English Literature

Lecture Seven

James Joyce (II). Myth and Literature: Ulysses; Finnegans Wake

1. Ulysses (1922)

Joyces third work marks a further step on his journey to aesthetic fulfillment & artistic craftsmanship. If A Portrait is a flight from the labyrinth of nationality, politics, sexuality, religion, or tradition, Ulysses seems to propose a flight into the labyrinth and work towards accumulation and inclusiveness, aiming to transform the complexity of the immediate, everyday life into art. The novel- published in Paris, in a limited edition of 1,000 signed copies- was banned both in England and America and had to wait until 1933 when its free circulation was allowed in the US. Only three years later, in 1936, was the book available on the English market. 1922 saw the publication of the two masterpieces that would mark experimental fiction and modernist poetry in the first decades of the 20 th c. One is Ulysses, the other one T.S.Eliots The Waste Land. Different as they may be, they share a common compositional strategy: the use of myth, and, partially, a common theme: that of the quest. For Eliot, the myth is that of the Holy Grail and the quest is for the ways to regenerate the deserted waste land, his metaphor for the crisis of modern civilization. For Joyce, the myth is that of Ulysses, and the quest is for the all-inclusive synthesis that would bring together the various interconnections of contraries: the world of action

& the world of art, idealism & realism, individualism & collectivism, the spirit & the body, the son & the father, the exile & the citizen. Basically, Ulysses is an account of one day, 16 June, 1904 in the lives of 3 Dubliners: the lower middle-class Jew, Leopold Bloom, working in advertising, his unfaithful wife, Marion Tweedy (Molly), a soprano, and the young poet Stephen Dedalus, now a more mature figure than in A Portrait. Thus, the novel is the description of a limited number of events, involving a limited number of characters, in a limited space. From here, Joyce takes the reader into the labyrinth of Homeric legend, multiple symbolism and an extraordinary display of linguistic virtuosity. Joyces ambition is to turn his story into a microcosm of all human experience by presenting his plot in such a way that the events become symbolic of the activity of Man in the World. The underlying device employed to this purpose is his use of the myth of Ulysses from Homers Odyssey to such an extent that each of the 18 chapters in the novel corresponds in some ways to an episode in the Odyssey,written in its own distinctive language and structured with musical and color codes. Whats more, an analogy can be established between the chapters and the parts of the human body. As he wrote in a letter, the novel is an epic of two races (IsraeliteIrish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a dayIt is also a sort of encyclopedia. My intention is to transpose myth sub specie temporis nostri. Indeed, the correspondence between the ancient myth and Joyces novel has become common place. There is a displacement of the mythical and the heroic at the character level: Bloom is a modern Ulysses, Stephen acts as Telemachus, Molly has replaced Penelope.

In terms of structure, too, the novel, like the ancient epic is divided into three sections: the first three chapters ( Telemachus, Nestor, Proteus) are a parody of Telemachus looking for his father, Ulysses; the next 12 chapters are concerned with the peregrinations of Bloom trying to return home; the last three chapters (Eumaeus, Ithaca. Penelope) find Bloom at his house again and bring about the long- awaited reconciliation of father and son, husband and wife. Commenting on the mythical framework used to structure the novel, T. S. Eliot remarked that: No one else has ever built a novel on such a foundation beforeIn using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Joyce, be believed, had found a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary historyInstead of the narrative method, we may now use the mythic method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art.. Joyce regarded Homers Ulysses as the most complete man in the western cultural history, portrayed in all his puzzling & contradictory aspects: coward & hero, prudent & careless, weak & strong, husband & lover, father & son, sublime & ridiculous. So, he makes his hero, Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, into a modern Ulysses and, in so doing, he makes him Everyman, and his Dublin the World.

The novel begins at 8 oclock on the morning of June 16, 1904, introducing SD who had returned to Dublin because of his mothers fatal illness. He now lives at Sandymount, south of Dublin, in an old military tower on the shore. In the first three episodes (the Telemachiad), focused on Stephen, he appears as the distant, uncompromising artist, rejecting all the advances of the normal world, embittered by the lack of genuine affection in his family, or in his friends. He is still the

incomplete man to be later contrasted with the complete LB who embodies the idea of experience and mature practice. After following Stephen in his early morning activities and learning the main currents of his mind, we go, in the 4th chapter, Calypso to the Blooms household and meet Molly who is expecting a visit from Blazes Boylan, her lover. In the next 11 episodes we follow closely Blooms every activity in the city of Dublin: he goes to the post office and to a public bath (V.Lotus-Eaters); attends the funeral of a friend, which makes him think of his fathers suicide and of the death of his infant son, Rudy (VI.Hades); goes to the office of Freemans Journal to arrange for the printing of an advertisment (VII.Aeolus); has lunch and then barely avoids an encounter with Blazes Boylan (VIII.Lestrygonians); on the steps of the National Library, he muses on Shakespeare and on Hamlets adulterous mother. The allusion to adultery resembles his own situation, while the concept of fatherhood anticipates his meeting with SD (IX.Scylla & Charybdis). The next four sections, while still following LP through the streets of Dublin, enlarge the perspective (X.Wandering Rocks offers a brilliant panorama of the city) or bring up other issues: music (XI. Sirens); anti-semitic violence (XII. Cyclops); sexuality ( XIII. Nausicaa) At each successive step, the contents of LPs mind are revealed through the use of the stream of consciousness technique, through retrospection & anticipation, directly, without any authorial intrusion. Without any warning, we may move in the same paragraph from the description of a characters action to the evocation of the characters mental or emotional response to that action. The response is always multiple: it derives from the characters present situation, from his past history, or from a whole complex of analogies or literary echoes. Past and present mingle in the texture of his prose because they mingle in the texture of consciousness. This temporal simultaneity can be indicated by puns, parody or

pastiche, by changing types of discourse, by quotations, by sudden shifts of the subject matter, and this stylistic virtuosity points to the ever changing, kaleidoscopic nature of human awareness. ( In Proteus, for example, Stephen does not go to visit his uncle and aunt but, passing by their house, imagines the conversation that would have taken place in his house if he had paid the visit and had then returned home to tell his parents about it.) Finally Bloom and Stephen, who have been missing each other all day long, get together in Chapter XIV. Oxen of the Sun. By this time it is late and Stephen, who had been drinking with some medical students is feeling sick. Bloom joins them in their drinking and then, moved by a paternal sympathy for Stephen, follows and protects him in his subsequent adventures. Chapter XV. Circe is a climactic moment of the novel. Bloom worn out with fatigue and Stephen, far gone in drink, experience guilt & remorse. They purge their souls through a series of hallucinations whereby their subconscious and unconscious mind is presented in dramatic form, and their hiddenmost thoughts and feelings are revealed with a frankness and completeness unique in literature.

The last three episodes (XVI. Eumaeus; XVII. Ithaca; XVIII. Penelope) are devoted to the homecoming, i.e., the Homeric nostos (return) Bloom takes Stephen home, gives him a meal and, after Stephens departure, retires to bed, curled up, like a phoetus in a womb: Womb? Weary? He rests. He has travelled. With? When? Where?. It is now 2 a.m., June 17. The novel ends with a long soliloqui. Molly, representing the idea of sexuality & reproduction on which all human life is based, closes the book with a long monologue which reveals daringly and completely, her experience as a woman. Her concluding words are a strong, optimistic affirmation of life: Yes, I said. Yes, I will. Yes!.

Ulysses is a multi-layered narrative and a comedy of multiple identities(D. Daiches). On the level of realistic description, the novel can be read as a vivid evocation of early 20th c. Dublin. The clarity of details, the colors, smells and noises of the city, the natural tone of dialogues, all belong to the inventory of the realistic method. On the level of psychological analysis, it is a deep and moving exploration of the consciousness of the three main protagonists. On the level of style, it exhibits the most fascinating linguistic virtuosity. By using themes from literature ( Homer, Dante, Shakespeare), philosophy & history, or religion, in an ironical and parodical manner, the novel weaves a subtle pattern of allusions & suggestions which illuminate many aspects of human experience. On a deep, symbolic and cultural level, the novel explores the paradoxes of human loneliness & sociability, the problems posed by the relation between generations, between parent & child, or between the sexes. All in all, Ulysses is an impressive achievement that marked decisively not only the evolution of 20th c. fiction, but also the way we read literature. By its all-encompassing ambition, by its linguistic brilliance, Ulysses is a novel that never exhausts its meaning. It is a heremeneutic text that continues to require interpretation. In the words of M. Bradbury, Joyce was not only constructing a modern book; he was constructing, with it, the modern deconstructive reader.

2. Finnegans Wake (1939)

J. Joyce once declared that Ulysses took him five years and a lifetime to write. FW, which he considered his masterpiece, took him 16 years, but, in the words of one critic, the reading of the book is a life sentence.

The work began as an open-ended project which Joyce had entitled Work in Progress, before deciding on the definite title, but it has remained, in a sense, a work in progress, since, being structured on a cyclical pattern, it has no proper ending. Nor does it have a plot, a setting, or clearly delineated characters. If in Ulysses the symbolic dimension is as important as the realistic, in FW he gives up realism altogether. This vast story of a symbolic Irishmans cosmic dream develops by enormous reverberations & by a continuous expansion of meaning, the brilliant play upon words uses every conceivable source in history, mythology or Joyces personal experience. The whole book being a dream, Joyce invents his own dream language in which words are combined, distorted or created by fitting together bits of other words, often drawn from different languages and employed with several meanings at once, so as to achieve complex semantic clusters simultaneously. The title is taken from an Irish-American music-hall song, Finnegans Wake, about Tim Finnegan, a bricklayer and drinker. He falls off a ladder when drunk but revives when someone spills whiskey on him during the wake. The theme of death & resurrection, of cycles of change both in human time and in the course of history is central to the novel. If Ulysses resorts to myth, the organizing principle here is the cyclical theory of history as elaborated by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico in The New Science(1725). According to Vico, history passes through 4 stages: the divine/theocratic- when people are goverened by their fear of the supernatural the aristocratic/heroic age, as reflected, for example, in Homer & Beowulf the democratic/individualistic the final stage of chaos which sends man back into the supernatural and starts the cycle all over again.

Joyce, like Yeats saw his own generation as in the final stage, awaiting the collapse that would then make rebirth possible. FW- divided into 4 parts, after Vicos model- is difficult, if not impossible to summarize.

It opens with Finnegans fall, then introduces his successor Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker who is Everyman and whose dream makes up the novel. He is presented as having guilty feelings about an indecency which he committed, or may have committed in Phoenix Park, Dublin. He is married to Anna Livia Plurabelle, or ALP, who is also Eve, Iseult, Isolde, Isobel, Ireland, or the river Liffey. They have 2 sons Shem & Shaun (or Kevin & Jerry) who suggest the basic dichotomy in human nature: introvert/extrovert, artist & practical man. Actions can be comic & grotesque, sad or tender, desperate, passionate or ordinary, characters change into one another or even into inanimate objects and the dream setting keeps shifting all the time. The initials of the dreamers name indicate his universality: H C E: Here Comes Everybody, but, at the same time he is a particular person who keeps a pub in a Dublin suburb. His mysterious misbehaviour in Phoenix Park is, in a way, the Original Sin. For he is Adam, Man in History, as well as a primitive giant and the Great Father: HCE: Haveth Childers Everywhere. Other characters that appear and change in the dream/narrative are the Twelve Customers, who are also twelve jurymen and public opinion, or the Four Old Men, who are also judges, the four evangelists, or the four elemets. They all help to expand the texture of multiple significance that is so characteristic of Finnegans Wake.