James joyce

1882—1941

James Joyce, an Irish novelist, is considered one of the 'fathers' (together with Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka) of the art of Modernism in the 20th c. A talented writer, he believed that Realism no longer satisfied the needs of society and was among the first who destroyed it by their art. Ulysses (1914 – 1921) became the result of his creative activity and his search of the new essence and form of art.

The first prewar period of his writing is marked by his articles of literary critique, a collection of poetry Chamber Music  Joyce scoffed at chamber music of the contemporaries, reducing its meaning (importance). In a basis of the name is obscene pun: chamber pot – «ночной горшок», chamber music – «непристойное журчание» (1907), short stories collected in a book Dubliners (1903 – 1905, published in 1914).

Joyce's first novel The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is the largely autobiographical story of a middle-class Irish boy, Stephen Dedalus, from his infancy in the strongly Catholic, intensely nationalistic environment of Dublin in the 1880s to his departure from Ireland, having realized that in order to fulfill his destiny as an artist he must rise above the vulgarity of his environment and live apart from others. Despite guilt about his sexual desires, Stephen has been tempted to enter the priesthood. In the following extract, walking by the seashore, he sees his friends, a group of Christian Brothers, swimming in the water. They call out his name in Greek, which causes him great excitement, 'a flash of understanding'. He feels he is flying like that 'hawk-like man', Dedalus in Greek myth, an artist of wonderful powers who escaped from Crete by making wings for himself and his son Icarus and flying across the sea. He rejects 'the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar' and decides instead to become a poet.

An important role in Joyce's stories and novels is played by 'epiphanies'. Joyce used the word 'epiphany' to describe an intense flash of understanding, which illuminates the most commonplace of objects. This literary device is used both in short stories and in novels. The post-war period brought the most famous of Joyce's novels — Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan 's Wake (1939), which left unfinished after the writer's death.

In Ulysses, Joyce created a completely new style of writing which allows the reader to move inside the minds of the characters, and presents their thoughts and feelings in a continuous stream, breaking all the usual rules of description, speech and punctuation. This style is known as 'stream of consciousness', and it has had a powerful influence on the work of many other writers.

This term was first used by the American philosopher, William James (brother of Henry James, a writer) in 1890 to describe the flow of thoughts of the waking mind. Now it is also widely used to describe a narrative method consisting of the characters' unspoken thoughts and feelings, as they pass by often without logical sequence or syntax. A related term, 'interior monologue', is used to describe the inner movement of consciousness in character's mind without the obvious intervention of the author.

Ulysses has no real plot, but follows the three main characters — Stephen, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly – through a day in Dublin. The characters and parts of the novel are connected with and reflect characters and events from ancient Greek stories, as the title suggests. The novel is funny, touching and often satirical; some events are clearly fanciful, while other parts of the book are completely realistic. Joyce is again concerned with the artist and the nature of the act of artistic creation, and also with the relationship between mind and body, especially when he is attempting to show all the half-formed thoughts that go through the characters' minds. At the end of the novel, Molly is lying in bed; among many thoughts that go through her mind, she is planning a musical evening:

what shall I wear shall I wear a white rose those cakes in Liptons I love the smell of a rich big shop at 7 jd a pound or the other ones with the cherries in them of course a nice plant for the middle of the table I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers ...

Finnegan's Wake (1939) takes one step further the new type of language which Joyce was starting to create in Ulysses; here, not only the sentences are mixed up but the forms of the words themselves. Again, Joyce uses references to ancient stories to express the themes of the nature of creation (of the artist and of God) and the humour and tragedy of human life; but the difficulty of the language, in which Joyce is forcing as many associations as possible into each word, gives many readers great problems of understanding.

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time…”