James Joyce's Ulysses: New Perspectives on Man and the Universe, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce's Ulysses: New Perspectives on Man and the Universe e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE DRUMS OF WAR World War | World War | broke out when the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914. Germany marched through Belgium, which was neutral, in order to attack France. The powers involved in the war were, on the one hand, Germany and Austria-Hungary, on the other hand, the Allies (Britain and its Empire, France, Russia, including later USA and Italy). Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914 justifying that Germany did not respect Belgium’s neutrality. It therefore told the nation that it would defend the weak (Belgium) against the strong (Germany), so Britain wanted to fight for democracy and freedom. The entry into the war was aided by a wave of patriotism, which allowed England to be an impressive unity. At first Germany managed to defeat the Allies because it had better equipment, the soldiers were well trained and they had a clear plan of attack. Britain, instead, was not prepared to face such a modern war, since it had fought only in the Crimean War, and it hadn't fought a European war since the Napoleonic Wars. Moreover, the country was unprepared for the terrible and destructive modern artillery, such as machine guns and tanks, and the use of gas and shells during the attacks. This war was terrible and had a lot of psychological effects and disorders on the soldiers, which were called shell shock, which came from shell explosions. On the 2"° April 1917 the United States joined the war. They wanted to fight for democracy and wanted this war to be the end of all the wars. Anyway, thanks to the attack of the USA, Germany was defeated quicker: on 11**" november 1918 Germany signed the armistice. The peace treaty was signed in 1919 in Versailles by Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. The US president Wilson proposed 14 points to prevent any possible occasion of war in the future. He founded the League of Nations, which was an organisation in which the representatives of the world's nations would try to discuss and settle their differences, instead of restoring a war. Nevertheless, the American Senate did not want to be involved in European problems, so they voted against and the United States never joined the League of Nations. It was a terrible war because 9 million people were involved in it, and caused the ruin of four great empires. Furthermore, it made possible the Communist revolution in Russia and paved the way for the rise of dictators like Benito Mussolini and Adof Hitler. THE WAR POETS Different attitudes to war When the war broke out, a lot of young men decided to join it as volunteers and they considered the war like an adventure undertaken for noble ends. Many young people wanted to defend their motherland. But this spirit changed as soon as they fought the Battle of the Somme (1916), where pride and exhilaration were replaced by doubt and disillusionment. In fact, in the so-called Western Front any sense of humanity was lost and soldiers began to understand the terrible war they were in. Soldiers lived in trenches, which were considered like hell because of the rain and mud, the rats which ate the corpses of dead men and the repeated bombings and the use of poison gas. The poets who experienced the war wrote about it in a very realistic and unconventional way, because they wanted to make all the readers aware of the horrors of the war. These poets are known as War Poets. Rupert Brooke He was born in 1887 into a wealthy family and was educated at King's College in Cambridge. He was a good student and became particularly popular because of his handsome look. He attended literary circles and came to know many important political, social and literary figures before the war. He actually saw little combat since he died during the war because of poison gas in 1915. Nevertheless, he wrote five sonnets in 1914, in which he promoted the idea of the war as clean and cleansing and tried to testify to the safeness of war, saying that only the body can suffer and that even death is a reward. His poems, which were traditional, show a sentimental attitude which was completely lost in the brutal turn that war poetry took in the works of other War Poets. His sonnets were published when he died, making him a symbol of the young romantic hero who inspired patriotism. Wilfred Owen He was born in 1893 and was an english teacher in France when he visited a hospital and decided to return to England to join the war. He was injured and then he was hospitalised in order to recover from shell shock. There he met Siegfried Sassoon who encouraged him to write after having read his poems. VVhen he recovered he returned to fight and he was killed in a machine gun attack seven days before the armistice. His poems are painful and he wrote about the terrible effect of war on men. He used assonance and alliteration to give his lines a haunting quality, a gravity and moral force which made them suitable for any situation in which people must suffer or die. In June 1918 he wrote Disabled and Other Poems and its Preface, which said that that book wasn't about heroes, glory or honour, but war: he wanted to warn about it and he said that all the poets had to do that. For this reason poetry must be truthful. Siegfried Sassoon He was bom in a jewish family in 1886. He lived a pastoral life and wrote romantic verse. His reactions to the war were bitter and violent and he expressed them through irony. He was against war and wrote against it: his works were also read out in the House of Commons. His friend Robert Grave managed to make everybody believe he was suffering from shell shock, so he was sent to the hospital where he met Wifred Owen. In his poems, collected in The Old Huntsman and Counter-Attack, he denounced the political errors and lies for which the soldiers were being sacrificed in various ways. What Sassoon achieved was neither compassion nor pity, but the bitter spontaneity of shocking and realistic detail. He was a resolute pacifist: he got involved in politics, siding with the Labour Party, and, in 1957, at last he found peace in his religious faith, becoming a Roman Catholic. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace If during some nightmare, you (those ones who remained home and narrates the war, without having experienced it), you could walk as we did Behind the wagon that we flung him in, behind the wagon where we put the corpse of this poor companion And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, and look carefully at his white eyes moving quickly (chaotic) in his face His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; his face in looking for air to breathe, in a similar position of the devil (simile— like the face of the devil full of sin) If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood If you could hear every movement of blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, moving quickly from his lungs full of gas Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud as obscene as cancer and as bitter as food of cows (che è amarissimo) Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, and (obscene as) other diseases that kill even the innocent My friend, you would not tell with such high zest my friend, you would not narrate with great enthusiasm your experience ironic or sarcastic: if you could live what | lived, experienced the war, you would not glorify the war, To children ardent for some desperate glory, suggest to young people joining the war, that is to say, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est following the old lie Dulce et decorum est. it is sweet and honorable. Pro patria mori. “to die for one's country” Before the Battle of the Somme all the English people wanted to join the war, but after this war, which is considered a sort of tuming point, they changed their mind, because they realised the horrors of the war. This poem was written after the battle, for this reason it does not glorify the war, but criticises it. The Latin title Dulce et Decorum Est is taken from the Roman poet Horace and means "it is sweet and honorable". It is followed by pro patria mori, which means "to die for one's country" it was said that it was sweet and glorious to die for our homeland, but it is an old lie, because even the Romans told that, but it did not bring glory to die for the homeland. The first stanza has short words, adjectives, verbs to reflect their quick movement. Soldiers are going back to the shouthers to have a rest after a long day of fighting, while gas chlorine has attacked them. They had to put on the masks quickly but someone did not manage to do it quickly and died. In the second stanza new weapons, such as gas, are illustrated. In ine third stanza words become quicker because he wants to reproduce the movements of the soldiers. Modern poetry: tradition and experimentation The poets are experimentalists, not more traditionalists. Their works are unconventional for that time: they express horror and tragedy, through crude scenes (like the ones of the poem Dulce et Decorum est). THE GREAT WATERSHED A deep cultural crisis A deep cultural crisis had been growing since the last tvo decades of the 19* century and led to the end of the system of Victorian values. The private morality of Victorian society had been strict and the taboo-ridden, decency had to be maintained; the positivistic faith in progress and science had led people to believe that all human misery would be swept away (removed). The First World War, in which almost a million British soldiers had died, left the country in a disillusioned and cynical mood: stability and prosperity proved to belong only to a privileged class, consciences were haunted by the atrocity of the war. The gap between the generation of the younger and the older one, regarded as responsible for the waste of lives during the war, grew wider and wider. An increasing feeling of frustration led to a remarkable transformation of the notions of Imperial hegemony and the white superiority as a result of the slow dissolution of the Empire into a “Commonwealth of Nations". Nothing seemed to be right or certain; even science and religion seems to offer little comfort or security. New views of man and the universe emerged: in 1905 Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity, which radically changed the concepts of time and space: everything depends from the point of view. Freud and the psyche The first set of new ideas to have a profound effect on 20* century thought was introduced by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). He created a structural model of the psyche where he identified three parts: the id, which is the wildest and uncontrollable part of our psyche, the ego, the realistic part and superego, which has a critical and moralising role since it includes the rules imposed on the individual by society, education and moral laws. Freud explained that the development of the human psyche is deeply affected by the subconscious; the discovery that man's actions could be motivated by irrational forces of which he might know nothing, was very disturbing. Freud's theory also maintained that the superego can profoundly distort man's behaviour: authors like Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson had already written about the power of psyche, Mr Hyde (the id) and Dr Jeckill (ego). The effects in the sphere of family life were deep: the relationship between parents and children was altered; the conventional models of relationships between the sexes were re-examined. Freud's new method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of “free association" also influenced the artists and writers of the modem age. 1905, Freud publishes Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality This work contributed to changing the way that people thought, behaved and leamt about sexuality. Its controversial reputation was not due to the first of Freud's three essays, which dealt with perversions. Nor did the last “The Transformations of Puberty”, seem to be shocking at a time when personal needs, desires and social practices only emphasised the omnipresence of sexuality. Rather, the debate that greeted Freud's work was linked to the second essay, in which he discussed sexuality in childhood (the central theme of the book). Freud links sexual aberrations to unexpected or abnormal events during childhood. He also understood puberty as the sum of changes acting upon infantile sexuality. The theory of time The philosopher Henry Bergson stated a theory of time, he divided it into two categories: - The time of the clock (which is an extemal, abstract and objective); - The time of the mind (the interior, individual and subjective time, because it is influenced by our inner thoughts and emotions). Time is different for everybody. In our mind, past, present and future are not separated, but with the free association, we shift between them. The time of the mind doesn't follow the chronological order of the events. We can see that in the novels of James Joyce, for example in Ulysses, a work composed by thousand pages which describes only one day, because time in our mind is subjective and it works according to the free association of the ideas: it means that it shifts from trivial object to other memories, which don't seem connected but in our mind are. The modernist spirit o Introduction The first decades of the 20* century was a period of extraordinary originality and vitality in the history of art, in which all the artistic movements belong to modernism. The term covers a variety of trends which expressed the desire to break with the past forms and subjects. The artistic activity was mainly centred in Paris, however some of the main representatives were not French, but many artists moved there because it was open minded (Joyce, Wilde, Picasso, Modigliani, Marinetti: many of them were not understood and were penniless). o In novels In the novel, under the influence of Freud, it explored the characters' psyches through the stream of consciousness technique and the interior monologue. The focus was interiority, subjectivity because outside was everything negative, dark and pessimistic. o In poetry In poetry, it mixed slang with elevated language, experimented with free verse, and often employed obscure symbols and fragmented images. o In painting > Fauvism: it developed in France, with its stress on the supremacy of colour instead of the form, was a manifestation of the new interest in the primitive and the magical: at this time, Pablo Picasso retumed to the pre-Roman art of Iberia; Henri Matisse tumed his attention to African masks; in Munich, Wassily Kandinsky was inspired by the primitive paintings of Bavarian peasants. > Cubism: in 1907, Picasso and Braque simultaneously and independently began to develop Cubism. They painted by separating objects and figures into basic geometric shapes such as cubes, cylinders, spheres and cones; then they broke them into semi-geometric fragments and reassembled them in order to give various points of view of the object. > Abstractism: abstract painting, whose main representative was Kandinsky, refused to represent extemal reality and focused its attention on a line or sign. a shape or a colour, making it the subject of the painting. > Vorticism: in England, Wyndham Lewis founded Vorticism, which, as its name suggests, tried to incorporate the ideas of violent motion and apocalyptic change with such natural vortices as tornadoes, whirlpools and the like; the image was a 'vortex' from which, through which and into which ideas were constantly rushing. > Futurism: similarly, Italian Futurism, led by Tommaso Marinetti, celebrated the power and dynamism symbolised by new technology, by speed and motion, by mechanisation and by urban settings. James Joyce Life James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, one of a large family. He was educated at Jesuit schools, including University College, Dublin. Here he studied French, Italian, German and English literature, and graduated in modem languages in 1902. His interest was for a broader European culture, and this led him to begin to think of himself as a European rather than an Irishman. When he was young he was a fervent supporter of the Home-Rule, a group formed by people who were against the british parliament and fought for irish independence. His attitude contrasted greatly with that of his literary contemporaries. Joyce believed that the only way to increase Ireland's awareness was by offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European, cosmopolitan viewpoint. He believed Ireland had to open to Europe instead of closing on its past. He was attracted by his mother country, but at the same time he hated the irish men, because they were affected by a sense of passivity inside their mind, a sort of psychological disease, which prevented them from finding their own expression. In his opinion Ireland was imprisoned by 3 chains: - religion: they were too respectful to the close-minded rules imposed by catholicism; - politics: they couldn't find the power to reject the British laws; - cultural: instead of being interested in the new literature movement, which arose in Paris, they went back to the past evaluating their own traditions, through the Irish renaissance of their own culture made up of their folklore, ballads, songs. Yeats was one of the writers of this group. In 1904 he met and fell in love with Nora Barnacle, a simple woman, a waitress in a hotel coming from Galway: she saved him from desperation, because he was drunk addicted, but also depressed. They had their first date on 16% June, which was to become the “Bloomsday of Ulysses". Bloomsday is a commemoration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16% June, the day of Leopold Bloom, who is one of the 3 main characters of Ulysses. Then they settled in Trieste where Joyce began teaching English and became friends with Italo Svevo. They became friends, because their style was similar (interior monologue), and Joyce encouraged him to publish his novels. The years in Trieste were difficult because of financial problems; in fact, Joyce was in trouble with publishers and printers because of the obscene elements in his prose, as a consequence the first of his works to appear in book form was thirty-six short poems, Chamber Music. He was very fond of music and he had the voice of a tenor: for these reasons in his literary production we can find hints of music. He came back to Dublin because his mother was ill, she had a tumor and at the end she died. Then he wrote Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories all about Dublin and Dublin life. It was divided into the 3 steps of life until death: Childhood, Mature Life and Public Life (the last one is called “The dead’). In 1916 Joyce published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his semi-autobiographical novel. The protagonist is Stephen Dedalus, who was one of the first martyrs who fought and died for his christian faith. He was a mythological figure: Dedalus in Greek mythology wanted to arrive at the Sun with his wax wings but near the Sun the wings melted and he fell down. Similarly to Dedalus, Joyce wants to overcome the monotony of Ireland intellectualism, the wings are for Joyce the wings of culture. In 1914 Joyce wrote most of his naturalistic drama Exiles. But his works did not alleviate his financial difficulties. In 1917 he received the first of several anonymous donations which enabled him to continue writing Ulysses, which was published in Paris in 1922. Probably the donations were from the tycoon Ezra Pound. He became rich only at the end of his life. In 1923 he began to work on what was eventually to be published as Finnegans Wake in 1939. If in Ulysses Joyce describes what is happening inside the protagonist's mind, here he describes the thoughts of Finnegans during the night, when fears and wishes appear. This work was impossible to translate. But later, Hitler's advances in Europe forced him to flee from France to neutral Switzerland, where he died in January 1941, because of a deadly disease which tumed him blind. Ordinary Dublin He set all his works in lreland and mostly in the city of Dublin. He wanted to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives. By portraying these ordinary Dubliners, he succeeded in representing the whole of man's mental, emotional and biological reality, fusing it with the cultural heritage of modern civilisation and with the reality of the natural world around him. Dubliners (1914) The origin of the collection It was the oppressive effects of religious, political, cultural and realistic economic forces on the lives of lower-middle-class Dubliners that provided Joyce with the material for a psychologically picture of Dubliners as afflicted people. In fact he chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to him the centre of paralysis. Dubliners consists of 15 short stories; they reveal human situations and moments of intensity and lead to a moral, social or spiritual revelation. - The opening stories deal with childhood and youth in Dublin; - The others concern the middle years of characters and their social, political or religious affairs. The stories are arranged into four groups, which are childhood (Araby), adolescence (Eveline), maturity (A painful Case) and public life (A Mother), each group represents the steps of the life of an ordinary dubliner. What holds all these stories together is a particular structure and the presence of the same themes, symbols and narrative techniques. The last story, 7Yhe Dead, can be considered Joyce's first masterpiece, because, however similar in theme, it is denser, more elaborate and more remarkable. lt should be separated from the section of public life and it is considered a tale; in addition to that, it was written separately, not in the same time when Joyce wrote Dubliners. The use of epiphany The description in each story is realistic and extremely concise, with a lot of details, even the most unpleasant and depressing ones. The use of realism is mixed with symbolism, since external details generally have a deeper meaning. Joyce managed to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life through a technique: the epiphany. It comes from greek and it means “manifest' that is, ‘the sudden spiritual manifestation® caused by an external object or a banal situation, which is used to lead the character to a sudden self-realisation perceived with the 5 senses. Indeed, this motive is central to the stories. Since these epiphanic moments are revealed by both the character, who experiences them, and by the reader, who perceives them, the Whole process, in turn, becomes an epiphany for him. So Dubliners can be seen as a sequence of multiple epiphanies that offer a revelation of the city in its intellectual, moral and spiritual paralysis. A pervasive theme: paralysis The paralysis of Dublin which Joyce wanted to portray is both physical, resulting from external forces, and moral, linked to religion, politics and culture. Dubliners accept their condition because: - they are not aware of it - they lack the courage In fact all the Dubliners are weak and scared, they are like slaves of their familiar, moral, cultural, religious and political lives. The centre of the work is not paralysis, therefore the fact that a person is blocked by society, but the moment when people realize that they are blocked, therefore paralyzed. The problem is how to get out of paralysis, because many people escape, but that means failure. It originates from an impulse caused by a sense of enclosure that many characters experience, but none of them succeeds in overcoming; they live as exiles at home, unable to react. Narrative techniques e The omniscient narrator and the single point of view are rejected: each story is told from the perspective of a character. e Narrated monologue in the form of free direct speech, and often of free direct thought, is widely usedì; it consists of the direct presentation of the protagonist's thoughts, through limited mediation on the part of the narrator, and allows the reader to acquire direct knowledge of the character. e The linguistic register is varied, since the language used in all the stories suits the age, the social class and the role of the characters. Similarities of the short stories - Setting in Dublin (he wanted his hometown inhabitants to take action against the passivity affecting their mind) - They all begin in medias res, the moment immediately before the tuming point (such as in Shakespeare) - No chronological order, use of interior monologue - They have many inemes in common: > the theme of paralysis; > the theme of escape (the opposite) because Dubliners feel suffocated, trapped in their society that's why they want to escape; > the theme of music (sometimes Joyce uses to repeat the same words or lines and it seems a sort of refrain, which is a typical feature of songs); > the prototype of the /rish man and Irish woman, who is a sort of reflection of Joyce's father (he had lost all his fortunes, he was drunk addicted and he had become violent and aggressive) and the women are submitted and don't take action; > the use of epiphany. Catholic background of Ireland, makes him insecure throughout the novel. In part III, “Penelope” consists of Molly Bloom's interior monologue as she lies in bed next to her husband. She corresponds to Penelope, but unlike the Greek heroine, Molly is sensuous and unfaithful, tfough satisfied with her marriage and also in love with Leopold. Ulysses his an overreacher put by Dante in hell, because, he wants to overcome the unknown world, that is Hercules Columns and he is similar to Leopold Bloom because he takes his joumey similarly, throughout the ocean but for him the journey is inside himself, he wants to find the answer to the question “why am | existing?", so he wants to reach a deep consciousness not permitted to human beings. Ulysses’ voyage is a voyage in search of adventures, because he wanted to discover what was beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Joyce managed to public Ulysses thanks to the money of a great american intellectual, Ezra Pound: he was a patron (mecenate) and he was the only one who understood the power of modern novels, in fact he helped a lot of intellectuals who didn't have enough money to publish books. On the other hand he was a nazist. Plot Ulysses is a long, complex novel set in and near Dublin on one single day, 16% June 1904. It's composed of 18 episodes that narrate actions and interactions of three characters. First we meet the young Stephen Dedalus, whom Joyce had already presented in his previous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The next and main section focuses on the urban wanderings of Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jewish advertising salesman. Finally, the third section brings Leopold back home to his loving but unfaithful wife Molly. The section ends with the spectacular adventure of Molly's monologue, nearly 1600 lines of free-flowing stream of consciousness prose in eight unpunctuated sentences, concluding with a triumphant affirmation of love and acceptance of her husband, Leopold. A modern Odyssey In a narrative that wanders through the city of Dublin, ironically reflecting the travels of wanderers like Odysseus, Leopold Bloom and the Jews, Joyce's Ulysses is an epic novel which offers different visions of daily life, personal attitudes, political and cultural discussion and reflection on the human condition. Its styles are multiple and varied; its language and structure inventive as Joyce delights in upsetting sentence structure, playing with and inventing words, delighting in sound patterns. Each episode offers its own style and Joyce prepared his own outline for this immense creation, indicating for each episode a title referring to a character from Homer's The Odyssey, a time and place, a part of the body (heart, liver, stomach...), an art (music, painting...), a colour, a symbol and a narrative technique. Joyce's constant references to Homer's The Odyssey and to the world of ancient mythology adds a layer (strato) of universality to the events narrated in the novel and at the same time ironically underlines the squalid reality of modemity, which lacks the heroism of the ancient world. In this sense the “mythical method” both writers use ancient myths to represent the modem world as a place where heroism has disappeared and sterility dominates. Joyce's stream of consciousness One of the most remarkable features of Joyce's Ulysses is the number and variety of narrative styles, and especially of one of the most interesting techniques of Modernist writing, the stream of consciousness' technique. By relying on the massive use of this narrative technique, Joyce's novel tries to reflect the workings of the mind of its protagonist, Leopold Bloom, whose incoherent flux of ideas, thoughts, mental associations, impressions and memories is rendered on the page without any logical or rational organisation. Molly°s Monologue It is the last part of the novel and it is very complicated: there are no punctuation or paragraphs, because Joyce wanted to reproduce the thoughts in our mind. .. a quarter after a quarter past 2 a.m. / what an unearthly hour people should be asleep / | suppose theyre (it is only one word) just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails (trecce) for the day in China at the same time people are getting ready for the day / well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus morning prayer / theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office she thinks that it is such an early hour that the nuns can only look for odd priest to celebrate the prayer / the alarmclock next door at cockshout at down clattering the brains out of itself makes a very disgusting sound, maybe breaking the brains / let me see if | can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 she realizes that she must get asleep, she is trying to count the sheeps in order to fall asleep / what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer she is looking at the wallpaper and wondering what kind of flowers whose shape is similar to the stars and the same flowers were on the wallpaper she had in Lombard street I the apron he gave me was like that the apron (grembiule) that Bloom gave to me was like that (like the wallpaper) / something only | only wore it twice / better lower this lamp and try again so as | can get up early she realize she must go to sleep / III go to (we shift from the present to the future) / Lambes (fioraio) there beside Findlaters and get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in case he brings him home tomorrow she will go to the flower shop, to buy flowers in case Bloom invites Dedalus at home (he was in search of a father) or today | mean being 2 am itis today, not tomorrow / no no Fridays an unlucky day Friday reminds the death of Jesus Christ / first | want to do the place up someway she wants to clean / the dust grows in it / | think while Im asleep then we can have music and cigarettes | can accompany him Leopold Bloom / | must clean the keys of the piano with milk / what'Il | wear Molly is a very sensual woman and she imagines what she would wear, just in case Leopold comes / shall | wear a white rose or / those fairy cakes in Liptons / | love the smell of a rich big shop a 7%d a Ib or the other ones with the cherries in them and the pinky sugar 11d a couple of Ibs of course she likes the cake with cherries and with pink sugar / a nice plant for the middle of the table she thinks about the plant she will buy / Id get that cheaper in wait / where's this | saw them not long ago / | love flowers / Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses she increased (like a crescendo) her love for flowers saying she would love to have her place full of roses. The idea of nature, brings her to the idea of God / God of heaven there's nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of cats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses primule and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God All kind of natural things (included animals) created by God will make our heart / | wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their leaming / why don't they go and create something she would never give up marveling at nature / | often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves him is Leopold Bloom (and all the atheist, because he was a jewish man but he had rejected his faith), who was a jewishman, but he has rejected his religion, like Dedalus / first then they go howling for the priest when atheists are about to die they call the priest, because they are afraid of going to hell / and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience the attitude of atheism wanted the priests, because they are frightened of their sinful soul / ah yes | know them well /who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they don't know neither do | V\ho was the first person who create the universe? Atheists cannot provide any answer, neither does Molly / so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow she is remembering the first day she met Leopold Bloom, the place, the clothes she was wearing, the kiss and the sensations / the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons proper name of another flowers (realism) on Howth name of the hill were the two had met head in the grey tweed typical fabric of UK suit and his straw hat (cappello di paglia) the day / got him to propose to me she persuaded, convinced him to marry her / yes first | gave him the bit of seed cake (a cake containing anise, anice) out of my mouth and it was leap year anno bisestile like now / yes 16 years ago / my God after that long kiss | near lost my breath / yes he said | was a flower of the mountain / yes so we are flowers all a woman's body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today / yes that was why | liked him (the reasons why she likes him) because | saw he understood or felt what a woman is and | knew | could always get round him because she managed to persuade him and to make him do what she wanted / and | gave him all the pleasure | could leading (she was the leader) him on till he asked me to say yes she didn't answer as soon as she received the proposal, but she started thinking about her past / and | wouldn't answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky / | was thinking of so many things he (Leopold Bloom) didn't know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly she starts listing the things Leopold didn't know / and | say stoop (chinarsi) and washing up dishes they called it on the pier / and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing around his white helmet the sentry has a white helmet, because it is faded (schiarito) by the sun / poor devil half roasted / and the Spanish girls (like Molly) laughing in their shawls and their tall combs / and the auctions vendite all'asta in the morning / the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe Gibraltar being the important Harbour, she mentioned all the important people have passed through this city / and Duke street and the gowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep the city was very noisy and she reminds also ofthe asleep donkeys / and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps / and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls / and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors she saw everyone charming, which is why she tended to betray her husband all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop / and Ronda little city where Molly lived with the old windows or the posadas (Spanish pubs) glancing eyes / a lattice hid for her lover to kiss / the iron and the wineshops half open at night / and the castanets typical Spanish music instrument and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and 0 that awful deepdown torrent / 0 and the sea the sea crimson when the sun reflects in the see, it becomes a deep red sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees (alberi di fico) in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where | was a Flower of the mountain yes when | put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used / or shall | wear a red / yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall she goes back to the day she said yes to Leopold / and | thought well as well him as another and then | asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would | yes to say yes my mountain flower and first | put my arms around him lo abbraccia / yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume / yes and his heart was going like mad and yes | said yes | will Yes. She says yes THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD AND SAMUEL BECKETT Samuel Beckett's life Samuel Beckett was born in 1906 in Dublin. He was educated at Trinity College and he was a brilliant student. After taking his degree in French and Italian, he moved to Paris and settled there in 1937, where he became closely associated with James Joyce. He wrote most of his works first in French, then translated them into English. He began his literary career as a short story writer and a novelist, however his intemational reputation was established by his plays. He was one of a group of dramatists who developed the so-called Theatre of the Absurd, with the common basic belief that man's life appears to be meaningless and purposeless and that human beings cannot communicate and understand each other. His first play was Waiting for Godot (1952). Although it shocked the public, it achieved immense success; it was regarded as the most original, influential play of the time and its protagonists, the tramps Vladimir and Estragon, became the emblems of the Absurd. Beckett's further plays develop the character of the naked, helpless, static being: - Endgame (1958) deals with the dissolution of the relationship between the physical and the intellectual sides man experiences at the moment of his death; - Krapp's Last Tape (1959) is a monologue which stresses the impossibility for a man to find an identity; - Happy Days (1961) reveals the tendency to reduce characters to motionless individuals. - Breath (1970) shows how human life has become mere sounds, if not silence. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in December 1989. The Theatre of the Absurd It begins immediately after the Second World War between 1952 and 1962. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which was first performed in Paris in 1953 and in London in 1955, is generally considered the starting point of Absurdist drama. The literary critic Martin Esslin applied the term “absurd” to the works of a group of dramatists who emerged in the 1950s: the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, the Russian-bom Arthur Adamov, the Spanish Arrabal and the French and Romanian Eugène lonesco. Ihey did not form a school, since each playwright regarded himself as an outsider, with his own roots and background and a personal approach to form and subject matter. lonesco defined “absurd" as “that which is devoid of purpose [...] Cut off from religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless”. This sense of metaphysical anguish, rootlessness, lack of purpose and inaction, is the theme of the plays of Beckett, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. These dramatists do not argue about the absurdity of the human condition, they simply present it in concrete situations on the stage. Literary language The main features of the Theatre of the Absurd are: - absence of a real story or plot; - vagueness about time, place and the characters— nothingness of living - no traditional language: the value of language is reduced. In fact, what happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by the characters; - extensive use of pauses, silences, miming and farcical situations which reflect a sense of anguish; - incoherent babbling makes up the dialogue. Waiting for Godot (1952) This play was written in french and -ot in French means little, so Godot means little God. God stands for any value we can have in our life. For this reason the play can be read in many ways: it can be my family, God, career, children... something you live your life for. According to some critics, he is the God of religion because he is represented with white beard, but for some others Godot can be Karl Marx and the victory of the proletarian. Plot The play is divided into two acts: in the first one, two tramps (barboni) Vladimir and Estragon, or 'Didi' and 'Gogo', are waiting on a road for mysterious Godot, who eventually sends a boy to inform them he is not coming but will surely come the following day. The tramps have cold, hunger and pain; they quarrel and think about separation and even suicide in each act, but they are dependent on each other and never do anything. In fact they can not separate each other: one is concemed about his boots, the other about his hat. One represents the body (Estragon), the other the mind (Vladimir). As opposed to the two protagonists, the other characters in the play, Pozzo and Lucky, who are physically linked to each other by a rope as well as by a tyrannical relationship of master and servant, they make continuous purposeless journeys to fill their existence. At the end they discover the tree is a willow (salice piangente) and they discover there are some leaves: Beckett doesn't say anything about that, itis up to you if it symbolizes hope. Act Il differs only apparently from the first, and the play ends with the tramps still waiting for Godot, who never comes. Absence of a traditional structure - The play has no time, since there seems to be no past or future, just a repetitive present; - It has no setting but only a country road (symbolize the conditions of modern men, who have no aim to survive) and a bare tree (generally symbol of the regeneration); - lthas no plot, because events do not mean anything in the course of time; - lthas no characters in the traditional sense, because they don't have a personality; - Ithas no action, since the situation is static, because they wait all the day; - It has no dialogue in the conventional sense, because the characters are unable to provide each other with information either about their present situation, or about their recent experiences and current events in the world outside. The meaninglessness of time Time is meaningless as a direct result of chance, which is at the basis of human existence. This is why there is a cyclic pattern to events. Vladimir and Estragon retum to the same place each day to wait for Godot and experience the same general events with variations each time. It is not known for how long they have been doing this but time essentially is chaos. Human life is treated arbitrarily and is characterised by suffering, but Beckett does not want to offer any solution because when you try to systemise, you simplify and stop understanding the truth. The fundamental question is: is there a God? The evidence seems to be that there is no God, but Beckett leaves the question open because it is impossible to know. The language The language of the play is informal, because it was originally written in french, so Beckett used an easier language: in fact his aim was to use a language less elaborated. Dialogue is only sketched and each character, who usually follows his own thoughts, appears to be perfectly aware that the words he produces are just a way to fill his endless waiting. Another device used to show the lack of communication between characters is the use of para-verbal language, such as pauses, silences and gaps. It was a language that had lost its aims. After the Holocaust, it was not possible to have relationships with human beings. So all the artists reflected the sense of loss and the integration of values in their art. Music had no more sound, Picasso made paintings with men in scrambled order. The symmetrical structure The two acts are symmetrically built: e the stage is divided into two halves by the tree (a willow); e the human race is divided into two, Didi and Gogo, then into four, Didi-Gogo and Pozzo-Lucky; e when the boy arrives, into tvo again, mankind and Godot e Throughout the play Estragon tries to take off one of his boots, while Vladimir takes off his hat and peers into it. Both tramps need to take off their hat to think, whereas Lucky and Pozzo need to do the opposite. Vladimir and Estragon Vladimir and Estragon are never described as tramps; they are two human beings concerned with questions about the nature of the self, the world and God. They are complementary: Vladimir is more practical, he never dreams and he keeps waiting; Estragon is a dreamer, sceptical about Godot and always complaining about mysterious people who beat him during the night. To fill the time they speak about whatever they think but it was difficult for Beckett to keep a dialogue running for so long, so he made the characters forget everything: Estragon cannot remember anything about his past; Vladimir, has a better memory, but distrusts what he remembers. Estragon needs his friend to tell him his history; it is as if Vladimir establishes Estragon's identity by remembering for him. Estragon also serves as a reminder for Vladimir of all the things they have done together. Thus both men serve to remind the other man of his very existence. Nothing to be done page 545 - Act | The extract is the beginning of the play; the two tramps are alone. The stage directions read: 'A country road. A tree. Evening. Estragon, sitting on a low mound', is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhaustedì, rests, tries again. As before. Enter Vladimir. The only actions these survivors can perform are very trivial. Analysis The two characters are sitting on a low mound near a tree, a willow (salice piangente), which is bare, leafless. Estragon is trying to take off his boots, but he doesn't manage to do it. Then Vladimir meets Estragon, who has spent all the night alone in a ditch and they say they believed they were gone forever, for this reason they celebrate the day because they have met again. Vladimir asks Estragon if they didn't beat him (“they" — we don't know who they are, they are mysterious people (it creates a terrifying atmosphere)) Then they remember when they went to the Eiffel Tower (‘we were respectable in those days", to say that the time has changed a lot and that the past was better than the present). Their occupation is waiting for Godot, because it is the only thing they do all day long. Estragon asks for help to take off his boots and Vladimir takes off his hat, tha means that he does not do anything, but then Estragon with a supreme effort succeeds in pulling off his boot and inside there is nothing.