“In using the myth, in manipulating the contentious parallel between
contemporaniety & antiquity Mr. Joyce is pursuing the method which others
must persue after him. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of
giving a shape & significance to an immense panorama of futility & anarchy
which is contemporary history”. Myth is the way of organizing history. The
writers’ quest for order lead to their preoccupation with the artist
himself & with the artistic process. The imaginary character stood for the
author himself:
Marsel Proust “Remembrance of the Things Past”
Lawrence “Sons & Lovers”
Joyce “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
We can’t say that the artist became modernists’ hero. Not all writers of
that period were modernists. There was the co-existence of different
styles.
James Joyce (1882 – 1941)
He was born in Ireland (Dublin). Although he spent many years not in
Ireland he is considered one of Irish writers. Primarily he wrote about
himself, transforming his experiences in his books, & relatives & friends –
into symbols. His works are said to be “expansive & inclusive”. Expansive –
because he gave a very wide panorama of Dublin life at the turn of the
century, inclusive – because his works seemed to include all the human
history. These novels still are the stories & novels about life in general.
He started to attend an expensive private boarding school but his father
became bankrupt & he continued his education at home. Then he attended
“University College” in Dublin. He read very much & began to write
seriously. He produced critical articles, essays but also poems & notebooks
of epiphanies (theological term – an intense moment in a human life when
the truth of a person or some thing is being revealed). He studied in
Paris, then returned to Ireland & in 1904 left it. He lived in different
places in Europe. First, he earned money by giving English lessons. In 1905
he submitted to the publisher his first version of the collection of
stories “Dubliners”. But it was repeatedly rejected & even after acceptance
it was subjected to severe censorship for sexual frankness & use of
obscenities & use of real names & places. This collection consists of 15
stories devoted to childhood, mature life & public life. All are unified by
the theme of person’s loneliness & hopelessness. Joyce describes life with
all naturalistic details. Everything suggests that life is dead. All the
stories explore the paralysis of Irish life. The most famous stories are
“Araby” & “The Dead ”. The stories are arranged in successive sequences –
childhood, adolescence, mature & public life. Mood is gloomy, imagery is
dark & malignant. People are incurably lonely, their hopes are doomed to
disappointment & frustration.
In the full form the collection was published in 1914 together with his
autobiographical novel “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, which
was to be called “Stephen-Hero”. This book explores the story of the
formation of the artist’s consciousness. In criticism it is called “a
gestation of the soul”, for he tries to penetrate into people’s mind. It is
deeply psychological work. In form it is “buildungsroman” (German word
meaning “educational novel”). Life is shown chronologically. The main hero
– Stephen Dedalus. The process of his maturing is shown in the development.
In the first part the language is very simple. Then some glimpses of
family life are given. The disagreement between its members has political
roots. Another stage is school & college. Stephen does not participate in
boys’ games. He longs for the moment when he can be alone, he is weak &
suffering. The Jesuit college bred an aversion for religion in the young
artist. Everything was repulsive in the college: sermons, system of
punishment, religibility + hypocrisy. It was an anguish experience. Stephen
learnt to build a wall between him & all the rest of the humanity.
The book has an open ending – we don’t know Stephen will do. It ends
with the decision to leave Ireland. This exile, solitude are the ways in
which Stephen opposes to the oppressing influence of the society. He
rejects what life suggests to him – his choice is loneliness. The problem
of correlating of artists & society is solved by Joyce from highly
individualistic standpoint. The last pages express Stephen’s understanding
of form & time categories. “The past is consumed in the present & the
present is living because it has force in the future”. The name “Dedalus”
is symbolic. It is a symbol of new art which is liberated from restrain of
old art… He discovers & explores the possibilities of new art. Its aim is
to create a new labyrinth of forms of new art.
In 1922 ”Ulysses” was published. It started as another short story for
“The Dubliners” but grew into the massive novel. Joyce recreates the action
of “Odyssey” in a single day – July 16, 1904 (it was a significant day for
Joyce: he decided to leave Ireland & met his future wife). Since two plains
run parallel. The main characters are associated with certain people in
“Odyssey” by Homer: the main characters are Stephen Dedalus & Leopold
Bloom, an advertising solicitor & in a certain way an eternal Jew both
figuratively & literally. Minor characters are the people whom they meet in
different places. Dedalus acts as Telemachys & Leopold Bloom is modern
Odyssey & his wife Molly is modern Penelope. Bloom wanders from place to
place throughout this day – butcher’s shop, post office, cemetery, printing
house, library, pub, hotel, again pub, shop, his poor house, cheap pub… his
adventures has nothing in common with adventures of Odyssey. They are down
to Earth, petty. In Bloom Joyce tried to show wandering of “eternal…”. He
has unheroic adventures & finally meets Stephen who becomes his spiritual
son. This is a plot.
In form the book is mostly a never-ending stream of Bloom’s
consciousness (he is not an intellectual person, his impressions are very
incoherent). The book has a very rigid form. Joyce describes in many
details every moment of the day: actions, feelings & thoughts. But apart
from it Joyce deepens into human consciousness… he tries to render
something which doesn’t depend on people’s mind, he tries to penetrate into
human psyche, impulses which govern, move them. Each chapter corresponds to
the certain episode in Homer’s “Odyssey” & each chapter has its own style.
It witnesses that Joyce was a virtuous of the English language. ”Ulysses”
has 18 episodes, each of them tracing the deeds & the thoughts of three
people during one day in Dublin. The book is a mosaic. It consists of
different & not quite linked together parts. There is almost no plot. Joyce
still puts the idea in it to describe symbolically man’s wandering in the
chaos of life & floating with the stream of his thoughts. The humanity is
lost & confused about all the contradictions of modern life, people waist
their lives in this chaos, their existence is sensless & purposeless. The
three main characters present three eternal types of human beings – common
person, an artist, a woman. Bloom stands for the symbol of a typical
bourgeois person. He is very limited & content with down-to-earth
pleasures.
The book caused a storm of outrage. It was banned in Britain & America
for more than ten years. Now it is praised for technical experimentation &
stylistic brilliance. The book attracted attention to the stream of
consciousness technique. In general it evoked controversial responses.
Even before completing “Ulysses” Joyce wrote “Finnegan’s Wake” – a
novel. If “Ulysses” is considered to be a daybook, “Finnegan’s Wake” is a
night book. Joyce tried to present the whole human history in a dream of a
Dublin innkeeper Earwicker by name. The style is appropriate to a dream,
the language is shifting & changing, the words blur & glue together, this
suggests the merging of images in a dream. This technique enables Joyce to
present history & myth as a single image. The characters stand for eternal
types, identified by Earwicker himself, his wife & the three children.
The work masks the limit of formal experiment in the language.
“Finnegan’s Wake” is considered to be a closed book. It is very
sophisticated. Joyce loses the thread of narration sometimes… attempted in
the sound of words, construction of a sentences, to render the meaning of
what he was talking about (e.g. images of woman & the river are merging;
the rhythm – gurgling, flowing water). What unifies these two books – both
of them express Joyce’s positive credo: he asserts that life is eternal,
human society does change but the change has a circular character.
Everything is renewed, nothing can be destroyed. Joyce starts the work with
the continuation of thoughts & the beginning of them is at the end. Man
must believe in the city (symbol of Dublin).
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1889 – 1965)
Thomas Stearns Eliot is considered today’s genius in poetry.
Quintessence: refine sensibility – the essential quality of the poet. “Our
civilization comprehends great variety & complexity; & this variety &
complexity playing upon a refined sensibility must produce various &
complex result. The poet must become more & more comprehensive, more & more
allusive, more indirect in order to force, to dislocate if necessary
language into his meaning” – said Eliot. This is an account of what a
modern poet should do. He must be finely tuned to the world to be able to
express the various & complex. The poet can distort the language, to use it
figuratively.
Extremely was influential figure in literary circles. Editor, poet,
playwright, critic – he came from a prosperous American family, his father
was a rich manufacturer & his mother wrote poetry. He was brought up in St.
Louis Missouri. He was educated in private school & attended Harvard to get
his degree in philosophy in 1906. Then left for Paris. There he attended
lectures of Henry Bergson – “Subjective Idealism Philosophy, Theory of
Intuitivism”. Being in Paris he read much on French symbolist poets. The
symbolist movement was one of major influences upon his poetry. The goal of
art is to express the unique personal emotional responses to a certain
moment in human life through indefinite illogical, sometimes private in
meaning symbols. Eliot returned to Harvard & there he read widely in
Sanskrit & oriental philosophy (had a powerful influence on him). In 1915
he decided to give up philosophy to remain in England & to begin writer’s
career. In 1916 he completed his Ph.D. theses, but never received a degree.
He married & settled in England permanently.
The beginning of his literary career starts from 1910 when he wrote “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. It was published in 1915 in magazine
“Poetry”. The poem is written in a very simple style. Then he made a
collection “Prufrock & Other Observations”. This was compared with “Lyrical
Ballads” of Wordsworth & Coleridge. This work inaugurated the age of
modernism in poetry. There is no plot in the story. It’s a dramatic
monologue but of the new kind. It sounds like a stream of consciousness of
a person who walks up the street of London. The protagonist is Alfred
Prufrock. He is an antiromantic hero, rather timid, self-centred. The tone
is very ironic, images are startlingly fresh. The title suggests that some
feeling should be shown to the other person. The poem starts as a dialogue:
Let us go out – you & I…
Critics argue that you & I are two sides of one & the same person. Eliot
says that “YOU” is a companion of Prufrock. We should pay attention to the
epigraph: “The truth will remain under”. This means that the speaker can
persuade himself to talk only if this will never be heard. It is his own
dramatic monologue. Prufrock is intensely preoccupied with himself.
Probably he signs his love song to himself… (though it doesn’t matter much)
We can understand “love-song” in ironic sense because the whole poem is
an elaborate rationalization for not seeking love. Love cannot exist in
this ugly senseless chaotic world. It is a miracle, hopeless yearning of
person for the vitality. The whole scene makes us see that love is not
possessive in this world. Repulsive attitude of the narrator towards what
he sees – images of a pair of ragged claws, mermaids singing each to each.
Leitmotif:
 ãîñòèíûõ äàìû òÿæåëî
Áåñåäóþò î Ìèêåëàíäæåëî.
It means that they talk of what they pretend to know.
The poem is full of allusions. The epigraph is quite important, taken
from Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”. The end of poem is pessimistic. It is one
of the most understandable of his poems.
“The Waste Land” (the poem (1922) in ”Dial” & “Criteria”[GB]). The poem
consists of 5 parts & their titles speak for themselves:
“The Burial of the Dead”
“A Game of Chess” – an allusion of a medieval play, where the action was
as if in two playings.
“The Fire Sermon” – the postulates of oriental religion.
“The Death by the Water”
“What the Thunder Said”
In terms of forms the poem is a collage of fragments of memories,
overheard conversations, quotations put together only by the implied
present of a sensible person (= a refined sensibility = a modern poet),
upon whom all these complexibilities & varieties of human world are hipped
& who staggers under the burden of them. We can say that the mind of the
poet is heavily packed with cultural tradition. A poem abounds in highly
sophisticated allusions:
. “The Tempest”
. Anthropological account of “Grail”(“Ãðààëü”) legend– a legend
connected with Christianity – a cup from which Christ drank;
. from “The Divine Comedy”;
. alluded & used words from operas of Wagner;
. refers to the story of crusification;
. uses French symbolists;
. as well as scraps of popular culture – music-hall songs, slang
words, contemporary fashion;
He hips everything together. This bits & pieces are set into a matrix of
flowing stream of consciousness of a man. The dramatic portrait of a single
mind becomes the portrait of an age. Eliot provided 52 notes for “The Waste
Land” when it was first published. The poem was opposed violently but there
were also admirers. They said that Eliot gave a definite description of
their age. Now terms “lost generation”, “post-war disillusionment”, “jazz
age”, “waste land” are used parallelly For many contemporary writers &
critics “The Waste Land” was a definite description of the age.
Civilization was dying. Critics regarded it as the disillusionment of a
generation. Eliot protested against that. The term “waste land” is used in
literature alongside with the term “lost generation”.
He also employed the myth of dying & reviving king – what the poem
expresses is the need of salvation & this is expressed in 3 Sanskrit words
(give, sympathize & control). There are many barbarisms in the poem.
In 1925 he published another poem in the same tonality. “The Hollow Man”
develops the major themes & images of “The Waste Land” – problems of
spiritual bareness, the problem of loss of faith in contemporary
generation. The poem is a set of recurrent symbols. The meaning depends on
cumulative effect of the individual images. The idea of spiritual sterility
in the image of Hollow Man – grotesque caricature of man, their behaviour
is mimicry of human activity. The poem is very short. It is easily read but
not so easily understood. There are 5 parts in the poem. Other images –
Death of the Kingdom. The life of the Hollow Man – is more shadowy & less
real than the life beyond the grave. Religion is substituted by simple
rituals devoid of all true feelings & emotions. The end-of-the-world
(apocalyptic) motive is very strong in the poem. The picture is very
pessimistic. The poem ends hopelessly:
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper…
Eliot’s development after “The Waste Land” was in the direction of
literary, political, religious conservatism. Classicist in literature,
royalist in politics & Anglo-Saxon in religion he developed more composed
lyrical style.
His mature masterpiece is “Four Quartets” (1944) which is based on the
poetic memories of certain localities of America & Britain. This is a
starting point for his probing in the mystery of time, history, eternity,
the meaning of life. It deals with one single question of what significance
in our lives are ecstatic intense moments when we seem to escape time &
glimpses of supra-ordinary reality (it resembles Joyce’s “Epiphanies”.
There are two epigraphs that give clues to the answer. The epigraphs are
very important.
The first comes from Heroclitus. It contrasts the general wisdom of the
race with moments of private individual insight. It shows the dualism of
individual existence. First of all individuality is apart of a body of
mankind, located in history & tradition. Secondly, it is a unique
personality. Each person embraces both & this predetermines the reaction to
Ñòðàíèöû: 1, 2, 3, 4
