Escaping the Boundaries of Modernism: James Joyce’s Continuous Search for Independence
- Autores: Olga Fernández Vicente
- Localización: Joyce’s Heirs: Joyce’s Imprint on Recent Global Literatures / coord. por Olga Fernández Vicente, María del Mar Boillos Pereira, Richard Jorge Fernández, Paulo Kortazar Billelabeitia, 2019, ISBN 978-84-9860-727-7, págs. 24-42
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Modernist works frequently tend to be ordered not on the sequence of historical time or the evolving sequence of character, from history to story, as in realism or naturalism. Thus, the task of modernist art seems to be to redeem, essentially or existentially, the formless universe of contingency as it tends to have to do with the intersection of an apocalyptic and modern time. However, that modernist style fails in its attempts to read the world that imperialism has rendered unreadable.
The Modernist way of reading —however limited, like all frameworks— has been one of the main ways of reading Joyce for nearly three quarters of a century but we argue that an unsuspected Joyce is yet to be found. In this paper we state that Joyce found Modernism restrictive and in his aim to liberate poetics, he included magic realism in his texts.
In fact, Joyce inherited the late- 19th-Century tradition of the naturalistic novel, and the moto at the opening of A Portrait —‘and he turns his mind to the unknown arts’— suggests that his flight was to be not from provincial Ireland to the mainland and from Roman Catholicism to the great archetypes of myth, but also from naturalistic novel to the archetypes of mythology as well. We aim to prove how the contradiction embodied in Joyce’s inclusion of magical elements within realism, meant that his novels questioned the political system which had engendered the confusion and lack of control felt in society.
