Thematic issues in James Joyce’s Novels

(With Special Reference to Ulysses)

 

Reema Sukhija

Academic Associate (General Management), Indian Institute of Management Indore.

Email: reema.sukhija@gmail.com; reemas@iimidr.ac.in

 

James Joyce (1882-1941) is one of the most thoroughly read and analyzed authors in English literature. Numerous and varied interpretations of his work abound. He revolutionized the novel in the twentieth century by abandoning conventional narrative mode for stream of consciousness and unprecedented play of language. It holds Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (1939) as the peak of literary achievement in this regard.

 

Joyce's technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history, and literature, and created a unique language of invented words, puns and allusions.

The uniqueness of research lies to know his experimental use of language and his exploration of new literary methods in special context to Ulysses. Also to reveal his brilliant and innovative utilization of language, that keeps recurring interest of literary critics.

 

KEYWORDS: Stream of consciousness, Narrative Mode, Experimental Use of Language

INTRODUCTION:

A towering figure in the modernist literary period, James Joyce is considered the most prominent English-speaking writer of the first half of the twentieth century. While he wrote in a number of genres, including drama and lyric poetry, Joyce's reputation rests primarily on his prose works. Joyce's novels, including A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), are widely considered ground-breaking works of fiction. Joyce is among the most widely-read and studied figures in the history of English literature, and is often considered as significant a talent as John Milton and William Shakespeare.

 

 Numerous and varied interpretations of his work abound; critics have provided religious, feminist, sociopolitical, historical, sexual, and autobiographical perspectives on his fiction. His brilliant and innovative utilization of language remains a recurring interest of literary critics, as is Joyce's use of humor. Literary critics note that his life has come to symbolize the spiritual alienation of the modern artist, and his work has spawned numerous imitations. A complicated artistic genius, he created the work worthy of comparison with the masterpieces of English literature. His literary influence is considered profound, and such writers as Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, and John Irving are regarded as his literary descendants.

 

Joyce's career displays a consistent development. In each of his four major works there is an increase in the profundity of his vision and the complexity of his literary technique, particularly his experiments with language. Dubliner is a linked collection of 15 short stories treating the sometimes squalid, sometimes sentimental lives of various Dublin residents

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an autobiographical account of the adolescence and youth of Stephen Dedalus, who comes to realize that before he can be a true artist he must rid himself of the stultifying effects of the religion, politics, and essential bigotry of Ireland.

 

Ulysses. Framed by the dream-induced experiences of a Dublin publican, the novel recapitulates the cycles of Irish history, and in its multiple allusions almost reveals a universal consciousness.

 

LIFE AND WORKS OF JAMES JOYCE

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, better known as James Joyce was a writer of great literary talent. He was born on 2 Feb 1832. He was known better for his style of writing, which was much like the "stream of consciousness" method where the writer just moves on as and how his thoughts take shape.

 

The novels of Joyce were replete with symbolism and significance and a deep study could only help the readers to unlock the pleasure of reading associated with it. Since his novels were tough to comprehend for the common, he could not gain much popularity. It is surprising that Joyce hated life in Ireland but most of his literary works are based in Ireland and share one or the other kind of association. His psychological world could not get rid of Ireland, which constantly inspired him to write about his native place.

 

Joyce’s early work reveals the stylistic influence of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Joyce began reading Ibsen as a young man; his first publication was an article about a play of Ibsen’s, which earned him a letter of appreciation from Ibsen himself.. Joyce imitated Ibsen’s naturalistic brand of realism in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and especially in his play Exiles. Ulysses maintains Joyce’s concern with realism but also introduces stylistic innovations similar to those of his Modernist contemporaries.

 

Ulysses has become particularly famous for Joyce’s stylistic innovations. In Portrait, Joyce first attempted the technique of interior monologue, or stream-of-consciousness. He also experimented with shifting style—the narrative voice of Portrait changes stylistically as Stephen matures. In Ulysses, Joyce uses interior monologue extensively, and instead of employing one narrative voice, Joyce radically shifts narrative style with each new episode of the novel.

 

Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake, is often seen as bridging the gap between Modernism and postmodernism. A novel only in the loosest sense, Finnegans Wake looks forward to postmodern texts in its playful celebration (rather than lamentation) of the fragmentation of experience and the decentered nature of identity, as well as its attention to the nontransparent qualities of language.

 

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Stream of consciousness is the continuous flow of sense, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind or a literary method of representing a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue. The term is often used as a synonym for interior monologue, but they can also be distinguished, in two ways. In the first (psychological) sense, the stream of consciousness is the subject matter while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it.

 

In the second (literary) sense, stream of consciousness is a special style of interior monologue: while an interior monologue always presents a character's thoughts ‘directly’, without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator, it does not necessarily mingle them with impressions and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate the norms of grammar, syntax and logic; but the stream of consciousness technique also does one or both of these things. An important device of modernist fiction and its later imitators, the technique was pioneered by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage (1915-35) and by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), and further developed by Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1928).

 

JAMES JOYCE USE OF STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

For Joyce it was not a technique but just a phenomenon, which he couldn’t dent for a phrase’s sake. Joyce had always been fascinated by the power of the word to confer an idea. Still, what struck him most was the way people misused words in a speech. In many letters to his publishers Joyce would make it clear that in his works what mattered most was fidelity to what had been seen and heard. Observed phenomena had to be conferred faithfully, anything could have been sacrificed but not the reality as perceived by the artist.

 

Writers who create stream-of-consciousness works of literature focus on the emotional and psychological processes that are taking place in the minds of one or more characters. Important character traits are revealed through an exploration of what is going on in the mind.

 

Irish writer James Joyce in his novel Ulysses (1922) focused on the events of a single day and related them to one another in thematic patterns based on Greek mythology. In Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce went beyond this to create a whole new vocabulary of puns and portmanteau (merged) words from the elements of many languages and to devise a simple domestic narrative from the interwoven parts of many myths and traditions. In some of these experiments his novels were paralleled by those of Virginia Woolf, whose Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) skillfully imitated, by the so-called stream-of-consciousness technique, the complexity of immediate, evanescent life experienced from moment to moment.

Stream of consciousness (described above) attempts to present the unedited, uncensored, free-flowing thoughts of a person. However, Joyce and other writers who use this technique do so with forethought and calculation. They are creating the thoughts of fictitious characters, not brain-scanning the thoughts of real humans. The thoughts these writers present to the reader are shaped to the theme of a literary work or the mindset of its characters. Consequently, one may argue, they are not really presenting true stream of consciousness. 

 

JAMES JOYCE’S EXTENTIALISM IN ULYSSES

Ulysses follows the relationships and lives of several people in Dublin Ireland: Leopold, Molly bloom, Stephan Dedalus, and others. The book uses several different narrative techniques, including Interior Monologue, Stream of consciousness, play script, and several points of view.

Ulysses recreates the events of one day in Dublin June 16, 1904; widely known as “Bloomsday”—centering on the activities of a Jewish advertising-space salesman, Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and the aforementioned Stephen Dedalus, now a teacher. The fundamental design of Ulysses is based on Homer's Odyssey; each chapter in the novel parallels one in the epic and is also associated with an hour of the day, color, symbol, and part of the body. Attempting to recreate the total life of his characters—the surface life and the inner life—Joyce mingles realistic descriptions with verbal representations of his characters' most intimate and random thoughts, using techniques of interior narration.

 

Ulysses is an experimental novel in the modernist tradition. It uses parody in its imitation of The Odyssey. It also uses satire and burlesque in ridiculing religion, culture, literary movements, other writers and their styles, and many other people, places, things, and ideas.

 

Due to charges of obscenity in Ulysses it was banned in the United Kingdom until 1930.Joyce deliberately peppered the novel with puns, literary allusions, and alliteration, and complicated the book with a non-linear structure in an attempt to "gain immortality." His tactic has succeeded, as the book is one of the most critically analyzed literary works in the English language.

 

The author writes in third-person point of view with frequent use of allusions, symbols, literary archetypes, pastiche, and the stream-of-consciousness technique, all of which make the novel difficult to comprehend for even the most intelligent and informed readers.  In Ulysses an author portrays a character’s continuing “stream” of thoughts as they occur, regardless of whether they make sense or whether the next thought in a sequence relates to the previous thought. These thought portrayals expose a character’s memories, fantasies, apprehensions, fixations, ambitions, rational and irrational ideas, and so on. In the last chapter of the novel, consisting of eight long paragraphs, Joyce omits punctuation entirely in order to mimic the uninterrupted flow of naked thoughts. Joyce also uses numerous sentences and phrases from Latin, French, German, Spanish, Russian (transliterated) Italian, and other languages. In addition, he uses refined language, vulgar language, slang and demotic dialogue, gibberish, coined words such as noctambules for night walkers (nocturnal ambulators) and circumjacent for surrounding closely, passages in all-capital letters, unpunctuated sentences, and abbreviations (such as H. R. H., rear admiral, the right honourable sir Hercules Hannibal Habeas Corpus Anderson, Another technique he uses is to combine two words into one to create a single adjective and sometimes a noun. Examples are the following: dangerouslooking, hocuspocus, fifenotes, jogjaunty, deepmoved, muchtreasured, dogbiscuits, snotgreen, rosegardens, shrilldeep, canarybird, freefly, allimportant.

Ulysses is an extraordinarily satisfying book, a celebration of life unparalleled in its humor, characterization, and tragic irony.

 

CRITICAL INTERPRETATION

Opinions of the novel range across the spectrum. Some readers insist that Ulysses is a superior novel, a tour de force marking a turning point in modern literature. Others insist that it is an inferior novel, an extremely boring work featuring long passages with a chaos of strange words that are a penance to read and a hell to fathom. There can be no gainsaying, though, that Joyce has been highly influential. Through stream of consciousness–and through sometimes manipulation of language–he allows readers to view the complicated, perplexing, and sometimes irrational workings of the human mind. His display of this technique inspired later writers to use it in their own literary works. Unfortunately, because of its mission and its experimental nature, Ulysses tasks the reader like no other novel before it, making him plod through jungles of obscure symbols, perplexing allusions, and boring portraits of ordinary Dublin life. Admirers of Joyce acknowledge that the novel is difficult. Passages like the following (part of a chapter in which Joyce writes in various idioms that evolved during the development of the English language) make it so:

 

A liquid of womb of woman eyeball gazed under a fence of lashes, calmly, hearing. See real beauty of the eye when she not speaks. On yonder river. At each slow satiny heaving bosom's wave (her heaving embon) red rose rose slowly sank red rose. Heartbeats: her breath: breath that is life. And all the tiny tiny fernfoils trembled of maidenhair.

 

Since its publication, many scholars, distinguished writers, and average readers have exalted Ulysses as a work of enormous significance and brilliance. Probably just as many scholars, distinguished writers, and average readers have dismissed it as an unremittingly dull, tedious, and Ulysses as a work of enormous significance and brilliance. Probably just as many scholars, distinguished writers, and average readers have dismissed it as an unremittingly dull, tedious, and tiresome work–a waste of time. The verdict: The novel needs another century or two to ferment, marinate, or whatever literary works do when they go through the "test of time" (as literary tastes change and standards evolve) to reveal itself in all of its fullness to an unbiased judge. This much can be said for certain about the novel: Except in academia, not many people read Ulysses. Those who do decide to have a go at the thick, allusion-laden, language-bending tome frequently put it down after reading a few chapters, never again to pick it up. 

 

CONCLUSION:

Literary opinion is that James Joyce revolutionized the novels in the twentieth century by his modernist narrative mode of stream of consciousness which holds Ulysses at its peak. His extraordinarily attempt towards the modernistic approach involving the sensuality of the times are unparallel in its humor, characterization and tragic irony. His works though tough to unravel their magic, obscene to the cotemporary period has their adaptability and relevance in modern context which make it masterpieces of today.

 

REFERENCES:

Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, 1978. Princeton University Press, 01-Feb-1984 - 344 pages

 

Friedman, Melvin. Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1955.

 

Humphrey, Robert. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1954.

 

Beebe, Maurice (Fall 1972). "Ulysses and the Age of Modernism". James Joyce Quarterly ,University of Tulsa 10 (1): 172–88

 

Borges, Jorge Luis, (ed.) Eliot Weinberger, Borges: Selected Non-Fictions, Penguin (31 October 2000). ISBN 0-14-029011-7.

 

Bulson, Eric. The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-521-84037-8.

 

Cavanaugh, Tim, "Ulysses Unbound: Why does a book so bad it "defecates on your bed" still have so many admirers?", reason, July 2004.

 

Deming, Robert H. James Joyce: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1997.

Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1959, revised edition 1982. ISBN 0-19-503103-2.

 

Received on 30.05.2012

Revised on   05.06.2012

Accepted on 07.06.2012

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