Nowadays the term psychological literature is used in many senses. In the 17th century it was used as the analysis of moral sentiments & the struggle of the ideas of right & wrong. In the 19th century the term psychological analysis was applied to novels in which the characters inner world & motivations were examined by the reader & for the reader where the hero thought of his own actions & emotions. Later such writers as Dostoyevsky, Bodlain, E. A. Poe, and H. James were termed psychological as they were preoccupied with the abnormal states of mind.
Writers of the time were interested in exploring the dim recesses of human mind & psychic. Sometimes their interests were exposed. But their methods were considered unusual & untraditional. They all belonged to the literature of modernism & its manifestations.
Then Lawrence & partly Joyce were called psychological be cause they concentrated on the inner world of the characters. But their methods were different, but unusual its disregarded by many critics as far as Joyce is concerned. Critics usually speak about expressionistic dialogues, inner monologues, stream of consciousness etc.
In long lassoes from the Cock the water flowed full covering the green-goldenly lagoons of sand rising flowing shows Joyces gift for word painting. He gives us a contour, volume, color, movement creating a picture.
James Joyce (1882 1941)
Dubliners (1914)
A portrait of the artist as a young man; Ulysses (1922)
Joyce was almost blind & this accounts for his method. He relieved upon his ear more than upon his eye. He was a refugee. He could not stomach the limitations Ireland imposed on him. He wrote about Dublin in his Dubliners. Its Dublin that unites all stories in the collection.
Joyce should be read entirely for the proper understanding. His literary development begins with relatively conventional stories that later form a collection Dubliners. Then his career proceeds through A portrait of the artist as a young man to the very experimentation to Ulysses & finds its climate in the difficult but rewarding Finnigans Wake.
When we speak about A portrait of the artist as a young man we can say that some of the characters are transported bodily to Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus, a hero of A portrait of the artist as a young man in an embryonic form in some stories of Dubliners & becomes one of the central characters in Ulysses.
The importance of Joyce is in many respects dependant on the language he uses & on the way how he deals with the language. For many years Joyce was a professional language teacher. Language occupies a dominant place in his technique. Hes familiar with archaic & meaning of words he needed. Almost blind he was sensitive to the sound of words, touch, and smell. He tries to portray & verbalize these senses in language. Joyce is a master of reproducing the speech. He has captured the spirit of everyday conversation. He is unsurpassable in this respect. There are terms that describe his method interior monologue, impressionist description, the stream of consciousness technique. These techniques develop but each of them produces a separate unique effect.
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Some people say that the term monologue describes Joyces method better than stream of consciousness. His characters mostly talk to themselves. Its the how they are doing it & in this respect they do not even try to establish some logical scheme & order. Joyce tries to reproduce the workings of the mind & the associations which are characteristic of the workings of the mind. If we compare Galsworthy & Joyce they both use the interior monologue. But with Galsworthy its an ordered text addressed to the person himself, but if it were not the person who is talking it could be anybody else. The form would not change. With Joyce everything seems to be verbalized but in fact much is implied. He doesnt make pauses. He changes the speaker and does not give us any warning. The change gives us an ideal pause the place to make conclusions. On the one hand even ticking of the clock & the speech of waves is verbalized. On the other hand reader should imagine the actions & intentions of the character.
Characters that boast of having no particular education speak in the accents of Dante & Shakespeare using the same philosophical notions. They form images worthy of poets. Its so because Joyce never tried to curve his own want of interaction. He endowed his characters with his own mind & vocabulary (24000 words in Ulysses). His craftsmanship makes these words sound natural in the lips of any character that is chosen to be the speaker. The reader of Ulysses is emerged into the stream of consciousness, which is represented by allusive & highy packed language.
One has to consult dictionaries & encyclopedia to find the meanings of every allusion. He brought his technique to a climax & this climax gave us a structure of a novel that is based upon a pattern, which has been chosen prematurely & then carefully worked out. I. e. he took Odyssey & imitated it very carefully. In Ulysses the effect of simultaneousity is achieved by switching rapidly from one character to another. Joyce had a host of imitators but no one proved to be successful. Still Joyces chief stylistic device is stream of consciousness represented as interior monologue, inner thoughts combined with stimuli of the external world & the mental processes portrayed in disconnected sentences. Interior monologue is a succession of disconnected (at first sight) characters.
Joyce was born in Dublin.
Dubliners
His first 3 stories are about childhood told in the 1st person by an unnamed boy-narrator. This boy is disillusioned in his hopes, love & faith. Its The Sisters, Encounter, and Arabi. The 2nd group consists of 4 stories about choices & in many cases wrong choices of a mate, vocation. Very often people get trapped & cant get out (Eveline). The 3rd group is of 4 stories it shows the results of entrancement in later life. Its empty & horrible. Its not their fault; its the fault of circumstances. The 4th group gives us 3 stories of public life, hopes, ambitions, frustration & disillusionment. In some of the stories the character is given an insight into the problem but it doesnt help much. People ask each other questions & cant answer them. The whole city suffers because of the paralysis of the will. The final story of t6he collection is The Dead. Its a long story & genre is of the long story or novella. Its the end of the novel, the finishing touch it is some outlet that is given after 14 stories of progressive paralysis. The final part of the novel is like a blanket that covers humanity. It shows that were all interdependent & cant be separated from our ancestors & contemporaries.
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A portrait of the artist as a young man
Its written in a rather conventional style. There is some strange use of punctuation in it the use of dashes instead of quotation marks.
The career of the main character Stephen Dedalus is followed from his schooldays upon the moment he turns to literary career. The novel corresponds to first 20 years of Joyces life. The major portion of the action takes place at school. From the descriptions of school & college we understand that these are places Joyce himself attended. Stephen is a capable student but he gets into trouble because of his independence & certain religious doubt. Hes tormented by sensual passions & because of his education he believes that the passions mark him for eternal domination. Finally after some unpleasant encounters he decides to leave Ireland for some foreign land.
Ulysses
Its a pattern novel, in which the experiences of people are described through the date of June, 16.1904. Bulky novel describes practically 24 hours in the characters life & the construction of the novel is superficially to that of Homers Iliad. The chief characters are Leopold Bloom (a middle-aged advertising salesman), his half-Spanish wife Molly, their daughter Milly, Mr. Boilan (Mollys lover), & Stephen Dedalus (a young intellectual, just returns from Paris, now teaching in a small private school).
Joyce is very much naturalistic showing us social details, feelings that are not shared (after a substantial dinner or being unjustly offended.
