Scarica Ulysses by James Joyce: A Modern Epic in Prose e più Tesine di Maturità in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Ulysses (1922) James Joyce The story The whole novel takes place on a single day, Thursday, June 16, 1904, which was special to Joyce because it was the day that Nora Barnacle, his future wife, made her fondness clear to him. During the course of this day, three main characters wake up, have various encounters in Dublin, and go to sleep eighteen hours later. The central character, Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged advertising canvasser and non-practicing Jew, is Joyce’s common man. He leaves his home at eight o’clock to buy his breakfast and returns finally at two the following morning; in the hours in-between, he lands on the shores of many streets, attends a funeral, endures misadventures and delight. During his wanderings, Bloom meets Stephen Dedalus, who is the alienated protagonist of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and who becomes, momentarily, his adopted son: the alienated common man rescues the alienated artist from a brothel, and takes him home where the paralysis of their fatigue prevents them from achieving a personal communion. Finally there’s Bloom’s wife, Molly, a voluptuous singer who is planning an afternoon of adultery with her music director. The relation to the Odyssey As its title suggests, Ulysses is related to Homer’s great epic the Odyssey, the tale of Odysseus and his travels after the Trojan War. Joyce used the Odyssey as a structural framework for his book, arranging its characters and events around Homer’s heroic model, with Bloom as Ulysses, Stephen as his son Telemachus, and Molly as the faithful Penelope. Ulysses is divided into three parts and eighteen episodes, as its chapters are usually called: ‘Telemachiad’ (chapters 1–3), ‘Odyssey’ (chapters 4–15), ‘Nostos’ (chapters 16–18), embodying the three main characters, and imitating the three parts of the Odyssey. While the Homeric parallels are the most important structural device in the novel, each chapter is additionally organised around a different hour, a colour, an organ of the body, a sense, a symbol, a narrative technique suitable for the subject-matter. The setting Ulysses is the climax of Joyce’s creativity and sums up the themes and techniques he had developed in his previous works. It was designed as a detailed account of ordinary life on an ordinary Dublin day and Joyce planned each movement of each character on each street as though he were playing chess. He placed them in houses he knew, drinking in pubs he had frequented, walking on cobblestones he retraced. He made the very air of Dublin, the atmosphere, the feeling, the place, almost indistinguishable, certainly inseparable, from his human characters. Consequently, Dublin becomes itself a character in this novel. The representation of human nature Stephen Dedalus, Mr Bloom and Mrs Bloom are more than individuals: they represent two aspects of human nature. -Stephen is pure intellect and embodies every young man seeking maturity; in his stream of consciousness, usually stimulated by sense impressions, he associates things by resemblance. -Mrs Bloom stands for flesh, since she identifies herself totally with her sensual nature and fecundity; her train of thought, while she is lying in the darkness at night, is carried on by her own memories, one triggering another by a kind of association which is simply literal. -Mr Bloom, uniting the extremes, is everybody, the whole of mankind; in his stream of consciousness things are linked by cause and effect or by being near in space / time. The theme of the novel, implied by the quest or journey, is moral: human life means suffering, falling but also struggling to rise and seek the good. The mythical method Joyce’s Ulysses was a new form of prose based on ‘the mythical method’, resulting from the progress made by psychology, ethnology and anthropology, rather than on the ‘narrative method’. This allowed the author to make a parallel with the Odyssey and provides the book with a symbolic, cross-temporal meaning; Homer’s myth was used to enlarge by resemblance and difference the actions and people of a Dublin day, to give them another dimension and to express the universal in the particular. Joyce, however, called his work a ‘novel’, declaring he wanted to write a ‘modern epic in prose’. In fact in Ulysses he achieved a new form of realism. A revolutionary prose Ulysses is famous for many things, from its complex structure to its difficulty, from its brilliantly realised characters to its ‘obscenities’; but what really marks it is its revolutionary prose. In fact, Joyce combined several methods to present a variety of matters. The stream of consciousness technique; the cinematic technique with the literary equivalents of close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots, suspension of speech; question and answer; dramatic dialogue; and the juxtaposition of events, with the consequent construction of order and unity from their randomness, enabled the writer to render his characters’ inner life creating the so-called ‘collage technique’, quite similar to the techniques used by the Cubist artists who depicted a scene from all perspectives. In Ulysses Joyce brought to perfection the interior monologue employing both the two levels of narration, one external to the character’s mind and the other internal, and only the mind level of narration, with the character’s thoughts flowing freely without any interruption coming from the external world. The language used is rich in puns, images, contrasts, paradoxes, juxtapositions, interruptions, false clues and symbols; the range of vocabulary and registers is amazing, moreover, in almost every episode slang, catchphrases, nicknames, even expressions taken from advertising are present and used to voice the unspoken activity of the mind. Foreign words, literary quotations and allusions to other texts are other important linguistic features. https://webtv.loescher.it/home/zoomPublic?contentId=16177 COMPREHENSION 1 ANSWER these questions about the novel Ulysses 1 What are the main events of the novel? 2 How is Ulysses related to the Odyssey? 3 In what sense is Dublin a character in the novel? 4 Who are the three main characters and what do they represent? 5 What does the mythical method allow the writer to make? 6 Where does the complex structure of Ulysses derive from?
