Author Series 29 - James Joyce

Author Series -29 - James Joyce

James Joyce (1882-1941)

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914- 1915, serial; 1916, book), James Joyce extended the Proustian effort to render reality as it appeared to human consciousness by resorting to different linguistic registers with their own vocabulary and grammar. Thus, the child Stephen Dedalus emerges with his own language in the opening passage about a “moocow.” Joyce is not merely describing a child’s world, or picturing that world from the child’s point of view—as Charles Dickens does in Great Expectations (1860-1861, serial; 1861, book), for example. On the contrary, Joyce inhabits a child’s world using the child’s words and phrases to create a sense of immediacy, of what critics have called a stream of consciousness. Reality is not there to be observed but rather to be created in the child’s mind. Stephen is the artist already making up stories in his unusual style. The modern novelist captures the fluid nature of perception as it is enacted in the mind.

Perhaps the most conspicuous example of Joycean stream of consciousness is Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy at the end of Ulysses (1922). Joyce daringly delves into Molly’s private thoughts and feelings as she lies in bed dwelling on her lover’s and her husband’s behavior as well as on her own cravings for sex. Her constant repetition of the word “yes” to convey her obsessive desire shocked many of Joyce’s contemporaries. He was breaking new ground in fiction, announcing, in effect, that what made the novel modern was the novelist’s willingness to deal explicitly with subjects that heretofore had been deemed illicit and the province of pornographers. Joyce, however, believed that the novelist should not shy away from any feeling or desire expressed by his or her characters, even if this meant—as it did—that his or her work would be censored. Ulysses could not be legally published in the United States until 1933, when a court lifted the ban on the novel.

Joyce’s modernism is defined then, not only by his method of narration but also his subject matter: women as fully active and demanding sexual creatures and who tell stories from their own point of view and with their own words. Similarly, the hero of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew, is hardly a conventional male protagonist. He is, rather, what some critics have called an antihero because he engages in no daring actions and is not a leader of society or a military figure. He is, outwardly, unremarkable. What makes him noteworthy is the attention Joyce devotes to Bloom, including to his lively inner life, which is, in its own way, adventurous and absorbing. In other words, the modern hero or antihero acquires his or her status through the energy and imagination the novelist invests in him or her and not as the result of a record of accomplishment (namely in men) that society admires. Bloom is the common man as hero, making up the story of his own life as he lives it.