NOVEL II Lecture 3

1. NOVEL IILecture 3

2. SYNOPSIS • James Joyce – An Introduction • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • The Specifications • Contextual Background • Plot Overview • Characters

3. Insights in the beginning of the story • Sensory Experiences • Political Context • Analysis of Major Characters • Mythological Touch

4. James Joyce (1882–1941)

5. James Joyce (1882–1941) • He was an Irish novelist. He revolutionized the methods of depicting characters and developing a plot in modern fiction. • His astonishing way of constructing a novel, his frank portrayal of human nature in his books, and his complete command of English has made him one of the outstanding influences on literature.

6. James Joyce --Ireland • In the 20th c., Joyce was deeply influenced by Ireland and wrote all his works about Dublins, but unlike his contemporary Yeats, he took no part in Irish nationalism or in Ireland’s life. • The eldest of ten children born in a Dublin suburb. His family was quite well off at first. But after the father’s death, the Joyce family fell into worse and worse poverty.

7. Religion and education • Like most Irish people, his parents were religious Catholic. And Joyce’s education came under the influence of priests. • Eventually he and his youngest brother were admitted without paying to another school run by Jesuit Priests. He was a very good student and the leaders hoped he would become a priest. But he left in disgrace because he lost all faith in the religion during his last year at school.

8. Artist in exile • Dublin College(1899–1902), where he studied languages. literature. • When Joyce graduated in 1902, he knew he would become a writer and an exile. Joyce believes, the artist could only work outside the established social order. He went to France, Italy and Switzerland.

9. Joyce, the person • He took with him a peasant girl from the west of Ireland, whom he loved very much. She was uneducated and had no interest in literature, but her liveliness and witty sense of humour delighted him, they were devoted companions until he died. Her practical, sometimes cynical response to Joyce’s work provided a needed complement to his own self-absorption. • He promised her loyalty and a share in any happiness or fame that might come to him. “No human being has ever stood so close to my soul as you stand.”

10. Works • In his early years abroad he began to write poems, short stories and an autobiographical novel about Stephen Hero. • But his book of short stories entitled The Dublinerswas not published until 1914. • His autobiographical novel was published in 1916 under the title of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

11. How he loved his country and how he is loved by his people • Most of the stories and characters came from his own experiences • He influenced many later writers like Samuel Becket Waiting for Godot • Most of his works were related • with Ireland and especially Dublin • Revealed the real world and • especially the spiritual world of the people

12. Works • His Ulysses came out at first in Little Review in New York in 1918. suppressed, • The book appeared in Paris in 1922 in its complete form. He became the center of a storm of literary controversy. Its publication was banned in the United States until 1933.

13. Works • From 1922 until 1939 Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake(1939. • In 1917, Joyce contracted glaucoma; for the rest of his life he would endure pain, periods of near blindness, and many operations. Joyce died in Zürich in 1941 after an operation.

14. Modernism and James JoyceA bit in detail…

15. Modernism • (1) The rise of modernist movement • Modernism rose out of skepticism and disillusionment of capitalism, which made writers and artists search for new ways to express their understanding of the world and the human nature. • The French symbolism was the forerunner of modernism. The First World War quickened the rising of all kinds of literary trends of modernism, which, toward the 1920s, converged into a mighty torrent of modernist movement. • The major figures associated with the movement were Kafka, Picasso, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Modernism was somewhat curbed in the 1930s. But after World War II, varieties of modernism, or post-modernism, rose again with the spur of Sarter's existentialism. • However, they gradually disappeared or diverged into other kinds of literary trends in the 1960s.

16. The characteristics of modernism • Modernism amounts to more than a chronological description, that is to say, the more recent does not necessarily mean more modern. • Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the idea of psychoanalysis as its theoretical base. • The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. • The chief characteristics of modernism are as follows:

17. The characteristics of modernism • (A) Modernism marks a strong and conscious break with the past, by rejecting the moral, religious and cultural values of the past. • (B) Modernism emphasizes on the need to move away from the public to the private, from the objective to the subjective. • (C) Modernism upholds a new view of time by emphasizing the psychic time over the chronological one. It maintains that the past, the present and the future are one and exist at the same time in the consciousness of individual as a continuous flow rather than a series of separate moments. • (D) Modernism is, in many respects, a reaction against realism. It rejects rationalism, which is the theoretical base of realism; it excludes from its major concern the external, objective, material world, which is the only creative source of realism; it casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature like story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc., which are essential to realism. As a result, the works created by the modernist writers can often be labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry or anti-drama.

18. Stream of consciousness • Stream of consciousness is a phrase coined by W. James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the flow of thoughts of the human mind. • Now it is widely used in a literary context to describe the narrative method whereby certain novelists describe the unspoken thoughts and feelings of their characters without resorting to objective description or conventional dialogue. • Among English writers, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are two major advocates of the technique. • The ability to represent the flux of a character's thoughts, impressions, emotions, or reminiscences, often without logical sequence or syntax, marked a revolution in the form of novel.

19. His first novel, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' (1916), • is largely autobiographical. It describes the childhood, youth and early manhood of Stephen Dedalus, a highly gifted young Irishman. • After mental torment and inner conflict, Stephen abandons Catholicism and leaves Ireland making up his mind to devote himself to artistic career in exile: 'I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home. my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning. • ' The plot is symbolic of the relation between an artist and society as well as that between art and exile in the modern western world. In the novel, there are changes of vocabulary, idiom, and prose structure to befit the various stages of the hero's development from childhood to early manhood, but the novel presents no difficulty as prose. • It is the author's "preliminary canter over the field of infinite stylistic adaptability".

20. Artistic points of view • (1) Joyce is a self-conscious and self-prepared artist. He holds that the subject matter of art should not be limited only to the sublime; anything that pleases the aesthetic sensitivity can be the subject matter of art. To Joyce, the creative artist should be concerned with the beautiful. As to how to apprehend the beautiful, Joyce quotes Aquinas' notion about the three required things for the perception of beauty, i.e. wholeness or integrity, harmony or proportion, and clarity or radiance. • (2) Joyce believes that literary art can be roughly divided into three forms, i.e. lyrical, epical and dramatic. He also thinks that the artist is two in one: on one hand, he is an unconscious receptor, who reacts emotionally to the world around him; on the other hand, he is a conscious converter, and schemes them in different forms.

21. (3) In Joyce's opinion, the dramatic form is the highest form of art. To his understanding, the artist, who wants to reach the highest stage and to gain the insights necessary for the creation of dramatic art, must rise to the position of god and be completely objective. • (4) To Joyce, comedy is the perfect manner in art. That well explains why Joyce sticks to comedy in his writings. And this comic spirit, which makes its early appearance in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, achieves its great flowering in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

22. A Review of James’ famous works Novel: The Genera

23. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ---- Novel of Education • It tells a lot about his own life but it is not a true autobiography. It is a symbolic story concerning the relation between any artist and society in the modern world. • The hero of this book is Stephen Dedalus, who resembles Joyce. It tells the hero’s life from early childhood to manhood, which closely resembles Joyce’s. When he grows up, Stephen realizes his destiny as an artist. • He resists the temptation to become a priest and decides instead to be a writer. He wants to have the god-like power of recreating the world by the use of worlds.

24. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ---- Novel of Education • Novel of Education: Usually about a sensitive young man who is at first shaped by excessively powerful and oppressive forces of his environment, but gradually realizes the pressure and rebels against it and tires to find his own identity. It tends to follow the pattern of rebellion either against parents, or against religion. • In this sense, Joyce’s Portrait can be read as a straight-forward, naturalistic account of the bitter youthful experiences and final artistic and spiritual liberation of the protagonist (Joyce’s alter ego in the novel). • p.7, p.14, p.48 flogging p.53

25. 1922-Ulysses • Officially banned from sale in America until 1933. today, it is considered to be one of the great masterpieces of English literature. • A parallel with Greek Mythology: Ulysses was originally the hero of the great epic poem. He is a brave warrior, and wanders through the world for many years after his triumphs in the Trojan War, crossing seas and having extraordinary adventures. At last he returns his home just in time to save his wife from marrying again, as she believes he is dead.

26. 1922-Ulysses • Three persons in the novel: Bloom is Joyce’s modern version of Ulysses, who is a middle-aged Irish Jew, a normal businessman; Stephen Dedalus, a dedicated writer resembling Joyce; Molly Bloom, Bloom’s unfaithful wife, representing the earthy forces of life and reproduction.

27. 1922-Ulysses • It is told entirely through stream of consciousness. the first part concentrates on Stephen Delalus in the morning. • His thoughts show that he is an artist who stands aloof from society, brilliant, observant and creative, but incomplete because he does not experience life to the full.

28. 1922-Ulysses • The second part draws a sharp contrast between Stephen and Bloom, a complete man. The readers follow Bloom’sdaily activity through his thoughts: attending a funeral, transacting business, eating lunch, taking a walk, worrying about his wife. • His thoughts reveal his whole history, past and present. In the evening Bloom meets Stephen. Bloom has no son, so he feels very fatherly towards Stephen and follows him through various adventures in the night, in order to protect him. In the end, Boom takes drunken Stephen to his house, giving him a meal, and sending him home. Bloom goes to bed. • The last part of the book deals the thoughts of his wife Molly. Joyce shows the disorganized, natural flow of her thoughts by putting no punctuation at all, for 40 pages.

29. Dubliners • Dubliners mirrors the poverty-stricken years of early exile. It is a look back in anger. • Joyce portrays his countrymen as drunks, cheats, boasters, gossips and schemers: failures all, people who cannot take the chances life offers them and who, as in Araby, prevent the young from taking theirs.

30. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

31. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManThe Specifications… • Title ·  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • author · James Joyce • type of work · Novel • genre · Autobiographical novel

32. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManThe Specifications… • narrator · The narrator is anonymous, and speaks with the same voice and tone that Stephen might. • point of view · Although most of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in the third person, the point of view is Stephen's: as Stephen develops as a person, the language and perspective of the narration develop with him. We see everything in the manner in which he thinks and feels it. At the very end of the novel, there is a brief section in which the story is told through Stephen's diary entries. This section is in the first person. • tone · The tone is generally serious and introspective, especially during Stephen's several heartfelt epiphanies. • tense · Past

33. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManThe Specifications… • setting (time) · 1882–1903 • setting (place) · Primarily Dublin and the surrounding area • protagonist · Stephen Dedalus • major conflict · Stephen struggles to decide whether he should be loyal to his family, his church, his nation, or his vocation as an artist. • rising action · Stephen's encounters with prostitutes; his emotional reaction to Father Arnall's hellfire sermons; his temporary devotion to religious life; his realization that he must confront the decision of whether to center his life around religion or art

34. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManThe Specifications… • climax · Stephen's decision in Chapter 4 to reject the religious life in favor of the life of an artist • falling action · Stephen's enrollment in University College, where he gradually forms his aesthetic theory; Stephen's distancing of himself from his family, church, and nation • themes · The development of individual consciousness; the pitfalls of religious extremism; the role of the artist; the need for Irish autonomy • motifs · Music; flight; prayers, secular songs, and Latin phrases • symbols · Green and maroon; Emma; the girl on the beach • foreshadowing · Stephen's heartfelt emotional and aesthetic experiences foreshadow his ultimate acceptance of the life of an artist. Additionally, Joyce often refers to Stephen's vague sense, even very early in his life, that a great destiny awaits him.

35. Contextual Background • James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in the town of Rathgar, near Dublin, Ireland. • He was the oldest of ten children born to a well-meaning but financially inept father and a solemn, pious mother. Joyce's parents managed to scrape together enough money to send their talented son to the Clongowes Wood College, a prestigious boarding school, and then to Belvedere College, where Joyce excelled as an actor and writer. • Later, he attended University College in Dublin, where he became increasingly committed to language and literature as a champion of Modernism. In 1902, Joyce left the university and moved to Paris, but briefly returned to Ireland in 1903 upon the death of his mother. • Shortly after his mother's death, Joyce began work on the story that would later become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

36. Contextual Background • Published in serial form in 1914–1915, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man draws on many details from Joyce's early life. • The novel's protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, is in many ways Joyce's fictional double—Joyce had even published stories under the pseudonym "Stephen Daedalus" before writing the novel. • Like Joyce himself, Stephen is the son of an impoverished father and a highly devout Catholic mother. Also like Joyce, he attends Clongowes Wood, Belvedere, and University Colleges, struggling with questions of faith and nationality before leaving Ireland to make his own way as an artist. • Many of the scenes in the novel are fictional, but some of its most powerful moments are autobiographical: both the Christmas dinner scene and Stephen's first sexual experience with the Dublin prostitute closely resemble actual events in Joyce's life.

37. Contextual Background • In addition to drawing heavily on Joyce's personal life, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also makes a number of references to the politics and religion of early-twentieth-century Ireland. • When Joyce was growing up, Ireland had been under British rule since the sixteenth century, and tensions between Ireland and Britain had been especially high since the potato blight of 1845. • In addition to political strife, there was considerable religious tension: the majority of Irish, including the Joyces, were Catholics, and strongly favored Irish independence. • The Protestant minority, on the other hand, mostly wished to remain united with Britain.

38. Contextual Background • Around the time Joyce was born, the Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell was spearheading the movement for Irish independence. • In 1890, however, Parnell's longstanding affair with a married woman was exposed, leading the Catholic Church to condemn him and causing many of his former followers to turn against him. • Many Irish nationalists blamed Parnell's death, which occurred only a year later, on the Catholic Church. Indeed, we see these strong opinions about Parnell surface in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man during an emotional Christmas dinner argument among members of the Dedalus family. • By 1900, the Irish people felt largely united in demanding freedom from British rule. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young Stephen's friends at University College frequently confront him with political questions about this struggle between Ireland and England.

39. Contextual Background • After completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Zurich in 1915, Joyce returned to Paris, where he wrote two more major novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, over the course of the next several years. • These three novels, along with a short story collection, Dubliners, form the core of his remarkable literary career. He died in 1941.

40. Contextual Background • Today, Joyce is celebrated as one of the great literary pioneers of the twentieth century. • He was one of the first writers to make extensive and convincing use of stream of consciousness, a stylistic form in which written prose seeks to represent the characters' stream of inner thoughts and perceptions rather than render these characters from an objective, external perspective. • This technique, used in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man mostly during the opening sections and in Chapter 5, sometimes makes for difficult reading. • With effort, however, the seemingly jumbled perceptions of stream of consciousness can crystallize into a coherent and sophisticated portrayal of a character's experience.

41. Contextual Background • Another stylistic technique for which Joyce is noted is the epiphany, a moment in which a character makes a sudden, profound realization—whether prompted by an external object or a voice from within—that creates a change in his or her perception of the world. • Joyce uses epiphany most notably in Dubliners, but A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is full of these sudden moments of spiritual revelation as well. • Most notable is a scene in which Stephen sees a young girl wading at the beach, which strikes him with the sudden realization that an appreciation for beauty can be truly good. • This moment is a classic example of Joyce's belief that an epiphany can dramatically alter the human spirit in a matter of just a few seconds.

42. Plot Overview • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, a boy growing up in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, as he gradually decides to cast off all his social, familial, and religious constraints to live a life devoted to the art of writing. • As a young boy, Stephen's Catholic faith and Irish nationality heavily influence him. He attends a strict religious boarding school called Clongowes Wood College.

43. Plot Overview • At first, Stephen is lonely and homesick at the school, but as time passes he finds his place among the other boys. • He enjoys his visits home, even though family tensions run high after the death of the Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. This sensitive subject becomes the topic of a furious, politically charged argument over the family's Christmas dinner.

44. Plot Overview • Stephen's father, Simon, is inept with money, and the family sinks deeper and deeper into debt. After a summer spent in the company of his Uncle Charles, Stephen learns that the family cannot afford to send him back to Clongowes, and that they will instead move to Dublin. • Stephen starts attending a prestigious day school called Belvedere, where he grows to excel as a writer and as an actor in the student theater.

45. Plot Overview • His first sexual experience, with a young Dublin prostitute, unleashes a storm of guilt and shame in Stephen, as he tries to reconcile his physical desires with the stern Catholic morality of his surroundings. • For a while, he ignores his religious upbringing, throwing himself with debauched abandon into a variety of sins—masturbation, gluttony, and more visits to prostitutes, among others. • Then, on a three-day religious retreat, Stephen hears a trio of fiery sermons about sin, judgment, and hell. Deeply shaken, the young man resolves to rededicate himself to a life of Christian piety.

46. Plot Overview • Stephen begins attending Mass every day, becoming a model of Catholic piety, abstinence, and self-denial. • His religious devotion is so pronounced that the director of his school asks him to consider entering the priesthood. • After briefly considering the offer, Stephen realizes that the austerity of the priestly life is utterly incompatible with his love for sensual beauty.

47. Plot Overview • That day, Stephen learns from his sister that the family will be moving, once again for financial reasons. Anxiously awaiting news about his acceptance to the university, Stephen goes for a walk on the beach, where he observes a young girl wading in the tide. • He is struck by her beauty, and realizes, in a moment of epiphany, that the love and desire of beauty should not be a source of shame. Stephen resolves to live his life to the fullest, and vows not to be constrained by the boundaries of his family, his nation, and his religion.

48. Plot Overview • Stephen moves on to the university, where he develops a number of strong friendships, and is especially close with a young man named Cranly. • In a series of conversations with his companions, Stephen works to formulate his theories about art. • While he is dependent on his friends as listeners, he is also determined to create an independent existence, liberated from the expectations of friends and family.

49. Plot Overview • He becomes more and more determined to free himself from all limiting pressures, and eventually decides to leave Ireland to escape them. • Like his namesake, the mythical Daedalus, Stephen hopes to build himself wings on which he can fly above all obstacles and achieve a life as an artist.

50. Characters… Stephen Dedalus • The main character of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Growing up, Stephen goes through long phases of hedonism and deep religiosity. He eventually adopts a philosophy of aestheticism, greatly valuing beauty and art. Stephen is essentially Joyce's alter ego, and many of the events of Stephen's life mirror events from Joyce's own youth.