Life. James Joyce was born in Dublin and was educated at Jesuit schools and University College, Dublin, where he studied philosophy and languages. He was well-read from an early age and took an

JAMES JOYCE (1882–1941)

Life. James Joyce was born in Dublin and was educated at Jesuit schools and University College, Dublin, where he studied philosophy and languages. He was well-read from an early age and took an ardent interest in modern languages. Under Jesuit tutelage he considered the vocation of a priest. Later he abandoned this idea and the Roman Catholic Church itself for the career of a writer. He decided he had learned enough to reject his religion and all his obligations to his family, homeland and the British, who ruled there. In 1902 he went to Paris, where he lived for a year in poverty, wrote poetry and discovered E. Dujardin’s novel of 1888, Les Lauriers sontCoupés, from which he later borrowed the interior monologue, or the “stream of consciousness” narrative technique. He returned to Dublin, but left soon after with Nora Barnacle – who bore him a son and a daughter. During the First World War he lived in Zurich, but settled in Paris in 1920, which was to become his permanent home. He remained impoverished, suffering from severe eye trouble, which led to near blindness in later life.

Joyce's life is that of constant wanderings and a spiritual Odyssey.

Creative Works. He is the writer of four masterpieces {" Dubliners" (1914), “ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ” (1916), "Ulysses ”(1922), " Finnegan’s Wake ”(1939)}.

“ Dubliners ” is a collection of 15 stories. The stories treat slices of Dublin life. The book was greeted with enthusiasm and admiration by Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972), an American expatriate, one of the founders of European modernism. Ezra Pound believed that a new century demanded new art, new poetry, new fiction, new music – everything new. He supported and promoted Joyce and his experimental writings. Those who seek an insight into Joyce the artist and his work will find here a complete spectrum of his Irish roots. With meticulous attention to detail he created an intimately observed portrait of Dublin and its inhabitants.

Joyce is more or less traditional in “ Dubliners ”. He does not yet utterly destroy literary forms. He does not yet decanonize the structural design, the character. The plots are conventional. The language is not yet weblike. He does not yet audaciously experiment with combinatorial potencies of words. The narration is not yet that of an obscure stream of consciousness with a myriad impressions, associations and quotations. There are no enigmas and puzzles, intricate symbolic and linguistic labyrinths. There are no multilingual puns with allusions to every aspect of history and literature.

The dominant mood is realistic. We see an accurate visual perception of an objective reality, with actual people in a real place. Still there is something symbolic here. Two parallel worlds of the real and the symbolic are coexistent and related in his text, which justifies the double reading of “ Dubliners ”. It is more than a miscellaneous collection of stories. It is rather a fragmentary novel about the moral history of Ireland and Dublin, about humane comedy. It is the same panorama of futility, as we shall see in T.S. Eliot’s “ The WasteLand ”(1922) and his own “Ulysses ” (1922). Dublin stifles, cripples, paralyses the life of its inhabitants. It is Joyce’ s Waste Land.

In “ Dubliners ” we find the problems, which are to be developed in “ APortrait …” and “ Ulysses ”. Such is, for instance, the interrelation between matter and spirit. The protagonist of the story “ A Painful Case ”, like Stephen Dedalus from “ A Portrait …” and ‘ Ulysses ”, is incapable to reconcile matter and spirit.

“ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ” (1916) is largely autobiographical. The complex character of Stephen Dedalus, and the charting of his early hopes and ambitions, is closely linked with the author himself. The stages in the development of Stephen’s personality repeat the life of Joyce himself: childhood in a family that is a microcosm of the Irish society of that time, education in a Jesuit college, religious doubts, rebellion and loss of faith, self-knowledge as an artist, a poet, rejection of Irish life, the decision to leave the native land.

The book provides a remarkably objectiveand linguistically complex account of Stephen Dedalus from his birth to his decision to leave Dublin in pursuit of his art. Shaped by his experiences of early life at home where his father exerts a powerful influence, through bullying at school to an adolescent crisis of faith and student days, Stephen gradually emerges with a sense of his own destiny as poet, patriot and unbeliever. He is determined to create his own individual voice.

The novel is exuberantly inventive and experimental. It shows the evolution – biological, spiritual and intellectual - of Stephen Dedalus, the growing complexity of his perception of the world. This growing complexity of an artist is being reflected in the growing maturity of fiction. The book is becoming more and more complicated and inventive in accord with the growing maturity of the protagonist.

It is a Bildungsroman developing the European tradition (Ch. Dick ens’s” David Copperfield ”, W.S.Maugham’s “ Of Human Bondage ”). Joyce challenges received ideas. Experimenting with genres, and composition he creates a brainy philosophical parable. Joyce violates the canon of the classical realistic novel based on the model “ world – man -consciousness”, instead he uses the “man – consciousness – world” model. At the centre of his attention is man’s psychological make-up.

The book closes with Stephen's pas­sionate desire to see " the white arms of the roads ", " the black arms of tall ships ", to hear " their promise of close embraces " and " their tale of distant nations ". " Welcome, o life ", he exclaims. The "I" of the end of the novel is not merely that of a concrete youth desiring to ex­perience real life, but the "I" of millions before him, who have been wandering in search of personal truth: "I go to encounter for the mil­lionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race ". Stephen asks the initial bearer of his name, the great ancient artificer Dedalus, to help him realize his dreams: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead ".

The book is written in a mood of enraptured fervour. Joyce richly resorts to Christian symbolism and theological terminology. He seems to be supersaturated in Roman Catholic teaching. H.G.Wells called " A Portrait..." by far the most living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing”.

This is an artist novel. Traditionally artists fall into 3 categories: The Ivory Tower, The Sacred Fount and The Divided Self. Stephen Dedalus,like his creator James Joyce, is an ivory tower artist, self-centered, egotistic, confessional and obsessively introspective, solitary in the midst of people. He flies towards the lofty summits of the Ideal, tormented by the desire of the unattainable.

Stephen dreams of leaving Ireland and creating his own version of the Ivory Tower. He feels himself Dedalus, a talented ancient artificer, the creator of the famous intricate labyrinth, and Icarus flying towards the sun. Joyce treats his Stephen somewhat ironically, which means that he was not devoid of self-abuse and self-irony.

The dominant theme of the novel is quest for self.

Stephen Dedalus is carried forward to “ Ulysse s ”. His experience increases and the prose grows more resourceful. It is Joyce ’s artistic discovery to create prose, which is capable of maturing, of getting sophisticated, of corresponding to a hero’s growing maturity.

There are promises of the Joyce of “ Ulysses ” in “ A Portrait …”: a comparatively shapeless plot, drifting time and space, the stream of consciousness technique. Joyce prepares the way for the internal monologue, which is capable of conveying the dialectics of the soul, with the laws of outward logic being destroyed by the mighty forces of the unconscious.

In “ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ” we do not yet see that mental flotsam and jetsam, that mental sewage which drifts endlessly without cohesion in “ Ulysse s ”. We do not yet see unpunctuated interior monologues, the language, unintelligible to the average mind, echoic language, distorted sound-echoes and subjectless syntactic structures, prolonged linguistic games, endless punning and word-making.

The literary fate of “Ulysses ”. Even before “ Ulysses ” was published, critics were comparing Joyce’s breakthroughs to those of Einstein and Freud. " Ulysses ” was published in Paris in 1922 and created, what the gutter press loves, a scandal. For more than 10 years “ Ulysses ”, banned for obscenity, could not legally be brought into any English – speaking country. In 1933, " Ulysses ” was exonerated from the charge of obscenity in the US and became available everywhere. Since its first publication thousands of scholarly works and articles have been written about " Ulysses " in all the civilized languages of the world. "Joyceana" is truly limitless. " Ulysse s " has enormous influence on the literature and culture of all countries, it has become a legendary clas­sic. It continues to inspire musical settings, recordings, radio and TV programs, stage and film versions.

The reaction of the literary world to "Ulysses”. The publication of Joyce’s greatest book brought him notoriety and fame, disparagement and adulation. His detractors fiercely attacked Joyce for obscurity, poignant obsession with sex, destruction of artistic form and art itself, sheer disorder of syntax. They found the novel as featureless as a telephone directory, an epic of decay and the author the prophet of chaos.

Arnold Bennett found the book difficult and dull, the things repro­duced trivial and perfectly futile: " Joyce has no geographical sense, little sense of environment, not much poetical sense, no sense of per­spective. His vision of the world and its inhabitants is mean, hostile and uncharitable. Though the book is not pornographic, it is more inde­cent, obscene and licentious than the majority of pornographic books. He (Joyce ) forbids himself no word". Still A .Bennett found Joyce an as­tonishing phenomenon in literature, dazzlingly original, with marvellous ingenuity, wit and prodigious humour.

Richard Aldington, recognizing Joyce's intellectuality, his amazing obser­vation, memory and intuition, other marvelous gifts, qualifies " Ulysses " as “ a bitter, sordid, ferociously satirical book, a tremendous libel on humanity, a dangerous reading for anyone whose style is unformed”.

Joyce's admirers hold that it is now as impossible to imagine the 20th century literature without " Ulysses " as to imagine the 20th cen­tury physics without Relativity.

Thomas Stearns Eliot found Joyce " the greatest master of English since Milton ", the book " the most important expression which the present age has found ". " Ulysses " gave him " all the surprise, delight and terror..."

Wi lliam Faulkner said: " The two great men in my time were Man n and Joyce. You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith".

Ernest Hemingway found Joyce the greatest writer in the world and his " Ulysses" " a most god-damn wonderful book ". Stephen Dedalus's words "1 fear those big words...which make us so unhappy ” (episode "Nestor") produced an unforgettable impression upon Hemingway and became his ar­tistic credo. Deliberately anti-intellectual, Hemingway worshipped the profoundly intellectual Joyce. C.Baker chose as an epigraph to his book " Ernest Hemingway. A Life Story " Joyce's words from his " A Portrait.." " To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life..."

George Orwell wrote to a friend: “ Ulysses …I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like this...I feel like a eunuch".

Joyce’s perception of life. Joyce found life a senseless horror having no objective and coherent aim, a chaos of existence, a complete break­down of all but the most superficial communication between human beings. He believed that society has gone far in decomposition. Everything gra­dually disintegrates, dissolves into crazy and hideous nothingness or a something that is worse still - into triviality. Life is a labyrinth, an insolvable riddle. To express his dismay and horror at the sight of it, Joyce hurled " Ulysses " as a defiance at the contemporary world.

The plot of "Ulysses". Externally "Ulysses ", more than seven hundred. pages long, is plotless. The plot is minimal, simply recording exhaustively the events of an ordinary, grey weekday - June 16, 1904 - in the lives of two Dubliners, Leopold Bloom, an advertising agent, and Stephen Dedalus, a poet and teacher. They ramble in the streets of Dublin. The cent­ral character of the book is Leopold Bloom. " Ulysses " is a description of " the dailiest day possible " of his life, a Bloomsday. Bloom is trying to block off from his thoughts what ought to be the novel's principal topic-the Boylan-Molly liaison (a love-affair). The book is not merely about Bloom's story, the cuckold-to be drifting round the city. It is also a story about Stephen Dedalus, seeking a father, drinking, ruminating. As far back as 1932, Karl Young wrote: " Ulysses”... pours along for seven hund­red and thirty five pages...one single and senseless every day of Every­man...a day, on which, in all truth, nothing happens... It not only begins and ends in nothingness, but it consists of nothing but nothingness ".

The novel is uneventful. Event becomes word. Words replace visible acts. Joyce is not interested in events as such. He is coldly indifferent to harsh political realities. In " Ulysses " Joyce substitutes inner action, a series of images, drawn from the memory, a disorderly throng of free associations, or the fantasy world, for the outer action of Dubliners.

The conceptual basis of "Ulysses". Some light is to be shed on the con­cepts which influenced Joyce philosophically and artistically. Joyce was an erudite philologist. He knew the most significant philosophical and linguistic theories from antiquity to his day. In " Ulysses " Joyce materialized relativity, existentialism, freudism, reincarnation. He was highly affected by Jordano Bruno's idea of dichotomies, according to which every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realize itself. We find a whole pa­radigm of dichotomies, upon which " Ulysses " is constructed: the ideal and the real, dream and action, spirit and matter, deed and vision, reunion and separation, departure and return, life and death, The God and The Satan, etc. These oppositions constitute a unity: the movement of a day from sunrise to sunset, a biblical history from genesis to apocalypse. These polarities (saint and heretic, Christ as the bringer of light and Lucifer as the bringer of darkness, good and evil, etc.) meet. " 'Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life... In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet". The borderline between the genius-as-saint and the genius-as-heretic is blurred. Joyce was affected by Nietzsche’s ideas of The Eternal Return, that is reincarnation. The universe is thus shown as a circular movement, which has repeated itself an infinite number of times. History repeats and renews itself. Everything eternally returns. Ulysses returns as a private and obscure man, Leopold Bloom. Telemachus, Icarus and Hamlet return as Stephen Dedalus. Joyce was enchanted by Nietzsche's idea of life being a labyrinth. Stephen's thoughts, ever shifting from subject to subject, are a labyrinth, in which one can orient himself by means of some clues and guides.

Joyce was committed to the Neorenaissance idea of absolute preference of man over society. Hence, it is not the events that interested him but man’s psyche, the subterranean forces, those hidden tides which govern everything.

The dominant themes. There are several dominant themes in "Ulysses ”. The theme of reincarnation is implicitly present in the reproduction of Ulysses ’s adventures in those of Bloom’s, Hamlet’s meditations in those of Stephen Dedalus’s. Joyce explores the theme of fatherhood as creativity, human and divine. The theme of motherhood is also distinguishable. Stephen rebels against his own mother, his mother the Church, his mother country. The text under analysis is cohesive. It is due to the repetition of the theme of death, which is explicit and implicit here.

The writer and reality. " Ulysses " was conceived in the suffocating atmosphere of the war crisis. Joyce came to realize that the stability of the traditional way of life in the age of social crisis and world-wide devas­tation was overthrown. Joyce re-examined the relationship between writer and reality. Joyce stood aloof from the political events. He escaped into the realm of introspection. He wanted to live apolitically, weaving the web of his interior monologues. He believed that an artist is a rebel, like Lucifer.

Dream and reality in “Ulysses”. Like T.S. Eliot,Joyce considered contem­porary history to be an immense panorama of futility and anarchy. Being indifferent to social and political matters, Joyce withdrew into himself. He depicted reality from the individual, subjective point of view. The solid world, peopled with ordinary objects, disappears. It is a new world of imaginings, thoughts, associations and impressions. Philosophizing becomes an end in itself. In " A Portrait..” Joyce only begins to mix imagination andreality. In " Ulysses " this intermingling is significant. A self-exiled artist, Joyce followed the imperatives of his vocation. He retreated be­hind the psychological defenses of the solitary mind. His alter ego Stephen Dedalus builds a fantasy world out of past memories and momentary sensations. Fantasy, dreams, visions are confused with reality in his mind. Z. Freud saw dreams as fulfillment of repressed desires. Much is re­miniscent of Freud’s theory of dreams, his effect of dream displacement, of dream distortion.

Joyce's new techniques and methods of literary representation. In the 1920 - s disorder, disillusionment and loss of direction affected many writers. Joyce's literary endeavours echo Lawrence's " liberation of the instincts ", Huxley's extreme intellectualism, Mansfield's delicate impressionist sketches based on mundane happenings, Woolf's and Eliot's rejection of conventional forms. Joyce was the most notable of the writers of the beginning of the century to have violated the moral and artistic conventions and codes observed by the novelist. He rejected the aesthetic principles of the classical novel. Treating life as a horror and chaos, where everything decomposes, deteriorates and dissolves into nothingness, Joyce had to elaborate entirely new narrative and structural techniques, new artistry and new syntax. " Ulysses " is a decanonization of traditional canons of all kinds, literary, stylistic and linguistic ones. Joyce refused from the plot, exposition, climax, harmony of the narrative techniques, the harmony of styles. " There is no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style" (V.Woolf), there is no familiar periodization of history, objective time. Joyce is blending styles, voices, narrative techniques, temporal and spatial spheres. It is as if we saw a double, or even a multiple cinema film with a clear foreground and a background, blurred and out of focus. He demonstrates a stereoscopic and stereophonic vision and hearing.

Homeric parallels. The book is built on parallels between antiquity (Homer's " The Odyssey ") and modernity (1904 ). Joyce stated himself that this is a book based on the wanderings of Ulysses, but he was writing about recent times, and his hero’s wanderings took no more than eighteen hours. The importance of the Homeric parallel is primarily structural: it provided Joyce with a convenient framework. Each episode of " Ulysse s " has its parallel in " The Odyssey ". All the main and most of the minor characters of " Ulysses " cor­respond to the major and minor characters of " The Odyssey ". The foregro­und is taken up by an ordinary day in the life of Bloom and Stephen, while in the background lies the relation of Bloom to Odysseus, Dedalus to Telemachus, the modern to the ancient world, i.e. the general questions of human destiny.

" The Odyssey’s " twentv four books are named by the Greek alphabet's 24 letters, and the 18 episodes of " Ulysse s " agree in number with the 18 letters of the Irish alphabet. But the Homeric parallel is a dangerous guide to what is actually happening in the book. True, each chapter revives an incident from Homer' s epic and each character has a Homeric prototype, but these incidents and characters are mocking mirrors. Stephen and Bloom are son in search of father and father in search of son, like Telemachus and Odysseus. Bloom is wandering along Dublin streets - Odysseus is wandering across the seas and oceans. Bloom returns to his flat - Odysseus returns to Ithaka. Like Homer, Joyce keeps his protagonists moving. Unlike Odysseus, who is striving to get home after his severe pilgrimage, Bloom is finding many reasons not to go home just yet. Telemachus in " The Odyssey " sets out from Ithaka in quest of his father Odysseus. Stephen fears he will never escape the destiny of his drinking father. He is dreaming of inspiration to be received from his spiritual father, the old artificer of antiquity Dedalus. The shifts from episode to episode are kaleidoscopic and we acquire the illusion of having traveled all over Dublin city. We are captivated by this incessant movement, " a slow dance of Fate " (V.Nabokov).

Unlike the heroes of " The Odyssey ", who perform great deeds, the characters of " Ulysse s " do nothing. They dream, reflect, reminiscence. The symbolic cross-reference between " The Odyssey " and "Ulysses " is a constant source of comedy. The hero Odysseus and the spineless Bloom. The devoted family man Telemachus and the Stephen, who breaks away from his home. The faithful Penelope and the multiple adulteress Molly. " Ulysses " is a travesty of Homer's heroic poem. Bloom travesties Odysseus. Stephen travesties Telemachus. Molly travesties Penelope.

T.S.Eliot thought highly of Joyce as the creator of the mythological method of literary representation: " Mr. Joyce is using the myth in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity. He is pursuing a method which others must pursue".

A new genre. Joyce seriously experimented in a new literary genre. This is not a novel in the traditional understanding. " Ulysses " has one clue, a title, which does not help at all, as we shall not find Greek heroes here. Neither shall we find customary narrative, dialogue, comment and reverie. It is an ad hoc genre. Joyce prompted his critics putting into circulation the phrase " interior monologue ".

Summary. The extract analyzed opens with a description of the sea as observed by Stephen, tortured by remorse and repentance. He hasn't fulfilled his mother's dying wish to kneel down and pray for her at her deathbed. Stephen is standing on the seashore looking at the tireless waves, thinking. He is gloomily thinking of his mother, whose ghost is pursuing him. He is thinking of the drowned man, whose corpse was drawn out of the sea at this spot several days ago. Imagining a decayed corpse, which has become a prey of fish, he muses on seadeath, the mildest of all possible deaths, and death in general. Frightened by the thunderstorm, he is returning to Dublin to continue his frustrated Odyssey through life. Nothing is happening here, but the fragment is full of the breath of the sea waves, of thoughts, allusions and associations, which continuously flow in Stephen's mind, as the waters of the Irish sea.

The general slant of the text. The text is pervaded with tragic gloom, poetic lyricism and sarcastic irony, which alternate and merge. With all its uneventfulness and disorderliness, the text is coherent, which is due to the reiteration of the topic of death. Stephen is obsessed with the idea of death. Death is being present permanently in his thoughts. He thinks of the drowned body, imagining all the naturalistic particulars of the decaying corpse. He broods upon the generations passing away. He aptly recalls a quotation from Shakespeare 's " Tempest " ("Full fathom five thy father lies "). There is an implication of death in Tennyson's lines, where the spectre of his late mother is invisibly present. Stephen's broodings are shot through with mockery, irony and self-contempt. Frivolous irony springs up in his allusion to Mulligan's song "...hising up their petticoats ". He blasphemously ruminates on God, who, creating man in his divine image, through a number of metamorphoses finally turns into “ a featherbed mountain”. He cynically advertises seadeath rewarding it with Prix de Paris. He is mocking at Lord Tennyson, “ gentleman poet,” changing his title into “ Lawn Tennyson ” to indicate that a poet is above class distinctions. Along with gloom and blasphemy there are deeply poetic lines, devoted to the greenly-golden 1agoons, cups of rocks, the writhing weeds, the unfurling flower of the foam, the naked woman shining in her courts. So the permeating atmosphere is multi-dimensional, gloom, sarcasm and lyricism alternating and blending continually.

" Ulysses’s" narrative phantasmagoria. Stephen is alone on the seashore, but we have a perception of a densely populated world. "Ulysses " is full of voices sounding from so many parts of the city and from so many moments of the past, that its spatial clarity is blurred. We hear the voices of the appearing and disappearing author, Stephen's voice, talking with the waves, the weeds, the moon, those of the characters from Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, the imaginary voices of the boatmen, the rescuers of the corpse, the voices of the auctioneers and visitors of the Parisian Fair, the voices of the priests reading masses in Latin, the voice of Christ, the voices of the wanderers of distant epochs, who cannot find peace with themselves. An orchestra of voices, an orchestra of pronouns (“ I shall wait.” “ They are weary...” “thy father lies…” “We have him.” “ I thirst.” “ Allbright he falls..” ” Just you give it a fair trial").

All the inanimate substances are presented as living beings. The waves speak, the waters breathe, whisper and sigh, the weeds " hise up their petticoats ", the moon is tirelessly working...

Narratively, " Ulysses " is the most peculiar book of the century. It is a gigantic soliloquy(R. Aldington), an ocean of erratic monologues packed with allusions, quotations, and associations. It is a constant fusion of voices and narrative stances which depends on the constant shifting of the point of view. There is no traditional inner speech, given in the Future-in-the past tense. Stephen's thoughts are rendered in the first person without quotation marks. Narrative stances alternate and fuse within a paragraph, within a sentence, which can begin in the third person and end in the first person. The absence of the omniscient voice brings about a shifting of narrative stances.

" Ulysses " is a portrayal of the inner world of the mind. As Joyce wanted to uncover the subterranean forces of " the unstructured consciousness ", dreams and visions, a diffused pre-speech state, he had to elaborate a new narrative technique. This technique is qualified as the interior monologue technique, or the technique of free associations. Prior to Joyce, no writer had ever played with sensations, images, impulses, fancies and flashes of thought the way Joyce did. Joyce gave E.Dujarden's stream-of-consciousness a new life. He ventured to show exactly how the minds of people operate. He recorded the flow of his characters' thoughts and sensations, with all the complex associations attached to them, thus rendering the drama of cognition. The stream -of – consciousness carries the present and the past, unrestrained, boundless floods of associations, half-apprehended impressions of the outer world, phantasmagoria of imagination, the freely floating caprices of diffused thinking, the unpredictable impulses of liberated instincts, dreamy pictures of fantasy, fragmentary images..." He examines an ordinary mind on an ordinary day when this mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel " (V. Woolf). Joyce believed that only these subterranean forces of the mind, a fusion of recollections and associations can reveal a man.

Stephen’s stream-of-consciousness carries a mass of mental flotsam and jetsam, a myriad impressions, allusive, trivial, fantastic, which come from all sides, " an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” (V. Woolf). Through his mind there float and converge snatches of talk, reminiscences, associations, fragments from different pieces of literature, jumbled phrases from Blake, Byron, Shakespeare, and elsewhere, references to the history of the Church, Europe, Ireland, the Homeric epic … Joyce records them as they fall upon Stephen’s mind, disconnected, disjointed, incoherent. They breed some rhythmic imaginative phrases for the poem.

The interior monologue is a basic means of characterization in “ Ulysses ”. It creates a picture of the inner personality. Stephen’s, Bloom’s, Molly’s interior monologues, being structurally similar, are different as to their contents. They carry the personages’ free associations, unique and individual thoughts and emotions, which represent unique, individual traits and properties of the characters’ consciousness. A. Bennett singled out the long unspoken monologue of Mrs. Bloom, which closes the book.: “ It is a magical record of inmost thoughts of a woman… Nothing to surpass and equal it… It helps understand feminine psychology”.

Upon publication of " Ulysses " many writers were immediately enchanted by the throbbing of interior monologue, an endless diversion of psychological life, and the vast, not yet explored realms of the subconscious.

The "I" of "Ulysses". The "I" of the novel is split. It denotes the split consciousness of the author, the "I" of Stephen Dedalus, the allusive "I" of Odysseus and Telemachus, the "I" of humanity, wandering from epoc to epoch, reproducing themselves from the dead.

Joyce’s time and space. Joyce abandoned all attempts at logical and consistent presentation of facts. His universe is nonsimultaneous, never to be grasped in one act of apprehension. Everyone's status is continually shifting. " Ulysses " is not time-bound and historically entrapped. Its time is eternally drifting and shifting. The present and the past, the distant and the nearest are constantly fused. We plunge into differing temporal spheres: the immediate past (" he saw the writhing weeds..."), the immediate present (" she draws a toil of waters..."), into timeless present (" Dead breaths I living breathe..."), into near future (" Tuesday will be the longest day..."). There are two sorts of time here. One is objective, relegated to the background. The other is subjective, the basis of his depiction. The real interior action takes place in the subjective time of a rambling memory and capricious imagination.

In the cosmos of " Ulysses " we see different microworIds, that of Ireland, that of the British empire, that of the Catholic Church, that of Homer's “ The Odyssey ”.

Temporally and spatially the text is multidimensional.

The presence of the author. There is no customary author here. The author does not merely disappear. Joyce is always present in the book as a self-effacing narrator, as a mischievous, cunning Arranger, the maker of everything. He is powerfully intrusive throughout the novel (in the name of the arctic goose " the barnacle goose ", in Stephen's fear of the thunderstorm, etc.). The Arranger can't be identified with the author. It is some mind, some consciousness, some ideal reader, who keeps track of all the details of the printed cosmos of "Ulysses", the exact forms of words used hundreds of pages earlier. The intrusion of this consciousness is the most radical of Joyce's innovations in " Ulysses". It is something new in fiction. It is not the voice of the storyteller, not a voice at all. Some critics have detected in the Arranger the spirit of Dublin itself endowed with a distinctive personality.

Joyce’s synthesis of styles. Joyce was enchanted by F.Nietzsche’s idea of stylistic pluralism. He realized this concept in distorting proportions of finely balanced styles. Joyce’s prose is an extravagant combination of styles (lofty and low, poetic and vulgar, etc.). It carries refined lyricism, poetic symbolism, revolting naturalism, blasphemous cynicism. These styles can merge within one paragraph and within a sentence (The rescuers’ rude shout “ Hook it quick ” is followed by the lofty quotation from Milton “ Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor”).

Joyce is overtly naturalistic when recording sensual perceptions. Stephen sees green- goldenly lagoons of sand, writhing weeds, he hears vehement breaths of waters, in his imagination he breathes dead breaths of corpses. There are gruesome and naturalistic pictures of a decaying body, the prey of greedy fishes, all presented with revolting faithfulness ("... his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun "). Stephen's reflections are gloomily naturalis­tic, blasphemous as regards God, whose labour turns out to be futile, as re­gards humanity, whose fates are so frail. This mixture of styles is in the use of refined and low similes. The poetic and the down-to-earth alternate each other. The cynical naturalism is softened by an amorous allusion-asso­ciation (a barnacle-goose). Impressionism is an important complementary of " Ulysses ", with its microscopic attention to nuances of meaning, its succession of synaesthetic sense-impressions.

Joyce's new language. " Ulysses " is a repository of the author's rare eru­dition and linguistic attainments. " Ulysses " is written sometimes in a new language, much of it is unintelligible to the average mind. " Ulysses " ex­pands the limits of English. Its vocabulary is enormous. Joyce is experi­menting with word-making. He is daringly coining new words and creating echoic language effects. Joyce is continually displaying the knowledge of all the European languages. In his linguistic orchestra there merge the vowels and consonants of all these languages, jargons, vernaculars and dialects. Modern words, coupled with Dante's, Shakespeare's, melt in Stephen's mind. He experiments with the combinatorial potencies of words. Erudite quotations go alongside collo­quialisms in many languages, coarse and common words occur in company with rare ones, with the newly-coined words of the writer's composition.

In " Ulysses " sound complexes, grammatical forms, syntactical structu­res mean very much. The Joycian word is primarily metaphoric, whatever situation it denominates. It is semantically syncretical, as its environ­ment is deeply associative. In the given fragment the words father, moon, loom, sea are richly meaningful.

Joyce operates with monosyllabic words, which are active and pliable phonologically, morphologically, semantically and syntactically. The verb draw, which participates in the creation of the complex image-symbol of the sea, metaphorically refers to the weaving loom, drawing an eternal thread, to the moon, drawing the waters of the sea, to the beautiful woman, drawing the lascivious glances of her lovers, to the goddesses of Fate, drawing the thread of Stephen Dedalus's life. The verb fall in the quo­tation " Allbright he falls..." from Milton's "Paradise Lost " denotes the flight of the fallen angel, the carrier of powerful intellect, his moral downfall, the fall of Dedalus's son and many other falls, which the laby­rinth of the novel offers to decipher. Joyce’ s language is weblike, constantly suggesting a network of con­nections between similar sounds and images.

" Ulysses’s" imagery. The text is multidimensional sensually. It is stere­ophonic and stereoscopic, as it reflects Stephen's auditory, visual and tactual perceptions. It is due to metaphoric and synaesthetic images, po­lysemantic symbols, innumerable allusions, quotations and unpredictable associations. " Ulysses " is a new artistic code, an abundance of new meta­phors. The prevalent metaphor is to be found in the title of the book. "Ulysses " is a wanderer in space and time. There are striking and poeti­cal images, presumably mythological in origin. The description of the sea's movement is blended with dark and gruesome fantasies: the water seems to be moving among seasnakes and rearing horses. The atmosphere is animated and musicalized by the living sounds of the sea. The effect of personification is achieved by the combinabilitv of logically incompati­ble words (wavespeech, sigh of leaves and waves), by the use of the gen­der-sensitive pronouns (she applied to the moon, he applied to the corpse).

" Ulysse s " is a symbolic network, which gives the novel its incredible complexity. The fragment carries a whole system of polysemantic symbols, which allow competing interpretations. These are the symbolic images of the sea, the loom, the moon, the father, the mother. Joyce’s symbolism is continually shifting. The sea is a synthesis of contradictory symbols. The sea symbolizes fertility and barrenness, creativity and futility, fa­therhood and motherhood, life and death, monotony and renewal. As “ extremes meet ”, the sea is simultaneously the cradle of life and the graveyard of death. Looking at the sea and hearing its” vehement breath ”, Stephen per­ceives the waves, the waters, the weeds, the moon. They all ceaselessly move, symbolizing a ceaseless monotony of life. The sea has inspired po­ets and writers with visions of grandeur and courage. To Stephen it is a picture of infinite futility, of hopeless monotony, vast and timeless life in its impersonal cruelty. Ceaseless are Stephen's wanderings thro­ugh life, passionless, dreary and lonely. The moon is compared with a tireless weaver and with “ a naked woman shining in her courts ”. She eter­nally “ draws a toil of waters “ and eternally “ draws the glances of lascivious” lovers. The moon is also a wanderer, like Odysseus and Odysseus’s son of the 20^th century, Stephen Dedalus. Stephen is drifting amid life, like “ the barren shell of the moon ”(“ A Portrait...”).

Allusions, quotations, associations. The metaphoric imagery of the fragment is pierced through by allusions, quotations, associations. Joyce embroidered into " Ulysses " references to science, his previous books, people from his own life, antiquity, Catholicism, Christianity, medieval ages, classical epochs, modernity, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Tennyson. The text abounds in quotations, drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Distant epochs of Stephen's allusions and quotations merge with the gloomy present of his remorse and repentance. In the allusive labyrinth of " Ulysees " most impossible associations are possible. The moon, likened to a loom, arouses associations with Circe, a schemer and a temptress.

As Stephen is obsessed with the idea of spiritual father, and is haunted by his spectral mother, most of the allusions and quotations are pertaining to fatherhood and motherhood, futility and creativity, life and death. His dead mother appears as the incarnation of death.

In the fragment under analysis we distinguish the images of Christ and Lucifer. They are traditionally understood as ideas of goodness and evil. The reader, who remembers the Biblical text, understands that Ste­phen thinks not only of elementary thirst (" Come. I thirst "). Christ was thirsty before dying. Stephen is ready to get crucified, to live from day to day a senseless and dreary life of a wandering poet. We extract the dichotomies " day:: night ", " light:: darkness ", " goodness:: evil ". When analyzed poetically, in terms of Joyce’s language, Christ and Lucifer represent the same phenomenon - light. Christ is God's son, which sounds as sun. Lucifer means lightbringer. As sun, Christ is indi­stinguishable from Lucifer, the morning star, who brings light. Lucifer is the fallen angel, driven by God out of Paradise for rebellion. Christ is crucified to rise, ascend to his Father. Lucifer arouses in Stephen admiration, as he is a symbol of rebellion, freedom and quest for know­ledge. There is much more to be extracted from the Miltonian phrase “ Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect”. Stephen is irritated at his own overreliance onintellect, which imprisons his creativi­ty. In " A Portrait …" Stephen alternates between Christ and Lucifer, the antipodes of goodness and evil. Different dicho­tomies can be interpreted in terms of images, which are either given on the surface or implied in sounding words.

Joyce sets down the most distant, individual and arbitrary associations that come to his hero's mind in connection with physical things around him. The verb weave arouses associations of Penelope weaving and unwea­ving her web, of Odysseus telling and retelling his story, altering its particulars, of Shakespeare's " A Midsummer Night's Dream ", where weaving means dreaming, of Joyce himself, creating his weblike labyrinth of " Ulysses ".The text of " Ulysses " takes on a life of its own due to these count­less associations.

Syntax. Joyce’s syntax in "Ulysses " is formidably and powerfully new. "Ulysses’s " sentences are varied, from elaborately construed and highly imaginative to clipped, distorted, unfinished, striking, like hammer. Stephen's free associations are expressed by fragmentary, parcellated or segmented structures, elliptical, distorted phrases, that are obscure in meaning, unconventional and ungrammatical (“ A seachange this brown eyes saltblue"). Joyce is not afraid to deform customary structures, to throw out links, to behead sub-clauses. Associations appear in the form of loose, unpunctuated, unfocused sentences with the structural connections slackened. Joyce understood syntax as a co­mpositional device. Melodious and rhythmical, it organizes his frag­mentary and plotless prose.

Rhythmicality. There is peculiar music in the book. In Joyce’s onomato­poeic junk we recognize Wagner, who was an enthusiasm of Joyce's late adolescence. Several episodes have a kind of sonata structure (move­ment along streets, an indoor lingering, street movement again...). The Joycean word has a melody and a rhythm. We hear the richest palette of the sounds of the real world. These sounds are recreated by sound-imi­tation words, by monosyllabic verbs with repeated sound complexes, by detached participles with alliterated consonants. Coupled with many other devices, these means express Stephen's auditory impressions. At times his prose has a verse-rhythm.

Character-drawing. The techniques of interior monologue, stream-of-consciousness, free associations serve to create the Joycean characters. " Ulysses " is a vivisection of the artist's mind in action - the drama of cognition. Philosophizing is Stephen's way of life. Hence, the book abounds in cerebral outpourings and verbal pyrotechnics. It is a roar­ing Niagara of reflections, dreams, reveries, recollections, associations, at times mystical meditations of the modern Irish Hamlet.

There is much information in Stephen Dedalus's name. Joyce believed that our name is the story of our destiny. Stephen’s name is a combination of two polarities, the saint and the heretic. On the one hand, it is an allusion to the name of a Christian martyr, falsely accused of blasphe­my and stoned to death. On the other hand, there is a prophetic force in the strange surname Dedalus, the Athenian architect, who built the Cretan Labyrinth and later escaped from Crete by use of artificial wings. Stephen wants to be heir to the vocation of the fabulous artifi­cer. He dreams to create something new and soaring, beautiful and im­perishable. His religious fervour is gone. He is rebellious, guilt-ridden, individualistic. He has lost his illusions along with his faith. He strikes the reader with his intellectualism and egocentricity. There is much Hamletic in him (obstinate mourning, self-analysis, soliloquies, indecision). Like Hamlet, he is frustrated by his inadequacy and inacti­vity as son, lover, artist. He cannot find a happy balance between the self and the world. He cannot reconcile inner and outer reality. He is an introverted figure, who cannot and does not want to realize his perso­nality in action. His mind is that of an aloof artist, playing with the vast corpus of learning. He is weaving the unending web of his interior monologue. He seeks his self-attainment in day-dreams and visions. He is obsessively egotistic, confessional, introspective. He alternates between the roles of Christ and Lucifer. He refused to humour his mo­ther's dying wish. It is an act of disobedience, by which Lucifer rebel­led against God.

The author of "Ulysses " shuts himself in his world of visions and dreams. The self-reflective artist, Joyce recreates himself in Stephen. Like his creator, Stephen is overrefined, intellectual and artistic, a walking encyclopedia, freely operating with thousands of qu­otations from all ages. At the same time Stephen Dedalus is a traditio­nal figure in the European novel. A super-refined artist, a divided self, who cannot reconcile spirit and real life.

Conclusion. " Ulysses ", the literary Evangel of the century, is a travesty of the Homeric heroic epic of Odysseus, the dignified splendour of the past, a damnation of sordid unheroic modernity. It is the panorama of anarchy and futility that is the contemporary world. Ho­meric correspondences and parallels are mocking mirrors. In “ Ulysses ” Joyce parodies styles, literary trends, musical forms, himself and many other things. " Ulysses " is a kind of encyclopedia, a literary universe, comparable with real universe. It touches upon the larger issues of the modern world and the human psyche. The book poses some of the darkest existential dilemmas facing modern man. Some find the book an embodiment of hopelessness. To others it represents an affirmation of the spirit of life, as it ends with Molly's resounding “ Yes ". " Ulysse s " represents each person's own odyssey, each person's search for the road he must travel.

After the first edition of " Ulysses " the book was considered untranslatable. Even today scholars still argue over the meaning of individual passages in “ Ulysses ”. It takes several readings to understand " Ulysses ", the major imaginative work in English prose of the present century.

“ Ulysses ” is said to be the prose for intellectual élite. But it continues to intrigue not only the academic world, the Joycean specialists, but the general reading public as well.

James Joyce "Ulysses"

(a fragment)

In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering green-goldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant¹ will float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing chafing against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsscciss ooos.² Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks, in cups of rocks³ it slops: Hop, slop. slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool,⁴ flower unfurling. '

Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats,⁵ in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds.⁶ Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary: and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose⁷ heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniursia patiens ingemiscit ⁸. To no end gathered: ⁹ vainly then released, forth flowing, wending back: loom of the moon.¹⁰ Weary too in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a toil of waters.

Five fathoms¹¹ out there. Full fathom five thy father lies.¹² At one he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar.¹³ Driving before it a loose drift of rubhle, ¹⁴ fanshoals of fishes,¹⁵ sillv shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, ¹⁶ bobbing¹⁷ landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. ¹⁸ There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. ¹⁹ We have him. Easy now.

Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. ²⁰ A quiver of minnows,²¹ fat of a spongy titbit... God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose ²² becomes featherbed mountain. ²³ Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal²⁴ from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale ²⁵ he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.

A seachange this brown eyes saltblue.²⁶ Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man. Old Father Ocean. Prix de Paris: ²⁷ beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.

Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there? Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect²⁸, Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum. ²⁹ No. My cockle hat and staff³⁰ and his my sandal shoon. ³¹ Where? To evening lands. Eve­ning will find itself.

He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make their end. By the way next when is it? Tuesday will be the longest day. Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn Tennyson,³² gentleman poet. Già. ³³

(J. Joyce. Ulysses .- Paris, 1930, pp. 48—50)

¹ ashplant — here: walking-stick made of ash

² These words render the speech of the waves ("the wavespeech").

³ cups of rocks — hollows and cavities in the rocks

⁴ foampool — shallow water covered with foam

⁵ hising up their petticoats — these are words occurring in a song that Stephen had heard his friend Mulligan sing earlier the same morning

⁶ upturning coy silver fronds — shyly raising their silvery stems and leaves

⁷ Saint Ambrose — a Catholic saint (5th century)

⁸ diebus ac noctibus iniursia patiens ingemiscit (Lot.) — he who suffers injuries complains day and night

⁹ to no end gathered— brought together without any purpose

¹⁰ loom of the moon — here: entirely subject to the influence of the moon (the ebb and flow are caused by the attraction of the moon, a loom is a machine for weaving yam or thread into fabric: its shuttle is constantly moving back and forth)

¹¹ fathom — about 180 cm, a measure chiefly used to state depth

¹² full fathom five thy father lies — quotation from Ariel's song in Shakespeare's play The Tempest (Act I, Scene 2)

¹³ bar — here: bar of sand across the mouth of a harbour

¹⁴ rubble — stones

¹⁵ fanshoals of fishes — a number (a shoal) of fishes resembling in form a large fan

¹⁶ undertow— here: under the water

¹⁷ bobbing — here: swinging

¹⁸ a porpoise — a sea-animal; a pace a pace a porpoise — moving slowly, pace after pace, like a porpoise (note the alliteration)

¹⁹ sunk though he be beneath the watery floor — a line from Milton' s poem Lycida s that had occurred to Stephen earlier that same morning when he first heard about the drowned man

²⁰ bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine — Stephen means the evil smell of the dead body surrounded by dirty sea-water

²¹ a quiver of minnows etc. — his body has become the titbits (choice morsel) for minnows

²² barnacle goose — arctic goose visiting England in winter

²³ God becomes man etc. — God makes the man, the man is drowned and eaten by the fish, the goose eats the fish and is used to make featherbeds

²⁴offal — remains

²⁵ hauled stark over the gunwale — his naked body is hauled overboard

²⁶ Stephen means that the sea changes brown eyes into saltblue, giving the eyes of the dead its own colour.

²⁷ Prix de Paris (French) — the first prize received m Paris. Joyce implies that death by drowning being the easiest, it would be sure to be awarded the biggest prize, in preference to all other deaths. The French words and the English phrases following it are the words of common advertisements.

²⁸ allbright he falls etc. — a free quotation from Milton's Paradise Lost

²⁹ dico, qui nescit occasum (Lat.) — I say he knows no death

³⁰ cockle hat — a hat bearing the badge of a pilgrim, a scallop shell; staff — here: pilgrim's stick

³¹ my sandal shoon — quotation from Byron's Childe Harold: "not in vain he bore his sandal-shoon and scallop-shell" (shoon — arch. plural of shoe)

³² Of all the glad new year, mother... — the beginning of a hackneyed quo­tation from Tennyson's poem The May Queen: "Of all the glad new year, mother, the maddest, merriest day", the optimistic ending is sacrificed for the sarcastic "rum tum tiddledy tum" whose rhythm is meant to render the rhythm of Tennyson's poem.

³³ Lawn Tennyson — a play on words: Tennyson — tennis, thence lawn tennis(on)

³⁴ già (Ital.) — already; Joyce means that Tennyson, the gentleman poet, belongs to the past

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