A Painful Case at the Wikipedia
JAMES JOYCE
James Joyce is one of the most influential and
important writers of the 20th century. He is known for his experimental use of
language and exploration of new literary methods, including interior monologue,
use of complex network of symbolic parallels and invented words and allusions
in his novels, especially in his main novel Ulysses.
BIOGRAPHY
James Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, was born
in 1882, in Dublin (Ireland) into a middle-class family.
He was the eldest of ten children. At the age of six
he went to a Jesuit boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. But, as his
father was not the man to be affluent for long; he drank, neglected his affairs
and borrowed money from his office, and his family sank deeper and deeper into
poverty, Joyce didn't return to Clongowes College in 1891; instead, he stayed
at home for the next two years and tried to educate himself. In 1893 he and his
brother Stanislaus were admitted to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar school
in Dublin. Joyce was a brilliant student and there did well academically.
He entered the Trinity College Dublin in 1898. There
he studied modern languages, English, French and Italian, and read widely, particularly
in books not recommended by the Jesuits. He began to write verses and
experimented with short prose passages that he called Epiphanies. To support
himself while writing, after graduation in 1902, he went to Paris to become a
doctor, but he soon abandoned this idea.
He went back home in April 1903 because his mother was
dying. He tried several occupations including teaching; he also began to write
his first novel, Stephen Hero, based on the events of his own life, and he also
began to write the short stories published as Dubliners in 1914.
Joyce had met Nora Barnacle in June 1904, and they
began a relationship until his death; they probably had their first date, and
their first sexual encounter, the day that is now known as “Bloomsday”, the day
of his novel Ulysses. The couple left Dublin and emigrated together to
continental Europe where he taught languages in Pola (Croatia) and Trieste
(Italy), where their son Giorgio was born. He also lived for a year in Rome,
where he worked in a bank and where their daughter Lucia was born.
Joyce visited Ireland in 1909 and again in 1912, this
time with his family. In 1914 he rewrote and completed the novel A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, and he began to write Ulysses.
In 1915 the Joyce’s couple moved to Zürich and in 1916
he published his play Exiles. It was also the year that chapters from Ulysses,
his novel in progress, began to appear in the American journal, “The Little
Review”. The completed book would not appear until 1922. Ernest Hemingway and
Winston Churchill were two of the first to buy the ready famous new book.
Ulysses, the most notable novel of the twentieth
century, his main novel, is a gigantic work. All the action takes place in and
around Dublin in a single day. The novel is the chronicle of the Dublin journey
of the main character, Leopold Bloom, on an ordinary day. The three central
characters: Stephen Dedalus, (Telemachus) the same hero of Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) a Jewish advertising canvasser,
and his wife Molly (Penelope), the unfaithful woman. The events of the novel
loosely parallel the events in Odysseus’s journey home after the Trojan War.
Joyce employs interior monologue, stream of consciousness, parody and almost
every other literary technique to present his characters.
Finding out that he was gradually gaining fame as an
avant-garde writer, Joyce set himself in Paris to finish his Ulysses. His last
book was Finnegan's Wake, published in 1939. Joyce's eyes began to give him
more and more problems, and he travelled to Switzerland for eyes surgery.
Joyce died at the age of 59 in January 1941, in Zurich
for a perforated duodenal ulcer.
SOME FACTS ABOUT JOYCE
He was the eldest of ten brothers and sisters.
His family were very poor, but his father had some
airs. He didn’t belong to the working classes, he had “business”, and in all of
them he failed. He was not a hard-working man, but he wanted some education for
James: after a lot of pleading, he got a seat for him in a well-known and high
reputation Jesuit School.
Joyce studied languages at the University and, after
that, he went to Paris to try to study medicine, but he spent his days there
reading in libraries.
When he was 22, he met Nora Barnacle, and, in the
second date, she masturbated him, and they started being together for the rest
of their lives.
The next year, they ran away from Dublin and went to
live abroad forever. They lived in Trieste, Rome, Zurich and Paris. At the beginning
he worked as an English teacher, and in a bank translating letters from Italian
to English. But then he asked money to institutions to write his masterpiece, Ulysses.
He got it from sponsors and from the British government. He didn’t earn
anything from his books.
Although we can imagine him as a bohemian artist, he
was not any of it because he was essentially a family man. He worked doing
English classes (for instance, he taught English to Italo Svevo) to provide for
his family, and, apart from this, he wrote following his artistic call.
He had a lot of health problems with his eyes, and
there were some periods when he was almost blind. But he continued writing all
his life. His wife was a bit illiterate and she only read one of his books, the
collection of poems Chamber Music. She asked him to write more
commercial books.
He died at the age of 59 of a sudden illness.
WORKS
James Joyce is known for his experimental novel Ulysses.
In this novel, Joyce tells us about one day in the life of a very ordinary man.
It’s a thick book and hard to read, but it has a lot of radical fans. Before
this, he wrote some poetry (but he wasn’t very happy with it), some short
stories under the title of Dubliners (following Ibsenian ideas and
style), a novel, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (a Bildungsroman),
and another experimental novel, more extreme than Ulysses, under the title of Finnegan's
Wake.
In Dubliners, Joyce tried to make a portrait of
Dublin’s moral personality, and he arranged its stories according to the ages
of a person (childhood, youth, maturity, old age). He had a lot of difficulties
to publish it because a lot of real people and real places appeared in the book,
and he didn’t want to change anything to hide real names under fictious names.
They are “classical” texts, very different from his most famous works. The last
story, “The Dead”, has been made in a film directed by John Huston.
A PAINFUL CASE
According to one letter to his brother, this story was
one of the worst of the collection, but then it’s a story with two books
studying only it.
It is a short story belonging to the group of
“maturity”. It narrates the voluntary loneliness of a self-made single man and
the involuntary one of a married woman. The man is very proud of being alone,
because this way he can spend his free time on his intellectual and lofty
hobbies. He meets a married woman, but he doesn’t want an affair, he only wants
a listener. When the woman tries to make some advances, he breaks up the
relationship because he thinks that between a man and a woman friendship is
impossible. Afterwards, the woman has a depression and dies in an accident in a
railway station, and he feels (and not only knows) his loneliness.
The form of the story is a classical one: first
introduces the characters, then there is a conflict and a solution for this
conflict, and last of all, a moral reflexion.
QUESTIONS
Can you describe in your own words Mr Duffy (that in
Gaelic means “black” or “dark”)? Age, personality, physical appearance, job,
interests…
From the description of his lodgings, what can deduce
about Mr Duffy’s personality?
Why do you think that the Maynooth Catechism is
“sewn into the cloth cover of a notebook?
What do you know about Hauptmann’s Michael Krammer?
And about Nietzsche?
Mr Duffy eats arrowroot cookies because they are
healthy. Do you think eating healthily can make a person better? What is your
opinion about “you are what you eat”?
Mr Duffy thought that he could be a rebel sometimes
and rob a bank. Was this only a bluff, or was it for real?
Describe Mrs Sinico in your words
Mrs Sinico is pictured as having an intelligent face.
Do you think that the face can be the mirror of a person’s personality or
qualities?
What do you know about astrakhan?
How did Mr Duffy and Mrs Sinico come to know each
other?
What kind of friendship did they have? What did they
usually do in their dates? Was there any love between them?
What was Mrs Sinico’s role for her husband? And for Mr
Duffy?
What city is Leghorn? Do you know other cities with
names very different from the native language?
Can you explain why he liked Mozart, according to your
opinion?
What do you know about the Irish Socialist Party? What
were Mr Duffy political ideals?
Talk about Mrs Sinico’s family.
“Every bond is a bond of sorrow”. What does it mean?
Do you think it’s true?
“Friendship between man and woman is impossible
because there must be sexual intercourse”: what is your opinion about this?
How did Mrs Sinico die?
How did the breaking up of her relationship with Mr
Duffy affect her?
How did Mrs Sinico’s death affect Mr Duffy? Did he
hate her, or did he pity her?
Can you explain the metaphor of the “worm with a fiery
head” and the end of the story? (page 9 line 1)
Is it possible to compare this story with Madame
Bovary, or Anna Karenina, or The Lady with the Dog? What do they
have in common? What differences are there between them?
mean, shallow, double desk, alcove, Bile Beans, saturnine, tawny, hazel, arrowroot, bill of fare, roaming, thinly (peopled), house, plying, garret, timorous, wages, phrasemonger, impresario, propped, haze, buff, reefer overcoat, inquest, league, threadbare, hobbling, shop, gaunt, withheld, gnawed
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