James Joyces Artistry, Method, and Ideas - Essay Example

James Joyce Introduction Perhaps the 20th century’s most critically renowned James Joyce’s works range in time from Chamber Music written in 1907 to Stephen Hero written in 1944. All of his works deal with his characters growing into adulthood, the essential metaphor of the self. Within this paradigm his discourse examines poverty, love, and injustices in the world. Joyce’s The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is one of the most respected books of its time because of its exploration of young people struggling to grow up, sexual relationships and economic problems. It was not until Ulysses, 1922, that Joyce ever made enough money to support his family with only his writing as a job. After this book he had the support of an audience, which made it so he could sell the rest of his books; this include Finnegan’s Wake, 1939. Joyce was one of the most outstanding writers of all time as he had fore-grounded many stylistic trends and new ideas, including invented puns, words, and illusions. He also implemented things from his real life such as growing up poor, Catholic, and Irish as important elements of his work. This essay considers Joyce’s artistry, method, and ideas, tracing the self as an essential metaphor in his work. Biographical Information In considering Joyce’s work it’s necessary to consider biographical information as the self is an essential metaphor in all of his prose work. Large segments of his semi-autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man explore Stephen Dedalus’ maturation at Clongowes. James himself attended Clongowes Wood. He excelled in all his subjects there with great ease and was soon at the head of his class. Here he became interested in the religious rituals of the liturgy and served as an altar boy in daily masses. After a short time at a Christian Brothers school, James was sent to Belvedere College. This Jesuit day school was a continuation of his religious education. It was at Belvedere where Joyce developed a keen interest in theology and even thought of becoming a priest. But he soon found out that the vows of celibacy and chastity were much too demanding for him to overcome and crushed the notion of becoming a holy man. After graduating from Belvedere, he enrolled in yet another Jesuit institution, the University College in Dublin. It was at the University that Joyce’s formal Jesuit education ended, having given him much knowledge and wisdom, but also much to learn. While Joyce’s life can be said to have been rocky and troublesome, he also had some glimmers of light. His rejection of Catholicism might have been imminent and inevitable but the Jesuit ideals that were instilled in him through his childhood were lasting ones. His parents went to many pains to be able to give him the best education available, but their economic difficulties left a lifelong scar on his drive to succeed. His father’s alcoholism added to his grief as a child, as did his mother’s death, causing him to tear away from the only home he had ever known. Later in life Joyce himself would become an alcoholic, leading Mahon to surmise, “that the disembodied voices of Finnegans Wake may owe something to Joyces alcoholism” (Mahon, pg. 2). Here we see that even Joyce’s most experimental work is centrally concerned with the self. Artistry In examining Joyce’s writing much criticism has focused on two of his most studied works, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. While both of these novels make groundbreaking use of stylistic devices, they are also characteristic of Joyce’s work, from Dubliners through Finnegan’s Wake, as being centrally concerned with the metaphor of the self. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen is detached through frustration, not through cool judgment and throughout the novel he finds himself in a process of shaping up a passionately involved attitude that is alien to the coolness and aloofness towards which the novel aspires. Despite the basic inconsistencies of Stephen’s personality we can follow the gradual process of self-achievement in him. Central to Stephen’s individuality is the inconsistency between his personality of a romantic frustrated man, and his aesthetic theory (a classical one which cherishes the autonomy of the aesthetic and supports individual personality as a principle) (Connelly). We may say that, in terms of Stephen’s identity formation, Portrait has a centrifugal movement (rejecting every influence), whereas Ulysses has a centripetal movement, trying to internalize all levels and mould them in one unifying consciousness. Unlike Ulysses, which focuses on the reunification of father and son, the Portrait deals with the breaking up of this relationship (Connelly). While Ulysses has a multiple focus, shifting between the consciousness of Molly, Stephen and Leopold, the Portrait has a single focus a, that of Stephen’s central consciousness. The novel is made up of a group of moments of climax and anticlimax. Stephen in the first part “Telemachus” manages to keep the balance between himself and the outer world. Despite his doubts and uncertainties, he dominates each level of the father-son relationship: the national level, the artistic level and the philosophical level. As a whole, u. is again dominated by the theme of the father-son relationship, but we are no longer dealing with separation, but with communion. Ulysses is very much a novel about repentance in the religious sense, and the understanding of this novel is based to a great extent on an understanding of the religion in it (Connelly). Stephen’s search of the father takes a number of forms and the Homeric parallel gives a broader importance to the theme, hinting at the obsession of the lack of a country – Ireland (Connelly). This goes in parallel with the theme of invasion. The religious level of the quest points to the Bible, and to an abstract spiritual speculation: Christ, the Father and the Spirit constitute the formula through which Joyce demonstrates his idea of identity. In the Portrait total freedom from the creator was necessary for the formation of the artist. The Country, the Church and the Father have no importance in this process and their influence needs, therefore, to be discarded. In Ulysses, however, the artist had grown up and realizes the most important aspect of his creation: namely the crucial relationship between artist (or creator) and his creation (Connelly). He therefore tries to find a bridge between himself and his father, thus reestablishing at a certain level the creator-creation relationship, with himself in the position of creation. In Ulysses, the father is not the biological father but the spiritual one, trying to complete the Oedipal triangle Mother- Father –Son (Connelly). Significantly for Stephen, since his mother is dead, her place in the triangle is taken by Ireland, the country. Bloom himself is in search of a son because his biological son died and that he is trying to complete his own triangle in which were present himself – as the Father, Molly – as the Mother, yet no son. In regards to James Joyce’s literary technique it’s been said that, “Joyce’s peculiar technique is that of taking in everything, but nothing in particular, maintaining a neutral approach to all details” (Ellman, pg. 112). In Portrait, each chapter presents a triumph of Stephen’s, but the structure, despite its apparent redundance, gives a sense of progress because each chapter is at the same time a denial of the triumph that had preceded it. The final triumph is Stephen’s because he finds the stability which is denied to him in the first chapter, thus reaching the final step in the circular movement of the novel as a whole. In Ulysses and to a greater extent Finnegan’s Wake Joyce advances a highly experimental style that has been referred to as revolutionary. In Ulysses Joyce’s stream of conscious style that was advanced in Portrait took full form, occurring throughout the events of a single day. In Finnegan’s Wake Joyce advanced one of the most challenging novels of the 20th century, implementing a style heavily reliant on polyglot puns and complex symbolism. While the work has been derided by some, Harold Bloom wrote, “If aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon Finnegans Wake would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante” (Bloom, pg. 392). Ultimately, the experimental style in these novels has made them some the most renowned artistic works of the 20th century. While arguably not as renowned as Joyce’s novels, his short story collection Dubliners is also a seminal work. One of the main stylistic devices utilized in these stories are epiphanies. Joyce‘s meaning of epiphany is aesthetic and it means a sudden revelation of the essence of things. In stories such as Araby and the Sisters, these epiphanies help Joyce build his philosophy of existence and his aesthetic creed (Valente). Epiphanies are for Joyce a concentration, as in a nutshell, of his sense of significance. Both in a human and in an aesthetic sense, Joyce’s epiphanies are woven in a cyclic pattern of the exterior time, because for Joyce time is either external or internal (Valente). The external time is cyclical and history as chronology is meaningless, as it constantly repeats itself (history is a nightmare we are unable to awaken from, said Joyce) (Valente). From a qualitative perspective, the artistry inherent in these stories and their clear and direct style make them some of Joyce’s most accessible work. Conclusion The life of James Joyce portrays the struggle of a man who rejected his tradition, suffered poverty, and endured its effects until his death. Joyce remains one of the most frequently named Irish authors of the 20th century and through his works one witnesses in great part the evolution of Joyce himself. In great part his works are concerned with this essential metaphor of the self; that is, a concern for the aesthetic, intellectual, and personal maturation of the main protagonists. While Joyce may be most renowned for his revolutionary stylistic advances, it is this concern with the individual’s evolution that is at the core of Joyce’s artistry. References Bloom, Harold. (1995). The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead Press. Connolly, Thomas ed. (1962) Joyces Portrait Criticism and Critiques. New York: Appleton- Century-Crofts. Ellmann, Richard. (1965). James Joyce. New York: Oxford UP. Joyce, James. (1963) Finnegan’s Wake. New York: New Directions. Joyce, James. (1968) Ulysses. London: Penguin. Joyce, James. (1975) Dubliners. New York: Viking. Joyce, James. (1969) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin Mahon, Vincent. "James Joyce: A Students Guide/The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom: Ulysses as Narrative/Joyces Moraculous Sindbook: A Study ofUlysses.." Modern Language Review 75.2 (1980): 378-382. Sept. 2010. Valente, Francesca. "The Modern World." Joyces Dubliners as Epiphanies. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Sep 2010. . Read More