go to the bazaar to buy a gift for the girl he loves, but he is late because his
uncle becomes mired in the routine of his workday. In “A Painful Case” Mr. Duffy’s obsession with his predictable
life costs him a golden chance at love. Eveline, in the story that shares her name, gives up her chance at love by
choosing her familiar life over an unknown adventure, even though her familiar routines are tinged with sadness
and abuse. The circularity of these Dubliners’ lives effectively traps them, preventing them from being receptive
to new experiences and happiness.
2) THE DESIRE FOR ESCAPE
The characters in Dubliners may be citizens of the Irish capital, but many of them long for escape and adventure
in other countries. Such longings, however, are never actually realized by the stories’ protagonists. The schoolboy
yearning for escape and Wild West excitement in “An Encounter” is relegated to the imagination and to the
confines of Dublin, while Eveline’s hopes for a new life in Argentina dissolve on the docks of the city’s river. In
“Two Gallants”, Lenehan wishes to escape his life of schemes, but he cannot take action to do so. Mr. Doran
wishes to escape marrying Polly in “A Boarding House”, but he knows he must relent. The impulse to escape from
unhappy situations defines Joyce’s Dubliners, as does the inability to actually undertake the process.

3) THE INTERSECTION OF LIFE AND DEATH

Dubliners opens with “The Sisters”, which explores death and the process of remembering the dead, and closes
with “The Dead”, which invokes the quiet calm of snow that covers both the dead and the living. These stories
bookend the collection and emphasize its consistent focus on the meeting point between life and death.
The monotony of Dublin life leads Dubliners to live in a suspended state between life and death, in which each
person has a pulse but is incapable of profound, life-sustaining action.

Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop the text’s major themes.
1) PARALYSIS
Paralysis is seen by Joyce as a condition which is characteristic of modern man; the consequence of a frenetic and
impersonal city life which affects many of us and may have different sources; the frustrating situations of an
unfulfilling job, the unhappiness and loneliness caused by unsuccessful marriage or lack of friendship; a life which
many don’t like, but few are able to change. A common aspect among the characters in Dubliners is the nature of
failure they experience. All characters have a desire, they try to fulfill their lives by overcoming all the obstacles
but in the end they surrender because they do not have the will (courage, strength) to transform their wish into
action. This universal condition of inaction affects all the inhabitants of Dublin and it’s defined by Joyce as
paralysis.
In Dublin paralysis is not just a physical condition: it’s a spiritual stagnation of the self, a universal lack of courage,
growth that affects the Irish nation.
In other words it means spiritual and physical death. As a consequence Joyce’s Dublin becomes the symbol and
prototype of the paralyzed city of modernity. According to him Dublin “seemed to him the centre of paralysis”.
Dublin is portrayed as a static and provincial town with no cosmopolitan atmosphere of many other European
capital of that time. Eveline freezes like an animal, fearing the possible new experience of life away from home.

2) EPIPHANY
Characters in Dubliners experience both great and small revelations in their everyday lives, moments that Joyce
himself referred to as “epiphanies”, a word with connotations of religious revelation.
Apparently there is only one way to escape from the universal paralysis: epiphany, a word which means
“revelation”, “manifestation”. Joyce uses it to refer to the moments where the characters of Dubliners experience
the sudden revelation of their condition of paralysis. Unfortunately this revelation doesn’t lead to a real change in
their lives: it simply makes them more aware of how dead and paralyzed they are.
These epiphanies do not bring new experiences and the possibility of reform, as one might expect such moments
to.

3) BETRAYAL
Deception, deceit, and treachery mark nearly every relationship in the stories in Dubliners, demonstrating the
 unease (disagio) with which people attempt to connect with each other, both platonically and romantically. In
“The Dead”, Gabriel feels betrayed by his wife’s emotional outpouring for a former lover. This feeling evokes not
only the sense of humiliation that all of these Dubliners fear but also the tendency for people to categorize many
acts as “betrayal” in order to shift blame from themselves onto others.

4) RELIGION
References to priests, religious belief, and spiritual experience appear throughout the stories in Dubliners and
ultimately paint an unflattering portrait of religion. The presence of so many religious references also suggests
that religion traps Dubliners into thinking about their lives after death.

Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
1) WINDOWS
Windows in Dubliners consistently evoke the anticipation of events or encounters that are about to happen. Both
Eveline and Gabriel turn to windows when they reflect on their own situations, both of which center on the
relationship between the individual and the individual’s place in a larger context.

2) DUSK AND NIGHTTIME

Joyce’s Dublin is perpetually dark. No streams of sunlight or cheery (bright and pleasant) landscapes illuminate
these stories. Instead, a spectrum of gray and black underscores their somber tone. Characters walk through
Dublin at dusk. The darkness renders Dubliners’ experiences dire (terrible, frightening, fearful) and doomed
(destined, fated).

3) FOOD
Nearly all the characters in Dubliners eat or drink, and in most cases food serves as a reminder of both the
threatening dullness of routine and the joys and difficulties of togetherness (solidarity). Food in Dubliners allows
Joyce to portray his characters and their experiences through a substance that both sustains life yet also
symbolizes its restraints.

THE NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE

Joyce rejects the Victorian idea of the third-person omniscient narrator, but he uses the internal narrative
perspective: this means that each of the stories in Dubliners is narrated from the point of view of one of the
characters. Joyce adopts a realism which is a mix with free direct speech and free direct thought.
Joyce took the technique of the stream of consciousness.
This expression, used for the first time by William James, described the continuous flow of thoughts, feelings and
perceptions that fill the mind of a person. These thoughts don’t generally come to a person linearly but are often the
result of spontaneous free-associations. The mind jumps from one argument to another, from a past memory to a
future event, from a positive to a negative thought. Writers began to explore this process and adopt it in their
writings in order to obtain an original narrative technique. It was a way to enter the minds of characters.

ULYSSES
The novel takes place on a single day, Thursday June 16th 1904, which was a special day to Joyce because it was the
 day Nora Baracle, his future wife, expressed her love for him. During this day the 3 main characters wake up and
have various encounters in Dublin and go to sleep 18 hours later.
Central characters: Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged advertising canvasser is Joyce’s common man. He leaves home at
8am to buy his breakfast and returns at 2 pm the following morning. During these hours he turns up in many streets,
attends a funeral, endures misadventures and delight. Bloom meets Stephen Dedalus the alienated protagonist of A
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and becomes his adopted son. The alienated man rescues the alienated artist
from a brothel and takes him home.
Molly is Bloom’s wife a singer who is planning an afternoon of adultery with her music director.

The plot shows the ordinary life on an ordinary Dublin day.

Joyce placed his characters in houses he knew, drinking in pubs he had frequented, walking in streets he knew. He
made the very air of Dublin.
Consequently, Dublin becomes itself a character in this novel.
Stephen Dedalus, Mr Bloom and Mrs Bloom represent two aspects of human nature:
→ Stephen is pure intellect and embodies every young man seeking maturity
→ Mrs Bloom stands for flesh, as she identifies herself with her sensual nature and fecundity
→ Mr Bloom embodies the mankind

The theme of the novel is moral:

→ human life means suffering, falling but also struggling to ride and seek the good
→ the fragmentation of man’s life
→ the modern world lacks of heroism and values
→ the theme of exile

A revolutionary prose
Ulysses is famous for its complex structure; Joyce adopted the technical innovation of “stream of consciousness” to
express the unspoken language of the mind, so to show the chaotic flow of thoughts.
Joyce used flashbacks, suspension of speech, question and answer, juxtaposition of events. The language is rich of
puns (giochi di parole), images, contrasts, paradoxes, interruptions, symbols.

The epic method

As the title suggests Ulysses is related to Homer’s great epic Odyssey. The wanderings and tribulations of Homer’s
epic hero, his adventures through different countries and seas and his final return home to his wife are used in
Joyce’s Ulysses as a parallel to the event in the life of common men and women in modern Dublin.
Joyce, however uses the epic model to stress the lack of heroism, of ideals, of love and trust in the modern world.

Joyce used the structural framework of Odyssey:

● → The 24 hours of Bloom’s day correspond to the 24 books of the classical epic.
● → The 18 episodes correspond to as many incidents in Homer
● Joyce compares Homer’s hero to Bloom, Stephen to his son Telemachus, and Molly to Penelope.
● In the first episode called Telemachus, Stephen is evicted from his home by his housemates, just as Ulysses’ son is
forced to leave his home.
● In the Circe episode Bloom and Stephen meet at a brothel just as Ulysses‘ companions are turned into swines by the
witch Circe, so the two modern heroes almost lose themselves in the house of pleasure and the owner of the brothel
is a grotesque version of mythical Circe.

Allegorical meaning
Ulysses’ story has been taken to represent man’s journey through life.
The relation with Odyssey is a way to remark the deep difference between these two men.
Joyce stressed the limitations and lack of heroism of the modern man.
If Ulysses is exalted by Homer as a man who has seen many cities, Leopold Bloom only knows Dublin.

MOLLY BLOOM
Molly corresponds to Penelope, but unlike her, Molly is not faithful to her husband. Their relationship shows a lack
of passion.
The character of Molly seems to have been built by Joyce inspired by his wife Nora Barnacle, a hypothesis reinforced
by the fact that the day in which the story of the novel takes place is June 16, 1904, the date of the first meeting
between the two.
Molly is Leopold Bloom's unfaithful wife, she has an impulsive and initially insecure character, which undergoes a
real metamorphosis in the course of the narration. Following the parallelism with the Odyssey, she is compared to
Penelope, although there are several differences between the two women.
Molly, in fact, does not embody the prototype of a faithful woman and, in addition to having an extramarital affair,
she is decidedly modern, energetic and passionate, a dominant female figure that does not coincide with the
submissive role that Penelope plays in the Odyssey, given that a Molly is even tasked with closing the entire opera.
By entrusting her with this task, Joyce wants to reproduce the change in the role of women in society that was taking
place in the years of publication. This could be attributed to James Joyce's stay in Paris, where he presumably
became acquainted with the then nascent female emancipation movement of the Suffragettes.