Scarica "Ulysses" di James Joyce e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Nuclei tematici: Joyce, Ulysses, mythical method, main characters of Ulysses, archetypes, journey It was T.S. Eliot who first praised Joyce's mythical method, the device of imposing an ancient myth upon contemporary experience and establishing a continuous parallel between the ancient past and the disastrous present. Eliot considered the innovation of the "mythical method" as important as a scientific discovery. Myths offer a pattern on which to arrange the fragments of experience and also serve as a substitute for plot and the traditional narrative structure. The use Joyce made of the Odyssey as a parallel text, creating correspondences between the Homeric poem and his novel, adds a universal dimension both to Dublin and its inhabitants: Dublin becomes the epitome of the world, the main characters archetypes of an eternal mankind. The structure of Ulysses parallels symbolically the structure of Homer’s Odyssey. In both works, a man goes on a journey, encountering a variety of people and situations along the way. However, the journey in Homer’s work lasts ten years, whereas the journey in Joyce’s work lasts about 18½ hours. Every human goes on a journey, just as the mythical Odysseus (Roman name, Ulysses) did in his heroic adventures in Homer’s Odyssey. But in the real life of modern man, this journey is generally humdrum (boring) and uneventful, as in Joyce's Ulysses. Rather than heroic, Joyce’s characters are ordinary and unheroic in contrast to Homer’s extraordinary and heroic figures. Ulysses is set in Dublin on a single day, June 16th 1904, and revolves around three main characters: Leopold Bloom or Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus or Telemachus, and Molly Bloom or Penelope. The novel is divided into three sections following the Homeric outline of Odyssey and the eighteen chapters of Joyce's Ulysses correspond to specific episodes in Homer's epic. The main theme of the novel is a father's search for a son, and a son's search for a father. When Leopold meets Stephen, he finds in him a surrogate for his missing fatherhood (Bloom's only son died eleven years ago several days after his birth), while Stephen finds a paternal figure to replace his own drunken father. These quests seem to end in Bloom’s kitchen, with Bloom recognizing “the future” in Stephen and Stephen recognizing “the past” in Bloom. Though united as father and son in this moment, the men will soon part ways, and their paternity quests will undoubtedly continue. Ulysses demonstrates that the quest for paternity is an archetype, a search for a lasting manifestation of self. Besides, both Dedalus and Bloom and are exiles in their own country: Stephen is disgusted by his compatriots' nationalism and has rejected his Catholic faith; Bloom, as a Jew, is the quintessence of exile. They also embody two opposing ways of life: Bloom is the citizen, while Stephen is the artist. Joyce took Stephen's family name, Dedalus, from the mythical inventor who escaped from his island prison by constructing wings and flying to his freedom. Stephen, too, will eventually escape from the island prison of Ireland. Stephen is fiercely independent, willing to pursue life as an artist no matter what the cost. He exists mainly within his own world of ideas—his actions in the world tend to distance himself from others and from the world itself. In his efforts to create a modern hero, Joyce returned to classical myth only to deconstruct the Greek warrior into a parody of the "Wandering Jew." The protagonist of Joyce's mock-epic novel, Bloom, is a "modern" anti-hero in contrast to the Homeric Ulysses. Throughout the novel, Joyce exposes Bloom, an ad-canvasser, as an outsider since he is a Jew in an overwhelming Roman Catholic environment. Despite Bloom's substantial weaknesses, he emerges as a "hero" for the compassion that he shows towards his fellow men and plays a father-like role for Stephen Dedalus. Bloom’s ability to empathize with such a wide variety of beings—cats, birds, dogs, dead men, vicious men, blind men, old ladies, a woman in labor, the poor, and so on—is the modern-day equivalent to Odysseus’s capacity to adapt to a wide variety of challenges. But Lepold's message is, at a basic level, to “love.”
