Today we remember James Joyce, the Irish writer born on February 2, 1882 and who died on January 13, 1941. Among his works we cannot fail to mention Ulysses, a book that explores the theme of the knowledge of time. There are days when time never seems to pass and days when, on the other hand, the hand of the clock turns so fast that it cannot be followed. That time is relative is now an established concept, but it has not always been this way . If we read a book set in the nineteenth century we will see how the dimension of time is represented in an objective and linear way.
A completely different temporal experience awaits us as we take a book by James Joyce in our hands. In the wake of the revolution triggered by Sigmund Freud (and the discovery of the unconscious),Joyce’s Ulysses was in fact destined , from the day of its publication, February 2, 1922, to change the fate of contemporary literature forever . Let’s see why! Why our perception of time has changed
The twentieth century was born under the sign of speed and acceleration, which immediately make their effects felt even in art and literature. The great authors of the early twentieth century, such as Marcel Proust , Virginia Woolf and James Joyce , return the fragmentation and disorder of the present through new writing methods, which reach their expressive apex in the ” stream of consciousness ” technique.Time changes according to what we are experiencing.
The chronological and linear time of the nineteenth-century novel is replaced by a time of consciousness. The characters born from Joyce’s pen discover that past experiences are not only past, but settle in the unconscious . Unconscious from which fragments of one’s past continually emerge and mix with the present in a way that is not always voluntary. The time of consciousness is in fact composed of indistinguishable moments that pass through one into the other and form a stream that is continually enriched: the “stream of consciousness”. In the characters, time undergoes notable transformations: alongside an objective, chronologically linear time, the idea of ​​a subjective time appears., experienced by the consciousness of the characters. Joyce’s Ulysses and the archetype of contemporary man With an irresistible charm and symbol of the thirst for knowledge, Ulysses is the hero of many faces . If in the Homeric poems the positive qualities of him were exalted, in the literature of the following centuries the negative ones were highlighted, such as deception and cynicism, up to the rewriting that James Joyce made in the twentieth century. Joyce’s Ulysses thus becomes the archetype of the daily wanderings and anxieties of contemporary man , the symbol of a new and revolutionary perception of time. What Joyce’s Ulysses is about
Joyce’s Ulysses and the story of a day, June 16, 1904, of a group of Dubliners. The characters crossing the lives of others in an apparently casual way, determine its development, and describe it, through a continuous inner monologue. The main protagonist, the Irish Jew Leopold Bloom, is not a hero or an anti-hero , but simply a man of broad-mindedness and great humanity, always attentive to the weakest and the different, and capable of courtesy even towards those who dowry not to use with him. The other protagonists are the young intellectual, brilliant but frustrated Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom, the wife of the Jew, the real queen of the novel . Finally, lying on the creaking old bed,Molly will be intent on reflecting – in a monologue of more than twenty thousand words not marked by punctuation – on the day just passed, on her husband’s betrayal, on every memory of the past, and on the potential futures imagined . A figure with a solid body, Molly is a gloriously instinctive woman, but also resistant to any form of categorical characterization. James Joyce James Joyceand one of the most important authors of the twentieth century. After studying in Jesuit colleges, he distinguished himself at the University of Dublin for his preparation and wit as a linguist. After moving away from the Catholic religion, I leave Ireland for Paris, where he studied medicine for a few months, before returning to Dublin due to the death of his mother. From 1904 he first moved to Trieste, where I teach at the Berlitz School and where he made friends with Italo Svevo ; then in Zurich and finally in Paris, which I leave shortly before dying due to the Nazi invasion and a severe depression. Back in Zurich, he was operated on for an ulcer and died in hospital the next day.
After a first approach to writing, in which he follows the traditional expressive forms of narrative prose, Joyce begins to experiment, inspired by the first theories on psychoanalysis. In 1922 he published “Ulysses” , a work of extraordinary importance for all future literature, in which he began to use the technique of the “flow of consciousness” , which consists in the free expression of thoughts as they appear in the mind of the protagonist.
