INTRODUCTION: JOYCE AND THE ‘PAS MAL DE SIECLE’

Abstract

must be difficult succeed in France where nearly everyone writes (LII 202).Not so well as that. He [Flaubert] begins with a fault. (quoted in JJII 492)1Reading preceding quotes (the first written in Rome and second said in Paris), one can describe Joyce's relation French literature, and specifically nineteenth-century French novel, as one that moved between awe and qualified appreciation. Joyce's attitude Maupassant, conveyed in a 1905 letter from Trieste his brother Stanislaus, provides another example: I agree with you, however, about Maupassant. He is an excellent writer. His tales are a little slipshod but that was hardly be avoided, given circumstances of his life (LII 107). Yet, one lesson of decades of studies is that Joyce's affairs with writers as well as with countries and their national literatures are beyond love and hatred. At dawn of twentieth Joyce's quest for a drove him in direction of French literature (JJII 76): contemporary symbolist movement but also, more significantly roman that was hallmark of previous century.If once mistakenly accused Flaubert of committing grammatical mistakes in Trois Contes,2 he also exhibited a continued imaginative engagement with Flaubertian oeuvre as he overcame difficulties involved in writing well and succeeding within and beyond France-a succes de scandale which grew in a similar way successes of Gustave Flaubert and ?mile Zola.3 This volume of essays on and Nineteenth-Century French Novel examines many previously unexplored facets of intricate Flaubert-Joyce relationship but its analyses also extend both ends of nineteenth-century with contributions on some of Joyce's explicit and implicit responses Alexandre Dumas, Honor? de Balzac, Victor Hugo and ?mile Zola in Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and in his life, letters, and critical writings. It would take another volume ? and it is an aim of this work that further research be carried out precisely in such a direction ? investigate further Joyce's relations other French prose writers of 19th Century whom refers such as: Chateaubriand, Daudet, Huysmans, M?rim?e, Villiers de L' Isle Adam, George Sand, Lautr?amont, Michelet, Quinet, Verne, Dujardin, Mirbeau, and, insofar as they wrote prose, Baudelaire and Mallarme.A study of such a multilayered subject as Joyce and Nineteenthcentury French Novel, demands that we first delineate boundaries and intersections of intimidatingly expansive space-times: nineteenthcentury, France, novel. Graham Robb' s recent study The Discovery of France provides us with probably most appropriate basic metaphor in this respect. In Robb's journey into some of physically and conceptually uncharted territories of France, nineteenth-century emerges as a decisive moment in gradual invention of France as a modern nation while some nineteenth-century novelists, namely Balzac, appear as invisible guides along this exploratory journey.4 France's nineteenth-century can be said begin in eighteenth-century, precisely in 1789, with French Revolution and end in 1889, with Gustave Eiffel's construction of monumental tower. In this century, France established some of foundations of novel, which is a modern monument and anti-monument in edificidal visions of Hugo in mid-nineteenth century and in early twentieth century.5 Edificidal thoughts and realities are endemic histories of nineteenth-century France and nineteenthcentury French novel since both were by successive and overlapping revolutions, revolutions of word and world, bringing down political, social, and aesthetic monuments and announcing new that often prematurely died only be revived in other forms in twentieth century. A quick run of some key moments, personalities, and trends highlights this convulsive history: 1789 French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, Bourbon restoration, romanticism, July Revolution, realism, 1848 which marked last Western European revolution in classical urban mode,6 orientalism, Crimean War, photography, Second Empire, to write mediocre well7 and indirect free style, Franco-Prussian war and Paris Commune, naturalism, bourgeois and the people, Haussmannisation of Paris, symbolist movement, film, J'accuse. …