Norris Simply Joyce

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-943657-05-6
Verlag: Simply Charly
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 6, 159 Seiten

Reihe: Great Lives

'Simply Joyce is a perfect introduction to the complex work of one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century. Margot Norris, who has devoted her professional life to opening Joyce's canon to all levels of readers, has produced a lucid, erudite, and entertaining overview that will engage those who have heretofore been intimidated by Joyce's reputation and will revive in others a recollection of the pleasures that have derived from his writing. Although Norris offers a compact overview, it is by no means reductive or simplistic. Rather, in deft but accessible language, she lays out the marvelous range of possible responses to Joyce's work. Her book is a wonderful gift to all readers who love Joyce's writing.'
-Michael Patrick Gillespie, Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities in an Urban Environment at Florida International University
Generally considered one of the greatest modern writers, James Joyce (1882-1941) grew up in Dublin, Ireland, but spent his adult life in the European cities of Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Yet, while he left his native country behind, he never stopped writing about it. He published his well-known short story collection, Dubliners, in 1914 and the coming-of-age novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man two years later. In 1922 came Ulysses, the book that would make Joyce famous and infamous at the same time: extremely controversial in its time, Ulysses was banned in the U.K. and the U.S. and led to a landmark obscenity case in 1933. 
In Simply Joyce, author Margot Norris strips the mystery from Joyce's groundbreaking books by offering a clear introduction to why and how they were produced. Along the way, she offers insights into Joyce's life and creative inspirations by exploring his stories and novels in depth. Beginning with the more accessible early works and proceeding through Ulysses and the even more challenging Finnegans Wake-Joyce's final work that was published two years before his death-Norris provides a clear and easily understandable overview of this seminal writer. 
Both Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist are included on almost every list of the greatest novels of all time. Simply Joyce shows why this is so and, for those who have never had the pleasure of discovering Joyce's works, it will serve as a riveting introduction and a jumping-off point into the extraordinary linguistic world of one of the most influential writers of the previous century.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Norris, Margot

Leseproben

Preface
James Joyce is considered one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century. But is he one of the most widely read? This question is prompted by what many consider the extraordinary difficulty of some of his works, which daunted readers from the very beginning of their publication. The Irish writer George Moore was sent a copy of Ulysses shortly after it was published, and immediately complained about it. “I was told I must read it, but how can one plow through such stuff?” he told a friend. A century later these works remain difficult for many readers approaching them for the first time, and Simply Joyce has this readership particularly in mind as it offers discussion and analysis of Joyce’s writing. The project of this book is not to simplify Joyce by putting aside the remarkable complexity that makes his themes and language so aesthetically and intellectually rich, but to make his unique work accessible. The approach that will enable this is to offer an introduction to Joyce’s life and career, followed by a systematic study of each of his major works: the short stories of Dubliners, his coming-of-age novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his classic Ulysses, and the highly experimental Finnegans Wake. Readers will be led through each of these works consecutively, from beginning to end, with descriptions and summaries of the themes, but also with attention to the language, not only to what it says but also to what it does not say, to its mode of expression, the often layered meanings of the words, the humor of its puns and double entendres, and the beauty of its sound. In the process, attention will focus on the surprisingly ordinary traits and circumstances of Joyce’s numerous characters among the colorful population of Dublin, Ireland in the early 20th century: the thoughtful children at the beginning of Dubliners, the young artist of Portrait struggling with ambition and family poverty, the Jewish advertising canvasser and his outspoken wife in Ulysses, and the complicated men, women, and children in Finnegans Wake, who are not only humans but also rivers and landscapes, animals and clouds, and illuminating symbols. The challenge for Simply Joyce will be to present this rich array of literary life without losing sight of the aesthetic and intellectual complexities of the language in which it is vested. Given the challenges posed by the four major works, and particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, it may be helpful to ease into our discussion of Joyce’s life and writings by noting that these ambitious texts were not Joyce’s only accomplishments. He also produced a collection of poems, assorted insights or ‘epiphanies’, a series of critical essays, a notebook titled Giacomo Joyce, and a play called Exiles. These diverse writings do not share the fame of the later productions, but they have their merits and serve as a useful prelude to his more classical texts. Joyce’s verses, in particular, have a lyrical quality, and the distinguished Irish poet W.B. Yeats appears to have found some of the early poems highly promising. They, therefore, function as an indicator of the poetic quality of Joyce’s later prose, the way words are selected for the effects of their sounds and rhythms, creating a form of verbal music. Given his life-long love of music, it is not surprising that Joyce titled his first published collection of poetry “Chamber Music,” although this title by one account was inspired by his listening to the sound of urine tinkling into a chamber pot. The musical theme appears in the opening lines of the first poem: “Strings in the earth and air/ Make music sweet;/ Strings by the river where/ The willows meet” (Collected Poems 9). The music appears to be produced by “Love,” a male figure wearing “Pale flowers on his mantle” and dark leaves in his hair, his head bent as his fingers are “straying/ Upon an instrument” (9). While Love plays a string instrument, a female figure in the next poem appears to be playing the “yellow keys” of an old piano, and in poem IV, there is the sound of singing: When the shy star goes forth in heaven
All maidenly, disconsolate,
Hear you amid the drowsy even
One who is singing by your gate.
His song is softer than the dew
And he is come to visit you. (12) In a surprising twist, the end of the poem asks “Who may this singer be,” and reveals that it is the speaker himself: “Know you by this, the lover’s chant,/ ‘Tis I that am your visitant” (12). The language of this poem is deliberately archaic, and the scene is metaphorical rather than realistic, evocative of Romeo and Juliet only in its images of evening and night falling, of music and wooing. But in the next poem the figure of a Juliet becomes more explicit, and the mood lightens as the lover appears to hear her singing happily in response: Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair,
I heard you singing
A merry air. (13) The lover is no longer at her gate wooing her, but in a room, reading, with the fireplace fire dancing its images on the floor, who puts his book aside to hear the merry voice singing in the evening gloom outdoors. If we wished to connect these poems to Joyce’s later fictions, we might recall a scene in Joyce’s story “The Dead,” in which Gabriel Conroy looks at his wife listening to a singer as she stands on a stair, and she later tells him about a delicate tubercular boy who used to sing, and who once stood under her window in the rain out of love for her. The poems derive their unusual tone from an intriguing intersection between the formality of the speaker whose voice projects an adult wisdom, but whose controlled diction cannot suppress the youthful and vibrant emotions it expresses. As they progress, the moods of the poems of “Chamber Music” become much darker. The sounds of the penultimate poem XXXV are no longer musical and no longer reflect the joy of the beginning: All day I hear the noise of waters
Making moan,
Sad as the sea-bird is, when going
Forth alone,
He hears the winds cry to the waters’
Monotone. (43) The allusions to the sound of water predict the importance of rivers and the sea in Joyce’s later work. Stephen Dedalus, the young protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, has a magical moment when he sees a young woman wading in a stream by the strand. He is captivated by her loveliness and, as he watches her stirring the water with her foot, the sound arrests him. “The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither” (Portrait 171). Many years later the sound of water still haunts Joyce’s writing, and one of the signature chapters of Finnegans Wake offers an image of two washerwomen doing laundry in the river Liffey, that is also identified with a female figure named “Anna Livia Plurabelle.” Joyce told friends that he wanted to evoke the sounds and rhythms of water in the words of that chapter, and on the night he finished it, he went to listen to the sounds of the river Seine in Paris, to make sure he captured it. He is said to have returned reassured that he did so. But sound and music are not the only attributes of nature presented in the poems of “Chamber Music,” where light and color also play important roles. In the eighth poem a wooded area is described as illuminated by sunlight, “The ways of all the woodland/ Gleam with a soft and golden fire” (16). And light and color also illuminate evening scenes, as in the second poem, which begins with the lines “The twilight turns from amethyst/ To deep and deeper blue” (10). Remembering the evocative quality of such scenes in Joyce’s early poems helps us to anticipate the lyricism of his scenes of nature in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake many years later. Joyce’s poems were not all lyrical, however. Although William Butler Yeats had been surprisingly kind to him, Joyce included him as a target in a satirical poem he wrote in 1904 called “The Holy Office,” that attacked some of the prominent Irish literary figures in his day. The complaint in the poem is that while these writers focus on producing aesthetic language and spiritual forays they are ignoring the realities of Irish life, which are left to a realist like Joyce to produce: But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique.
That they may dream their dreamy dreams
I carry off their filthy streams. (Critical Writings 151) His criticism of the Irish literary scene began even earlier. In a 1901 protest, Joyce accused the Irish Literary Theatre of abandoning its original plan to present some of the European plays that were revolutionizing drama in Scandinavia, Germany, and Russia in preference to staging more popular works to please a general public, or “the rabblement,” as he called it. In “The Day of the Rabblement” Joyce argues that a “nation which never advanced so far as a miracle-play affords no literary model to the artist, and he must look abroad,” presumably to such Continental writers as “Ibsen, Tolstoy or Hauptmann” who were neglected by the Irish Literary Theatre (Critical Writings 70). Other early essays do praise Irish writers, however, including a 1902 piece on James Clarence Mangan. And one of Joyce’s most poignant essays, published in 1909, offers a highly sympathetic account of the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde. In “Oscar Wilde: The Poet...