English faculty II

Chapter II. Major influence on modern English novels James Joyce’s “Ulyesses”
Contribution of James Joyce to English literature
James Joyce, in full James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, (born February 2, 1882, Dublin, Ireland—died January 13, 1941, Zürich, Switzerland), Irish novelist noted for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods in such large works of fiction as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).


Early life
Joyce, the eldest of 10 children in his family to survive infancy, was sent at age six to Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school that has been described as “the Eton of Ireland.” But his father was not the man to stay affluent for long; he drank, neglected his affairs, and borrowed money from his office, and his family sank deeper and deeper into poverty, the children becoming accustomed to conditions of increasing sordidness. Joyce did not return to Clongowes in 1891; instead he stayed at home for the next two years and tried to educate himself, asking his mother to check his work. In April 1893 he and his brother Stanislaus were admitted, without fees, to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin. Joyce did well there academically and was twice elected president of the Marian Society, a position virtually that of head boy. He left, however, under a cloud, as it was thought (correctly) that he had lost his Roman Catholic faith.


He entered University College, Dublin, which was then staffed by Jesuit priests. There he studied languages and reserved his energies for extracurricular activities, reading widely—particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits—and taking an active part in the college’s Literary and Historical Society. Greatly admiring Henrik Ibsen, he learned Dano-Norwegian to read the original and had an article, “Ibsen’s New Drama”—a review of the play When We Dead Awaken—published in the London Fortnightly Review in 1900 just after his 18th birthday. This early success confirmed Joyce in his resolution to become a writer and persuaded his family, friends, and teachers that the resolution was justified. In October 1901 he published an essay, “The Day of the Rabblement,” attacking the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin) for catering to popular taste.


Joyce was leading a dissolute life at this time but worked sufficiently hard to pass his final examinations, matriculating with “second-class honours in Latin” and obtaining the degree of B.A. on October 31, 1902. Never did he relax his efforts to master the art of writing. He wrote verses and experimented with short prose passages that he called “epiphanies,” a word that Joyce used to describe his accounts of moments when the real truth about some person or object was revealed. To support himself while writing, he decided to become a doctor, but, after attending a few lectures in Dublin, he borrowed what money he could and went to Paris, where he abandoned the idea of medical studies, wrote some book reviews, and studied in the Sainte-Geneviève Library.
Recalled home in April 1903 because his mother was dying, he tried various occupations, including teaching, and lived at various addresses, including the Martello Tower at Sandycove, which later became a museum. He had begun writing a lengthy naturalistic novel, Stephen Hero, based on the events of his own life, when in 1904 George Russell offered £1 each for some simple short stories with an Irish background to appear in a farmers’ magazine, The Irish Homestead. In response Joyce began writing the stories published as Dubliners (1914). Three stories—“The Sisters,” “Eveline,” and “After the Race”—had appeared under the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus before the editor decided that Joyce’s work was not suitable for his readers. Meanwhile, Joyce had met Nora Barnacle in June 1904; they probably had their first date, and first sexual encounter, on June 16, the day that he chose as what is known as “Bloomsday” (the day of his novel Ulysses). Eventually he persuaded her to leave Ireland with him, although he refused, on principle, to go through a ceremony of marriage. They left Dublin together in October 1904.


Early travels and works
Joyce obtained a position in the Berlitz School at Pola in Austria-Hungary (now Pula, Croatia), working in his spare time at his novel and short stories. In 1905 they moved to Trieste, where James’s brother Stanislaus joined them and where their children, Giorgio and Lucia, were born. In 1906–07, for eight months, he worked at a bank in Rome, disliking almost everything he saw. Ireland seemed pleasant by contrast; he wrote to Stanislaus that he had not given credit in his stories to the Irish virtue of hospitality and began to plan a new story, “The Dead.” The early stories were meant, he said, to show the stultifying inertia and social conformity from which Dublin suffered, but they are written with a vividness that arises from his success in making every word and every detail significant. His studies in European literature had interested him in both the Symbolists and the realists of the second half of the 19th century; his work began to show a synthesis of these two rival movements. He decided that Stephen Hero lacked artistic control and form and rewrote it as “a work in five chapters” under a title—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—intended to direct attention to its focus upon the central figure.


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In 1909 he visited Ireland twice to try to publish Dubliners and set up a chain of Irish cinemas. Neither effort succeeded, and he was distressed when a former friend told him that he had shared Nora’s affections in the summer of 1904. Another old friend proved this to be a lie. Joyce always felt that he had been betrayed, however, and the theme of betrayal runs through much of his later writings.


When Italy declared war in 1915 Stanislaus was interned, but James and his family were allowed to go to Zürich. At first, while he gave private lessons in English and worked on the early chapters of Ulysses—which he had first thought of as another short story about a “Mr. Hunter”—his financial difficulties were great. He was helped by a large grant from Edith Rockefeller McCormick and finally by a series of grants from Harriet Shaw Weaver, editor of the Egoist magazine, which by 1930 had amounted to more than £23,000. Her generosity resulted partly from her admiration for his work and partly from her sympathy with his difficulties, for, as well as poverty, he had to contend with eye diseases that never really left him. From February 1917 until 1930 he endured a series of 25 operations for iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts, sometimes being for short intervals totally blind. Despite this he kept up his spirits and continued working, some of his most joyful passages being composed when his health was at its worst.


Unable to find an English printer willing to set up A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for book publication, Weaver published it herself, having the sheets printed in the United States, where it was also published, on December 29, 1916, by B.W. Huebsch, in advance of the English Egoist Press edition. Encouraged by the acclaim given to this, in March 1918, the American Little Review began to publish episodes from Ulysses, continuing until the work was banned in December 1920. An autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist traces the intellectual and emotional development of a young man named Stephen Dedalus and ends with his decision to leave Dublin for Paris to devote his life to art. The last words of Stephen prior to his departure are thought to express the author’s feelings upon the same occasion in his own life:


Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
James Joyce (1882-1941) is a colossus of modernist fiction. He has been derided as obscene and immature and lauded as an erudite humanist; some have deemed his prose impenetrable, too concerned with artifice and verbal gamesmanship, while others have described his writing as life-affirming and always attuned to the music of language. Joyce combined stream-of-consciousness, absurdist drama, mythical parallelism, and other techniques in a formal mélange that has had a profound impact on other modernists and future generations of novelists.


Joyce was born in the Dublin suburbs in 1882 to a Roman Catholic family. His father, John Joyce, a renowned drinker, singer, and storyteller who was on a steady social decline throughout his son’s childhood, would serve as a model for Simon Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. As a young student, Joyce attended first Clongowes Wood College and then Belvedere College, both Jesuit schools. At the age of 16, Joyce rejected Catholicism; the symbols, rituals, history, and theology of the Church, however, would remain important sources for his later fiction.


Starting in 1898, Joyce attended University College Dublin, where he began dabbling in lyric poetry and wrote a review of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken that received an appreciative response from the playwright himself. After graduating in 1902, Joyce left for Paris to study medicine; he soon found this career unpalatable, however, and instead embarked upon a literary career. In 1903, Joyce returned to Dublin to see his dying mother, refusing to kneel at her bedside, a decision that would haunt Joyce’s future fictional avatar Stephen Dedalus.


On June 16, 1904, Joyce went on his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle; the date would later be immortalized as Bloomsday, on which the action of Ulysses is set. Shortly thereafter, Joyce and Nora moved away from Ireland, living in Zurich, Trieste, Rome, and Paris. Embracing the life of the exile, Joyce would never live in Dublin again.


Joyce’s first published book, Dubliners (1914), consisting of stories he had written over the previous decade, was a naturalistic look at what Joyce called the spiritual paralysis of Dublin. Although he had completed most of the book by 1905, most prospective publishers feared prosecution for obscenity and libel, since the book contained the word “bloody” and an unflattering reference to King Edward VII. When it was finally published, no prosecution followed, but it would not be Joyce’s last experience of censorship.


During the decade it took to get Dubliners published, Joyce had been working on an autobiographical novel that eventually became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ezra Pound, who had learned about Joyce’s work from William Butler Yeats, took up Joyce’s cause, publishing one of his poems in his anthology Des Imagistes (1914), and arranging for the publication of Portrait in The Egoist, beginning on February 2, 1914 (Joyce’s thirty-second birthday). In this novel, the free indirect discourse of Dubliners gave way to more daring formal experimentation, such as the mimicking of an infant’s language in the novel’s opening pages and the representation of a young aesthete’s mind at work throughout.


Joyce had been scraping by as an English teacher in Trieste and moved to neutral Zurich after the outbreak of war. Pound and Yeats convinced the Royal Literary Fund and the Civil List to make grants to Joyce that permitted him to spend the war years working on Ulysses, serialized (again thanks to Pound’s intervention) in the Little Review from 1918 onwards until censorship prevented its continuation in 1920. The novel was published in book form by Sylvia Beach on Joyce’s fortieth birthday, February 2, 1922; it remained unavailable in Britain, Ireland, and the United States for over a decade because of continuing censorship.


All of the formal devices of Joyce’s earlier work were put into the shadows by the pyrotechnics of Joyce’s last two novels, Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). T.S. Eliot wrote of Ulysses, “It is a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape.” Ulysses is often cited as the exemplary instance of the stream of consciousness in modernist fiction. The chapters in which this technique appears, however, occupy less than a quarter of the novel. Joyce wrote chapters parodying the stylistic evolution of English literature and the clichés of pulp magazines; in another section, he combined the format of the Catholic Catechism with a scientific lexicon to provide the broadest possible interpretation of the events of June 16, 1904.


Finnegans Wake, a dizzying web of allusions and languages, is perhaps even bolder in its technical innovations. Joyce considered this novel to be his masterpiece. One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, Finnegans Wake possesses the characteristics that have made Joyce one of the most maddening and rewarding of modernists: a seriocomic engagement with myth and history; a labyrinthine complexity and recursive form; and a sense of humor that provokes laughter despite obscurity. The novel was published in May 1939, shortly before the start of the Second World War. Joyce died two years later, as a result of surgery for an ulcer.
Ulysses of James Joyce
After World War I Joyce returned for a few months to Trieste, and then—at the invitation of Ezra Pound—in July 1920 he went to Paris. His novel Ulysses was published there on February 2, 1922, by Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Ulysses is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey. All of the action of the novel takes place in Dublin on a single day (June 16, 1904). The three central characters—Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce’s earlier Portrait of the Artist), Leopold Bloom, and his wife, Molly Bloom—are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope. By the use of interior monologue, Joyce reveals the innermost thoughts and feelings of these characters as they live hour by hour, passing from a public bath to a funeral, library, maternity hospital, and brothel.


The main strength of Ulysses lies in its depth of character portrayal and its breadth of humour. Yet the book is most famous for its use of a variant of the interior monologue known as the stream-of-consciousness technique. Joyce claimed to have taken this technique from a largely forgotten French writer, Édouard Dujardin, who had used interior monologues in his novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888; We’ll to the Woods No More), but many critics have pointed out that it is at least as old as the novel, though no one before Joyce had used it so continuously. Joyce’s major innovation was to carry the interior monologue one step further by rendering, for the first time in literature, the myriad flow of impressions, half thoughts, associations, lapses and hesitations, incidental worries, and sudden impulses that form part of the individual’s conscious awareness along with the trend of his rational thoughts. This stream-of-consciousness technique proved widely influential in much 20th-century fiction.


The technical and stylistic devices in Ulysses are abundant, particularly in the much-praised “Oxen of the Sun” chapter (Episode 14), in which the language goes through every stage in the development of English prose from Anglo-Saxon to the present day to symbolize the growth of a fetus in the womb. The effect of these devices is often to add intensity and depth, as, for example, in the “Aeolus” chapter (Episode 7) set in a newspaper office, with rhetoric as the theme. Joyce inserted into it hundreds of rhetorical figures and many references to winds—something “blows up” instead of happening, people “raise the wind” when they are getting money—and the reader becomes aware of an unusual liveliness in the very texture of the prose. The famous last chapter of the novel, in which we follow the stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom as she lies in bed, gains much of its effect from being written in eight huge unpunctuated paragraphs.


Ulysses, which was already well known because of the censorship troubles, became immediately famous upon publication. Joyce had prepared for its critical reception by having a lecture given by Valery Larbaud, who pointed out the Homeric correspondences in it and that “each episode deals with a particular art or science, contains a particular symbol, represents a special organ of the human body, has its particular colour…proper technique, and takes place at a particular time.” Joyce never published this scheme; indeed, he even deleted the chapter titles in the book as printed. It may be that this scheme was more useful to Joyce when he was writing than it is to the reader.
James Joyce (1882-1941)
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914- 1915, serial; 1916, book), James Joyce extended the Proustian effort to render reality as it appeared to human consciousness by resorting to different linguistic registers with their own vocabulary and grammar. Thus, the child Stephen Dedalus emerges with his own language in the opening passage about a “moocow.” Joyce is not merely describing a child’s world, or picturing that world from the child’s point of view—as Charles Dickens does in Great Expectations (1860-1861, serial; 1861, book), for example. On the contrary, Joyce inhabits a child’s world using the child’s words and phrases to create a sense of immediacy, of what critics have called a stream of consciousness. Reality is not there to be observed but rather to be created in the child’s mind. Stephen is the artist already making up stories in his unusual style. The modern novelist captures the fluid nature of perception as it is enacted in the mind.


Perhaps the most conspicuous example of Joycean stream of consciousness is Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy at the end of Ulysses (1922). Joyce daringly delves into Molly’s private thoughts and feelings as she lies in bed dwelling on her lover’s and her husband’s behavior as well as on her own cravings for sex. Her constant repetition of the word “yes” to convey her obsessive desire shocked many of Joyce’s contemporaries. He was breaking new ground in fiction, announcing, in effect, that what made the novel modern was the novelist’s willingness to deal explicitly with subjects that heretofore had been deemed illicit and the province of pornographers. Joyce, however, believed that the novelist should not shy away from any feeling or desire expressed by his or her characters, even if this meant—as it did—that his or her work would be censored. Ulysses could not be legally published in the United States until 1933, when a court lifted the ban on the novel.


Joyce’s modernism is defined then, not only by his method of narration but also his subject matter: women as fully active and demanding sexual creatures and who tell stories from their own point of view and with their own words. Similarly, the hero of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew, is hardly a conventional male protagonist. He is, rather, what some critics have called an antihero because he engages in no daring actions and is not a leader of society or a military figure. He is, outwardly, unremarkable. What makes him noteworthy is the attention Joyce devotes to Bloom, including to his lively inner life, which is, in its own way, adventurous and absorbing. In other words, the modern hero or antihero acquires his or her status through the energy and imagination the novelist invests in him or her and not as the result of a record of accomplishment (namely in men) that society admires. Bloom is the common man as hero, making up the story of his own life as he lives it.
Like Proust, Joyce exercised a sort of sovereignty over his material, a superiority over the requirements of both classical literature—in the form of epics such as Homer’s Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.)—and nineteenth century realism, which took society as a given, a template on which to place characters. Joyce’s characters are alluring not because of what they do but because of the way Joyce invents them, endowing them with an interior language rather than just with certain mannerisms and tics, the externals of the characters that Dickens, for instance, was so adept at creating.


maxresdefault (1)Joyce focused his novels on contemporary society and, it could be argued, from a male point of view, notwithstanding his sensitive creation of characters like Molly Bloom and Gerty MacDowell in Ulysses. One of Joyce’s contemporaries, Virginia Woolf, wished to remake the modern novel so that it more fully reflected women’s creativity in narratives that questioned the conventional ordering of history and traditional gender relationships.


Since the late 19th century, ‘modernist novel’ has been flourished in a manner that is opposite to the traditional novel; hence a modernist writer is thought to have some political aspects. But the truth is the quintessential modernist writers such as Joyce, Eliot, Faulkner, were actually anti-politics. They adopted new formal and thematically aesthetic inspirations which distinguished them from the earlier modernists. This ‘avant-garde’ interpretation of modernism changed the focus on form into the one on content. This shift then made it possible for writers not to limit their creative powers allowing them to use new techniques and methods which widened their horizon and reshaped their self-perception and also metaphysical one. The modern consciousness and spirit needed ways of expression underneath, that a technique of the surface alone cannot approach (Schorer, 1962, p. 267). Thus, the writers of this genre took the high road; they discovered allegory as the only solution to overcome this lack of expression. Their desire for the one, that is ethereal, found its way within time and space with the Romantics’ heroic and ideal by confronting the history. This ambiguity of naming the writers can be settled by suggesting new terms such as ‘avant-gardist’, ‘pre’, and ‘pioneer’ instead of using solely the term ‘modernist’. In this paper, the term modernist will refer to such various aspects of the writers of the genre.
Modernist Perceptions in James Joyce ‘’Ulysses’’
Hermeneutic elements of modernist novel in terms of technique, creativity, imagination, perception of reality can be traced in Joyce’s Ulysses. T. S. Eliot in his response to Ulysses announces that:
No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary. I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a 'novel'; and if you call it an 'epic' it will not matter. If it is not a novel it is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need for something stricter...The novel ended with Flaubert and with Joyce.
(as cited in Sicari ,2001, p.193)
Eliot’s review goes on to its more famous articulation of the mythic method, as a ‘’way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’’ (p. 194). With Ulysses, Joyce invented a new kind of writing; it is an allegory, of course, but it is also builds itself into another kind, which is ‘epic’. And yet none is enough for Joyce’s way of thinking; neither of them serves to the deepest purposes of the writer. Understanding Ulysses as an epic can only be possible through realization of Homer’s Odyssey from which the novel takes its inspiration. Some claim that Ulysses is the modern interpretation of the epic with the same goal in mind that is to return home, as some say the exact opposite; from the choice of the title Ulysses, Joyce tried to keep a distance alienating himself from the nostalgia, he paradoxically included the epic to stay away from it. The choice of title may seem ironic but it does not necessarily mean alienation, at least not at a paradoxical level. As Stevens (1961) puts it:
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place 
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves 
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days. (p. 383)
In Ulysses then, Joyce’s attempt was to write a novel that is not distant from the original story. His interest was to highlight the ‘renewal’. That was the ultimate thought of all the modernists; the old themes are permanent but now with a new form and language. This characteristic of modern discourse somehow proves that intertextuality is indeed present in the works of modernists; it does not only belong to post-modernism. Even further, this could mean that Joyce might actually be a post-modernist.
In each chapter of Ulysses, the actions of the characters match with the ones in Odyssey. In the first chapter, we see Stephen Dedalus wandering around the streets of Dublin without any intentions in mind. This resembles Telemachus’s search for his father without any hope. Dedalus, on the other hand, does not seem to look for something but we know, or we sense, that he cannot be an idle wanderer since he is a man of thought; he is more of a personal character who to talk of politics, literature, religion. As we know, Dedalus is the protagonist and anti-hero of the novel A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Dedalus is referred as Joyce’s literary ‘alter-ego’. So in Ulysses, Joyce, the narrator, inserts himself as Dedalus, a counter character to ordinary man. In the second chapter, we encounter a Jewish man, Leopold Bloom. He is an everyman with whom the reader sympathizes in the very first moment. He is Odysseus, trying to get back home, Ithaca, in search of something. Again we do not know what the ultimate destination is, what it is that these two men are looking for. Bloom also wanders around the streets of Dublin where he encounters many things that introduces him many sensations like jealousy, hate, love, sympathy, apathy, affection and even one’s love for his children. In the last chapter of the novel, we see Dedalus and Bloom travel together; it is a spiritual and an intellectual journey shared by them. They are united in the end; salvation comes in its own way satisfying both their needs.
Ulysses made a distinctive contribution to the historiography. Recovering the claims of the epic to represent historical events, Ulysses is an analogous allegory. First of all it is a novel city, a time book. It explores the social, cultural and political state of Ireland which Joyce knows very well. The experimental techniques he used can be seen as a challenge to give voice to the suppressed, brutalized and hidden historiography of his hometown. Ulysses elaborates the fable of Stephen Dedalus’s encounter with Leopold Bloom and their efforts at continuity as the embodiment of a historical understanding possible for Ireland in the wake of these concerns (Ungar, 2002, p. 8). Modernist discourse has a desire to retell the native stories entangled with the obscurity of language. It abandons the linear technique of exposition; it speaks up for the insane, lunatic and the overwhelmed. Faulkner criticized the people of the South in his works. He wanted the world to see from the other part of South America. For Joyce, it is the people of Ireland with whom we have to sympathize; there is more than meets the eye. Faulkner (1960) says that “you should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith” (p. 77). One of the apparent examples of historical reference to this in the novel is in the ‘‘Ithaca’’ episode when Leopold wants Stephen to “chant in a modulated voice a strange legend on an allied theme” while they are talking. The lyrics of the song Stephen chooses make a reference not only to an actual case of blood libel from 13th century, but it also pertains to anti-Semitism which Bloom suffers as a Jewish living amongst Irish society. The antagonism of the chant is two-sided: it is a common problem that Bloom is experiencing everyday and it is also an evocation of historical anti-Semitism of British culture. The child’s ballad derives from the “Prioress’ Tale” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (Evan & Jehl, 2013).
Another descriptive aspect of modernism is the obsession of its practitioners with time and space. This binary framework first came into existence with the Theory of Relativity. Modernists complied with these two ways of thought. Virginia Woolf (1980) noted: ‘’I wanted, like a child, to stay and argue. True, the argument was passing my limits – how, if Einstein is true, we shall be able to foretell our own lives.” (p. 68) In Ulysses, Joyce eradicated the limits of time by the presence of Stephen Dedalus, from Portrait; he is our center, reference to all the other characters and their actions both closing off and opening up the time in the novel. Derrida defines the center as ‘’ a constant of a presence-essence, existence, substance, subject… transcendentality, conscience, God, man, and so forth’’ (p. 231-232) As for space, the narration in Ulysses counts for it all the way. The narration constantly changes in the form of stream of consciousness. A dialogue is inserted with a simple dash, then it swifts to an interior monologue and eventually becomes a third person narrative. Especially in internal monologues, stream of consciousness narration is seen in practice. One of the most famous examples for this in the book is in the last chapter, chapter 18 called ‘Penelope’, where Molly Bloom delivers an internal monologue a 4391-word sentence:
...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him 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 I said yes I will Yes. (Joyce, 2008)


An attempt to analyze Ulysses will almost always end in a frustration. This is the irony and also the tragedy of language; it is simply not enough for itself. Joyce knew that when he was writing the inexplicable work of all times. He said ‘’ I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.’’ (as cited in Brannon, 2003) And for the last fifty years, professors have, indeed, been busy. There is even a field called ‘’The Joyce Industry’’ with many academics, linguists, philosophers working. It is not just the enigmas and the puzzles inserted, but it is also the impossibility between languages; translated words and sentences do not seem to speak up for the artist. In this situation one cannot help but think of the ‘Myth of Babel’. Did Joyce want to be an immortal being? Did he want to be the God? If it were the case, then Joyce would be a twisted God; instead of confounding our lips, he did confound his, almost recreating the myth as the state of confusion in which we find ourselves. And today if what we are doing was to construct the tower up to Joyce through Ulysses, Joyce would weep over his work. His novel is the most original, the most epic, and the most poetic because he created it and gave it to himself, but now he is left without any sense. I bet he would plead for a translator.
Brannon, J. S. (2003). Who Reads Ulysses?: The Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars and the Common Reader. New York: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1989). Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. R. C. Davis & R. Schleifer (Eds.). New York: Longman Publishers.
Evan, R. & Jehl, R. (2013). The “Nightmare of History” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Journal, 9. Retrieved from http://vurj.vanderbilt.edu/index.php/vurj/article/viewFile/3766/1874
Faulkner, W. (1990). The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage International.
Joyce, J. (2008). Ulysses. Available from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm
Schorer, M. (1962). Technique as Discovery. R. M. Davis (Ed.). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Sicari, S. (2001). Joyce's Modernist Allegory: "Ulysses" and the History of the Novel. South Caroline: University of South Caroline Press.
Stevens, W. (1961). The collected poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. (Reprinted from Harmonium, 1937, New York: Alfred A. Knopf)
Ungar, A. (2002). Joyce's "Ulysses" as National Epic: Epic Mimesis and the Political History of the Nation State. Florida: University Press of Florida.
Woolf, V. (1980). The Diary of Virginia Woolf. A. O. Bell (Ed.). London: Hogarth Press.