INTRODUTION TO JOYCE I. Introduction A. Joyce's works as continuum 1. Common characters 2. Progressively greater interest in technique and language 3. Progressively greater complexity and difficulty 4. PAYM near the turning point between the early realism and the later liguistic playfulness 5. These distinctions are of EMPHASIS, not absolutes B. "Dubliners" 1. 15 stories from subtly varying viewpoints 2. Dubliner characters as paralyzed, trapped within social, religious, family roles a. "Eveline" b. "The Boarding House" c. "A Mother" d. "Clay" e. "Araby" 3. Key to the problem: their language is not their own 4. Cliched language, clicheed roles, clicheed plots 5. The Dublin characters are hence written by their society 6. Writing, reading are thus matters of power, not just aesthetics 7. Dominant theme becomes NARRATIVE: Dubliners fail to imagine themselves creatively II. The Major Works A. "A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man" 1. Example of a Dubliner who tries to escape the trap of pre-determined roles 2. To do this, he must be an artist (literally and figuratively) 3. Opening shows Stephen studying language, learning to control it 4. Stephen writes himself: an ARTIST 5. Systematic evasion of family, country, religion (the givers of predetermined roles) 6. Departs at the end as triumphant Dedalus (or Icarus??) B. "Ulysses" 1. Stephen is back: "artist" is a role, too 2. Stephen was a romantic hero in his own eyes 3. Hence he was still trapped in a role 4. He must free himself from artistic determinations: a. literary tradition b. history of the language c. limits imposed by each 5. Stephen's success or failure never takes place in Ulysses 6. The novel reproduces the problem of freedom artistically 7. The book itself: a. one day in the life of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, a cuckolded Dublin Jew b. Stephen and Bloom = son / father (maybe) c. 18 chapters using radically different styles d. Homeric parallel, "Hamlet" allusions, comprehensive schema serve as structural principle (and more? possibility of parody, commentary, comparison of ancient & modern sensibilities) e. Cross-referenced internal allusions are everywhere: multiple viewpoints linked, relativized g. The irrational, the subconscious (especially sexuality) increasingly important, with culmination in "Circe" h. Notions of metempsychosis, parallax i. culmination of realism (interior monologue) j. dismissal of realism (parodic montage) 8. The novel critiques itself 9. All writing exposed as conventional, created 10. No one style authoritative, final, natural 11. Realism a convention like any other 12. Bloom and Stephen are decomposed into their literary component elements 13. Artificiality of linguistic construct made explicit 14. "Ulysses" asserts the creative power and freedom that Stephen sought unsuccessfully 15. Stephen and Bllom's relationship is analogous to the HCE --> SHEM & SHAUN --> SHEM/SHAUN --> HCE scenario in "Finnegans Wake." C. "Finnegans Wake" 1. Final critique of language and literature 2. Final critique of writing and especially READING 3. Literary structures created, destroyed at once 4. Meaning itself (of sentences, of words) exposed as a creation of the reader 5. The book itself: a. 4 sections subdivided into 17 chapters b. written with English syntax in multilingual puns and portmanteau words c. organized loosely around several resurrection myths d. set (sort of) in Dublin, on the River Liffey e. characters reduced to "sigla": HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, and Issy -- archetypal family f. includes every literary critical style, viewpoint, genre, plot type, character type g. aspires to biblical/encyclopedic status h. emphasizes the musical as well as visual in language -- both at the expense of clear meaning i. extremely funny j. Joyce's 1924 summary of a chapter for his editor: "I have finished the "Anna Livia" piece. Here it is. [. . .] A few words to explain. It is a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone. The river is named Anna Liffey. . . . The stream is quite brown, rich in salmon, very devious, shallow." k. FW can be viewed as a hypertext: all of literature simultaneously cross-referenced with itself. 6. Readers try to write meanings onto the text 7. Forced awareness of what all reading requires: the active construction of meaning 8. No meaning persists long enough to seem natural III. Conclusion A. Where "Ulysses" defamiliarized narrative conventions, "Finnegans Wake" defamiliarized langauge itself, and hence THOUGHT, CONSCIOUSNESS B. All of these problems are implied in "Portrait" and "Dubliners" C. Joyce on his project and the project of modern literature: [In an interview with Arthur Power.] "In writing one must create an endlessly changing surface, dictated by the mood and current impulse in contrast to the fixed mood of classical style. [. . .] In other words we must write dangerously: everything is inclined to flux and change nowadays and modern literature, to be valid, must express that flux" (cf. Lukacs).