JAMES JOYCE
DUBLIN: 1882-1904
James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest surviving child of ten children, four
boys and six girls. He was largely educated at Jesuit schools, before finally enrolling at
University College, Dublin, where he gained a Bachelor of Arts degree with a focus on
Modern Languages in 1902.
Political and literary movements which had as their objective the freeing of Ireland from
English dominance held very little attraction for him. His interest was for a broader
European culture, and this led him to begin to think of himself as a European rather than an
Irishman.
His attitude contrasted greatly with that of his literary contemporary W.B. Yeats, who was
trying to rediscover the Irish Celtic identity by referring back to the past in order to create a
national conscience. Joyce, on the contrary, believed that the only way to increase Ireland’s
awareness was by offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European, cosmopolitan
viewpoint. He established himself on the Continent and spent some time in Paris, where he
intended to pursue a writing career ,but his mother’s fatal illnessin1903brought him back to
Dublin.
It was in this period that he began to seriously imagine his future career as a writer and
published his first short story, The Sisters, in the Evening Telegraph. It would eventually
serve as the opening story in his Dubliners collection. In June 1904, he met and fell in love
with Nora Barnacle, a 20-year-old girl who was working as a chambermaid in a hotel. They
had their first date on 16th the “Bloomsday” of Ulysses.
ORDINARY DUBLIN
Though Joyce went into voluntary exile at the age of22,he set all his works in Ireland and
mostly in the city of Dublin. His effort was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary
people doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives (→ T102, T103). By portraying these
ordinary Dubliners, he succeeded in representing the whole of man’s mental, emotional and
biological reality, fusing it with the cultural heritage of modern civilisation as well as with
the reality of the natural world around him.
THE REBELLION AGAINST THE CHURCH
In spite of his Jesuit education, Joyce challenged Catholicism. His hostility towards the
Church was the revolt of the artist-heretic against the official doctrine, or the struggle
between an aesthete-heretic and a provincial Church which had taken possession of Irish
minds. But the conflict was even more painful; it was like a conflict between a son and his
parents linked to the quest for his artistic potentialities.
STYLE
Joyce, influenced by the French Symbolists, believed in the impersonality of the artist, as
T.S. Eliot did. The artist’s task was to render life objectively in order to give back to the
readers a true image of it. This necessarily led to the isolation and detachment of the artist
from society.
As his works did not have to express the author’s viewpoint, Joyce used different points of
view and narrative techniques appropriate to the characters portrayed. His style, technique
and language developed from the realism and the disciplined prose of Dubliners, through an
exploration of the characters’ impressions and points of view, through the use of free direct
speech, to the interior monologue with two levels of narration: such as advice used to give a
realistic framework to the characters’ formless thoughts or also the extreme interior
monologue.
So language broke down into a succession of words without punctuation or grammatical
connections, into infinite puns, and reality became the place of psychological projections, of
symbolic archetypes and cultural knowledge.
A SUBJECTIVE PERCEPTION OF TIME
Joyce was a Modernist writer. His themes are reworked in such a way as to become
gradually less relevant than the ‘narrative’ itself. The facts become confused, they are
explored from different points of view simultaneously and are presented as ‘clues’ and not
through the voice of an omniscient narrator. Geographical, almost sociological, details are
interspersed in Dubliners and in Ulysses, and yet Joyce transcends photographic realism,
since he meticulously collects and analyses the impressions and thoughts that an outer
event, at a given moment, has caused in the inner world of the character.
It follows that Joyce’s stories and novels open in medias res with the analysis of a particular
moment, and that the portrait of the character is based on introspection rather than on
description. Time is not perceived as objective but as subjective, leading to psychological
change. Thus the accurate description of Dublin is not strictly derived from external reality,
but from the characters’ floating mind.
DUBLINERS
STRUCTURE AND SETTING
Dubliners consists of 15 short stories; they all lack obvious action, but they disclose human
situations and moments of intensity, and lead to amoral, social or spiritual revelation. The
opening stories deal with childhood and youth in Dublin; the others, advancing in time and
expanding in scope, concern the middle years of characters and their social, political or
religious affairs.
Whereas most Victorian writers had celebrated the developments in civilisation that came
along with the rise of cities, Joyce, being a Modernist novelist, was hostile to city life,
finding that it degraded its citizens. In fact, his Dublin is a place where true feeling and
compassion for others do not exist, where cruelty and selfishness lie just below the surface.
The stories are arranged into four groups, as Joyce explained: ‘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 last story, The Dead, was a late addition and can be considered Joyce’s first
masterpiece. It summarises themes and motifs of the other 14 stories of the collection, but it
functions more as an epilogue. It also anticipates Joyce’s move away from the short story
toward the novel.
CHARACTERS
It was the oppressive effects of religious, political, cultural and economic forces on the lives
of lower-middle-class Dubliners that provided Joyce with the raw material for a
psychologically realistic picture of Dubliners as afflicted people. Everyone in Dublin seems
to be caught up in an endless web of despair. Even when they want to escape, Joyce’s
Dubliners are unable to because they are spiritually weak. The young woman in Eveline is
a perfect example. Instead of choosing a new life in Buenos Aires, she decides to stay in
Dublin.
REALISM AND SYMBOLISM
The description in each story is realistic and extremely concise, with an abundance of
external details, even the most unpleasant and depressing ones. The use of realism is mixed
with symbolism, since external details generally have a deeper meaning. The name of
certain objects is carefully chosen and stands out from the naturalistic context in which they
are placed. For example, the choice of the term ‘street organ’, which is also called
‘harmonium’ in Eveline, in contrast to the everyday words for the rest of the furniture in the
sitting room, takes on a symbolic meaning.
It points out the general ‘disharmony’ of Eveline’s family, where the dead mother was a
victim of the aggressive father and Eveline now shares the same destiny.
Religious symbolism can also be found, like the holy chalice which is mysteriously broken
and is crucial to the real meaning of The Sisters. Even colour symbolism is widely
employed in the collection: brown, grey and yellow frequently suggest the pervading
atmosphere of despair and paralysis.
THE USE OF EPIPHANY
Joyce thought that the function of symbolism was to take the reader beyond the usual
aspects of life through the analysis of the particular. To this end he employed a peculiar
technique called ‘epiphany’, that is, ‘the sudden spiritual manifestation’ caused by a trivial
gesture, an external object or a banal situation, which reveals the character’s inner truths. So
at these revelatory moments the reader’s attention focuses on the real meaning of the
narrative.
STYLE
Even though Joyce’s major innovations in style come in his more mature works, Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake, his style in Dubliners is characterised by two distinct elements: the
interior monologue and patterned repetition of images, that is, chiasmus. In the first three
short stories, which make up the childhood section, Joyce employs a first person narrator,
who remains nameless and not identified. It may be the same little boy for each of them, but
we can never be certain.
This narrator describes events from the point of view of the young boy; this allows the
reader to penetrate the boy’s mind and consequently to understand him better. For the other
12 stories a third-person narrator is employed: he often shares a particular character’s
perspective and tends to reflect the language and the sensitivity of the person who is being
described. The narrator tends to disappear in the interior monologue, which is in the form of
free direct speech: the protagonist’s pure thoughts are introduced without any reporting
verbs, which implies the disappearance of the narrator from the text. This allows the reader
to acquire direct knowledge of the character’s mind. The syntactical structure maintains
exclamations, questions, repetitions, interjections and exaggerations. The language of
Dubliners appears simple, objective and neutral. It is always adapted to the characters
according to their age, social class and role. Chiasmus can create melodic effects, as in the
final sentence of The Dead; the final paragraph is often considered one of the most
beautiful in 20th century literature: ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling
faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the
living and the dead.’
PARALYSIS
Paralysis is a pervasive theme in Dubliners; it is present from beginning to end and becomes
gradually more powerful and universal. The paralysis which Joyce wanted to portray is both
physical – resulting from external forces – and moral – linked to religion, politics and
culture. Joyce’s Dubliners accept their condition either because they are not aware of it or
because they lack the courage to break the chains that bind them (→ T102). However, the
moral centre of Dubliners is not paralysis alone but its revelation to its victims. Coming to
awareness or self realisation marks the climax of these stories; knowing oneself is a basis of
morality if not the morality itself. The main theme is the failure to find a way out of
‘paralysis’. The opposite of paralysis is ‘escape’ and its consequent failure. It originates
from an impulse caused by a sense of enclosure that many characters experience, but none
of them succeeds in freeing themselves.
ULYSSES
PLOT
The whole novel takes place on a single day, Thursday, June 16, 1904, which was special to
Joyce because it was the day that Nora Barnacle, his future wife, made her love clear to him.
During the course of this day, three main characters wake up, have various encounters in
Dublin and go to sleep eighteen hours later.
The central character, Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged advertising canvasser and non-
practicing Jew, is Joyce’s common man. He leaves his home at eight o’clock to buy his
breakfast and returns finally at two the following morning; in the hours in-between, he lands
on the shores of many streets, attends a funeral, endures misadventures and delight.
During his wanderings, Bloom meets Stephen Dedalus, who is the alienated protagonist of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and who becomes, momentarily, his adopted son:
the alienated common man rescues the alienated artist from a brothel, and takes him home
where the paralysis of their fatigue prevents them from achieving a personal communion.
Finally, there is Bloom’s wife, Molly, a voluptuous singer who is planning an afternoon of
adultery with her music director.
THE RELATION TO ODYSSEY
As its title suggests, Ulysses is related to Homer’s great epic the Odyssey, the tale of
Ulysses and his travels after the Trojan War. Joyce used the Odyssey as a structural
framework for his book, arranging its characters and events around Homer’s heroic model,
with Bloom as Ulysses, Stephen as his son Telemachus and Molly as the faithful Penelope.
Ulysses is divided into three parts and eighteen episodes, as its chapters are usually called:
‘Telemachiad’ (chapters 1-3), ‘Odyssey’ (chapters 4-15), ‘Nostos’ (chapters 16-18),
embodying the three main characters, and imitating the three parts of the Odyssey. While
the Homeric parallels are the most important structural device in the novel, each chapter is
additionally organised around a different hour, a colour, an organ of the body, a sense, a
symbol, a narrative technique suitable for the subject-matter.
THE SETTING
Ulysses is the climax of Joyce’s creativity and sums up the themes and techniques he had
developed in his previous works. It was designed as a detailed account of ordinary life on an
ordinary Dublin day and Joyce planned each movement of each character on each street as
though he were playing chess.
He placed them in houses he knew, drinking in pubs he had frequented, walking on
cobblestones he retraced. He made the very air of Dublin, the atmosphere, the feeling, the
place, almost indistinguishable, certainly inseparable, from his human characters.
Consequently, Dublin becomes itself a character in this novel.
THE REPRESENTATION OF HUMAN NATURE (THEMES)
Stephen Dedalus, Mr Bloom and Mrs Bloom are more than individuals: they represent two
aspects of human nature. Stephen is pure intellect and embodies every young man seeking
maturity; in his stream of consciousness, usually stimulated by sense impressions, he
associates things by resemblance.
Mrs Bloom stands for flesh, since she identifies herself totally with her sensual nature and
fecundity; her train of thought, while she is lying in the darkness at night, is carried on by
her own memories, one triggering another by a kind of association which is simply literal
(for example one man in her life reminds her of another t166). Mr Bloom, uniting the
extremes, is everybody, the whole of mankind; in his stream of consciousness things are
linked by cause and effect or by being near in space/time.
The theme of the novel, implied by the quest or journey, is moral: human life means
suffering, falling but also struggling to rise and seek the good
THE MYTHICAL METHOD
Joyce’s Ulysses was a new form of prose based on the mythical method. This allowed the
author to make a parallel with the Odyssey and provides the book with a symbolic, cross-
temporal meaning; Homer’s myth was used to give the characters another dimension and to
express the universal in the particular.
In the essay Ulysses, Order and Myth (1923) T.S. Eliot explained the mythical method: “It
is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”.
A REVOLUTIONARY PROSE
Ulysses is famous for many things, from its complex structure to its difficulty, from its
brilliantly realized characters to its 'obscenities'; but what really marks it is its revolutionary
prose. In fact, Joyce combined several methods to present a variety of matters.
The stream of consciousness technique; the cinematic technique with the literary equivalents
of close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots, suspension of speech; question and answer;
dramatic dialogue; and the juxtaposition of events, with the consequent construction of
order and unity from their randomness, enabled the writer to render his characters' inner life
creating the so-called 'collage technique', quite similar to the techniques used by the cubist
artists who depicted a scene from all perspectives.
In Ulysses Joyce brought to perfection the interior monologue employing both the two
levels of narration (t165), one external to the character's mind, and the other internal, and
only the mind level of narration, with the character's thoughts flowing freely (t166) without
any interruption coming from the external world.
The language used is rich in puns, images, contrasts, paradoxes, juxtapositions,
interruptions, false clues, and symbols; the range of vocabulary and registers is amazing,
moreover in almost every episode slang, catchphrases, nicknames, even expressions taken
from advertising are present and used to voice the unspoken activity of the mind. Foreign
words, literary quotations and allusions to other texts are other important linguistic features.
