James Joyces Aesthetic Theory

Author : Thomas Michael Joyce
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (143 download)

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Download or read book The Aesthetic Process written by Thomas Michael Joyce and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joyce's early fiction embodies two finally incompatible ideals: naturalism and romanticism. Joyce's naturalism confirmed his allegiance to ordinary life amongst the lower classes. More importantly, the naturalistic tenet that environment determines character supported Joyce's bitter resentment of a social milieu that threatened to destroy his promise as an artist. His youthful response was to tailor Dubliners to serve his thesis that Dublin was the centre of spiritual paralysis that eventually afflicted all who remained there. Concurrently, Joyce believed art served life, a central expression of his aesthetic. In Chamber Music , Dubliners , Stephen Hero , and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Joyce identifies life with an idealistic romanticism devoted to adventurous freedom, to a consuming worship of the Virgin, but most importantly, to epiphany, the free artist's realisation of the threat posed to his soul and vocation by family, church, and nation. In upholding the ideals of naturalism and romanticism, Joyce embodies their incompatibilities. On the one hand, he attempts to establish his naturalistic thesis that all Dubliners succumb to Dublin's hemiplegia; on the other hand, his main fictive technique of epiphany implies the Dublin born narrator's freedom. In later works, Joyce criticised the naturalism and romanticism Dubliners expressed, though he never abandons romanticism entirely, as he never abandons his naturalistic interest in the ''here and now." In Portrait , the narrator's irony undermines Stephen's romanticism, but is not synonymous with Joyce's rejection of the aesthetic as some critics contend. Joyce consistently practised Stephen's aesthetic theory developed in Portrait 's fifth chapter. Joyce's tailoring his life to demonstrate the aesthetic resembles the application of his naturalism previously. These demonstrations of theory support the conjecture that the application of naturalism and of the aesthetic stem from a personal need for a standard of order and knowledge that precedes the novelist's full and disinterested response to life when and where he finds it. This need is a major theme of Portrait . Though Joyce in Ulysses modifies the aesthetic of Portrait , its central terms remain unchallenged throughout his works. In the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses , Bloom's equanimity challenges Stephen's romanticism and assists in Bloom's general redefinition of stasis as equanimity and sympathy rather than romantic and mercurial flight as in Portrait . Bloom's responsiveness, his refusal to be bitter or resentful, his refusal to adopt a biased belief or thesis that Dublin is paralysed are vivid testimony to Joyce's consummate achievement as a novelist responsible to life when and where he finds it. Despite the achievement Bloom represents, Ulysses is plagued by problems akin to the application of Joyce's naturalism in Dub liners . In the late revisions of Ulysses , Joyce attempted to move away from the novel into the mode of Finnegans Wake . Such a shift neglects meaning expressed in character and narrative event for the drama of allusions revealed in the ordinary. Joyce's adherence to the plan of Ulysses , to demonstrations of art, colour, technique, etc., resemble his application of naturalism and aesthetic theory. Large sections of Ulysses flesh out such formal matters, often apart from any dramatic considerations of character, event or theme, as we witness in the vast catalogue of opiates in the Lotus Eaters episode, in the catalogue of food in the Lestrygonians, or in the illustrations of blind mechanism in the Wandering Rocks. In Joyce's aesthetic belief that art imitates nature, in the aesthetic theory's stress upon formal relations of part to whole, in the emblematic character of quidditas , wherein the object in its essence becomes a substitute for the object's manifest appearances lies Joyce's justification of his method. Joyce's concentration upon technique as meaning reinforces his shift away from the novel where character and narrative event are the primary vehicles of meaning. In Finnegans Wake , language and technique are the protagonists. Finnegans Wake makes no pretense of being a novel, but use of the term is not solely confined to the literary form of and the painter, to ground his art the novel, for perhap as much as the novel! in the immediacy of s one expects the poet st, to serve life and human experience.