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American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
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02
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73-81
SJIF
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Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
ABSTRACT
The article examines Joyce’s development as an author and his changing use of the epistolary form. Joyce is interested
in representing character subjectivity and uses free indirect thought and focalization to do so. Joyce often focalizes
through and reports on the thoughts of a single character, replicating some of the traditional functions of the letter
in fiction.
KEYWORDS
Letters and letter writing, epistolary form, epistolary tradition, consciousness, character, interior monologue.
INTRODUCTION
James Joyce’s Ulysses reflects
the changes taking
place in the way people communicated at the turn of
the century in a busy city like Dublin. Stephen sends his
roommate Mulligan a telegram to cancel a meeting,
and Leopold Bloom makes a telephone call to the
office of the Evening Telegraph, which illustrates the
other
Research Article
JOYCE’S DEVELOPMENT AS AN AUTHOR AND HIS EXPERIMENTS WITH
THE EPISTOLARY FORM
Submission Date:
November 05, 2022,
Accepted Date:
November 15, 2022,
Published Date:
November 29, 2022
Crossref doi:
https://doi.org/10.37547/ajps/Volume02Issue11-10
Manzila Nuriddinovna Khabibova
Bsmi, Teacher Of English Language Department, Uzbekistan
Journal
Website:
https://theusajournals.
com/index.php/ajps
Copyright:
Original
content from this work
may be used under the
terms of the creative
commons
attributes
4.0 licence.
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characters’ attitudes towards him. But letters and
letter writing are what play a central role in the life of
the characters in the novel, because throughout the
day, Bloom and others read letters, write letters, and
receive letters: Bloom corresponds with Martha
Clifford; Mr. Deasy wants to publish his letter on hoof
and mouth disease in the paper; the Citizen and his
cohorts at Barney Kiernan’s read letters of application
written by barely literate hangmen; and, perhaps most
importantly, Molly Bloom receives a letter from Blazes
Boylan, confirming their rendezvous at four o’clock in
the afternoon. The epistolary form continues to be an
important thematic and structural element in
Finnegans Wake; few letters appear in Joyce’s early
works, such as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man. Part of Joyce’s progress as a writer, then,
is his decision to use the epistolary form extensively in
his later fiction.
In Ulysses, Joyce begins to use interior monologue in
his writing, allowing character thoughts to be directly
recorded in the text, making the epistolary form seem
superfluous. Instead of abandoning the letter,
however, Joyce uses it to explore the way language
fails to represent subjectivity, rejecting the character
element of the epistolary tradition and disrupting the
relationship between letters and external readers. In
Finnegans Wake, Joyce moves away from questions of
subjectivity and focuses on questions of language and
experience; he experiments with the narrative and
object elements of the epistolary tradition and
ultimately uses the letter to question the impact
language has on reality. Letters in Joyce’s fiction can
also be seen as a mise en abyme, but he exceeds other
modernist writers’ use of the epistolary form by
directly equating the letter with his own art in
Finnegans Wake.
Dubliners. The epistolary form was traditionally viewed
as a literary technique for using writing to represent
the human consciousness, and in his early fiction,
Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Joyce attempts to represent a single character’s
consciousness as directly as possible to his readers
without making unnecessary changes to the text. His
first attempt is in his collection of short stories,
Dubliners, which he worked on from 1904-1907, but
which was not published collectively until 1914 because
of objections from several publishers. In the first story,
“The Sisters,” the anonymous narrator meditates on
the word “paralysis,” which is the one of the recurrent
themes of the collection. As Joyce wrote to his friend
C.P. Curran, “I call the series Dubliners to betray the
soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many
consider a city”. Joyce uses focalization and free
indirect discourse to represent the consciousness of
his characters in Dubliners, and each story is a brief
psychological portrait of a character during a critical
moment in his or her life, when he or she struggles
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against, and ultimately succumbs to, the paralyzing
forces of family, religion, and politics.
Many of the stories in Dubliners are told by a
heterodiegetic narrator, and those
that are are usually focalized through a single main
character, which limits the external readers’ view of
the storyworld to what the main character sees.2 Joyce
also uses free indirect thought to paint psychological
portraits of his characters in specific moments in their
lives, but without superfluous punctuation and
language, such as quotation marks and phrases like
“he thought,” without introducing other forms in the
text, such as a letter or a diary, and without an
unnecessary narratee. The modernist authors use
focalization and free indirect thought not only to
present the subjectivity of a main character, called a
center of consciousness, but to present the subjectivity
of other characters, producing a narrative told from
multiple perspectives. Joyce, on the other hand, often
confines the perspective and thought reporting in
Dubliners to just one character, a decision that creates
strong parallels between Joyce’s short s
tories and the
character element of the epistolary tradition.
Examining the story “Eveline” demonstrates how both
focalization and free indirect thought allow Joyce to
represent the subjective experiences of a single
character. The opening of the story shows how an
omniscient heterodiegetic narrator, a heterodiegetic
narrator focalizing through a character, and free
indirect thought work side by side to represent a
character’s consciousness:
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the
avenue. Her head was leaned against the window
curtains, and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty
cretonne. She was tired. Few people passed. The man
out of the last house passed on his way home; she
heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete
pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path
before the new red houses. One time there used to be
a field there in which they used to play every evening
with other people's children. Then a man from Belfast
bought the field and built houses in it
—
not like their
little brown houses, but bright brick houses with
shining roofs.
The first two sentences are a distant view of Eveline,
describing her looking out
the window. The language of these sentences, with
their metaphorical description of
twilight and the acute attention given to what Eveline
smells, indicates that the voice
speaking is probably not Eveline’s voice, because in the
text she is depicted as a lower class woman who works
in a shop. The next sentence, which describes how
Eveline feels, is more simplistic and sounds more like
the language she might use: “She was tired.” The
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sentences, “Few people passed. The man out of the
last house passed on his way home” are examples of
the narrator focalizing through Eveline; he describes
what she sees out the window. But again, when the
narrator begins to discuss Eveline’s memories, “One
time there used to be a field there in which they used
to play every evening with other people's children,”
the words in the description sound like ones Eveline
w
ould choose if she were talking. The narrator’s
distinctive voice introduces the story, but readers are
slowly drawn into Eveline’s character as their vision of
the storyworld is soon limited by her sight and as they
are exposed to a voice that sounds like her own when
the narrator talks about her feelings or her memories.
The use of free indirect thought in this story allows
Eveline’s own voice to come out in the text, even
though nothing that she says is directly quoted. The
“free” quality of free indirec
t thought also allows
Joyce to move seamlessly between the different
narrative techniques he employs without punctuation
marks, phrases, a change of form, or a narratee.
Joyce’s decision to focalize through Eveline and to only
report on her thoughts demonstrates how language
can represent a character’s subjectivity, which was the
function of the letter in eighteenth-century fiction,
laying the foundation for the character element of the
epistolary tradition.
In Dubliners, Joyce works on refining his ability to
represent human consciousness to his external readers
and does not really experiment with the epistolary
form. There are only three stories where letters appear
in Dubliners: “Eveline,” “Counterparts,” and “The
Dead.” In “The Dead” there is a s
entence quoted from
a letter that Gabriel wrote when he was first in love
with his wife Gretta that is used to reveal Gabriel’s past
internal state to readers of the story.3 As Gretta and
Gabriel Conroy return this is why he could remember
something specific he had said to Gretta
—
because it
was written down in a letter. The sentence following
the letter also calls attention to the physical words on
the page: “Like distant music these words that he had
written years before were borne towards him from the
pas
t”. In a moment of synesthesia, the words on the
page are transformed into an audible sound, moving
through time, connecting him to the past and forming
a bridge to future thoughts as he imagines himself and
Gretta alone in their hotel room about to make love.
This one-sentenced quotation from a letter specifically
references Joyce’s own correspondence. In his
biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann points out the
similarities between this quotation from Gabriel’s
letter to Gretta and a couple of sentences Joyce wrote
to his wife Nora in one of his letters to her when they
were first dating. Joyce wrote to Nora: “And yet why
should I be ashamed of words? Why should I not call
you what in my heart I continually call you? What is it
that prevents me unless it be that no word is tender
enough to be your name”. This sentence suggests that
as a writer Joyce has a preference for the epistolary
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form. An avid letter writer, Joyce with this one
sentence draws a connection between his own
personal writing and his art, a move that will be
repeated in Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In his first
novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce
continued his experiments in representing a single
character’s consciousness usi
ng internal focalization
and free indirect thought. However, instead of just
focusing on the psychological state of a character in a
single moment of time, Joyce is striving to show a
person’s development over time and the events that
led to the formation of his personality. All the events in
A Portrait are shown through the main character
Stephen Dedalus’ eyes, and the majority of the
language used in the text matches the language
Stephen would use at certain stages of development in
his life.4 An incident between Stephen and one of his
schoolfellows illustrates how Joyce continued to use
both focalization and free indirect thought in A
Portrait:
They all laughed again. Stephen tried to laugh with
them. He felt his whole div hot and confused in a
moment. What was the right answer to the question?
He had given two and still Wells laughed. But Wells
must know the right answer for he was in third of
grammar. He tried to think of Wells's mother but he did
not dare to raise his eyes to Wells's face. He did not like
Wells's face. It was Wells who had shouldered him into
the square ditch the day before because he would not
swop his little snuff box for Wells's seasoned hacking
chestnut, the conqueror of forty. It was a mean thing
to do; all the fellows said it was. And how cold and
slimy the water had been! And a fellow had once seen
a big rat jump plop into the scum. In Book 1, Stephen is
about seven to nine years old, and his language,
though descriptive, is the language of a younger child.
His inability t
o completely understand Wells’ joke
demonstrates that this incident is told from his
perspective. Joyce continues to use these techniques
of representing consciousness throughout the novel,
until Stephen decides to leave Ireland and go to
Europe. At this point the discourse of the narrative
changes to a journal, and the novel ends with
Stephen’s attempt to represent his own subjective
experience in writing.
In his biography of James Joyce, Richard Ellmann
writes that, “Joyce’s first interior monolog
ue was
inserted at the end of A Portrait,” but his description of
the language of the journal is not completely accurate.
H. Porter Abbott defines interior monologue as “The
thinking and feeling of a character conveyed without
the usual grammatical signs of narration medication
(e.g. quotation marks or the phrases ‘he said, she
said’),” so the diary entry format which frames the
language at the end of A Portrait prevents it from being
true interior monologue. The journal did allow Joyce to
directly present character thoughts to the reader,
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unlike free indirect thought, which, as its names
implies, only allows for an indirect presentation of
thought through the heterodiegetic narrator. Ellmann
comments on some of the positive benefits of the
form: “[The journ
al] had a dramatic justification there
in that Stephen could no longer communicate with
anyone in Ireland but himself. But it had a way of
relaxing by sentence fragments and seeming casual
connections among thoughts the more formal style of
most of the nar
ratives”. On the other hand, the journal
format required an awkward switch to a new genre
that hadn’t been present in the novel previously;
nothing else in the text indicates that Stephen has
been recording his thoughts in a journal or a diary.
Inspired by other writers such as Edouard Dujardin,
George Moore, Tolstoy, and Freud, in his next work,
Joyce would begin to use interior monologue to
directly present character thoughts to the reader
without any accoutrements or forced forms. “Having
gone so far, Joyce in Ulysses boldly eliminated the
journal, and let thoughts hop, step, jump, and glide
without the selfconsciousness of a journal to account
for their agitation”. There is one letter in A Portrait of
the Artist as Young Man, which is in Book I. It is a letter
that Stephen imagines himself writing to his mother to
tell her that he is sick.
Dear Mother,
I am sick. I want to go home. Please come and take me
home. I am in the infirmary.
Your fond son, Stephen.
The language of his letter clearly represents S
tephen’s
thoughts. With its short sentences, repetitive style, and
simple words, this letter contains the language of a
young child, and because it mirrors the language in the
text, continues to add to the portrayal of Stephen’s
character in this section of the novel as a very young
and innocent boy. What is interesting about the letter,
however, is that it is completely invented. Stephen
does not write it down; it is his idea of the type of
message he would send to his parents to let them
know he is sick. So although use of the letter in fiction
was rooted in its mimetic form and its ability to
represent reality, in A Portrait, the letter becomes a
fantasy and a product of the imagination. This short
note shows that despite his focus using different
narrative techniques for representing human
consciousness, Joyce still sees the letter as a necessary
part of his fiction. In this example, he is still using the
letter to show that language can reveal a subjective
experience, but the imaginary nature of the letter
shows that he is also starting to see the potential of the
letter as a form he can experiment with.
Ulysses. Ulysses, published in 1922, retells the story of
Homer’s Odyssey in an early twentieth
-century setting.
One of the reasons Ulysses is an important
development in the history of the novel is that it was
the first consistent integration of new literary
techniques, specifically interior monologue, and a
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related technique, stream of consciousness, into
traditional fictional forms. Joyce did not make his mark
on literary history by inventing either technique; he
maintained
that
he
discovered
stream
of
consciousness in the French novel Les lauriers sont
coupés written by Edouard Dujardin in 1888. What
Joyce did do in Ulysses is effectively combine interior
monologue with other forms of narration in the novel
and refine the use of stream of consciousness
technique in particular. As David Hayman notes of
Joyce’s use of stream of consciousness in Ulysses: The
Mechanics of Meaning, “He used the techniqu
e as he
did many others to do specific jobs, and principally, to
bring into unusually sharp focus the alert conscious
minds of individuals whose character he wished to
define quickly, completely, and unmistakably before
dissolving individuality and disclosing the basis of
character in hidden impulses”. The use of both interior
monologue and stream of consciousness “. . . allows us
a glimpse of the nature and the workings of the human
mind in general”.
With the word “Chrysostomos,” which Stephen
thinks
as he looks at Buck Mulligan’s golden toothed mouth
in “Telemachus,” Joyce had completed his aesthetic
project of attempting to present a single character’s
consciousness to the reader without any auxiliary
forms or switches in genre. Interior monologue and
stream of consciousness allowed him to present one
character’s thoughts directly to the reader. With the
use of these new techniques, the included letter
became an outdated form for representing the
psychological states of characters. But Joyce decided
not to abandon the letter and, like other modernist
writers, used the epistolary form in literature in new
ways. He saw the letter as a place where he could
continue
his
experiments
with
representing
subjectivity through written language; thus Joyce built
on the character element of the epistolary tradition,
but took it in a new direction. Instead of showing that
written language could clearly represent experience,
he uses the letter to experiment with the ways
language cannot clearly represent experience
—
the
ways in which language fails to capture human
thought.
One of the facets of letters that Joyce explored was
how to represent the mental
processes involved in everyday activities like reading
and writing. An example of this is in the “Nestor”
chapter. Stephen finishes teaching his class and then
has a discussion with his employer Mr. Deasy, who is
attempting to be his mentor. Mr. Deasy asks Stephen
to read a letter he has written about foot and mouth
disease before he submits it to the newspaper. The
text of Mr. Deasy’s letter is not directly reproduced
within Ulysses; external readers of the text only have
access to it through Stephen’s thoughts. Here is an
excerpt of what the reader sees:
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May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of
laissez faire which so ften in our history. Our cattle
trade. The way of all our old industries. Liverpool ring
which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme. European
conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow
waters
of
the
channel.
The
pluterperfect
imperturbability of the department of agriculture.
Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman
who was no better than she should be. To come to the
point at issue.
Mr. Deasy’s letter is not a complete included letter,
because the full text is not presented, and readers only
see the letter through the lens of Stephen’s mind. As
his eyes glance over the page, Stephen does not think
every word that is written; he shortens sentences, pays
attention to keywords, and picks up on errors. Stephen
“skims” or only quickly reads his employer’s missive.
Since there are so many obvious gaps in what was
written, the emphasis here is not on the letter itself,
but on trying to show how Stephen’s mind works when
he reads.
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