Resumo de Ulysses - James Joyce

Ulysses

James Joyce locates his novel, Ulysses, in Dublin, Ireland before WWI and chooses two men, one single, one married, to bear the narrative burden. The first is Stephen Dedalus, a holdover character from Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen, an would-be priest who won't take vows, is haunted by his own refusal beside his mother's death bed to submit to the authority of the church. He is employed as a teacher when we first meet him in the novel. His name, of course, refers to the artificer of antiquity, builder of the labyrinth and the doors to the temple of Apollo in Book VI of Vergil's Aeneid. The second character is Leopold Bloom, a meat-loving Jew who is being cuckolded throughout the novel by one Blazes Boylan, as muscle-bound and aggressive as Bloom is flaccid and timid. Stephen is Jesuit-trained, at war and in love with the church; Bloom is a non-practicing Jew with discriminating tastes and a wandering wife. If the book has a plot, it consists of the gradual merging of their two destinies through a twenty-four hour period which is documented obsessively by Joyce: meat, perfume, blood, booze, piss, whores, and bawdy verse. The two most significant minor characters are Leopold's wife, Molly, a singer who delivers a lengthy stream of conciousness monologue at the end of the novel and Buck Mulligan, Stephen's well-off bon vivant who lives in a deserted tower above Dublin Bay.
These characters all come to life around a structure provided by the episodic Odyssey by Homer. Gilbert Stuart, in his helpful explanatory accompaniment to Ulysses labels Joyce's episodes: The Cyclops, The Land of the Lotus Eaters, Calypso's Isle, The Land of the Dead and so on. A thorough knowledge of Homer does help when you're reading Joyce, but the novel stands alone and is intellegible without it.

This absence of traditional plot frees the author to deepen the characters' ruminations to the point that some readers find it difficult to know who is speaking or being spoken to. This technique, dubbed stream of conciousness, allows the author to record the character's thoughts and impressions in a fast-paced, illogical fashion which allegedly approximates the way our mind works. A traditional novelist, such as Dickens, creates thoughts in the mind of David Copperfield, for example, that are discursive, that is the thought operates much the same way dialogic sentences operate: subject, verb, direct object, clauses, subordination, coordination, etc. The reader is never at a loss as to the direction the character's thoughts are taking since the author is constantly supplying discursive cues, guideposts, and signs. With Joyce these signs are largely absent. In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus may fasten his attention on sights, then smells, then an abstract thought, then a fleeting sensation. Moreover, his past becomes an open door through which the author may step and pull out memories and mix them with impressions and thoughts about the present--all done without any explanation to the reader what is happening. A more positive appreciation of stream of consciousness will emphasize that the if the reader is deeply engaged with the characters he will discover an ineffable reading experience beside which the traditional indirect speech approach that has been the mainstay of English fiction may seems outmoded.

Ulysses is neck-deep in other forms of experimentation, as well:

a.In Chapter Seventeen the burgeoning relationship between Bloom and Stephen is depicted via a format reflecting Joyce's scholastic training. In Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica theological questions are followed by answers which are then responded to with more detailed questions. In this chapter Joyce retains the Summa's question-interrogation style and ctual, list-compiling technique that gives the reader the impression of being in a court room in which the two characters are on trial for their lives.

b. The history of English prose from Caedmon to the present becomes the real actor in the birthing section in which Stephen and his friend Buck Mulligan are carousing in the hospital with pre med-students all while an infant is being born.

c. Compressing the action of the novel into one twenty-four hour strait-jacket is perhaps the most daring of the experiments. Vladimir Nabokov, in his Lectures on Literature, drew a map of the various wanderings and path crossings of the two main characters to illustrate how compressed the novel is in time and space.

It is often remarked by critics that any attempt to give a reader a second hand experience of a good book is bound to fail. There is no book to which this idea applies more appropriately than Joyce's Ulysses. .

Resumos Relacionados