Modernism – Joyce, Ulysses

Marius Hentea

Joyce Resources on the Net

• http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rickard/Joyce.html– A comprehensive list of fascinating websites on Joyce, with a brief description of each

website– The following are very useful websites:– http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rac101/concord/texts/ulysses/ [electronic concordance; you

can click on any word in Ulysses and see how it is used elsewhere in the text]– http://www.joyceimages.com [images to accompany every chapter of Ulysses]– http://www.michaelgroden.com/notes/ [a guide to reading Ulysses]– https://joycefoundation.osu.edu [International James Joyce Foundation – updates on

scholarship, Joyce studies, etc.]

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Biographical Info

• Born 2 February 1882 in Rathgar (Dublin suburb)

• Father John Stanislaus Joyce (then employed in the Collector General’s Office in Dublin)

• Mother Mary Jane Joyce (née Murray)

• Joyce family had been well-off but was sliding into poverty (despite John’s position earning about 800 pounds per annum); frequently had to move house when they ran out of money, etc.

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Early Education

• Aged seven, James Joyce sent to Clongowes Wood College on half fees – generally considered the best school in Ireland for Catholics

• The school was forty miles from the Joyce residence in Bray

• School run by Jesuits; classical learning; rote memory

• ‘The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with strong cries … He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of players and his eyes were weak and watery’. [Portrait]

• Leaves the school in 1891; illness and then lack of money in the family

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Education, continued

• From 1891 to 1893, in and out of various schools (father no longer working, debts mounting, family moving to escape angry landlords, etc.)

• 1893: stars at Belvedere College (a day school); also run by Jesuits– The Jesuitical education process: reading, translation, explication, analysis (of

poetic/rhetorical structure) and eruditio (knowledge/learning)– Young Joyce a brilliant student; also very religious– Some doubts about religion come about because of sexual temptations (masturbation,

etc.)

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University Years

• In 1898 Joyce enters University College Dublin (which had been founded for the advancement of Catholics; the already well-established Trinity College Dublin was for Protestants)

• Joyce not a keen student: he cut many classes and did not get very high marks

• But he read widely: in his first year at university, he read Carlyle, Newman, Macaulay, De Quincey, Ruskin, D’Annunzio, Dante, Zola, Turgenev, Pater, Yeats, Blake, Maeterlinck, Arthur Symon’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, and lots of Ibsen

• Gets a degree in languages (French/Italian) in 1902

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Entry into literature

• First published text: ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’, appearing in Fortnightly Review in 1900 (when Joyce was only eighteen)

• In 1902 moves to Paris, writes for Irish papers (although the ostensible purpose of the move was to study medicine)

• Called back to Ireland in April 1903 (mother dying); back in Dublin Joyce able to make more contacts in the Irish literary scene

• 16 June 1904: Joyce meets Nora Barnacle, they elope a few months later, arriving in Zurich in October 1904, but then quickly moves to Trieste and then Pola (in modern-day Croatia) to teach English; back in Trieste in early 1905

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Dubliners

• First stories written in 1903/1904 – a version of the stories sent to London publishers in 1905

• A contract arrives from Grant Richards in early 1905, but the publisher asks for changes in certain stories

• ‘My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order’.

• The stories, Joyce added, were written ‘in a style of scrupulous meanness’• Book withdrawn; only published in June 1914 (book had been rejected by nearly 20

publishers)

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Literary Debuts

• First published book: Chamber Music (book of poems; published 1907)

• At the time Joyce also writing a novel: Stephen Hero (the book which eventually became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – published 1916)

• Return to Dublin in 1909 – opens the country’s first cinema (it loses money, and the financiers sell it off a year later)

• Finally catches a break with Dubliners after Ezra Pound writes to Joyce, asking him to contribute to some little reviews – the first story from ‘Dubliners’ appeared in The Egoist in June 1912

• Then in June 1914 Dubliners was published by Grant Richards – with Joyce contributing to the costs (he had to buy the first 120 copies himself at trade price)

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Writing Ulysses

• When war breaks out, Joyce monitored by the secret police (his brother arrested for his irredentist political views)

• Moved to Zurich in June 1915; stayed there for four years – the bulk of Ulysses written there. Joyce supported himself by some teaching but also through patronage (obtained through Pound’s help)

• Unlike his other works, Joyce was fairly certain that Ulysses would be published because of Pound’s interventions – Little Review announces that it would serialize this prose masterpiece which was ‘rather better than Flaubert’. The first episode published in March 1918.

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Publishing Ulysses

• First began to appear in little reviews

• But the US Post office confiscated the January 1919 issue of the Little Review, burning it for obscenity

• Joyce family moved to Paris summer 1920; publication of Ulysses eventually occurs in 1922 through literary contacts there (Sylvia Beach – owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop)

• Censorship battles in the US and UK (see Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses [2014])

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Main issues to consider

• Form: one-day novel, an epic, etc.

• Style: specific use of language in different episodes; stream of consciousness (the interior mind of Stephen, Bloom, Molly, etc.)

• Relationship to Ireland: how is the novel positioned with regard to Irish culture and the English language

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Why the Odyssey?

• Each episode in Ulysses roughly corresponds to a book in The Odyssey (although the lofty concerns in The Odyssey are not equivalent to the ‘triviality’ in Joyce’s mock epic)

• The Western narrative of founding and adventure, of travel and vagabondage, of different cultures and of home

• Unlike the crucible of war depicted in the Iliad (which begins in the middle of a seemingly never-ending siege), the Odyssey takes as its theme private life (the longing for home, love that endures across separation, etc.) and is more spread out in terms of geography and time

• ‘The motif of wandering … The motif of the artist, who will lay down his life rather than renounce his interest’. (Joyce)

• One reading strategy: seeing Homer in Joyce (parallels between the two texts) – but perhaps it is more interesting to see departures, variations?

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The Art of the Everyday

Out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama … Life we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world, not as we apprehend them in the world of faery. The great human comedy in which each has a share, gives limitless scope to the true artist, to-day as yesterday and as in years gone … The sooner we understand our true position, the better.

‘Drama and Life’, a talk Joyce gave in 1900 to UCD’s Literary and Historical Society [largely drawing upon Ibsen]

The RELATIONSHIP this has to HISTORY: history reconceived, rewritten, made private

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Form: Circadian novel

• 16 June 1904: a day without history or importance

• The focus on one day: níl ann ach lá dár saol (it’s only a day in our lives)

• ‘A single day may prove the very antithesis of dullness. By recording the hour-by-hour variations in individuals, Joyce can show their selves in transformation. The very fact that no great events transpire on 16 June 1904 leaves the characters free to attend to their own thoughts as a discipline of self-exploration, rather than have those thoughts wholly dictated by others’ [Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 49]

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‘Telemachus’

• Telemachus: the son of Ulysses and Penelope; he seeks out news of his father so that Penelope’s suitors can be expelled from Ithaka

• Begins at 8am – introduces Stephen Dedalus (the narrative centre of the episode – which is already cut up, not strict in its representation of chronological time)

• Although Stephen Dedalus is not ‘new’ – protagonist of Portrait– Portrait ends with Stephen in 1902, leaving Dublin for Paris – his motto: Non serviam; his tools:

‘silence, exile, cunning’– Stephen has freed himself of his education at the hands of the Jesuits in Portrait– In ‘Telemachus’, though, Stephen is ‘[a] server of a servant’ (12) [Ireland as the servant of

England and Rome]– What do we know about Stephen in the first chapter? (relationship to father and mother, to his

native country, etc.)

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‘Telemachus’

• Begins in Martello tower – three main characters: Malachi (Buck) Mulligan, Stephen, Haines (the Englishman)

• A kind of dandified outpost – the tower had been built to stop Napoleon’s invasion; now taken over by aesthetes and bohemians

• Does Joyce applaud the bohemian life in Ulysses?

• The milkwoman – ‘[s]ilk of the kine’ [síoda ma mbó; Mother Ireland]– But no real connection to her ancient race (doesn’t speak Gaelic, etc.) – What is the relationship of Ireland to England in the opening chapter?

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Relationship to Ireland

• ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight’. (Portrait)

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