Radically modern writing in the novel of james joyce content Introduction

2.1. Joyce's linguistic innovation.

A special and important area where the poetics of the novel approaches expressionism is the work with word and language. Violating all linguistic norms, Joyce's text at the same time does not lose its strict organization. There is no sloppiness, spontaneity, chaos here; deformation and destruction are controlled by the artist and fulfill a whole range of purposes. Let us indicate the most important of them, starting with those closest to expressionism.

1) Purely expressionistic deformation : if the text expresses the pressure of emotions, a strong affect, then the internal pressure of the content acts in it, as it were, putting pressure on the form - and the form is broken. Joyce “shakes up the phrase”: punctuation disappears (Joyce generally refuses it willingly and under any pretext), word order and grammar are violated, breaks in logic appear. Many examples of this kind can be found in Lestrigons, where Bloom, wandering around the city, is overcome by various emotions: hunger, thirst for love, and in the finale - confusion at the sight of Boylan ... imitates its content, models it. Further, the same attitude, both mimetic and expressionistic, is driven to a large extent by Joyce's work with the word. First of all, the expressiveness of the word is achieved in the most direct way, by expanding and enriching the verbal element. In "Ulysses" one cannot help but be struck by the amazing richness of vocabulary, the immensity of the layers and registers of the language that the author owns and which he generously uses: ancient and modern language, tonal secular dialect and coarse jargon, provincial dialects and professional speech of doctors, sailors, theologians, merchants and judges. He has a special predilection for rare words - forgotten archaisms, pretentious Latinisms, as if seasoning the syllable of his novel with spices. However, ready-made words are not enough for him, and, acting on the boundaries of the language, expanding them, he creates many neologisms. Their most widespread form is the simplest: these are “prefabricated” or “folding” words, made up of two words - beer-filled, wheat-lone, sugary-sticky ... There is an abyss of such words in the novel, all the more so since they also serve as a reminder of Homer with his double epithets, about the wine-colored sea and pink-fingered Eos. Complicating the reception, Joyce also sticks together a few words (Davy Byrne “grinned, yawned, and nodded”). Another type of neologisms is “sounds of objects”, direct speech of things and elements, justified by the principles of pluralism of discourses (ep. 11). It is plentiful and diverse in the novel, since the author, as we have noticed, is a pronounced hearing aid.
Here we will find words - the voices of machines, the voices of animals, human organs, the sounds of all kinds of actions and departures. Some of these words are quite new, others are well-known, but distorted. The grand slashing of words in Finnegans Wake already has its beginnings in Ulysses. Here are legions of words with all sorts of mutilations and deformities: words with cut off members, fused pieces of different words (in "Sirens": "dpzhprdsvd"), words shifted into an alien grammatical category ("gradually"), words from other languages \u200b\u200bwith added English parts (already at the beginning of the novel, “shverno” anticipates the multilingual hybrids of “Commemoration”)... Once again, we are convinced that for the prose of “Ulysses” there are no fixed, unchanging elements: here everything is an expressive means and everything, serving expressiveness capable of reaching unrecognizability.
2) The transmission of inner speech is a legitimate and rich area for language deformations. Inner speech is characterized by chaos and illogicality, it can violate, generally speaking, any norms of literary speech, starting with the most general of all, with division into phrases. What a "sentence" is is generally not very clear, but for inner speech it is not at all clear, and we should not object when we see that Joyce's stream of consciousness is divided into any blocks - or ceases to be divided at all, as in "Penelope". According to Joyce, inner speech has two types, masculine and feminine, in many respects polar to each other. The stream of male consciousness is chopped, jerky, and its blocks - analogues of grammatical sentences - can break off anywhere, including conjunctions and prepositions: "I ate bread and." ("Calypso"), "Okay of all who out." ("Hades"). On the contrary, the speech of the female consciousness is characterized by fluidity, fusion: it is literally a continuous flowing stream, resisting any dismemberment. It is extremely whimsical, iridescent and stubbornly illogical: for example, in the reflections of Gerty - Nausicaa, parts of the phrase are usually connected by the union "because" (according to Joyce, this is one of the typically feminine words), although they do not have a causal relationship at all.
3) Often Joyce uses deformations of speech structures to obscure the meaning of speech. Deliberate complexity, darkness of expression is a characteristic trend in both modernism and postmodernism; but with Joyce this tendency, growing with time, reaches its extreme limit by the end of his work. There are many means of obscuring - lengthening and confusing phrases (a vivid example is the beginning of the "Bulls of the Sun"), an indefinite, roundabout and figurative syllable, esoteric vocabulary, polysemantic grammatical constructions ... There is a special aesthetic effect in understatement, in irresistible polysemy, in the inaccessibility of a clear pictures and final interpretation. And Joyce's novel persistently, constantly exploits this effect, starting from the very first lines (the description of the Martello tower is fragmentary and far from clear). Therefore, there is reason to talk about the presence in "Ulysses" of a special technique or manner of blurry writing. In this manner, as in many others, Joyce has as his direct predecessor Flaubert, whom he knew by heart and considered the first master in the entire history of the art of prose. But its first well-thought-out example is provided by Leonardo da Vinci's already famous sfumato technique.[17]