THE MODERNISM
The modernist movement was characterised by:

  • its rejection of 19th century traditions
  • innovative experimentation with forms and subjects.

The movement had its roots in the 1890s and exploded onto the international scene after World War I, when the society was physically and psychologically devastated. A wide range of innovative forms and techniques arose in literature, art and music.
Modernist authors, like James Joyce, tried to break away from traditions and conventions through experimentation with new forms and devices. They were attracted by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and concerned with how language could be used in literature. Their works reflected the sense of loss and disillusionment which swept through the society after the Great War.
Modernist novelists were mostly concerned with the search for techniques to portray the complexity of the inner life of the individual. James Joyce began to experiment with the stream of consciousnesstechnique and interior monologue. As the focus of the modernist novel is on the inner life, the story line loses importance and sometimes seems to disappear.

JAMES JOYCE

James Joyce (1882-1941) , “the greatest ,most difficult , most stimulating of the innovatory generation of novelists”, was a Dubliner belonging to a Catholic lower middle-class family.

Educated in two very good Jesuit colleges, which gave him an excellent traditional education, with special regard to English and Latin literature and philosophy, Joyce showed special interest in philosophy, in modern languages and incontemporary European literature already at University. He studied Italian,French and Norwegian and later he acquired a knowledge of eighteen languages.

His favourite Italian authors were Dante, G. Bruno and G. Vico.

While he was a university student, Joyce also decided to abandon the Catholic religion and he developed a sort of intellectual isolation ,pride and even arrogance for which he is remembered by his contemporaries.

He also acquired other personal characteristics which he did not change through the rest of his life: a rather delicate physique, an excellent memory, a subtle intelligence, extremely weak eyes.

Another striking personal quality of Joyce was courage , for which he can only be compared to Voltaire or to some anti-totalitarian writers; not physical, moral or political courage, however , but intellectual and artistic daring. This courage led him to break all kinds of ties which made him admire Ulysses just as Dante had admired him.

In 1902, after graduating from University, Joyce left Dublin to study Medicine in Paris.

By leaving Dublin , he was rebelling against the Irish Catholic Church, whose influence he saw as a limitation of his intellectual freedom; he was rebelling against Irish politics for its narrow nationalism, while his ideal was to be cosmopolitan ; he was rebelling against Irish culture , which also seemed to be narrow, especially in the form of the Irish Revival. Finally, in leaving Ireland, Joyce was revolting against family ties , which he had found to be inhibiting and restrictive.

Joyce’s first work , a collection of fifteen autobiographical short stories, Dubliners portrayed the decay and banality of Dublin life. They are studies of Irish life and types, and reveal the indecision , frustration, inhibitions that limit and paralyse the lives of the inhabitants of Dublin.

The author’s intention was “ to write a chapter in the moral history of my country, and I chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to me the centre of paralysis”. Dublindoes not only represents the whole of Ireland, but the whole of life; it is fallen humanity with all its degradation. In all the stories the climax consists in the special moment of sudden revelation of some reality that hadn’t been recognised before. Joyce called it “epiphany” , using the word of the Catholic tradition for the revelation of Christ’s divinity to the Magi. The epiphany is a way to discover the inner truth through apparently casual words.

The stories are usually grouped in four categories: stories of childhood, stories of adolescence, stories of mature life, stories of public life. “The Dead”, the last and longest storyof the collection can be considered one of the greatest short stories of the English literature.

The year 1914 was an important turning point in Joyce’s life and career : he completed his first novel , A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; he wrote a play, Exiles, and he began to write his greatest book, Ulysses.

The “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is a spiritual autobiography which sets the action inside the consciousness of the hero: what Stephen thinks is the heart of the book. Joyce’s power to explore the psychology of his own nature is unparalleled. Moreover, Joyce interweaves dialogue with narration anddescription so that the reader has the outer scene; what people are saying and what they are thinking held before him simultaneously, as happens in real life.

A very interesting feature of this novel is the evolution of the language , which is constantly adapted to the age of the hero. Thus the very beginning of the book reproduces infant language; towards the close of the book, the hero is a young man with university education and the language reflects both his studies and the crude chat of student life.

Ulysses first appeared in serial form and a few years later it was published as a book.The absolute realism which led Joyce to transcribe every thought that passed through the minds of his characters caused the novel to be banned as obscene.

The parallel with Homer’s Odyssey is aimed at suggesting the decline from the mythic, legendary and heroic to the unexcitingly human and the mediocre.

Under the influence of the Italian philosopher G. Vico’s theory of cycles in human history, Joyce saw the historic process represented by three stages of development:the divine, the heroic and the human.We are now living in the last phase of what has been a glorious cycle, and the sordid, mediocre society of today is the prelude of the anarchy to come. (This is the so called “mythical method”, largely used by other men of letters like T.S. Eliot to convey the decay of modern civilisation in contrast with the mythical heroes of the past).

This 20th century Odyssey appears to be an affair confined to the actions of one single day, 16thJune,1914. The author deals with the consciousness of three people and through their consciousness builds up a Dublin which is a microcosm of the universe. His Ulysses is LeopoldBloom, an Irish Jew who has lost his infant son; he is a simple man and represents the average individual.

The agonies of Ulysses’ years of wanderings and separation from Penelope find their parallel in the personal frustrations of Bloom, who goes around Dublin on his daily business while his wife entertains her lover at home. Homer’s Ulysses wandered for long years; in Joyce’s novel the whole of the action is confined to a single day (16th June).

Like Ulysses , Bloom suffers from separation from his wife because they drifted apart after the baby’s death and because she has taken a lover.

Telemachus is the intellectual Stephen Dedalus_-the hero of the Portrait- in search of fatherhood, because he has broken all links with home fatherland and Church. His bitterness and his pride isolate him from his fellows. The paths of the two men cross and re-cross through the day. Linking her two worlds by her desires is Molly, Bloom’s uninhibited wife, whose nocturnal meditations form the final part of the book. She is the Penelope figure.

There are few accidents ; in this strange novel the composition is much more important than the story. Joyce’s mastery of language, his range of vocabulary , the frequent puns render Ulysses one of the major literary achievements of the 20th century.

Finnegans Wake pushes experimentation several stages further. The book is about everybody, everywhere and everything, even if its base in Dublin.

It is a story of fall and resurrection, of love and rivalry in human history and in literature The hero of the book lies sleeping through the whole of the story and all that happens is found in the inner world of his dreams.

Joyce invented a strange language in Finnegans Wake and introduced several foreign words; he had two aims: on the one hand he attempted to capture the unity that lies behind the western languages; on the other end he suggested the loss of the power to communicate which marks modern life.

Style and themes

Joyce asserted that art should be independent of other disciplines and of any moral aim and was an enthusiastic admirer of Walter Pater, the theoretician of aestheticism, from which he derived his interest in form, even though he didn’t share the aesthetes’ belief in “Art for Art’s sake” because he believed that literature was a means to promote awareness.

The task of the artist was not to teach or convince people by explaining the meaning and the values of the world he was depicting, but that of providing all the separate elements of the picture that would enable the reader to reach their own conclusions. In conclusion, the writer’s aim was that of making people aware of reality through their own subjective perception.

In order to ensure that, his works carried no messages from himself, he adopted different points of view, different narrative techniques (from third person narration to the stream of consciousness) and different linguistic styles appropriate to different characters and situations.

Joyce revolutionised the traditional novel which, so far, had exposed its story in a chronological order, through a structured plot and its development through the technique of the “stream of consciousness”, by which he attempted to represent the conscious and the subconscious thoughts and impressions in the mind of a characters. This technique takes the reader inside the narrating character’s mind, where he sees the world of the story through the thoughts and senses of the focal character, of whom he achieves an internal representation.

Joyce developed a stream of consciousness technique called “interior monologue”, which represents an attempt to transcribe a character’s thoughts, sensations and emotions. He does not intervene to guide the reader or to impose narrative order on the often confused, and confusing, mental processes and, in order to faithfully represent the rhythm and flow of consciousness, Joyce often disregards traditional syntax, punctuation and logical connections.

James Joyce believed that the writer’s main task was to record remarkable moments of sudden insight, when a trivial gesture, external object or banal situation leads a character to better understanding of himself and the reality surrounding him and adopted the term “epiphany” to refer to them. The word “epiphany” is used by Christian philosophers to signify a manifestation of the presence of God in the world and has become the standard literary term to refer to the sudden revelation or self-realisation which frequently occurs in modern poetry or fiction.

The language used by Joyce is in harmony with his experimental technique. He often used neologisms and new word combinations, he was able to render in writing the rhythm, tone and pitch of a large variety of speaking voices.

The content of Joyce’s work was mainly concerned with the mankind and its life, and was influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis in describing emotions, feelings and thoughts in his characters.

The central themes in his works are: youth, adolescence, adulthood and maturity, and how identity is affected by these different stages in life. All his books have an autobiographical dimension.