Joyce had a musical ear and the sound of prose was always extremely important to him. A golden rule for the reader is 'when in doubt,read aloud'.
Language was his raw material,and he applied to it the kind of extreme tests and standards more usually expected of poetry.
He displayed the same standards of integrity in dealing with his subject matter, an uncompromising realist writing of areas of human experience previously regarded as too mean,too personal,too intimate or too risque to be made the subject of art.
In particular,he blew away the cobwebs surrounding the Victorian treatment of sexuality and presented it in an honest manner that was revolutionary.In doing so,he heroically expanded the frontiers of human spiritual development.
Joyce,above all else, is the quintessential modernist recorder of city life.
Despite his love for the city,Joyce was ruthlessly unsentimental about it.
"If Dublin were ever to be destroyed, it could be rebuilt from the pages of my works."
-Well,the boast is not strictly true. There is very little architectural detail of the city in Joyce's writings. He was more interested in the lives of Dublin's citizens than the building which housed them. It was the moral and psychological landscape of the town that fascinated him.
Joyce wrote to an Italian critic Carlo Linati, for an outline of his intention in writing Ullysses.."It is an epic of two races(Israelite-Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day."
Homer's Odyssey:
To enjoy Joyce's Ulysses, the reader does not need a profound scholarly knowledge of Homer's epic, The Odyssey, Latinized as Ulysses. An acquaintance with Homer's epic will certainly sharpen one's appreciation of Joyce's modern version, and it is essential to be at least familiar with an outline of Homer's original.
Odysseus was one of the Greek heroes who besieged and finally captured the city of Troy, a revenge for the adulterous elopement of Helen, wife of King Menelaus, with Paris, prince of Troy.
Odysseus suffered 10 years' delay in returning home to Ithaca, his punishment for having offended the sea god Poseidon. Thanks to his renowned cunning, Odysseus survived all the detours and perilous adventures that Poseidon inflicted on him. Odysseus encountered man-eating giants, the witch Circe who changed men into pigs, monsters, clashing rocks and whirlpools, and even traveled to the underworld of Hades to speak with the dead.
Meanwhile, at home, his wife Penelope who faithfully awaits his return, is being courted by 120 princes, each hoping to marry her and take the throne. The princes plot to murder Telemachus, son of Odysseus, when he returns from searching for his father.
Odysseus finally reaches home and in disguise kills all the suitors who have settled in his palace, drunk his wine, devoured his cattle and seduced his maid-servants..
Comic Translations::
Joyce makes 1904 Dublin the adventurous geography through which his Odysseus/Ulysses wanders. Whom did Joyce choose to play the role of modern Ulysses? He cast an ordinary, mild salesman, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish "alien" to play the central role in a deeply Irish book. Bloom is the modern-day, comic, realist anti-hero"translations" of the epic hero Odysseus.
There are many other character"translations" paralleling Homer's original
Where is the resolution in Ulysses?
Stephen Dedalus,the Telemachus in search of a father, finds a surrogate Bloom's paternal kindness-an encounter which occurs in a brothel and is in any case temporary, not a resolution.
Bloom is a married cuckold who releases his sexual tension by masturbating on Sandymount Strand, winding up at last upside-down in bed beside a wife with whom he has not had full sexual relations for nearly a dozen years. This too is hardly a conventionally resolved "happy ending". The resolution is a humanly "Imperfect" circle.
It can be seen that Bloom and Molly share in an unorthodox form of communion. Throughout his day of journeying, Bloom's reveries remained anchored in Molly, and she at the end responds faithfully to him in her own thoughts. There is genuinely shared feeling, communion and reconciliation between them, far beyond the mechanical squirt of sperm.
Joyce is saying, life can be affirmed; it can never be absolutely resolved.
The whole present action of this very long novel takes place in some eighteen hours.
It has more plot in its one day than writers previously thought to include as relevant to action.
Further, the novel follows, in a generally alternating way, two characters on their daily round in Dublin. One is the same Stephen Dedalus of A Portrait of the Artist, now two years older, thinking of quitting his lodgings, leaving his job as a schoolteacher and perhaps abandoning Ireland for good. The other principal character is an advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom. During the day Bloom pursues his job in a desultory sort of way, but mainly his mind is on his domestic situation, for he has discovered that his wife has arranged an assignation with another man for that very afternoon.
tempted to give up.
A moment comes indeed when language seems to break down into meaningless misprinted shapes.
Listen: a four worded wave speech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, oos.
Do take Joyce's advice. Listen! For this is the miraculous moment when Stephen captures the voice of the sea itself in words of his own making-the crash of a wave and the foam retracted through the shingle.
Say it over to yourself. It is like putting a shell to your ear, as a child does to hear the sea.
Stream of Consciousness
Joyce perfected a stream of consciousness technique which imitates the way the mind "speaks" to itself- in complex fluid patterns, random interruptions, incomplete thoughts, half words and so on. Joyce claimed to have developed his technique from a forgotten French novel, "Less Laurlers sont coupes" by Edouard Dujardin, picked up in a railway kiosk.
Joyce strongly disagreed with those who believed that his stream of consciousness had been borrowed from Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious.
Other writers at the time were developing similar ideas of the "inner mind". Virginia Woolf(1882-1941) describes a modernist practice of writing that fits Joyce's innovative technique in Ulysses.
Perhaps the most intellectually complex episode is in section 1, chapter 3, "Proteus". Joyce scavenges the whole history of European scholastic philosophy to provide weapons for his young artist, Stephen Dedalus, in his battle to capture the transitory flux of reality.
Joyce relates this intellectual struggle to Homer's story of how King Menelaus wrestled information from the slippery old "shape-shifting" sea king, Proteus.
Bewildered by a myriad obscure references and complex patterns of language, ever shifting like the sea, the first-time reader may be
Resolution or Affirmation?
In comic novels-in Jane Austen's, for instance-we can expect that complications and misunderstanding always lead finally to harmony and resolution in marriage-the traditional "happy ending". Where is the resolution in Ulysees?
Stephen Dedalus, the Telemachus in search of a father, finds a surrogate in Bloom's paternal kindness-an encounter which occurs in a brothel and is in any case temporary, not a resolution.
Bloom is a married cuckold who releases his sexual tension by masturbating .
Joyce is saying,life can be affirmed; it can never be absolutely resolved.
Language was his raw material,and he applied to it the kind of extreme tests and standards more usually expected of poetry.
He displayed the same standards of integrity in dealing with his subject matter, an uncompromising realist writing of areas of human experience previously regarded as too mean,too personal,too intimate or too risque to be made the subject of art.
In particular,he blew away the cobwebs surrounding the Victorian treatment of sexuality and presented it in an honest manner that was revolutionary.In doing so,he heroically expanded the frontiers of human spiritual development.
Joyce,above all else, is the quintessential modernist recorder of city life.
Despite his love for the city,Joyce was ruthlessly unsentimental about it.
"If Dublin were ever to be destroyed, it could be rebuilt from the pages of my works."
-Well,the boast is not strictly true. There is very little architectural detail of the city in Joyce's writings. He was more interested in the lives of Dublin's citizens than the building which housed them. It was the moral and psychological landscape of the town that fascinated him.
Joyce wrote to an Italian critic Carlo Linati, for an outline of his intention in writing Ullysses.."It is an epic of two races(Israelite-Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day."
Homer's Odyssey:
To enjoy Joyce's Ulysses, the reader does not need a profound scholarly knowledge of Homer's epic, The Odyssey, Latinized as Ulysses. An acquaintance with Homer's epic will certainly sharpen one's appreciation of Joyce's modern version, and it is essential to be at least familiar with an outline of Homer's original.
Odysseus was one of the Greek heroes who besieged and finally captured the city of Troy, a revenge for the adulterous elopement of Helen, wife of King Menelaus, with Paris, prince of Troy.
Odysseus suffered 10 years' delay in returning home to Ithaca, his punishment for having offended the sea god Poseidon. Thanks to his renowned cunning, Odysseus survived all the detours and perilous adventures that Poseidon inflicted on him. Odysseus encountered man-eating giants, the witch Circe who changed men into pigs, monsters, clashing rocks and whirlpools, and even traveled to the underworld of Hades to speak with the dead.
Meanwhile, at home, his wife Penelope who faithfully awaits his return, is being courted by 120 princes, each hoping to marry her and take the throne. The princes plot to murder Telemachus, son of Odysseus, when he returns from searching for his father.
Odysseus finally reaches home and in disguise kills all the suitors who have settled in his palace, drunk his wine, devoured his cattle and seduced his maid-servants..
Comic Translations::
Joyce makes 1904 Dublin the adventurous geography through which his Odysseus/Ulysses wanders. Whom did Joyce choose to play the role of modern Ulysses? He cast an ordinary, mild salesman, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish "alien" to play the central role in a deeply Irish book. Bloom is the modern-day, comic, realist anti-hero"translations" of the epic hero Odysseus.
There are many other character"translations" paralleling Homer's original
Where is the resolution in Ulysses?
Stephen Dedalus,the Telemachus in search of a father, finds a surrogate Bloom's paternal kindness-an encounter which occurs in a brothel and is in any case temporary, not a resolution.
Bloom is a married cuckold who releases his sexual tension by masturbating on Sandymount Strand, winding up at last upside-down in bed beside a wife with whom he has not had full sexual relations for nearly a dozen years. This too is hardly a conventionally resolved "happy ending". The resolution is a humanly "Imperfect" circle.
It can be seen that Bloom and Molly share in an unorthodox form of communion. Throughout his day of journeying, Bloom's reveries remained anchored in Molly, and she at the end responds faithfully to him in her own thoughts. There is genuinely shared feeling, communion and reconciliation between them, far beyond the mechanical squirt of sperm.
Joyce is saying, life can be affirmed; it can never be absolutely resolved.
The whole present action of this very long novel takes place in some eighteen hours.
It has more plot in its one day than writers previously thought to include as relevant to action.
Further, the novel follows, in a generally alternating way, two characters on their daily round in Dublin. One is the same Stephen Dedalus of A Portrait of the Artist, now two years older, thinking of quitting his lodgings, leaving his job as a schoolteacher and perhaps abandoning Ireland for good. The other principal character is an advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom. During the day Bloom pursues his job in a desultory sort of way, but mainly his mind is on his domestic situation, for he has discovered that his wife has arranged an assignation with another man for that very afternoon.
tempted to give up.
A moment comes indeed when language seems to break down into meaningless misprinted shapes.
Listen: a four worded wave speech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, oos.
Do take Joyce's advice. Listen! For this is the miraculous moment when Stephen captures the voice of the sea itself in words of his own making-the crash of a wave and the foam retracted through the shingle.
Say it over to yourself. It is like putting a shell to your ear, as a child does to hear the sea.
Stream of Consciousness
Joyce perfected a stream of consciousness technique which imitates the way the mind "speaks" to itself- in complex fluid patterns, random interruptions, incomplete thoughts, half words and so on. Joyce claimed to have developed his technique from a forgotten French novel, "Less Laurlers sont coupes" by Edouard Dujardin, picked up in a railway kiosk.
Joyce strongly disagreed with those who believed that his stream of consciousness had been borrowed from Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious.
Other writers at the time were developing similar ideas of the "inner mind". Virginia Woolf(1882-1941) describes a modernist practice of writing that fits Joyce's innovative technique in Ulysses.
Perhaps the most intellectually complex episode is in section 1, chapter 3, "Proteus". Joyce scavenges the whole history of European scholastic philosophy to provide weapons for his young artist, Stephen Dedalus, in his battle to capture the transitory flux of reality.
Joyce relates this intellectual struggle to Homer's story of how King Menelaus wrestled information from the slippery old "shape-shifting" sea king, Proteus.
Bewildered by a myriad obscure references and complex patterns of language, ever shifting like the sea, the first-time reader may be
Resolution or Affirmation?
In comic novels-in Jane Austen's, for instance-we can expect that complications and misunderstanding always lead finally to harmony and resolution in marriage-the traditional "happy ending". Where is the resolution in Ulysees?
Stephen Dedalus, the Telemachus in search of a father, finds a surrogate in Bloom's paternal kindness-an encounter which occurs in a brothel and is in any case temporary, not a resolution.
Bloom is a married cuckold who releases his sexual tension by masturbating .
Joyce is saying,life can be affirmed; it can never be absolutely resolved.
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