JOYCE’S SYMBOLISM

Abstract

The paper presents an interpretation of Joyce’s work as symbolist. After outlining the history of the codification of Joyce’s works, V.M. Tolmatchoff proposed to return to the advantages of Joyce’s vision as a symbolist, proposed in general terms by E. Wilson in 1931. This symbolism, declared by Irish authors in the twentieth century and systematically realized by Joyce, genetically goes back not only to the practice of the French Symbolist poets, W.B. Yeats, as well as to the experience of the ‘death of God’ declared by Nietzsche (who shifted the understanding of symbolism from the reform of obsolete poetics to the “crisis of the European spirit” and the corresponding absolute purpose of the artist whose purely individual poetic vision forms new boundaries of the world, of things), but - more broadly - to the Romantic origins of non-classical culture. Joyce extends F. Schlegel’s dream of the boundlessness of poetry to the novel. In his performance it becomes a complex sum of personal biography, reading of symbolists (and authors drawn by them into their orbit), processing of the variants of symbolism available at the beginning of the twentieth century, synthetics of personal symbolism, in whose framework the contradictions between naturalism, symbolism as such, avant-gardisms, mass culture are removed and the central symbolist problematic of the transformation of the old world by the vitality of creativity is emphasized. In the framework of this interpretation of symbolism, the paper considers Ulysses: Joyce’s interpretation of the parody of sacred by profane, erotics, the problem of sex, luciferianism, Ibsen’s material and the relationship between the main characters, which allows us to see Ulysses as a symbolist novel on creativity.