Riassunto introduzione Declan Kiberd (Ulysses - Penguin edition) - James Joyce, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Riassunto introduzione Declan Kiberd (Ulysses - Penguin edition) - James Joyce e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! THE BOOK Joyce had to scurry with his family from city to city, in his attempt to avoid the dangers of World War I, as he created a beautiful book in a Europe bent on self-destruction. History was a nightmare, an heroic deception (inganno) from which all Europe - and not just Ireland - was trying to awake. As he teaches Roman history in the second chapter, Stephen contemplates the futility of war with a mind which reflects the costs of victory to the ancient Pyrrhus but also Joyce's awareness of the bombardment of buildings in 1917. Men had killed and maimed one another's bodies in the name of abstract virtues, so Joyce resolved to write a materialist 'epic of the body', with a minute account. The modern Ulysses, Mr Leopold Bloom, becomes a standing reproach to the myth of ancient military heroism. Ulysses is a protest against the squalid codes of chivalric militarism and against the sad machismo of sexual conquest. Yeats, though only seventeen years older than Joyce, believed in ancient heroism and wished only to make it live again in Ireland. Joyce was more modern. He contended that the ordinary was the proper domain of the artist, arguing that sensationalism and heroics could safely be left to journalists. Joyce was convinced of the gentle race. To Joyce, however, Cuchulainn's combination of aggression and pain must have seemed but an illdisguised version of the 'muscular Christianity' preached in British public schools. Exposing the extent to which its nationalism was an imitation of the original English model, rather than a radical renovation of the consciousness of the Irish race. He had written Dubliners as 'a chapter of the moral history of my country' and had ended A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the promise to forge the 'uncreated conscience of my race'. Such solemn words suggest that Joyce saw himself as a national rather than a nationalist patriot. Joyce exploded the myth of the fighting Irish and, especially through his protagonist Bloom, depicted them as a quiescent, long-suffering but astute people, very similar in mentality to the Jews. if Joyce wished to base his narrative on an ancient legend, why did he turn to Greek rather than Gaelic tales? Ever since boyhood, he had been more attracted by the warm humanity of Odysseus. Many of the great modernist writers, from Conrad to Sartre, saw theirs as a literature of 'extreme situations', but Joyce was exceptional among them in cleaving (attaccamento) to the quotidian. Like Lawrence, Joyce wanted to afford the body a recognition equal to that given the mind, but to a post Victorian generation: both men appeared to elevate the body above all else. The authorities in the United States banned the book while the Irish responded with sarcasm and invective, but they never banned the book. The United States rescinded its ban and the Soviet writers' unions began to translate Ulysses into their own languages. In Dublin today, statues of Joyce abound. It was, and still is, in England that Joyce found it hardest to secure a hearing (ascolto). Lawrence complained (protestava) of the 'journalistic dirty-mindedness' of its author. Many English universities excluded the book from undergraduate courses. English sensed that Joyce, despite his castigations of Irish nationalism, was even more scathing (feroce,aspro) of the 'brutish empire'. THE STRUCTURE In the year 1800, the German critic Friedrich Schlegel contended that modern literature lacked a centre, 'such as mythology was for the ancients', because the Enlightenment of had taught men to contemplate the real world, with no mythic explanations. The human need to make myths is very deep-rooted, since myths are symbolic projections of the cultural and moral values of a society. Schlegel predicted the self-critical recuperation of Homeric mythology in Ulysses and foresaw the pervasive strategy of modernism: the liberation of a modern sensibility by an ancient myth and the resuscitation of an ancient myth by a modern sensibility. The famous diagram was published by Stuart Gilbert with the a completely straight face. He foresaw that the written word was doomed to decline in an age of electronic communications. He himself would have preferred a musical to a literary career, and his works all gain greatly from being read aloud. For example, in the Nausicaa chapter, Bloom's ecstasy at the sight of Gerty MacDowell's legs is captured by a rising crescendo of '0' sounds, after which she walks away, prompting him to ponder: The death of language takes many forms besides fatigued cliche, and one of them was the loss of Irish.. The interior monologues of Ulysses permitted Joyce to contrast the richness of a man's imaginative life with the poverty of his social intercourse. Like his creator, Bloom too is seeking to extend the limits of language. His sympathies with humans flow naturally to those as lonely as himself; and such encounters, as with Gerty MacDowell, are often wordless, conducted in the language of the body. The lonely inarticulacy of Bloom is poignantly captured in the scene on Sandymount Strand, after his masturbation, when he writes in the sand I AM A. This unfinished sentence is characteristic of the man's inability to bring many of his impulses to a satisfactory conclusion. The incomplete sentence had already been used by Joyce to register that sense of anticlimax which hung over (perdurano) many of the scenes in Dubliners and A Portrait. Joyce had made a central theme of a perennial problem that those who know how to feel often have no capacity to express themselves. Gerty’s mind has become so infected by the conventions of her favourite magazines that it is hard to tell when she is sincere in the expression of feeling and when she is simply impersonating the kind of woman she thinks she ought to be. Even Bloom's rich mind is a compendium of shreds (pezzi) garnered (acquisiti) from newspaper editorials and advertisements. Near the start of the Aeolus chapter, Joyce reorders a single sentence to illustrate just how interchangeable words can be: Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dull thudding out of Prince's stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dull thudding barrels rolled by gross booted draymen out of Prince's stores. That permutation comes significantly under the heading GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS, as if to suggest that for journalists words are simply tokens (pezzi) to be arranged and rearranged indifferently. But for an artist there can be only one ideal order. . During some of the years spent writing Ulysses, Joyce made money as a teacher of Berlitz English to continental students. The experience must have further convinced him of the foreignness of all language, and of the universality of the unfinished sentence (language recursion). Even less certain is the rapport between the vague, unidentified narrator of this Eumaeus chapter and the reader. After the Wandering Rocks chapter, the style of Ulysses had taken over from the characters as the focus of Joyce's concern (interesse), with even major figures like Stephen and Bloom appearing increasingly as pretexts for a series of meditations on the notions of language and style. Those meditations addressed a central problem of modern writing: the breakdown of the old equation between the structure of a language and the structure of a known world (language=world; Joyce destroyed this equation) . Joyce was one of the first to face the challenge. To his earliest readers, the interior monologue seemed a triumphant solution to the problems of describing the workings of the human consciousness. So there are many things which his interior monologues cannot do. (like what??) Blazes Boylan is attributed just four words of interior monologue . By giving Boylan only four sexist words, Joyce implicitly endorses (sostiene) the valuation of him as a low-budget rake (libertino) and lout (cafone). Proteus chapter is undercut by two other transformations - by the fact that the poet pees on the sand and picks his nose. Traditionally, 'style' was supposed to represent a writer's unique way of seeing the world, but this never prevented exponents of a tradition from judging one style 'good' and another 'bad'. Joyce was one of the first modern artists to appreciate that style was less the mark of a writer's personality than a reflection of the approved linguistic practice of a given historic period. Joyce claimed to base much of his material on borrowings from the talkers of Dublin; and took perverse pride in sharing with Shakespeare the boast (vanto) of never having created a single plot. Parody is the act of a trapped mind which, realizing that it cannot create a new, takes its revenge by defacing (deturpando) the masterpieces of the past. What makes Joyce a radical writer is his willingness to question (mettere in discussion) not just the expressive powers of language but also the institution of literature itself. At the heart of modernist, culture is a distrust (sfiducia) of the very idea of culture itself. THE CHARACTERS Joyce portrayed Irish males in groups less as guilds of freemen than as battalions of the walking wounded. Male friendship was destined to fail, as it did in Joyce's youth. He was left to conclude that at the root of many men's inability to live in serenity with a woman was a prior inability to harmonize male and female elements in themselves. In Ulysses, the mature artist set forth (presenta) Leopold Bloom as the androgynous man of the future. But not before he had defined the needs of the modern male in the figure of Stephen Dedalus, a youth in flight from the overweening (presuntuoso) machismo of his father's Dublin world. So the basic groundwork (preparazione) of Ulysses is laid (preparata) when the truth of maternity is shown to discredit the myth of paternity. The inadequate fathers in Joyce's world are exponents of a false masculinity, which Stephen shuns (evita) for the more womanly strategy of silence . The same guilt which assails Stephen also lacerated Joyce, who was retrospectively fired (segnato) by an almost feminist sense of outrage (indignazione) on behalf (per conto di) of his dead mother against 'the system which had made her a victim'.. However, many hours must yet elapse (trascorrere) before he learns the correct reply to Mulligan's opening invocation, 'Introibo ad altare Dei', and alters the gender of the almighty God, 'Ad deam qui laetificat juventutem meum'. Only then will he begin to divine the truth of the Qabbalah, that the supreme creator is female as well as male, the perfect androgyne. In the meantime, father to provide any lead at all. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus becomes 'himself his own father ... made not begotten' on the same principle by which Shakespeare recreated himself in both the doomed father and the avenging son of Hamlet . .. and by which Joyce reincarnates himself in both the middle-aged Bloom and the youthful Stephen. Whereas nineteenth-century literature had been obsessed with solving questions of origin and paternity, modernism abolished ideas of heritage and sought to usurp (or even murder) the father Joyce, too, sought to produce a Celtic Shakespeare and in Ulysses he had Stephen reinterpret the entire works as a developing narrative of exile and loss. The nationalist dream of an absolute return to a mythic Gaelic was impossible. The nationalism which Joyce lampoons (ridicolizza) throughout Ulysses is largely a copy of its English parentThe critic John Eglinton (one of Joyce's more surprising models for elements of Bloom) asked how a pastoral movement could be in any sense 'national' since the interest of the whole nation lay in extirpating the conditions which produced it. That question was a shrewd recognition of the poverty of tradition in Ireland Joyce and his contemporaries Like Stephen Dedalus, they saw Ireland's conscience as 'uncreated', and from this vacuum they hoped to build a vibrant land. The attempt to smuggle (introdurre di nascosto) a revolutionary text into society under a respectably ancient cover may be one aspect in Joyce's use of The Odyssey as a scaffolding (impalcatura) for Ulysses. The ancient analogues - Shakespeare, Cuchulainn, Odysseus - provided the space within which the radicals were free to innovate or improvise. The revolt against provincialism that underlay the Irish revolution was a revolt against fathers who had inured (assuefare) themselves to repeated defeat by declining, like Simon Dedalus, into 'praisers of their own past'. Joyce's constant struggles with the question of form, along with his scouting of the limits of language, place him squarely in this latter tradition - as does his insistence on the 'plurability' of experience. The romantic writer says: there is an essential Ireland to be served and a definitive Irish mind to be described. The modernist rejoins: there is no single Ireland, but a field of force subject to constant renegotiations; and no Irish mind, but Irish minds shaped by a predicament which produces some common characteristics in those caught up in it. Wilde had said that the only way to intensify personality was to multiply it, Bloom's sheer (completa) versatility seems like a liberation, his black mourning-suit a joke which he privately mocks as a gross simplification. He represents, indeed, a wholly new kind of male subject in world literature, a man whose womanly multiplicity is intended less to excite derision than to provoke admiration. In the writings of Wilde, Shaw and Synge, such a figure was presented for approbation. It was Joyce who rendered the womanly man quotidian and changed forever the way in which writers treated sexuality. Equally, at the level of artistic form, Joyce's experiments with the novel can be best understood in terms of the Irish crisis. For most national writers of the time, the mirror epitomized (incarnare) a realist aesthetic which merely reproduced a degraded colonial environment which they felt they should be contesting. That cracked mirror reappears in the opening pages of Ulysses amid implications by Stephen Dedalus of the menial (da servi, servile) degradation of those nationalist writers who content themselves with describing the surface-effects of colonial life. For Joyce, as for Wilde and Synge, art was not just surface but symbol, a process whereby the real took on the epiphanic contours of the magical. The Irish were among the first postcolonial peoples to restore the 'magic realism' of Shakespeare's later plays to modern writing. Joyce took immense liberties with the form of the novel, blending it intergenerically with elements of short story, epic, and drama from which, in its hybridity, it had derived. Joyce may have exploded the novel, much as Cervantes did the epic and romance, by taking these insights to their logical conclusion. But the urge to destroy is also a creative urge; Ulysses is an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin, 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.