Literature 5 als / 2

LIFE

James Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar.

When he was child, his family lost most of their prestige and wealth. His father was a supporter of the movement for independent Ireland, but when the leader of this movement died, Joyce’s father retired from politics and social life. This event was for Joyce the sign of the failure of his country unable to get free from the domination of Britain. At first, Joyce wanted to become a priest, so he attend two Jesuits schools, then he went to study modern languages at University College Dublin where he changed his mind and decided to become a writer.

However, his first work were refused publication by the university authorities so Joyce, deluded and frustrated for personal reasons and for the social, political situation of his country, left Ireland to live abroad for all his life. First he went to Paris, then to Pola and Trieste. He was accompanied by the woman of his life that he married later after having two children. In Trieste, he finished “Dubliners”, a collection of 15 short stories about the life of people in Dublin. At the outbreak of the war I, Joyce left Trieste for Zurich, where he started working on his masterpiece “Ulysses”. He had a poor health and had an eye operation against blindness. He died in Zurich in 1941.

“DUBLINERS”

Joyce loved and hated his country at the same time, he seems to reject everything that was Irish, but at the same time all his works are mainly about Ireland and Dublin in particular. In “Dubliners”, Joyce gives a realistic picture of every day life in Dublin, but at the same time he writes about the moral history of his country. The city seems paralyzed by the atmosphere of hypocrisy and spiritual inactivity. It’s the paralysis of will, courage: men and women seem to accept the limitation of the social, political context and have no reactions of any kind. The stories are symbolically linked one another so that the present the four aspects of man’s life: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life.

“Dubliners” then on one level appears realistic because it recreates characters, places, streets, pubs and idioms of Dublin, on the other hand makes use of symbolic effects which gives common objects and ordinary situations deep meaning. Joyce himself coined the definition of “epiphany” to indicate these moments of reflections on man’s life through simple things and actions. Epiphany, manifestation, just as in the showing of the Christ child to the magi kings.

Joyce’s first great portrait of Dublin life came with Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories. It is a penetrating depiction of the stagnation and paralysis of the Irish middle class life in and around Dublin, presented in four stages: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life.

Characters accept their condition because they are not aware of it. All Dubliners are spiritually weak people, they are slaves of their  familiar, moral, cultural, religious and political life. The hearth of the whole collection is the revelation of the paralysis to its victims, and the failure to find a way out of it.

The peculiar technique used is the epiphany, coined by Joyce himself: it is a sudden revelation of a strong reality caused by a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation. According to his task to reproduce the deep and hidden meaning of the life, the epiphany represents the key of the story itself.
Each story is told from the prospective of a character and so the interior monologue is widely used: it is the presentation of protagonist’s thoughts without any interfering agency. Thanks to it, readers acquire direct knowledge of who was speaking.
Linguistic register is varied: it suits the age, the social class and the role of the characters.

“EVELINE”

Eveline Hill sits at a window in her home and looks out onto the street while fondly recalling her childhood, when she played with other children in a field now developed with new homes. Her thoughts turn to her sometimes abusive father with whom she lives, and to the prospect of freeing herself from her hard life juggling jobs as a shop worker and a nanny to support herself and her father. Eveline faces a difficult dilemma: remain at home like a dutiful daughter, or leave Dublin with her lover, Frank, who is a sailor. He wants her to marry him and live with him in Buenos Aires, and she has already agreed to leave with him in secret. As Eveline recalls, Frank’s courtship of her was pleasant until her father began to voice his disapproval and bicker with Frank. After that, the two lovers met clandestinely.

As Eveline reviews her decision to embark on a new life, she holds in her lap two letters, one to her father and one to her brother Harry. She begins to favor the sunnier memories of her old family life, when her mother was alive and her brother was living at home, and notes that she did promise her mother to dedicate herself to maintaining the home. She reasons that her life at home, cleaning and cooking, is hard but perhaps not the worst option—her father is not always mean, after all. The sound of a street organ then reminds her of her mother’s death, and her thoughts change course. She remembers her mother’s uneventful, sad life, and passionately embraces her decision to escape the same fate by leaving with Frank.

At the docks in Dublin, Eveline waits in a crowd to board the ship with Frank. She appears detached and worried, overwhelmed by the images around her, and prays to God for direction. Her previous declaration of intent seems to have never happened. When the boat whistle blows and Frank pulls on her hand to lead her with him, Eveline resists. She clutches the barrier as Frank is swept into the throng moving toward the ship. He continually shouts “Come!” but Eveline remains fixed to the land, motionless and emotionless.

Eveline’s story illustrates the pitfalls of holding onto the past when facing the future. Hers is the first portrait of a female in Dubliners, and it reflects the conflicting pull many women in early twentieth-century Dublin felt between a domestic life rooted in the past and the possibility of a new married life abroad. One moment, Eveline feels happy to leave her hard life, yet at the next moment she worries about fulfilling promises to her dead mother. She grasps the letters she’s written to her father and brother, revealing her inability to let go of those family relationships, despite her father’s cruelty and her brother’s absence. She clings to the older and more pleasant memories and imagines what other people want her to do or will do for her. She sees Frank as a rescuer, saving her from her domestic situation. Eveline suspends herself between the call of home and the past and the call of new experiences and the future, unable to make a decision.

The threat of repeating her mother’s life spurs Eveline’s epiphany that she must leave with Frank and embark on a new phase in her life, but this realization is short-lived. She hears a street organ, and when she remembers the street organ that played on the night before her mother’s death, Eveline resolves not to repeat her mother’s life of “commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness,” but she does exactly that. Like the young boys of “An Encounter” and “Araby,” she desires escape, but her reliance on routine and repetition overrides such impulses. On the docks with Frank, away from the familiarity of home, Eveline seeks guidance in the routine habit of prayer. Her action is the first sign that she in fact hasn’t made a decision, but instead remains fixed in a circle of indecision. She will keep her lips moving in the safe practice of repetitive prayer rather than join her love on a new and different path.

Though Eveline fears that Frank will drown her in their new life, her reliance on everyday rituals is what causes Eveline to freeze and not follow Frank onto the ship.

Eveline’s paralysis within an orbit of repetition leaves her a “helpless animal,” stripped of human will and emotion. The story does not suggest that Eveline placidly returns home and continues her life, but shows her transformation into an automaton that lacks expression. Eveline, the story suggests, will hover in mindless repetition, on her own, in Dublin. On the docks with Frank, the possibility of living a fully realized life left her.

“ULYSSES”

His masterpiece was published in Paris in 1922. The story takes place in Dublin in the course of a single day, June 16, 1904, and tries to describe in details the actions but above all the chaotic flow of thoughts, feelings emotions of three characters: Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and his friend Stephen Deadalus. The main theme of the book is that of the Journey, Ulysses’s story is used to represent allegorically man’s journey through life. But while Homer’s Ulysses is a hero and his journey is full of adventures and heroic brave deeds, and he is in search of truth and knowledge, Bloom’s journey is banal and common and all the characters lack of passion and ideals

“If I gave it all up immediately, I’d lose my immortality. I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”

      J. Joyce, June 15 2018

The End