Movement in James Joyce's Ulysses: Physical, Forced, and Subjective, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Movement in James Joyce's Ulysses: Physical, Forced, and Subjective e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE MOVEMENTULYSSES James Joyce Ulysses is a novel which can be considered as an hymn to movement. It contains every kind of movement: physical movement that we have seen at the beginning with the rotation, the revolution and the traslation of the planets; subjective movement, the one of the feelings, of the thoughts and of the memories that here are rendered with the stream of consciousness technique or with the continuos references to Homer's poem (which is itself a poem about a man who moves from place to place to reach his home). Ulysses is such a perfect window on what movement can be that it contains even the theme of paralysis. Infact switching from streets to streets, from thoughts to thoughts, Joyce showes once more the paralysis of his native city. James Joyce THE MOVEMENT IN ULYSSES The obtjective movement: The firts kind of movement that we can find easly is the physical movement. It is Bloom's wandering in Dublin, the travelling in its streets. Joyce asked his brother to send him a map of Dublin to define as best as he could his characters' wandering. We can appreciate Joyce' s great ability in creating this movement especially in the fifth episode the Lotus-eaters in which Mr Bloom goes from the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company where he stops to indulge in fancies, to Westland Row, where postal office is, or also from a catholic Church to “the Bath”. We can find this kind of movement also in the Lestrygonians in which the hunger guides Mr Bloom from restaurant to restaurant in order to have his breakfast. In many of these chapters we understand that Bloom's wandering is actually a modern commutatio loci: the characters is always going somewhere, he's always loking for someone but its physical movement is caused by his interior movement. He desires "to find" his son, to fill that void that his unexpected death has caused. This is what happens also to Stephen who has the despairing need of a paternal figure. Problably because of his youth Stephen attemps to achieve what he wants, without understanding what he needs. A peculiar chapter is the ninth one: The Wandering Rocks, this is the part in which Dublin becomes the true protagonist and we can see the movement in its every single street not only the one of the main characters, but also the moving of the crowd of Dublin. What makes this chapter so interesting is the fact tha even if it's full of shifts from place to place it looks motionless. We have a wide perspective in which we see people like little figures who continue running without really move to a definite place. This is one of the chapters, which reflects the paralysis of Ireland, hold in the grisp of the English power, and of the old helpless guide of the Catholic Church against which Stephen rebels and that he wants to leave, (from the very first part we see that he leaves the tower in which he lived and his own job), but without achieving success as he had hoped. The objective movement in Ulysses is not only the one that we've just explained, it is also the forced movement. Obviusly Joyce wrote about this theme refering to the Homeric hero Ulysses who stayed 27 far away from home first because of the war and then for Poseidon's anger, infact both miss their “home” and both are forced to stay far away from it, but that doesn't prevent them from dreaming one about Ithacaand the other about the East. This theme belongs to the whole book, but it's really explicit, for example, in the Lestrygonians (where he thinks about his country in front of the Belfast shop), in the chapter Aeolus (where another time he is the victim of brutal behaviours, here of the editor in chief Keyes who denies to talk with him and insulted the poor advertising canvasse), an in the Cyclops (where at last Mr Bloom rebels against the Citizen's outrages)... The physical movement is also underlined by the passing of the time, in fact we are almost always told about what time it is and this allows the story not only to be more realistic, but also to create that flux, those waves which push our characters to their own shores. When there's no movement: the paralisis Ireland in the early 20th century was a place of little progression. The Catholic Church dominated the general order of things with a heavy resistance to change. Alcoholism was on the rise and the lingering effects of the great famine of 1845 were evident in the declining population rates. it is no surprise that James Joyce wrote such painfully accurate accounts of the world around him. He had already had a long struggle to have Dubliners published exactly as it was written. As in the previous masterpiece Joyce characters have the sensation to be oppressed and they need to escape. But the characters fail to find their way, they cannot change the situation: Stephen will remain an exiled in home and Mr Bloom won‘t reach neither his land nor his missed son (Stephen wont accepted his invitaion to live with him and his wife until the artist finds a new house).. The causes of the paralysis in Ireland are different the church, Ireland itself which wasn't able to acquire a selfgovernment, the intellectual who weren't open to Europe and all these factors caused the lack of courage of the characters. Joyce explained that his intent was not to insult Ireland, but to reveal its own ugliness in an attempt to awaken it from a paralytic slumber. All the novel reflects this condition, but as we've just said, the chapter which properly deals whit this theme is The Wandering Rocks whose title creates an obvious oximorous. The s u bjective movement In the Ulysses we have two most important kind of subjective movement. First the one that the story create in its readers' mind. In fact the whole book wants us to think about the Odyssey: we have the Telemachiad with the theme of the son (Stephen/Telemachus) in search for his father, here not the biological one, Simon Dedalus, but for Mr Bloom/Ulysses his counterpart, the protagonist of the part properly entitled Odyssey and in the end the Nostos. Moreover the name of each chapter clearly reminds to the Odyssey's episodes even if we must remember that Joyce confessed these ones only to some of his friends and relatives in his letters and had never want them to be published. Nevertheless by reading Ulysses we can find some similarities with another acient hero: Jason the main character of the Argonautica, written by Apollonius of Rhodes. This involuntary reference is clear in the episode of the Wandering Rocks (La Simplegadi) which are just mentioned in the Odyssey (when Circe explains to Odysseus that he can come back home sailing through these rocks or through Scylla and Charybdis), but which takes really the scene in the second century B.C poem. Mr Bloom, and Jason are both in some way dominated by inertia, they move like something push them, but they have no reasons to reach the places they reach. They are close to women who seem to 28 be stronger and self shure then them. Both are not violent, but use the art of eloquence. They are both very thoughtful and cautious and not dynamic as Odysseus. Both Jason and Mr Bloom are lonely, Jason in his power with no one understand his feeling, and Mr Bloom on the contrary in his helplessness: